The historic city of Chernovtzy, also known as Chernovitz, located in Western Ukraine has been relatively peaceful compared to other parts of the war-ravaged nation. Here, even amid the turmoil of war, the Jewish community of about 2,000 has been experiencing a renaissance. A new Chabad husband-and-wife team is setting down roots in the city to join the already thriving Chabad-Lubavitch of Chernovtzy team.

Enter Rabbi Mendy and Mushky Halperin, the first rabbi-and-wife team to move to Ukraine since the onset of the war. Mendy is from the Chassidic village of Kfar, Israel. Mushky grew up in Riga, Latvia, where her parents are Chabad emissaries. The couple, together with their 4-month-old son, Ari, crossed the border from Moldova into Ukraine on August 30, arriving in their new hometown the same day.

Prior to the arrival of the new team, the community was led by Rabbi Mendy Glitzenstein and his wife Pnina who, since 2003, have laid the foundation for a thriving Jewish community, establishing Shabbat and holiday services, and developing programming for Jewish women, children and seniors.

The Halperins are aiming to place even greater emphasis on youth. Rabbi Mendy is hoping to work closely with teenagers, while Mushky focuses on the younger children. Also, the rabbi hopes to strengthen ties with Jews who left during Ukraine during the war.

“I know it sounds crazy for a young couple to move to Ukraine in the middle of a war. We are not here for adventure. We are here because we want to work with the Jews of Chernovtzy, the Rabbi said.

Fifty years ago, Israeli archaeologists discovered an ancient Hebrew inscription on a stalactite in a remote cave near the Dead Sea. Recently, three researchers — an archaeologist, geologist and photographer — returned to the cave, hoping to find additional inscriptions. While exploring a new level of the cave, they discovered the iron head of a Roman javelin, hidden in a narrow crevice.

The trio immediately contacted the Israel Antiquities Authority, which has been searching Judean desert caves to keep artifacts out of the hands of looters and off the black market.

Meanwhile the three researchers discovered a cache of four 1,900-year-old swords, remarkably well preserved. Even the wood and leather accessories had been preserved in the desert’s arid climate.

The weapons most likely were left in the cave by Jewish rebels involved in the 132 to 136 CE Bar Kokhba Revolt to force the Romans our of the land after nearly two centuries of occupation. The revolt failed but, in the opinion of the IAA, “the swords may represent a small victory seized from the Roman army. The discovery is a major triumph, the best preserved Roman swords, manufactured by Roman armorers, ever discovered anywhere in the world.”

New York investigators seized three pieces of art from three out-of-state museums that they said had been stolen from a Jewish art collector killed during the Holocaust and rightly belonged to the Nazi victim’s heirs.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office issued warrants to the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in Ohio for works by the 1900s Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele. According to the warrants, “there is reasonable cause to believe” that the works constitute stolen property.

Prosecutors say the artworks rightly belong to three living heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, a prominent Jewish art collector killed at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany in 1941. Before the action on Sept. 13, the Grünbaum heirs had filed civil claims also against the Museum of Modern Art and the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California, and several individual defendants. In total, the plaintiffs are seeking to recover about a dozen Schiele works.

In 2018, Judge Charles V. Ramos found that “a signature at gunpoint cannot lead to a valid conveyance” of someone’s personal property.

Jewish worshippers pray ahead of Yom Kippur at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. AP photo

A picturesque village on the southwestern coast of Greenland, where Erik the Red first arrived more than 1,000 years ago, and where sheep outnumber the town’s population 20:1, is the home of Paul Cohen, an American Jew, and his wife Monika, who have lived here for 22 years — and love it. “It’s the Garden of Eden in many ways,” he says — “a little spot of civilization surrounded by pristine wilderness, and I have the unique privilege to be able to live and work here.”

He and Monika first visited Greenland as tourists in 1993 and, in spite of skepticism from family and friends who thought their idea of moving there was just “a phase,” they were serious and moved full-time in 2001.

Fluent in four languages — English, French, German and Danish — Cohen, a professional translator, has decoded hundreds of articles from German to English for the English website of Der Spiegel, also numerous academic books, and more translation work from Danish to English. He also rents properties to travelers.

There has never been an organized Jewish community in Greenland, other than the U.S. military base at Thule in far northwestern Greenland, where in the 1950s, more than 50 Jewish servicemen were stationed, celebrating Passover seders and Shabbat “at the northernmost minyan in the world,” according to the Danish Center for Holocaust Studies. There have been Jewish scientists, journalists, nurses and other professionals working there, a semi-autonomous territory of the kingdom of Denmark, but most were on short-term assignments.

Cohen says that he and Monika plan to live the rest of their lives there, health permitting. “Sometimes the ice recedes a bit and you find yourself walking on land that hasn’t been exposed for thousands of years,” he said. “There are days when I feel not only like I’m the only Jew in Greenland, but maybe the last person on Earth.”

—Dan Fellner/JTA

Excerpted from the Jerusalem Post

 [On a personal note, Herbert Michelson, a late uncle of Shofar editor Sara Bloom, was a military officer stationed in Thule for several years during the 1950s. He returned home with stories of the region’s great beauty, friendly people, and how much he enjoyed his assignment there. As a young teenager, I couldn’t imagine living there, but now, having read Paul Cohen’s story…]

As the trial of the mass killer at the Tree of Life progressed over the summer, another man was blanketing Pittsburgh with hate and threats. He placed Nazi-themed stickers on street signs and playground equipment around the city, and his haste-filled screeds arrived in the email inboxes of local reporters and Jewish organizations. Photos of people who had testified at the trial, including those who had been wounded in the synagogue attack, showed up on an “enemies list” on his website.

On social media, he pledged to track down the jurors at the trial, sought guidance on making ghost guns and pipe bombs, and urged anyone reading his website to follow the example of Robert Bowers, the man who had carried out the synagogue massacre.

A week after Bowers was sentenced to death, federal agents arrested Hardy Carroll Lloyd in Follansbee, WV, a city about 40 miles from the federal courthouse in Pittsburgh. He is charged with three federal criminal counts, including witness tampering and obstruction of justice in connection with a campaign of threats against people involved in the trial.

For much of the last 15 years, Mr. Lloyd was in and out of prison, serving a sentence on gun convictions, authorities said. Multiple times, he was let out, only to be sent back for violating the terms of his release, including urging violence against Jews.

He is to remain in custody pending a hearing and further legal action.                         Getty Images

Hoax phone calls to police departments or suicide hotlines say that a man is considering killing himself and others or that a bomb has been placed in a building. The address given belongs to a synagogue that is livestreaming its services so that the callers can watch in real time as the police interrupt the services and deal with frightened worshippers.

The practice is called swatting, referring to police SWAT teams that generally are dispatched in true life-threatening situations. Dozens of these calls are occurring in states across the country, according to the Anti-Defamation League, including at least five in New York City in a single week in August.

Oren Segal, director of the ADA’s Center on Extremism, told The New York Times that swatting calls pose a different type of threat than more typical antisemitic acts, such as graffiti or slurs. “ It’s the thousands of people who are anonymous, that are watching, that are getting excited by what they’re seeing and that may be animated to take it to the next level,” he said.