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Parsha Vaera • January 27, 2017 • 29 Tevet 5777 • Five Towns Candlelighting 4:49 pm, Havdalah 5:58 • Luach page 20 • Vol 16, No 4
The Newspaper of our Orthodox communities
Trump hits ‘pause’ Embassy move to Jerusalem will wait, again
President Donald Trump reading the first of three executive orders he was preparing to sign in the Oval Office on Monday. Action on an embassy move to Jerusalem was not among them. Ron Sachs/Pool/Getty Images
WASHINGTON (JTA and JNS) — The Trump administration has yet to decide on when to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, its spokesman said on Monday. Press Secretary Sean Spicer, in his first Q&A with reporters, said that President Trump had not yet made a decision about the embassy move. “There’s no decision,” Spicer said when he was asked about whether the administration had considered the strategic consequences of a move. “We’re at the very early stages of that decisionmaking process.” Later, asked whether Trump would order the move through executive action, Spicer said: “It’s very early in this process. We’re at the beginning stages of this decision-making process and his team will continue to consult with stakeholders there.” Finally, a third reporter asked Spicer whether he meant there was no decision yet — not just on when, but whether to move the embassy. “If it was already a decision, we wouldn’t be going through the process,” Spicer said. Trump said while he campaigned and reportedly as recently as last week that he planned to move the embassy from Tel Aviv. Last week, Spicer said there would be an announcement “soon.” The Palestinian leadership has said in recent days that an embassy move could bury any vestiges of the peace process, which
Trump has said he would like to advance. MSNBC reported Monday that Trump believes that advancing peace is a greater priority than moving the embassy. Jordan, a close U.S. ally, has also warned that the move could destabilize the region. Congress in 1995 passed a law mandating a move to Jerusalem, but allowed presidents to waive it every six months for national security reasons; successive presidents have done so. Trump would need to issue a waiver by the end of May if he chooses not to move the embassy. At Tuesday’s press briefing, Spicer said that when Prime Minister Netanyahu visits Washington next month, President Trump would raise the issue of recently announced settlement expansion plans. “We’ll discuss that,” Spicer said. “He has asked his team to get together” and study the settlement question, Spicer said. “Israel has continued to be a huge ally of the United States … he wants to get closer with Israel.” On Tuesday, Israel approved construction of 2,500 new homes in Judea and Samaria, which was the largest announcement in several years. While most of these homes are within main settlement blocs, according to Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman, approximately 100 units are in the Jewish community of Bet El near Ramallah, to which the Trump Foundation donated $10,000 in 2003. Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner has also donated to the community. Trump’s choice for ambassador to Israel, David Friedman of Long Island, also has close ties with Bet El.
Uncovering hidden Holocaust Friday, Jan. 27, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which commemorates the liberation of Auschwitz by Red Army troops in 1945. As Noah Lederman discovered, not all sites of the Shoah are remembered. By Noah Lederman, JTA rowing up, I had always heard the names Otwock and Karczew. Both are neighboring towns near Warsaw. Before the Holocaust, Otwock was home to some 14,000 Jews. Karczew had about 500 Jewish residents and became home to a Nazi forced-labor camp during World War II. While both places may have little name recognition around the world, in my family the names loomed large. They were as common to all of us as the names of Poppy and Grandma’s murdered siblings. My grandparents had grown up in Otwock. They fled to the Warsaw Ghetto following the summer of 1942, when they were teenagers, after the Nazis had murdered 12,000 of the 14,000 Jews living in their town. Years later, having survived the war and immigrating to the United States, my grandparents had children. They raised their two
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The Jewish cemetery in Otwock.
Noah Lederman
kids as best they could, often falling back on their Holocaust stories. But because of these grim bedtime tales, my father slept with a packed suitcase beneath his bed. The Nazis, he assumed, would inevitably storm his Brooklyn apartment. My aunt developed an eating disorder. Nightmares were constant. But Poppy and Grandma learned from their mistakes — by the time the grandchildren were around, their Holocaust stories were reduced to whispers. Discussions about Otwock, Karczew, the ghettos and the camps were off the table. Though I constantly pressed them for stories, they kept silent. In 2004, however, I traveled to Otwock. I discovered the four synagogues had been dismantled, the town hall had no records, Grandma’s street had vanished from the map, the supposed “Jewish Center” had no Jews. While the trip was disappointing, my visit broke Grandma’s silence. For the next six years, Grandma shared her stories. I also interviewed other survivors, pored through texts, wrote to tracing services, begged for records and watched my grandparents’ Shoah Foundation testimonies. See Uncovering on page 7
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1,500 at Darchei
Ronald Lowinger, Yeshiva Darchei Torah president and dinner chairman, speaks at Sunday’s gala that drew 1,500 supporters to the school’s Far Rockaway campus. See page 18. Tsemach Glenn