Jewish history

In the 1960s, Israel and Iran weren’t sworn enemies. In fact, there were political and cultural exchanges between the two countries. Among them was a visit by a famed Iranian author to Israel — an experience that he wrote about in a book with startling contradictions.

It’s nearly seventy years since World War II ended. In that time, many historians have documented what happened to Germany’s Jews under the Nazis. But less attention has been paid to what happened to Jewish survivors who stayed in Germany after the Holocaust – particularly the Jews who settled in the former East Germany, or the GDR as it was called. Now a new German play addresses some of that history.

A large crowd turned out in Jerusalem on Wednesday to pay final respects to the four French Jews who were gunned down outside a Jewish school in Toulouse this week. The funeral was a somber occasion, with many Israelis arguing this was a sign the French Jewish community needed to move to Israel.

Yurko Nazaruk opened a restaurant in Lviv, Ukraine that is designed to look like the sort of underground bunkers used by insurgents during World War II. It was so successful he opened one that’s themed after the country’s Jewish community, all but wiped out during the war, Lviv-born writer Leopold van Sacher Masoch, who lent his name to masochism. But not everyone is pleased.

France is home to Western Europe’s biggest Jewish and Muslim populations. Tensions have been rising since last March, when a man named Mohamed Merah killed seven people – including three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse. The Merah case is extreme, but among an alarming number of anti-Semitic attacks across France this year.