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Shabbos Behart • May 27, 2016 • 19 Iyar 5776 • Candlelighting 7:58 pm (Luach page 21) • Vol 15, No 21

The Newspaper of our Orthodox communities

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The Jewish Star / Susan Grieco

By The Jewish Star Nassau County and the Town of Hempstead legislatures each moved this week to assert support for Israel by opposing the antiJewish state Boycott Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The county legislature voted unanimously on Monday to refuse county work to companies that are involved with BDS, a movement that Legislator Howard Kopel said was “nothing more than thinly-veiled anti-Semitism.â€? “Anti-Semitic policies have no place in our society and Nassau,â€? County Executive Ed Mangano said. Last Wednesday, Town of Hempstead ofďŹ cials gathered with

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local rabbis and community leaders outside the Young Israel of Lawrence-Cedarhurst to announce plans for a similar bill affecting Town of Hempstead business. Councilman Bruce Blakeman said that BDS was “part of a far-left anti-Semitic agenda to discredit Israel and eventually bring Israel to its knees, and that will not happen.� Hempstead Town Supervisor Anthony Santino said he was not aware of any company doing town work that supports BDS, “but now we will require everyone that does business with us to certify that they are not.� Once the bill passes, “we can say with certainty that there is no one� in the BDS camp.

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By Tiferet Schaer The biggest challenge to Israel’s survival as the Jewish state isn’t the Boycott Disinvestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), and it’s not the poison that’s being spread through social media. Instead, it is the failure of the state to integrate its Russian immigrants and to narrow a religious

divide, several speakers warned at the ďŹ fth annual Jerusalem Post Conference in Manhattan on Sunday. Thousands of Russian immigrants have not undergone halachic conversions because the process has been made exceedingly difďŹ cult by the Israeli chief rabbinate, said Ephraim Halevy, former director of the Mossad and head

of the Israeli National Security Council. The result is that Russian immigrants and others cannot legally get married or have bar and bat mitzvahs, and instead have children who are not halachically Jewish, thereby perpetuating and widening the problem, he said. “If the population in Israel beContinued on page 6

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ing civil war in Syria that has seen hundreds of thousands of deaths — is still experiencing the aftershocks of the 1916 Sykes-Picot pact. Scholars tackled the subject earlier this month at a conference hosted by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) think tank. Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, director of JCPA’s Project on Regional Middle East Developments, explained in a policy paper that Sykes-Picot failed because it was drawn up not with the Middle East’s interests in mind, but with a mixture of British and French interests. “Britain was particularly interested in ac-

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By Maayan Jaffe-Hoffman One-hundred years ago this month, British colonel Sir Tatton Benvenuto Mark Sykes and French diplomat François Marie Denis Georges-Picot divided the Middle East loosely and arbitrarily between Great Britain and France. Following that division, which became known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, a series of further — and often contradictory — treaties and conferences resulted in power battles, internal uprisings, coups, and revolts. A century later, the Middle East — with an explosive array of conicts, including an ongo-

cess to petroleum in Iraq. France, for their part, wanted access to Mediterranean harbor cities like Beirut,â€? former Israeli ambassador to Canada Alan Baker noted. The secret map drawn up by Sykes and Picot established the geography for French and British colonial rule and inuence. It also established new national borders, failing to take into account the local people, demographics, or socio-cultural and religious aspects of the territories they divided. “Sykes-Picot is the poster agreement for the Continued on page 23

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