The Living Memorial, a monument in Budapest’s Liberty Square, was vandalized over the weekend, after a call by the neo-Nazi website Kuruc.info to destroy it, the website Hungarian Free Press reported Sunday. The Living Memorial was erected back in 2014 in protest against the monument to the German occupation erected by the government, which deflects Hungary’s responsibility for the Holocaust and pins it solely on the Germans.

An estimated 600,000 Hungarian Jews perished in the Holocaust.

For more than two years, the Living Memorial has served as a site for regular talks, lectures, discussion groups, musical performances and commemorations.

One Alitea Guzmán wrote on Kuruc.info: “I promise that one night, in the beginning of September, I will walk by the Living Memorial and I will pack up four or five kilograms of  the display, which legally is considered to be garbage, into a strong bag. And putting that into my car, I will take it to where it belongs. Naturally, I won’t dump it into the Danube, because that is already very polluted.”

Now, as promise, hundreds of photographs which were on display at the site have been torn up and other memorabilia items which had been added to the Living Memorial by survivors and descendants of survivors have been destroyed or stolen.

The Living Memorial group issued a statement saying, “With the exception of a few smaller incidents, respect towards the victims of the Holocaust always protected the memorial from the worst attacks. But yesterday something happened, which until now nobody dared to commit.”

According to the Hungarian Free Press, the Living Memorial group filed a police report immediately after the attack on the monument. The activists noted that Liberty Square is well-equipped with CCTV cameras, so police should be able to identify the perpetrators. But they also revealed that they “do not expect any meaningful response from the state.”

The ‘Change Direction’ organization, which encourages civil activism in the Galilee Panhandle, has called for a “tent-in” demonstration to be held Monday at 4 pm in the region, the Hebrew-language NRG news outlet reported Sunday.

The demonstration is being called to protest a government decision to shelve a long-standing plan to develop the northern region. The decision came as part of the general state plan to trim down the national budget.

The “tent-in” is slated to take place in Metullah near the ‘Pri Metullah’ packing house. Protest signs are be distributed at the site to residents of the region, organizers said.

Earlier this year, a new luxury hotel opened in the Upper Galilee on land owned by Kibbutz Kfar Giladi after having been under construction for the past five years. The Galilion hotel — which features 120 luxury rooms, a large conference center, health spa and swimming pool — was to be part of the opening of an industrial center.

The site was to include a farmers’ market, a spa health club and restaurants, as well as tourist attractions featuring observation balloons flying over the Galilee and Mount Hermon, scheduled to open later this year. Organized walking and driving tours were to be launched in the Agamon Hula Nature Park for bird watching as well.

Here are photos of some of the representatives from the Reform and Conservative Movements during their Protest-Prayer Rally at the Kotel plaza on June 16, 2016.

On Tuesday morning, Jerusalem Chief Rabbi, the Rishon Lezion Rabbi Shlomo Moshe Amar conducted a heartfelt prayer with a few dozen supporters in the remote area of the Western Wall known as the “Israelite Section,” which had been designated by the Israeli government for the mixed prayer services of Reform and Conservative visitors.

The chief rabbi’s followers erected an improvised mehitza-divider to separate men and women, in defiance of the government program. After the morning service, Rabbi Amar spoke tearfully, saying “there’s no such thing as the Reform Kotel, there’s only the Holy Kotel.”

“No one can revoke this holiness,” Rabbi Amar continued, “not the government, not the court, you can’t, it’s a hekdesh-sanctuary, it’s the Temple Mount. Not the goyim, not the UN, no power can revoke it. We stand guard and declare that our entire purpose is for the sake of God’s honor, only God’s honor, and the Shechina-emanation of God, and the people of Israel and the Land of Israel.”

Rabbi Amar’s prayer service reflected a perception on the part of many Haredi leaders that the Reform and Conservative movements are making inroads in Israel through the Supreme Court and certain government officials, and are threatening the classic status quo, whereby secular Israelis did not go to shul, but the shul they didn’t go to was Orthodox. Most Israelis are not interested in these American imports, but the fact that the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem went out of his way to condemn Reform access to the Kotel probably gave those two-minute movements a new lease on life.

For the record, the idea for the mixed prayer area by the Kotel came from an Orthodox Jewish politician, then Minister of Religious Services Naftali Bennett (Habayit Hayehudi), who in 2013 announced the creation of a new prayer area, south of the Mugrabim Gate and north of Robinson’s Arch, an area of 4,844 sq. ft., which is a non-contiguous extension of the Kotel Plaza. It was Bennett’s attempt at solving a 28-year long dispute between the Women of the Wall, a group of largely non-Orthodox Jewish women who have been praying in the Kotel’s women’s section on the first of each Jewish month as well as on select holidays, singing and donning talit and tefillin—all acts which have been provoking ultra-Orthodox Jews since the early 1990s.

While a broad section of ultra-Orthodox public figures attacked the Bennett solution, going as far as to dub it “tzelem ba’heikhal” or a statue in God’s temple, the Women of the Wall group also rejected the minister’s peaceful solution, accusing Bennett of aligning himself with the “extremist” views of Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch, the government-appointed Kotel Rabbi, and of Israel’s chief rabbis (of course, when one accuses the mainstream religious and political leadership of extremism, it would be difficult for her to claim the center).

The WOW also called the special fenced wooden platform Bennett provided for mixed prayers a “sundeck overlooking the Western Wall,” which, come to think of it, could be the name for a bangup real estate bonanza. And the Reform movement over in the US, where they dominate Jewish life, at least on paper, with some two million members (in largely Orthodox Israel they may be noisy but their numbers are puny), announced that the Kotel must be open and accessible to all the Jews and men and women must be treated equally there. In other words, why can’t you all be more Reform, like the rest of us.

The fact is that the Bennett solution, while acquiescing that Israelis who are Reform and Conservative have the right to use a state-owned and funded religious facility, resolves the conflict in a peaceful way, which is not something the Reform and Conservative movements want. Since the platform has been erected, it has been standing empty, first because very few Reform and Conservative Israelis have the time or inclination to regularly fight Jerusalem traffic to go pray at the Kotel when most of them hardly ever pray in their own synagogues during the week; and second because without the opportunity to provoke the Orthodox, what’s the point of schlepping all the way to Jerusalem?

Now, the pushback from the Jerusalem Chief Rabbi has revived the non-Orthodox, whose fundraising and membership largely depends on being the victims of Orthodox “repression.” And so, once again, spokespersons for both movements have condemned the aging rabbi, whose salary is provided by the taxpayers, and who attacks the principles of equality, freedom and the American way.

Perhaps the good chief rabbi of Jerusalem should have taken a hint from the fact that he and his followers were the only ones praying on the Reform “sundeck,” because no one else ever prays there on any given day, and even the Baha’i movement in Israel represents a bigger threat to Orthodox Judaism at the Kotel than do the Reform and Conservative.

The best cure for the WOW phenomenon is probably to let them have their way until they get bored with it. The most recent new month celebration of the WOW, a week ago, attracted fewer than 90 women, and the only coverage it received was a provocation by its CEO, who showed local cops at the end of the service that she had “smuggled” a Torah scroll into the women’s section. Otherwise even she couldn’t get arrested by a largely disinterested police, and couldn’t get covered by the media which is inundated with much bigger stories.

In light of the pervasive anti-Semitism allowed to fester at the University of California Irvine (UCI), 36 Jewish and civil rights groups today demanded UCI Chancellor Howard Gillman immediately implement the recently passed Regents Statement of Principles Against Intolerance.

“Jewish students report that UCI administrators have consistently turned a blind eye to acts of anti-Semitism that would have been promptly and vigorously condemned were they directed against any other racial, ethnic or gender minority,” the groups wrote to Gillman.

In the letter, organized by AMCHA Initiative, the groups demand Gillman publicly disclose how he plans to combat the rampant anti-Semitism on his campus.  Specifically, they ask him to answer the following:

“How do you plan to implement the Regents statement in addressing the alarming problem of anti-Semitic anti-Zionism that has created an intolerable campus climate for Jewish students at UC Irvine? Specifically, what rules, policies and procedures will you invoke or enact, and what educational initiatives will you establish, to ensure that anti-Jewish bigotry will be treated as promptly and vigorously as all other racial, ethnic or gender bigotry, and to guarantee the safety and well-being of Jewish students, and all students, at UC Irvine?”

In March, the UC Regents unanimously approved a policy to address the growing anti-Semitism plaguing many of UC’s 10 campuses.  The policy acknowledges that anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism are no less discriminatory than racism, homophobia or sexism, and calls on UC chancellors to address them just as they would any other act of discrimination.

“Recent events on your campus demonstrate the critical importance of promptly and comprehensively implementing the Regents statement at UC Irvine,” wrote the groups to Gillman.

Incidents include a massive disruption of a recent Hillel movie screening and a speech, by Neturei Karta’s Yisroel Dovid Weiss.  During the disruption event attendees were held hostage for nearly an hour by aggressive protestors and eventually had to be safely escorted out by police.  According to witnesses and university officials, protesters shouted threatening and violent profanities and attempted to push their way inside the room. The week before, during Anti-Zionism Week 2016, Weiss, invited to speak by the Muslim Student Union (MSU) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), spewed classic anti-Semitic tropes accusing Jews of mendacity, criminality and controlling the government. UC Irvine has played host to a number of anti-Semitic events over the past decade including the disruption of a speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren where multiple student protesters were arrested and prosecuted.

In March, AMCHA released an empirical study reporting widespread anti-Semitism in 2015 among the top 100 schools for Jewish students. The study found that the presence of anti-Zionist groups like SJP and MSU increased the likelihood of anti-Semitic incidents on U.S. campuses. In fact, 57% of schools with one or more active anti-Zionist student groups had one or more incidents that targeted Jewish students for harm, whereas only 8% of schools with no active anti-Zionist student groups had such incidents.

A full copy of the letter can be viewed here.

Perhaps it’s a sign that Lebanon has become safer and more Western-oriented: a group of about 50 LGBT activists from the Lebanon-based Helem association, for the first time in four years staged a sit-in outside the Hbeish police station in Beirut, where the “morality police” hold transgressors of article 534 in the penal code which criminalizes relations that are “against nature,” Naharnet reported. The protesters demanded that the law be revoked, and that four transgender women be released. They carried signs saying, “Homosexuality is not a disease,” “Sex is not illegal — your law is archaic,” and “Repeal 534.”

The punishment in Lebanon for “crimes against nature” is up to one year in prison.

An event that was scheduled to follow the demonstration, organized by Proud Lebanon, was canceled due to pressure from Christian religious authorities.

Helem leader Genwa Samhat told AFP that the sit-in, which took place two days before the International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia, “calls for the abolition of this section of law dating from the (1920-1943) French mandate in Lebanon.” She added: “Most people arrested under this law aren’t detained in the act but in the street because of their appearance.” Also, she said, people “continue to be fired if their boss finds out they’re gay. They’re made to say they quit voluntarily for fear of being outed.”

According to Naharnet, Lebanese police are known to raid nightclubs serving homosexual patrons, and homosexuality is a frequent subject of ridicule on television.

In 2012 dozens demonstrated outside a Beirut court to protest the use of an anal “test” for suspected gay men. According to Samhat, “these tests continue, despite the justice ministry asking police to stop the practice. This is humiliating.” Also, she noted that “arrested people are still screened for AIDS, while this should be voluntary. There is a preconceived idea that all homosexuals have AIDS.”

Just to compare, the Boston Globe recently wrote that Tel Aviv, only 130 miles south of Beirut, is the gayest city on earth. “Tel Aviv is, for lack of a better description, super gay,” the paper’s Christopher Muther told his readers, adding, “The long-standing rule of thumb is that 10 percent of the population is gay, give or take. The estimate by officials in Tel Aviv is 25 percent of its population is gay.”

This Sunday, May 15, at 11:00 AM, at Tel-Aviv University’s Antin Square, the annual Nakba (Catastrophe) commemoration ceremony will be held by the TAU Arab/Radical-Left students. Our friends at Im Tirtzu will be holding a “Nakba Charta” (Nakba Nonsense) counter protest and will update our website during and after the protest.

Nakba Day is commemorated on May 15, Israel’s declaration of independence day in 1948. The Jewish State, which follows the Jewish calendar for its “bank holidays,” celebrated the day on the 5th of Iyar (although this year, out of respect for Shabbat, we celebrated it on Thursday, Iyar 4). For the Arabs, it is an annual day of commemoration of the first day when their bad move at the UN Nov. 1947 partition vote blew in their faces, resulting in their succession of losses in their attempt to destroy the Jewish state—although they keep on trying.

It should be noted that as long as Israelis were determined to hold on to their right to settle anywhere in the Land of Israel, commemoration of the Nakba was being practiced by very few Arab citizens of Israel. The memories of 1948 were largely personal and communal, without a driving political component. But in the wake of the 1991 Madrid Conference, the first time Israel acquiesced to the concept of “Palestinian independence,” the observance of the Nakba has grown stronger and often violent. The Oslo Accords, which signaled that Israel was ready to capitulate on the fate of the liberated regions of Gaza, Judea, Samaria and the Golan, helped turn the Nakba craze into a regular day of confrontation between Arab Israeli youths and police, reminding many Israelis of the Arab pogroms of the 1920s and ’30s.

On Nakba Day 2011, egged on by the “Arab Spring,” Arabs from Judea and Samaria, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Syria marched towards the 1949 armistice (green line) borders, to mark their continued rejection of the right of the Jewish State to exist. At least twelve Arabs were killed and hundreds were wounded when the IDF blocked the zombie-fashion advance on the border fences by thousands of Syrian protesters who tried to forcibly enter the Golan Heights. Arabs also threw stones at Israeli soldiers guarding checkpoints in eastern Jerusalem, and the soldiers fired rubber bullets and tear gas in response.

A 2011 law empowers the Israeli finance minister to cut or reduce government funding to any NGO that organizes Nakba commemoration events.