National

32 publicly thanked him on Twitter, stating, “Thanks to those without whom the project would not have happened.” The Jewish Home | AUGUST 18, 2022 Rabbi Lerner pointed out that the contract with Panim was conducted improperly and in violation of regulations, while members of Panim participated in meetings with the members of the Office of Jewish Renewal. “The Panim organization is closely connected to the entity that ended up allocating tens of millions to itself,” Rabbi Lerner said. In addition, while the Panim organization’s annual budget in previous years amounted to just 1% of the scope of this entire project, strangely, it was not required to provide any proof of its ability to manage funds on such a scale. Rabbi Lerner points out additional legal difficulties involved in the existence of such a project through the Diaspora Ministry, whose formal field of activity, as mentioned before, is the Diaspora, while the directorate’s budget is intended for activities which will certainly take place within the borders of the State of Israel. Apart from that, there was no need to have a “conduit” for transferring the funding. “In light of all this,” concluded Rabbi Lerner, “we are asking for an immediate freezing of the contract and the opening of a comprehensive investigation into this matter.”

Rabbi Lerner added that it is for this very reason that the Eretz Hakodesh party was founded.

“The gedolim encouraged us to establish Eretz Hakodesh not only to serve as a voice of charedi Jewry, but to fight the corruption of the left and stop the flow of monies going to fund projects of the Reform and Conservative, who, through these undertakings, seek to fight the Orthodox community and draw more and more people away from Torah Judaism. Our uncovering of the duplicity and conflict of interest in this case reveals just how important it is that we keep at it, working on behalf of greater charedi Jewry.”

Salman Rushdie Stabbed

On Friday, Indian-born author Salman Rushdie was attacked as he was being introduced to give a talk on artistic freedom to an audience of hundreds of people in New York. The attacker rushed the stage and stabbed Rushdie, 75, repeatedly in the neck and torso. He may lose his eye because of the attack.

Hadi Matar, 24, was subsequently arrested and charged with attempted murder. He was living in Fairview, New Jersey, and was supposedly radicalized after a trip to Lebanon years ago.

Rushdie has lived with a bounty on his head since 1989, spending years in hiding after Iran urged Muslims to kill him over his novel “The Satanic Verses.”

Matar was born in California and recently moved to New Jersey, the NBC New York report said, adding that he had a fake driver’s license on him. He was arrested at the scene by a state trooper after being wrestled to the ground by audience members.

Rushdie, who was born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in Bombay, now Mumbai, before moving to Britain, has long faced death threats for his book. The 1988 novel, viewed by some Muslims as containing blasphemous passages, was banned in many countries with large Muslim populations.

In 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, pronounced a fatwa, or religious edict, calling on Muslims to kill the author and anyone involved in the book’s publication for blasphemy. Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of the novel, was stabbed to death in 1991 by an attacker who fled.

Iranian organizations, some linked to the government, have raised a bounty worth millions of dollars for Rushdie’s murder. Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said as recently as 2019 that the fatwa was “irrevocable.”

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Murders Soar in Philly

counted its 300th killing of the year; Lameer Boyd, 18, was gunned down one hot summer night. Since then, a grandmother was shot in the neck, a popular singer was killed in front of his house, and a woman was killed at a front-porch cookout.

With her death, the 322nd of the year, the number of homicides in Philadelphia is on track toward becoming the highest in police records, passing the bleak milestone set just last year. So far this year, more than 1,400 people in the city have been shot, hundreds of them fatally, a higher toll than in the much larger cities of New York or Los Angeles.

As much as the numbers are alarming, consider that the majority of the killings take place in North and West Philadelphia, some of the poorest parts of the city.

The city government has rolled out an array of efforts to address the crisis, including grants for community groups, violence intervention programs, and earlier curfews. But on one crucial matter, there seem to be no ready answers: what to do about all the guns.

In a recent news conference, Mayor Jim Kenney lamented that the authorities “keep taking guns off the street, and they’re simultaneously replaced almost immediately.” For every illegal gun seized by the police in Philadelphia between 1999 and 2019, about three more guns were bought or sold legally — and that was before a recent boom in gun ownership.

In Philadelphia over the past two years, as all around the country, the pace of legal gun sales surged, roughly doubling during the pandemic years. The number of firearm licenses issued in the city jumped to more than 52,000 in 2021, from around 7,400 in 2020. And that doesn’t include the booming illegal gun market.

Some citizens are begging authorities to bring back “stop and frisk” laws.

But a lot of the frustration has been directed at the district attorney, Larry Krasner, whose approach to criminal justice has drawn criticism from the mayor,

34 ire from the police union, and a threat of impeachment from Republican state lawmakers. The Jewish Home | AUGUST 18, 2022 Krasner, one of the most prominent progressive prosecutors in the country, has long argued that putting a major focus on the arrest and incarceration of people caught carrying firearms without a permit is not only ineffectual but counterproductive, because it diverts police energy and resources from solving violent crime and alienates people whom investigators need as sources and witnesses.

Raiding Mar-a-Lago

Last week, the FBI nabbed about 20 boxes of items when federal agents raided former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, including top secret (TS) and sensitive compartmentalized information (SCI) as well as information about the “President of France,” according to a Friday report by The Wall Street Journal.

News that Trump was improperly holding federal documents and records at his Palm Beach resort home first broke in early February, when the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) confirmed that it had been searching for 15 boxes of records.

After the 15 boxes were turned over to the NARA, that collection led to further suspicion that Trump still possessed additional materials. Federal investigators began interviewing Trump White House and Mar-a-Lago staffers to determine what was moved. The interviews, and a broader investigation overseen by a U.S. attorney, resulted in a grand jury subpoena served on Trump in late May to produce specific documents.

After the documents were not quickly turned over, the FBI and the Justice Department chose to take the unprecedented step of carrying out a search warrant against a former president. The decision was approved by Attorney General Merrick Garland, and a federal judge signed off on the warrant, believing the FBI had shown probable cause for the raid.

Trump and his allies have blasted the FBI search as political persecution. The former president has described the raid as part of a broader partisan “witch hunt,” contending that his political rivals aim to prevent him from seeking the presidency again. He has also called for the warrant and other documents related to the search to be made public.

Garland, in a brief statement to the press on Thursday afternoon, said that the Justice Department had filed a motion to unseal the warrant.

Anti-Semitic Attacker Kills Man

Aryeh Wolf, a 25-year-old Jewish father, was shot and killed last week in Washington, D.C. He had been installing solar panels on a building and was approached from behind and killed.

The murderer, a Black man, didn’t take any of Aryeh’s possessions.

“The suspect walked up to him, fired multiple rounds and fled the location,” said Cpt. Kevin Kentish of the DC Police.

Aryeh was a resident of Baltimore, Maryland. He was known for his generosity and chessed.

At the levaya, a letter was read from his wife, Mindy.

“There is just no way this is real,” she wrote in the letter. “You took care of me and Zahava like no one else could have and showed me every day how fully committed you were. There’s a gaping hole in my heart that only your love was able to fill. Two-and-a-half years with you will never be enough.”

Mindy and Aryeh have one child, Zahava, together. Zahava was born less than a year ago.

CDC Changes Guidelines – Again

es a much lower risk of severe illness, hospitalization, and death compared to earlier in the pandemic.

Now, the CDC is no longer recommending testing people in schools who don’t have Covid symptoms. Still, it is saying that testing should be taking place in certain high risk settings such as nursing homes, prisons, and homeless shelters.

According to the CDC, people who aren’t vaccinated no longer need to quarantine if they have been exposed to Covid. Instead, public health officials now recommend that these individuals wear a mask for 10 days and get tested on day five.

The CDC, in a report published Thursday, said there is a high level of immunity in the population from both vaccines and infections which means the virus now poses a much lower threat to public health.

The changes in CDC guidance come as public health officials have warned that the U.S. could face a major wave of infection in the fall and winter, as immunity from the vaccines wanes and people gather indoors to escape the colder weather.

People with healthy immune systems, regardless of vaccination status, should isolate for five days after testing positive for the virus, but you can end isolation at day six if you have not had symptoms or if you have not had a fever for 24 hours and other symptoms have improved, according to the guidelines.

After leaving isolation, you should wear a high-quality mask through day 10 after your positive test. If you have had two negative rapid antigen tests you can stop wearing your mask earlier, according to the guidelines. You should avoid people who are more likely to get sick from Covid, such as the elderly and people with weak immune systems, until at least day 11.

People with weakened immune systems, those who have been hospitalized with Covid, or those who have had shortness of breath due to the virus should isolate from others for 10 days. ‘

The U.S. military is working “furiously” to rewrite its nuclear deterrence theory to deal with threats coming from China and Russia.

Strategic Command chief Navy Adm. Chas Richard said the U.S. threats are “unprecedented in this nation’s history” during Thursday’s Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, adding, “We have never faced two peer nuclear-capable opponents at the same time, who have to be deterred differently,” according to Defense One.

This spring, as Russia advanced in Ukraine, Richard said he provided an assessment on what it would take to avoid nuclear war, but China has further complicated that threat. Beijing, in recent weeks, has heightened tensions in the region following Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan, which Beijing said was a violation of their agreements; the Biden administration maintains that the trip did not represent a change in policy.

Officials have also sought to move past the traditional deterrence theory of “mutually assured destruction,” which posits that should any country deploy a nuclear weapon, it would result in a retaliatory strike that would result in the destruction of both sides.

That calculation has been tested recently as Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested that it could use a smaller nuclear weapon in Ukraine under the belief that other nuclear powers would not respond with a retaliatory nuclear strike.

“Moscow is using both implicit and explicit nuclear coercion,” Richard said. “They’re trying to exploit a perceived deterrence gap, a threshold below which they mistakenly believe they may be able to employ nuclear weapons.”

Should this occur, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said just days ago, “There is probably no U.N. able to respond anymore ... We might all not be here anymore.” The Russian Foreign Ministry, also earlier this week, announced a temporary withdrawal from the Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, commonly known as the New START treaty, which limits nuclear arms.

“Russia and the PRC have the ability to unilaterally, whenever they decide, they can escalate to any level of violence in any domain. They can do it worldwide and they can do it with any instrument of national power. We’re just not used to dealing with competitions and confrontations like that,” Richard noted.

Protecting the Iranian President

Despite animosity between the two countries, the United States is forced to protect the leader of Iran.

President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran is set to speak at the UN General Assembly in September. As Iran has been the origin of vitriol aimed at the U.S. and its allies, seven Republican senators sent a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden asking him to deny visas for Raisi and his gang.

But the letters are having no effect. According to JNS, a State Department spokesperson said that it is “generally obligated under the United Nations Headquarters Agreement to facilitate travel” by UN member representatives. The spokesperson added: “We take our obligations under the U.N. Headquarters Agreement seriously. At the same time, the Biden administration has not and will not waver in protecting and defending all Americans against threats of violence and terrorism.”

In the letter written by the senators to Biden on August 2, the politicians noted that “Raisi’s involvement in mass murder and the Iranian regime’s campaign to assassinate U.S. officials on American soil make allowing Raisi and his henchmen to enter our country an inexcusable threat to national security.”

Just recently it was reported that a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had formulated an assassination plot against former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton. Bolton is not the only U.S. statesman in crosshairs. Various reports indicated former Secre-

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