International

The COVID-19 pandemic was not only a test of health systems. It was also a test of whether governments could be trusted to report what was happening, and a new Israeli study suggests that the strength of a country’s institutions may have mattered more than its ability to count.

The United Kingdom, France and Canada will ban goods produced in the West Bank settlements and Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told Parliament on Sept. 8, stating that all such communities were deemed by his country to be illegal.

President Volodymyr Zelensky awarded a medal of honor on Aug. 27 to Natan Sharansky in Kiev for his efforts to help Ukraine and preserve the memory of the Holocaust there.

Archaeologists have uncovered the full floor of Lithuania’s historic Great Synagogue in Vilnius, revealing treasures nearly erased by Nazi and Soviet occupations — and exposing rifts between Lithuanian Jews over how to preserve and interpret what survived.

When World Zionist Organization officials working with the Israeli Foreign Ministry opened the grave of Theodor Herzl’s grandfather on July 29 in Zemun, Serbia, they found it empty. Shimon Leib Herzl was not buried beneath his tombstone. So they kept digging to the side of his wife Rivka’s grave and found his remains there, according to Yizhar Hess, the WZO’s acting chair, who was present at the exhumation.

It was a surprise reunion. For the last nine years, Moshe Galinkin had been unable to see his younger brother Daniel, first because of travel restrictions imposed during COVID and then because of the war in Ukraine.

How do you stop neo-Nazis from meeting up at Adolf Hitler’s birthplace? Station officers there around the clock. That is just what the small town of Braunau in Austria has done, by turning Hitler’s first home into a police station.

An online campaign calling on people in Italy to surveil and report the whereabouts of Jewish and Israeli tourists, or anyone suspected of having ties to “Zionists,” has sparked anger among Israeli diplomats, local Jewish leaders and Italian politicians.

The Jewish chess legend Judit Polgár has declined an invitation to become Hungary’s president, a largely ceremonial position that would have increased the visibility of one of the country’s most celebrated Jewish figures.

Andy Burnham officially became Britain’s new Labour prime minister on Monday, July 20, replacing Keir Starmer, who resigned following the party’s disastrous showing in local elections in May. Starmer left behind a mixed record on anti-Semitism. He purged the party of its image as hostile to Jews under former party leader Jeremy Corbyn. But at the same time, attacks against Jews in Britain rose dramaticallly in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack on Israel. Uncertainty is at a high.