NCSEJ WEEKLY TOP 10 Washington, D.C. November 2, 2018

In a strange twist of fate, now it’s Russian praying for American Jews By Amie Ferris-Rotman Washington Post, October 31, 2018 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/10/31/strange-twist-fate-now-its-russian-jews-praying-american-jews/

MOSCOW — When hundreds of Jewish delegates from around the world convened in the Russian capital this week, their Russian hosts had prepared an item of good news they wished to deliver.

Anti-Semitism in Russia had fallen to a record low. Compared to East European countries, Russia, once the land of state-sponsored persecution, now came last.

But in the wake of the synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh on Saturday, the conference aimed at combating anti-Semitism, xenophobia and racism suddenly became a lot more timely.

Prominent members of Russia’s Jewish leadership held prayers for the 11 victims, who were gunned down during a morning ceremony at their Tree of Life synagogue.

U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman somberly read out each of their names to a large crowd including senior Russian officials and Jewish, Muslim and Christian clergy.

The conference, the second by the Russian Jewish Congress, was organized some time ago. But the events in Pittsburgh set the tone.

“Having something as tragic as that take place on the eve of this has given what we’re trying to accomplish here a much greater sense of urgency,” said Mark Levin, executive vice chairman and chief executive of the National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry.

“Our work became more important,” said Pinchas Goldschmidt, the chief rabbi of Moscow, who lead the memorial prayers for the victims. “We’re now not discussing abstract, philosophical anti-Semitism; we’re discussing actual processes which lead people to kill other people.”

Some speakers are closely linked to the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, where the attack took place. Goldschmidt’s cousin is Rabbi Daniel Wasserman, a member of the Pittsburgh Orthodox community and one of the volunteers who made sure the bodies were properly respected when being moved from the crime scene, as Jewish tradition mandates.

The president of the Russian Jewish Congress, Yury Kanner, found out about the mass shooting from his son, who lives in Pittsburgh with his American wife. Remarking on the deadliest attack on Jews in American history, Kanner’s feelings shifted between bemusement and shock.

He detailed how Russian Jews sought refuge in the United States in the 19th century, escaping the large-scale pogroms of the czarist era that ravaged the Jewish settlements on the western fringes of the Russian empire. “For Jews at that time, America was the place you could go. But this totally changes the Jewish American story.”

Like the century before it, the Soviet era was riddled with anti-Semitism. Jews were often discriminated against by the government, from restrictive quotas at top universities to having the equivalent of a letter ‘J’ marked in their internal Soviet passports. Anti-Semitic imagery and slogans were rife and generally accepted by Soviet society.

Starting in the 1970s, Soviet Jews began leaving for Israel and the West. By the time the collapsed in 1991, a 1-million-strong exodus had taken place. The chaotic 1990s saw many more go.

But today, the community — which Jewish leaders estimate to number up to 1 million, half of whom are in Moscow — is thriving. Jewish schools and synagogues throughout the country are hives of activity. President Vladimir Putin takes to state television to congratulate Jews on religious holidays.

And attacks on Jews and Jewish property are falling.

According to a recent poll by the independent Levada Center, commissioned by the Russian Jewish Congress, 80 percent of those surveyed, both Jews and non-Jews, said there is less anti-Semitism than during Soviet times.

Still, the United States and Israel are often viewed as the only “real future” for world Jewry, Goldschmidt said. “So many Americans ask me, ‘When is the last Jew leaving and turning off the light at the last synagogue?’” he said. “But what happened in Pittsburgh shows America is no longer apart from the rest.”

For European Jews, a horrifying sight on the other side of the Atlantic By James McAuley Washington Post, October 28, 2018 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/for-european-jews-a-horrifying-sight-on-the-other-side-of- the-atlantic/2018/10/28/0556d282-dad0-11e8-8bac-bfe01fcdc3a6_story.html

PARIS — Jewish children slaughtered in school. Jewish customers shot in a kosher supermarket. Elderly Jewish women beaten in their apartments, then thrown from the window or left to burn.

In recent years, deadly anti-Semitic violence has become a mainstay of European headlines, a troubling reality on the same soil where millions of Jews were systematically murdered less than a century before.

That violence was not mirrored in the United States — until Saturday, when 11 Jews were killed in a Pittsburgh synagogue. The man accused had taken to social media to decry a Jewish refugee resettlement organization several days after President Trump repeated a conspiracy theory with clear anti-Semitic connotations: the belief that the Jewish billionaire George Soros is importing foreign refugees to undermine the country’s putative white, Christian character.

This vision has become a common refrain on the European far right, part of the violent rhetoric that often precedes actual acts of violence. Now, European observers wonder whether Americans will confront the problem of anti-Semitism — and they see in Pittsburgh the dangerous confluence of that rhetoric and a population with easy access to firearms.

“I used to think that the United States is the guarantor of Jewish security worldwide, and now it’s not the case any more,” said Sergey Lagodinsky, a member of the assembly of the Jewish community of . “From the European Jewish perspective, this haven that we thought the U.S. is for Jews is no more there.”

For Delphine Horvilleur, one of three women rabbis in France and the leader of a popular liberal congregation in Paris, what happened at Tree of Life synagogue in the Squirrel Hill area of Pittsburgh is a sign of the times, evidence that “no one is immune from this anti-Semitism that traverses history.”

“Americans always remark on security at French synagogues,” said Horvilleur, who completed her rabbinical studies in New York. She was referencing the intense level of pat-downs and even ID checks required to enter many Jewish houses of worship in France, which has suffered the brunt of Europe’s anti-Semitic violence in recent years.

“I think sadly this question is something that will be posed at their own synagogues in the coming years.”

As a point of comparison, almost all recent instances of deadly anti-Semitism in Europe have involved suspects with North African roots, Islamist ties or both. But although the European far-right has recently attempted to court Jewish voters in a bid against Muslims, it has yet to shed the nativist rhetoric.

The Soros conspiracy theory is an example. It has been most prominently on display in Soros’s native Hungary, where Viktor Orban, Hungary’s right-wing, populist prime minister uses the Jewish financier — and Holocaust survivor — as the embodiment of all apparent national ills.

In Orban’s vision, Soros is leading a powerful but mysterious cabal behind the scenes of ordinary operations. It’s a cliche that harks back to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” an anti-Semitic book purporting to reveal a plan for Jewish world domination.

“We are fighting an enemy that is different from us,” Orban said at a rally in March. “Not open, but hiding. Not straightforward, but crafty. Not honest, but base. Does not believe in working but speculates with money. Does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world.” In mid-April, he was reelected in a landslide.

For European Jews, a striking feature of recent weeks has been witnessing these same tactics deployed by Trump and his political allies, themselves on the cusp of critical midterm elections this week.

This is not new territory for Trump, who closed his 2016 campaign with an advertisement that featured the faces of prominent American Jews such as Soros, Lloyd Blankfein and Janet L. Yellen as examples of “special interests” hostile to the American working class. But in recent weeks, those associations have become more commonplace. Trump has blamed a migrant caravan in Mexico as the work of Soros; Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) likewise said in an interview that he considered protesters at the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings to be paid agents of the New York-based philanthropist.

“There is this merger, this anti-Semitic international, that we’re witnessing now,” said Lagodinsky, referring to the apparent similarities between the rhetoric deployed by Trump and his Eastern European counterparts.

For Deborah E. Lipstadt, an expert on the history of anti-Semitism, the success of these theories in the United States is not necessarily surprising.

“Anti-Semitism is the ultimate conspiracy theory,” she said. “People look to conspiracy theories when they want to explain things they can’t understand, and no one can understand the economic system today. But if you can blame it on George Soros, Lloyd Blankfein or Janet Yellen, it becomes easy to understand.”

To Horvilleur, the French rabbi, said the attack on Pittsburgh was a challenge, but not necessarily an insurmountable one.

“American Judaism, as illustrated for decades, has been marked by ‘tikkun olam,’ the repair of the world,” she said. “That will stay despite the threats against the community.”

Anti-Semitic attacks are rare in Russia but the sentiment is rife, studies suggest JTA, October 31, 2018 https://www.jta.org/2018/10/31/news-opinion/anti-semitic-attacks-rare-russia-sentiment-rife-studies-suggest

Russia saw fewer than 10 suspected hate crimes against Jews in the first half of 2018, a human rights watchdog critical of the government said in a report.

The publishing this week of the SOVA Center’s report on anti-Semitism, which suggests a far lower risk to Jews in Russia than in Western Europe, coincided with the release of a Pew Center survey indicating far greater prevalence of anti-Semitic sentiment in Russia and other Eastern European countries than in the West.

In the Pew survey, 40 percent of Russians said they would not object to accepting a Jew into their family. The figure in Western Europe ranged from 96 percent in the Netherlands to 57 percent in Italy. Acceptance levels in Eastern Europe were significantly lower, from Slovakia’s 73 percent to Georgia’s 27. Only three Eastern European countries were above the 70 percent mark, compared to 11 in Western Europe, with Britain remaining at 69 percent.

Pew surveyed 56,000 adults in 34 European countries between 2015 and 2017.

The SOVA Center’s report lists the torching in January of two cars belonging to a Jewish communal leader in Murmansk, in northwestern Russia, and the scrawling of an anti-Semitic graffiti on the headquarters of Ksenia Sobchak, who ran for president. In June, several gravestones were burnt at the Jewish cemetery in Voronezh, in southwestern Russia, the report said.

In neighboring Ukraine, dozens of anti-Semitic incidents are reported each year. In Western Europe, hundreds are reported each few months.

The SOVA report was published ahead of the “Protecting the Future” conference in Moscow on anti-Semitism featuring senior government officials and communal leaders, including Russian Jewish Congress President Yuri Kanner; Russian Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar; and the president of the -Asian Jewish Congress, or EAJC, Michael Mirilashvili.

“There will be no anti-Semitism and xenophobia in Russia, and the Russian authorities together with civil society will do everything that is necessary for it,” Valentina Matviyenko, the chairwoman of the Council of the Federation of Russia, the Russian parliament’s upper house, said in a speech at the conference.

Separately, EAJC, an umbrella group and World Jewish Congress affiliate representing dozens of former Soviet Union communities, opened an office in Moscow on the week of the conference.

Commenting on Jewish organizations’ relative freedom to operate in Russia, Mirilashvili said in his speech: “We remember it was not always like this. But today Russia can serve as an example of the struggle against anti-Semitism and we hope that no geopolitical challenges will change this attitude.”

There is no anti-Semitism and xenophobia in Russia [coverage of Moscow conference] Vestnik Kavkaza, October 30, 2018 http://vestnikkavkaza.net/analysis/There-is-no-anti-Semitism-and-xenophobia-in-Russia.html

The 'Protecting Future' Second International Conference on Combating Anti-Semitism, Racism and Xenophobia opened in Moscow yesterday, attended by more than 600 experts from 37 countries. The plenary meeting was attended by government officials, and leading Russian and foreign experts on this issue. According to numerous sociological studies, the level of anti-Semitism in Russia is among the lowest in the world today, and it is steadily declining.

"The tragedy that occurred on Saturday at a synagogue in Pittsburgh shows how relevant the conference is. It is clear that unreasonable anger and xenophobia have no borders," chairman of the organizing committee of the Protecting Future conference, head of the Russian Jewish Congress Yury Kanner said.

"There will be no anti-Semitism and xenophobia in Russia. The Russian authorities, together with civil society, will do everything necessary for this. At the same time, we are facing growing Russophobia, which is used by certain forces in the West, in some other states as a tool to deter Russia's development, countering the ongoing independent foreign policy, the policy of forming a multipolar world using the so-called Russian threat to intimidate. At the same time, there is open propaganda of hostility, even hatred against other peoples. The Nazis criminals and their accomplices are glorified in the places where the right to study and receive information in native language is limited. Especially the current Ukrainian authorities succeeded in it, who actually introduced this ideology into the level of official policy. And not just them. Zones of ethnic segregation and apartheid are actually created in the center of Europe. I mean giving the humiliating status of 'non-citizens' to about 300,000 Russian-speaking people in Latvia and Estonia. These people are not only excluded from participation in politics, but also limited in a number of rights," Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko said.

She called terrorism "the absolute evil of our time" and cited Speaker of the Knesset Yuli Edelstein, who said during his last visit to Moscow: "To overcome the absolute evil, terrorism, the atmosphere in 1945 at the time of the meeting on the Elbe River must be renewed".

"It seems to me that this is very important - an atmosphere of trust. I want to believe that now, in the face of reviving ghosts of the past, people who consider themselves civilized will hear the voice of reason and conscience, will unite their efforts in protecting the common future," Matvienko said.

According to her, parliamentary diplomacy's role in searching for answers to global challenges is significantly increasing today: "This is evidenced by the UN support for the initiative to hold a world conference on interreligious and inter-ethnic dialogue proposed by the Russian delegation during the 137th Inter- Parliamentary Union Assembly last year St. Petersburg. A special resolution was adopted for this purpose by the UN General Assembly on May 22, 2018. We expect that the heads of state, heads of parliaments, [and] leaders of all world religions will take part in the conference. We need such a dialogue."

The speaker of the Federation Council also recalled that the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on combating the glorification of Nazism in December last year, initiated by Russia among others. For its part, the Federation Council launched an initiative to recognize the victory over Nazism in World War II as the world heritage of mankind, and monuments to fighters against Nazism in all countries as world memorials. "The first step could be to form a single international register of monuments to fighters against Nazism. It should certainly include memorial complexes at the sites of the Nazi death camps. We have no right to allow democracy, its principles and values to be used to cover the revival of Nazism and extremism. The opposition to them has been and will be an absolute priority of our policy," Matvienko assured.

According to the head of the Russian Federal Agency for Nationalities, Igor Barinov, "the elimination of discrimination is the most important social program aimed at enabling people in modern society to choose their professional path, develop their talents and abilities, and receive remuneration in accordance with their merits and achievements, regardless of their nationality, religion, color and so on."

OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities Lamberto Zannier designated the tools to combat the harmful phenomena: “We don’t pay proper attention to education. If we start doing this, the situation will improve. We cannot change all the horrors of the past, but the memory of them and the dialogue on this topic will allow us to overcome the trend towards anti-Semitism."

Within two days of the conference, it is also planned to discuss the interaction of government and civil society in the area of prevention of anti-Semitism and racism, problems of xenophobia in the Internet and the media, and much more.

Kiev synagogue was bugged, chief rabbi says JTA, October 31, 2018 https://www.jta.org/2018/10/31/news-opinion/listening-devices-found-kiev-synagogue-chief-rabbi-says Secret recording devices and other surveillance activities were discovered at one of Kiev’s main synagogues, according to a chief rabbi of Ukraine who said this “discredits the state.”

Moshe Azman, one of two chief Orthodox rabbis in Ukraine, announced the discovery this month in a statement Tuesday.

The synagogue’s security task force discovered individuals who “professionally carried out a covert surveillance of the premises and visitors of the Kiev Central Synagogue on 13 Shota Rustaveli Street,” Azman wrote.

The bugs were found in subsequent sweeps inside the “house of God,” as Azman called the synagogue in protest of the alleged surveillance activity there.

“I am obliged to emphasize my deep concern about actions that not only compromise our community and are manifestations of anti-Semitism, but also discredit the nation as a whole,” he said.

Azman said his security crew informed not only Ukrainian authorities about the discovery but also Israeli officials. He said he suspected “high-level law-enforcement officials” in Ukraine of mounting the surveillance operation.

Azman demanded an explanation from the government and legal action against the initiators of the alleged surveillance operation.

The government’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine has denied the accusations.

Under communism, Jewish communities and individuals came under constant surveillance in the former Soviet Union, to which Ukraine used to belong.

In his statement, Azman also said that his and other Jewish communities have spoken out against Russian propaganda that uses anti-Semitism to discredit Ukraine.

Jewish cemetery vandalized in Moldova and hundreds of Jewish headstones uncovered in Ukraine JTA, November 1, 2018 https://www.jta.org/2018/11/01/news-opinion/jewish-cemetery-vandalized-moldova-hundreds-jewish- headstones-uncovered-ukraine

A Jewish cemetery in Moldova was vandalized by unidentified individuals who painted a swastika on one of the headstones.

The Nazi symbol was discovered Monday at the cemetery in Chisinau, the capital of the East European country sandwiched between and Ukraine, the news website Point reported Wednesday.

Separately, last month hundreds of Jewish headstones were found at a military base near Chernivtsi in southwestern Ukraine during renovations, the Censor news website reported.

The headstones were discovered under a barrack’s wooden floor, according to the report. They had been removed from a nearby cemetery in the 1940s or 1950s, under communism. Rabbi Menachem Glisnshtain, a Chabad emissary serving in the Chernivtsi region, received a call from a Ukrainian army officer informing him about the find.

Glisnshtain took possession of the headstones for the local Jewish community, according to the report. About a quarter of all Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe were destroyed during the Nazi and Soviet periods, according to Rabbi Isaac Schapira, the Israel-based founder and chairman of the board of the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, or ESJF. Eastern Europe has about 10,000 Jewish cemeteries, according to ESJF.

The bulk of the damage to Jewish cemeteries happened during World War II and under communism. But they are still being degraded today due to unregulated construction and vandalism.

In September, the construction of a state-funded sports complex in the town of Klimontow, Poland, was completed atop what activists say was a disused Jewish cemetery. Last year, a judge in Belarus cleared the way for the construction of apartments atop two former Jewish cemeteries in Gomel. And in Lithuania, the government is ignoring an international outcry over its plan to build a conference center on what used to be one Vilnius’ largest cemeteries, which the communists razed.

In Moscow, an Emotional Assembly to Remember the Victims of Stalin’s Terror By Sophia Kishkovsky New York Times, October 29, 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/world/europe/moscow-stalin-victims-memorial-ceremony.html

Moscow — An annual ceremony to commemorate victims of repression under Stalin proceeded Monday after Moscow city officials backed down from a decision to bar it from its traditional site, a memorial near the headquarters of the former KGB.

Throughout the day, activists and descendants of victims gathered at the Solovetsky Stone memorial, which was brought from the former Solovki prison camp, a notorious destination for political prisoners in the 1920s and 1930s.

Bundled against the cold, they stood in line for hours to approach a rostrum and read out the names, ages, professions and dates of death of victims ranging from Soviet bureaucrats to factory workers to peasants to priests.

“This day is a reminder of tragic pages in the history of the country, when numerous people were patently falsely accused of crimes, shot to death or sent to corrective labor camps or into exile,” said Yelena Zhemkova, executive director of International Memorial, the human rights organization that created the event, in opening remarks.

Ms. Zhemkova said more than 30,000 people were shot in Moscow alone in 1937-38, the height of Stalin’s Great Terror, according to her group’s research.

“During the years of Soviet rule, 1,250,000 people were sentenced to death across the Soviet Union,” she said. “People were shot to death in secret — we will make their memory public.”

The first name was read by Tatyana Moskalkova, Russia’s human rights ombudswoman, who is appointed by Parliament. But the site on Lubyanka Square was fenced off, invisible to passers-by, and the ceremony was ignored by Rossiya 24, Russia’s 24-hour news channel.

Solovetsky Stone stands amid one of the latest of Moscow’s huge urban beautification projects. When officials suddenly revoked permission 10 days ago to hold the “Return of the Names” ceremony at the site, they cited “construction and repair” work.

Despite the obstacles, by evening the crowd drawn to the 12-hour event stretched into an underground passageway and people did not disperse even when it was clear that they would not get a turn to read a name.

At the close, Ms. Zhemkova said more than 4,000 people had attended. Many clutched flowers or votive candles and ended their recitation under snow flurries with the words “Memory Eternal.”

Many participants added the names of relatives who had died, and many invoked the names of current political prisoners and called for change in today’s Russia.

A young man read out the names of a 28-year old factory worker who was shot dead in 1934, followed by the name of his own great-great-grandfather, Nikolai Akimovich Khudyakov, a World War I and Russian Civil War hero on the side of the Bolsheviks. He was executed in 1938 on charges of participating in “a counterrevolutionary terrorist organization.”

“Shame to all Chekists and their successors and to all who do these awful deeds today,” said the young man, using a Russian term for Stalin’s secret police. They will one day be purged, he said, and “Russia will be free.”

Ukrainian programmers scrap game about Auschwitz JTA, November 1, 2018 https://www.jta.org/2018/11/01/news-opinion/ukrainian-programmers-scrap-game-auschwitz

Ukrainian gamers advertised a game about Auschwitz and then cancelled its production amid an outcry.

Dmitri Dibin and Alexey Kutischev from Odessa began in August advertising the game titled “The Cost of Freedom”, the Polish Rzeczpospolita daily reported Monday. According to the paper, the ads included the tagline “Polish Death camp.” Polish officials have vocally opposed the labeling of Nazi camps built on occupied Poland as being Polish because this transfers responsibility for the Holocaust from Germany to Poland, the officials said.

On Wednesday, Kutischev wrote on Facebook: “Due to the wide spread of misinformation about the game in various TV outlets and other media we are forced to freeze development for an undetermined time.”

The District Prosecutor’s Office in Warsaw is investigating a complaint against the designers based on legislation passed in January in Poland which prohibits blaming the Polish nation for Nazi crimes, Rzeczpospolita reported.

The game allowed players to play the character of a prisoner attempting to escape or of an SS guard. All characters can kill other characters, according to Rzeczpospolita’s reporter Agata Łukaszewicz. She added in her article her personal opinion that the designers of the game have “gone far too far” by allowing players to play SS guards “pursuing and murdering prisoners, deciding which group of prisoners to send to work and which to the gas chamber.”

The game features selection scenes, in which players get to decide who is murdered, as well as mass executions of prisoners.

A video advertised as a trailer for the game shows people dressed in striped prisoner uniforms choking to death in a room full of gas. The Nazi guard says: “Now it’s time for the ovens.”

Lithuanian state historians defend Nazi collaborator accused of killing Jews By Cnaan Liphshiz JTA, November 2, 2018 https://jta.org/2018/11/02/news-opinion/lithuanian-state-historians-defend-nazi-collaborator-accused-killing-jews

Lithuania’s state historical institute on the Soviet domination of the country defended in court a deceased collaborator with Nazi Germany who is accused of murdering Jews.

The Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of the Residents of Lithuania defended Jonas Noreika against the allegations by numerous historians last month in a document submitted to the Vilnius District Administrative Court. The defense was a response to an American activist’s lawsuit against the center for its refusal to facilitate the removal of a plaque honoring Noreika in Vilnius.

“The Center, based on existing historical sources, has numerous times come to the conclusion Noreika had not participated in the mass murder operations against the Jews during the period of German occupation, and not in the Telsiai or Šiauliai districts,” the Center’s lawyer, Kristina Cerednickenkaite, told the court in the defense against the lawsuit filed this year by activist Grant Gochin from Los Angeles.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center for years has argued that Noreika, whom many consider a hero in Lithuania because he was killed while being held by Soviet authorities, became a mass murderer after his appointment in 1941 as head of Siauliai County under the German Nazi occupation.

Silvia Foti, a granddaughter of Noreika who lives in Chicago, has written a soon-to-be-published book based on years of independent research that she says confirms the allegations.

In August, the Jewish Community of Lithuania said in a statement that the plaque honoring him on a central wall of the library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in central Vilnius must be removed because “Noreika was a direct and enthusiastic participant in perpetrating the Holocaust in Lithuania,” the community said.

Vilnius officials have declined to remove the plaque, saying they will defer to the state museum’s decision.

In September, amid growing international attention for Foti’s findings, Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius urged authorities to remove the plaque – the first such call by a senior Lithuanian official on any of the country’s numerous monuments celebrating killers of Jews.

Gochin, a South Africa native whose relative perished in the Holocaust in Lithuania and who has mounted multiple lawsuits against the glorification of their killers, said the defense is “shocking.”

“I had never heard of an EU government going to court to defend a Nazi,” he told JTA.

The center in its defense said that Noreika fell from grace with the Germans. It also suggested that Noreika helped save Jews from the Holocaust rather than help kill them. It called Foti’s research and that of Gochin unsubstantiated. The center asked the court to compel Gochin to pay the center’s legal costs.

Netanyahu flies to to chip away at EU ‘hostility’ By Herb Keinon Post, November 1, 2018 https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Netanyahu-flies-to-Bulgaria-to-chip-away-at-EU-hostility-570907

Prime Minister flew to Bulgaria on Thursday to meet with the heads of four Balkan countries and further his policy of forging sub-alliances inside the EU to counteract what he views as hostile treatment of Israel from .

Before departing for Varna, where he is scheduled to meet Friday with the prime minister of Bulgaria, Romania, and the president of – known as the Group after the Romanian city where the leaders of the four countries held their first summit in 2015 – Netanyahu said that he wants to work with these countries “to change the hypocritical and hostile approach off the EU” toward Israel.

“This is a process that will take time, but I believe in setting a goal, and systematically setting out to achieve it – and I believe this is something we will achieve with time,” he said.

This policy of seeking sub-alliances inside the EU led him to Vilnius in August, where he took part in a meeting of the leaders of the three Baltic states, and to Hungary in 2017, where he took part in a meeting of the Visegrad countries made up of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

He has also forged an alliance with Greece and Cyprus.

These efforts have borne fruit, as the countries that comprise these different groupings often stand up for Israel in various EU forums. For instance, in May, some of these countries prevented the EU from adopting a resolution that would have condemned the US for moving its embassy to Jerusalem.

Shortly after arriving in Bulgaria, he met with Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, whom he has already met twice previously this year, the last time in September in Jerusalem.

During brief statements before the meeting, Netanyahu said that radical Islam is a threat the world over, and that Israel has recently revealed a number of Iranian plots to carry out attacks on European soil. On Wednesday, an Israeli official was quoted as saying that the Mossad provided the intelligence that thwarted an alleged Iranian plot in Denmark to assassinate a figure in a movement calling for an ethnic Arab separatist region in Iran.

Netanyahu was originally scheduled to fly on Thursday to Albania and take part in a meeting of the leaders of Albania, Montenegro, Macedonia, Serbia, , and Bosnia and Herzegovina, but postponed that trip because a number of the leaders who had planned to attend were unable to do so.

In a related development, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is scheduled to come to Israel at the end of the month, though no firm date has yet been set, diplomatic officials confirmed on Thursday.

Poroshenko, one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s main rivals, was last in the country in 2015. He met Netanyahu in Davos, Switzerland, in January, where they discusses bilateral tie and a free trade agreement.

The purpose of the visit, according to one Israeli official, is to conclude the trade talks and has nothing to do with the current tension between Jerusalem and Moscow over Syria’s downing of a Russian intelligence plane in September.

A senior diplomatic official said that Netanyahu, who said last month he would be meeting Putin “soon” to discuss that incident, may meet the Russian president next month when they both are scheduled to attend a ceremony in France marking a century since the end of World War I. No official announcement of the meeting, however, has yet been released.

Israeli Leader Says He Has Warned EU Nations of Iranian Plots On European Soil RFE/RL, November 2, 2018 https://www.rferl.org/a/israeli-leader-netanyahu-warns-eu-nation-iranian-plots-european-soil- bulgaria/29578309.html

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling Iran the "most potent force of militant Islam," says he has warned Europe of possible Iranian attacks on its soil.

Speaking to reporters on November 1 after talks with his Bulgarian counterpart in , Netanyahu said radical Islam is a threat to the world and that Israel has recently revealed a number of Iranian plots to carry out attacks on European soil.

Netanyahu did not provide details, but cases involving alleged Iranian plots to attack Iranian opposition groups or figures in both France and Denmark have emerged in recent months

The Israeli premier's warnings about Iranian plots in Europe have been part of his campaign to pressure European nations to take a tougher stance toward Tehran.

Israel was one of the only countries to side with the United States this year in its decision to pull out of Tehran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers and reimpose sanctions.

European countries refused to follow suit, and European powers Germany, France, and Britain have been working with Iran to keep the nuclear agreement in place and circumvent U.S. sanctions.

Ahead of his trip to Bulgaria, Netanyahu said his goal is to "change the hostile and hypocritical approach of the " on matters like Iran and the Palestinian question.

Netanyahu is meeting on November 2 in Bulgaria's Black Sea city of Varna with European leaders he views as more "friendly" in the Craiova Forum, which includes the prime ministers of Bulgaria, Greece, and Romania, as well as the .

"This is not just a meeting of friends," Netanyahu said. "It is also a bloc of countries with whom I want to promote my policy, to change the hypocritical and hostile attitude of the EU.