The French-based “IPC – Sa” Firm said it will change the name of its deterging product from “Cyclone B,” almost the same as that of the infamous Nazi gas “Zyklon B,” after strong condemnation by European Jewish Association  General Director, Rabbi Menachem Margolin

The Nazis used “cyclone B”  gas to exterminate Jews in death camps during the Holocaust.

The European Union, which uses the French firm as its cleaning contractor, took measures to put it out of use when informed of the cleansing product’s notorious name.

Rabbi Margolin told German television Monday, “This is horrible ignorance at best, and a Guinness record in evil and cynicism if the company did know the history of the name of its product. No doubt that this is the most tainted name that a detergent can have.”

Immigrants to Israel from seven countries will light Hanukkah candles Tuesday night simultaneously with Jews in seven other countries in a ceremony organized by the Ministry of Immigration and Absorption and The Jewish Agency for Israel.

The candle lighting in Israel will take place at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem, where 300 young olim  from France, Ethiopia, the United States, Yemen, Latvia, Latin America, and the Bnei Menashe community of India will be joined by Jews lighting at the same time in Paris, London, Moscow, Kiev, Tashkent and Budapest.

The event will be broadcast live  here at 3:30 p.m. Israel time (8:30 a.m. EST).

French President Francois Hollande visited the Jerusalem graves of the victims of the attack on a Toulouse Jewish school on Tuesday, accompanied by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and members of the Sandler and Monsonego families.

Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, 30; his children Gabriel, 6, and Aryeh,3; and Miriam Monsonego, 8, were killed in March 2012 when radical Islamist Mohammed Merah entered the Ozar HaTorah school in the city in southwest France and shot at students and teachers.

The school slayings came a few days after Merah gunned down three French soldiers in two drive-by shootings from a scooter near Toulouse.

Merah was shot dead three days after the school shooting during a standoff with police. He had admitted to the shootings, saying they were in retaliation for Israel’s alleged treatment of Palestinian Authority Arabs.

France police are scouring Paris and surrounding areas for a lone gunman who critically wounded a leftwing newspaper’s assistant to a photojournalist Monday, days after gunman broke into CNN’s affiliate and threatened journalists before fleeing. It is not known if the threat on Friday and Monday’s shooting are connected.

The French daily Liberation in Paris said the man entered its offices on Monday with a shotgun and fired twice, hitting the 27-year-old victim in the chest. The gunman later opened fire in front of bank high-rise without injuring anyone.

The Interior Ministry ordered police deployment at offices of all French newspapers.

President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu practiced out their French Sunday to welcome French President Francois Hollande at Ben Gurion Airport Sunday.

Hollande suffered the Israeli accent, assuming he is like most Frenchmen, who shiver whenever a foreigner tries to pretend he can speak French.

Hollande returned the compliment and told Prime Minister Netanyahu, in Hebrew, that he would “always remain a friend of Israel.”

Netanyahu said, “Vive la France, vive l’Israel, vive l’amitie entre la France et l’Israel” after showering Hollande with praise in English for Paris’ stand against the Iranian and Syrian regimes.”

President Peres went all out and said, “Je suis heureux de vous recevoir en Israel à vous exprimer, au nom de tous les Israéliens, nos souhaits les plus vifs de la plus amicale et la plus chaleureuse des bienvenues. Votre visite, Monsieur le Président, met en lumière et votre attachement à Israel, et l’estime profonde qui lie nos deux peuples.”

The translation, more or less, is, “I am happy to receive you in Israel and to express in the name of all Israelis the kindest and most amiable greetings and warmest welcome. “

Having run out of superlatives, he continued in French, “Your visit, Mr. President, highlights your attachment to Israel and the profound esteem that binds our nations.”

For clinchers, he told Hollande, “The soul of France is equality” and then switched to English to explain, “I can add that the description that ‘equality is the soul of France’ accompanies me almost from birth. That is indeed France. A beating heart that gave to the world three irreplaceable words; liberty, fraternity and equality. The people of Israel owe France a great debt for standing by our side in times of peace and of war. For allowing the development of the Israel’s defensive force. Especially in the first years of the state, when we needed France more than at any other time.

“The gates of the world were closed to the survivors of the Holocaust. The countries that voted in favor of the creation of the State of Israel refused to provide even one gun for our self-defense. It was the France of the ‘resistance’ that broke the embargo which was placed upon Israel and allowed us to bring immigrants to Israel. It was France that stood by Israel’s side during our War of Independence. Enthusiastically, with the support of its citizens, its soldiers, its writers and its leaders France allowed us to defend ourselves as a sovereign state and to build a new society.”

The warm praises that the President and Prime Minister showered on Hollande, and the praise of Israel by the visiting president, contrast sharply with frigid relations nine years ago when then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon openly called on Jews in France to flee anti-Semitism and come to Israel to live.

Things have changed since then, such as the threat of a nuclear Iran even if anti-Semitism remains.

“We are full of admiration for your unflinching stance to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon for mass destruction. Iran seeks to dominate the Middle East with nuclear arms and long range missiles,” said President Peres, sparing Hollande from more ear-crunching French.

But he insisted on concluding in French and said,  “Vive la France. Vive Israel. Vive l’amitié entre la France et Israel.”

More than 5,500 people, including prominent French politicians, scholars and clergymen, have signed a petition against attempts to ban the ritual circumcision of boys in Europe.

Titled “No to a ban on circumcision,” the petition was published on Oct. 16 by CRIF, the umbrella organization representing France’s Jewish communities, following the Oct. 1 passage of a Council of Europe resolution that calls male ritual circumcision a “violation of the physical integrity of children.”

Among the petition signers are Anne Hidalgo, a candidate in next year’s Paris mayoral elections, the director Claude Lanzmann and former government ministers Claude Goasguen and Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet.

By Thursday, the petition had more than 5,500 signatures.

The non-binding resolution by the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly “targets European Jewish communities that are already exposed to the unprecedented resurgence of anti-Semitism,” the petition reads. “It is inconceivable to those who survived the Holocaust” and “dangerous because it stigmatizes Jews.”

Other co-signatories include Patrick Dubois, a French Catholic priest and Holocaust scholar, and Alain Massini, a well-known Protestant pastor.

The text of the petition also characterizes the resolution as “insulting” because it “equates between circumcision and [female genital] mutilation.”

The Palestinian Authority is trumpeting a Swiss report that Israel killed Yasser Arafat with polonium, but chemists have told The Jewish Press that the basis for the accusations is “nonsense.”

Arafat died nine years ago next month, and the Palestine Liberation Organization from day one has accused Israel of murdering him. The idea that Israel poisoned him with polonium surfaced last year after when Al Jazeera reported that high levels of the radioactive substance polonium were found on Arafat’s clothing.

His body then was exhumed for an examination, but the report on the results had been postponed time and time again, without explanation, leading to the reasonable conclusion that the PA was not able to come up with the needed evidence.

Now, just in time for Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas to throw a screwball at the  brain dead “peace talks” that are slowly returning to the grave,  the Lancet publication has published a report by Swiss radiation experts that “support the possibility” Arafat was poisoned to death.

Raising the “possibility” gets the Palestinian Authority off the hook. It cannot prove Arafat was poisoned and in effect is saying, “Go prove that Israel did not poison him.”

The Jewish Press is proving it indeed did not.

Chemists told The Jewish Press that not only is the report ridiculous in terms of chemistry, but there also are plenty of easier and less traceable ways to murder someone.

Given the admitted disappearance of polonium over a period of years, Israel would have had to use millions of times more polonium than what remains.

The Lancet report jibes well with the entire Palestinian Authority ideology, which history eventually will show as being a pack of lies that the “objective” media report as fact.  The report in Lancet really is not much different from what Al Jazeera reported last year when it quoted Francois Bochud, the head of the Institute of Radiation Physics, who said his team “did find some significant polonium” in Arafat’s belongings before the exhumation.”

Making the Lancet report even more suspicious is that it was written by the same Swiss scientists of the Institute for Radiation Physics who did the initial testing that was published by Al Jazeera. In other words, the not-so-independent experts reviewed their own work.

Even the exhumation smelled fishy. As Elder of Ziyon pointed out last year, “A Palestinian pathologist was the only person allowed to touch the body when Arafat’s grave was opened.”

He took 60 samples for the probe. The Lancet report states that eight scientists carried out radiological tests on 73 samples, 28 from Arafat’s clothes and toothbrush, which had saliva stains, and 37 on “reference” samples of cotton clothing that had conveniently been kept for a decade.

“Several samples containing body fluid stains (blood and urine) contained higher unexplained polonium 210 activities than the reference samples,” says the case report. “These findings support the possibility of Arafat’s poisoning with polonium 210.”

It concluded that after taking into consideration polonium’s delay, the remaining levels of polonium  mean that a lethal dose would have been astronomical.

If polonium had been used to kill Arafat, his hair would have fallen out,chemists told The Jewish Press.

The scientists acknowledged this fact, without comment, except to add that “an autopsy would have been useful” at the time of his death.

Of course, the Palestinian Authority did not want to do such thing in 2004 because there was no evidence of any poisoning.

Beatrice Schaad, head of communications at the Vaudois University Hospital Center that is in charge of the Institute, told AFP that the report in Lancet simply is the scientific version of last year’s report and, “There is still no conclusion that he was poisoned.”

One chemist, who said his name cannot be used because he works for a large Israeli chemicals firm, told The Jewish Press , “Why would Israel choose polonium to kill Arafat when there are lots of other substances that can cause death a lot quicker and that are not traceable?

Dr. Avraham Rotman, said, “Polonium 210 has a half-life of 138 days; it is hard to imagine that it could be detected in a small sample after nine years.”

“Half-life” means the radioactivity of a sample drops by half during the specified period. After eight years, when Arafat’s body was exhumed, virtually nothing would be left unless it came for a natural source that could replenish the polonium or unless he had been injected with enough polonium to kill a herd of elephants.

France’s right-wing National Front party headed by Marine Le Pen is leading the country’s two major parties in the polls for May’s elections to the European Parliament.

The Le Nouvel Observateur weekly reported that the party has the support of 24 percent of French voters, compared with only 22 and 19 percent respectively for the center-right UMP and Socialist parties.

The latest poll came as Alain Delon, one of France’s most celebrated actors, expressed his sympathy for the National Front and said he “approved” of the party’s rise, the European Jewish Press reported.

Other right-wing parties in other countries, such as Holland’s Freedom party headed by anti-Islamist Geert Wilder also might win more support. In Britain, the anti-immigration Independence also has won increasing popularity in polls.