A jury has found that the Pittsburgh synagogue mass shooter is eligible to face the death penalty. The 50-year-old gunman was found guilty on June 16 of all 63 charges against him for killing 11 worshippers and wounding 6 others at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. Twenty-two of those counts were capital offenses.

In the next phase of the trial, the jury will hear from survivors and the victims’ families. Then the jury will move into the final phase to decide whether to recommend death for the capital offenses.

“Golda,” a film by Israeli director Guy Nattiv, will open the Jerusalem Film Festival on July 13, and will run for 10 days. The film follows Israel’s first woman prime minister during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

British actress Helen Mirren stars as Golda Meir. Co-starring is Jewish-American actor Lieb Shreiber as U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The film is to be released in the United States on August 25, and is scheduled to be streamed on Netflix, Amazon Prime and other platforms.

The selection of Helen Mirren, who is not Jewish, for the role drew some criticism. In February, when the film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, Nattiv answered a question from a journalist regarding his choice to cast a non-Jewish actress for the role. “I can tell you,” he said, “when I met Helen, I felt like I was meeting a family member, an aunt…a Jewish person. For me, she had the Jewish chops to play Golda.”                                                                                                                            Photo: Haaretz

The German government’s advisory panel on Nazi-looted art has recommended that a vibrant tempera painting by Wassily Kandinsky be returned to the heirs of a Jewish family who suffered persecution under the Nazis in the Netherlands during WWII.

The painting, “Colorful Life,” was part of an extensive art collection belonging to Emanuel Albert Lewenstein. It is thought to have been on loan from the family to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam when the Germans invaded the Netherlands in 1940. Since 1972, it has been hanging in the Städtische Galerie in Lenbachhaus in Munich.

In 2021, the Lewenstein heirs recovered another Kandinsky work, “Painting With Houses,” which ended a bitter dispute between the heirs and the city of Amsterdam.

• The National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian has added a picture of Rabbi Sally Priesand, who became the first female rabbi in the United States when she was ordained in 1972. Her portrait will hang alongside portraits of Beyoncé and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
• Swastika Lake to be renamed: The lake, located in a national forest in Wyoming, was named early in the 20th century, before the Nazi Party appropriated the symbol. But Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and the philanthropist behind the StopAntisemitism campaign, noted in his appeal to change the name that “it has unfortunately become synonymous with one of the greatest atrocities in human history.” A county commissioner had wanted to keep the name as a “teaching opportunity,” but was overruled in a 2-1 vote to rename the lake in honor of Samuel Knight, a professor and dinosaur enthusiast who was known as Mr. Geology of Wyoming.

“Criticism from historians and Jewish organizations did little to dim the sale at Christie’s of jewels made of precious diamonds and colored gemstones bought with a fortune built in part with profits from the Aryanization of Jewish businesses during the Holocaust,” The New York Times said. “In bidding online and in person in Geneva, the sale of jewelry from the estate of Heidi Horten, an Austrian philanthropist, has brought in $202 million, making it the most successful jewelry sale in history.”

Christie’s has faced substantial criticism about the sale because of Horten’s husband, Helmut Horten, a German businessman and billionaire, who began to amass his fortune by purchasing at a discount the businesses of Jews forced by circumstances or edict to sell their companies during the Holocaust.

“In a time of Holocaust denial and the resurgence of antisemitism around the world, we find it especially appalling that a world-renowned auction house would engage in such a sale,” wrote Yoram Dvash, president of the World Federation of Diamond Bourses, in a recent letter to François Curiel, the auction house’s chairman of Europe and Asia.

Christie’s officials said they chose to move forward with the sale despite the criticism because the proceeds are going to the Heidi Horten Foundation, which supports medical research and a museum containing her art collection. The auction house also pledged to donate some of its proceeds to Holocaust research and education.                                                                                      [Photos courtesy Christie’s]

A 1,100-year-old Hebrew Bible sold for $38.1 million at a Sotheby’s auction on May 17 in Geneva, becoming the most expensive book ever sold.

Known as the Codex Sassoon, it was bought by the Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv through a donation from Alfred Moses, a former U.S. ambassador to Romania.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Getty Images