This week: A Jewish American couple were forced out of a Barcelona bathhouse on Friday after staff saw one of them wearing a Star of David. ‘Are you a Zionist person?’ an organiser asked. When the women would not disavow Israel, they were told to leave: ‘We don’t condone genocide either.’ The venue has apologised, Spain’s Jewish community is taking legal action, and both Israel’s Foreign Ministry and the US Embassy in Madrid have condemned it.
Days later in Germany, a Jewish woman, Keren Stopka, was made to hand over her Star of David necklace just to enter a courtroom in Flensburg, where a shopkeeper was on trial for barring Jews from his store.
In New York, more than 50,000 marched up Fifth Avenue in the largest Israel Day parade in its history, hours after Governor Hochul signed a new law creating fifty-foot buffer zones around synagogues. Britain barred the US streamers Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur, who have defended October 7 and mocked Orthodox Jews.
In Lebanon, two young soldiers, Adam Tzarfati, 20, and Michael Tyukin, 21, were killed by Hezbollah drones days apart. May their memory be a blessing. And in Miami, chef Raz Shabtai’s Mutra became the first kosher restaurant in the world to win a Michelin star.