Housing protest reaches n. TA as tents set up on Nordau... By Ben Hartman and JPost.com Staff. JPost.com. July 30, 2011

Activists say they want protests over high cost of living to reach as many people as possible; women's groups urge parents to join protests.

Tel Aviv activists taking part in nationwide protests against the high cost of living that began with Rothschild Boulevard's tent city two weeks ago are expanding their protests to the city's north after some people propped up tents on Nordau Boulevard overnight Friday.

The activists said their objective was to spread the tent protests around the city and country in order to raise awareness about soaring housing prices and to reach as many people as possible.

EUROPE

Norway's Jews Mourn and Worry About Future... JTA, July 17 2011

Oslo: Norway has just 1,500 Jews, but to hear Avi Ring tell it, the country is reacting to last Friday’s bombing of a government office building and massacre at a political summer camp in a traditionally Jewish way.

“As soon as people speak about it, they start to cry,” said Ring, a neuroscientist and former board member of Norway’s official Jewish community organization, called the Mosaic Religious Community and known by its Norwegian acronym, DMT. “It’s like a country sitting shiva.”

A sea of flower bouquets, candles, photographs and handwritten notes line not just major Oslo memorials – like the fence of the exclusion zone around the blast site or the central Domkirke Cathedral – but far-flung fountains, parks and statues with no connection to the violence.

“We’ll be together in the grief,” said Ervin Kohn, the leader of DMT, which is also the country’s main synagogue and counts about half the country’s Jews as members. No Jews are known to have been injured in the attacks.

At Oslo’s main synagogue, which was the target of an early-morning shooting attack in 2006 that resulted in cosmetic damage but no casualties, security already is high. Concrete barriers make it impossible to park in front of the building, and a receptionist told a reporter that he could not enter the facility on Tuesday “for security reasons.”

Norway, like practically every country in Europe, has a spotty history when it comes to the Jews.

Jews were first allowed into Norway after the Inquisition, but were banned from 1687 to 1851. The first synagogue in Oslo was established in 1892. Some 800 Jews were killed during the Nazi occupation of the country, and many who fled to seek asylum in Sweden did not return after the war.

Today, most of the country’s Jews live in Oslo, though smaller congregations do exist in other cities, like Trondheim, a seven-hour drive north.

In the wake of last Friday’s attacks, however, the prevailing mood among Norwegian Jews has been solidarity – as it has for all Norwegians.

More than 150,000 people participated in a “rose march” in front of Oslo City Hall on Monday even after the event was officially canceled for security reasons because it had grown too large. People have taken to cheering for policemen and Red Cross workers when they pass by on the streets. And bars and restaurants are packed in Oslo in an apparent show that this city of about 600,000 will not cow to terror.

While many Norwegian Jews interviewed by JTA were quick to say now is the time for grief and that soul searching should be put off for later, Rabbi Shaul Wilhelm, who runs the 7-year-old Chabad-Lubavitch center in Oslo, said the way to prove Breivik and his ideology wrong is to embrace tolerance.

“What we should try to learn from all this is that multiculturalism isn’t just a thesis and a concept,” he said. “That would be the greatest revenge against this murderer and against people of his ilk: that we can actually practice tolerance in a very real way.”

Czech Republic announces that it will not attend ‘Durban III’... European Jewish Press. July 24, 2011

The Czech Republic has announced it would not take part in the September 22 United Nations conference on racism in New York dubbed Durban III.

Prague cited concerns that the conference would be used as a platform to make "unacceptable statements with anti-Jewish connotations.”

"The Czech Republic will not attend the September top-level meeting and will not participate in any informal talks designed to pass a political declaration that is to ensue from them," the Czech Foreign Ministry said.

The Czech Republic is considered one of Israel’s closest allies in Europe. Its decision to boycott the commemoration of the 2001 Durban conference places it alongside Israel, the US, Canada, Italy and the Netherlands who have announced their intention not take part in the event.

Geneva-based rights group UN Watch commended the Czech government decision and called on EU states and other democracies to follow suit.

“The Durban process has been marked by ugly displays of intolerance and anti-Semitism, and that is not something that should be commemorated,” said UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer.

“We are further concerned by the timing and venue, given that New York will have just held solemn ten-year memorials for those murdered in the September 11 terrorist attacks.”

The decision to play the concert caused a storm there, forcing the Culture Minister to intervene to stop the orchestra's subsidies being cut.

"We all only musicians ... we are not politicians and we have no political mission," Paternostro said during a press conference on Sunday.
"I completely understand that those who have been affected by the horrors do not want to hear talk of it (but) I have had many people come to see me, music lovers, to tell me 'it's time that we tackle this music'," said Paternostro

Katharina Wagner, great-granddaughter of the composer, agreed to sponsor the concert.
"It's a great honour for us to welcome the Israel Chamber Orchestra ... we are full of respect for the courageous decision," they have taken, the Bayreuth Festival co-director said in a statement read out by town mayor Michael Hohl.

The annual festival opens on Monday with a new production of Tannhaeuser, a romantic opera written by Wagner in Dresden in 1845 and considered the most important work of his younger years.
Last December, the celebrated Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim said the legacy of German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) should be freed from the "weight" of its association with Nazism.