Courtesy of Alexander Zakharin

• Film student Lizza Prigozhina helps NYC real-estate agents market homes on TikTok, Curbed reported.
• The 23-year-old brings in up to $10,000/month helping them film in ritzy apartments to lure buyers.
• Alexander Zakharin shared what Prigozhina taught him to up his followers from 100,000 to 700,000.

It pays to be the TikTok whisperer for Manhattan’s luxury real-estate agents.

Lizza Prigozhina, 23, charges brokers $700 per week to act as their TikTok consultant, demystifying the buzzy app and directing videos to help them sell million-dollar apartments, according to a profile of her on real-estate site Curbed. A “good month,” she told Curbed writer Bridget Read, means up to $10,000 in income. 

Prigozhina’s tasks range from brainstorming concepts for video topics — often involving viral songs and skits in beautiful homes for sale or rent — to acting as the on-set camerawoman. It’s all in the name of helping real-estate agents capture eyeballs on TikTok, which they can hopefully turn into potential buyers and renters who actually pay them in commission. So far, agents and teams from major brokerages including Christina Kremidas from Douglas Elliman, Jason Lau and Marko Arsic from Corcoran, and the Kim Team at Nest Seekers have hired her to make them TikTok stars, according to Curbed. Collectively, their three accounts have around 500,000 followers on the popular app. 

“Some are like, ‘I can’t spend money on this,'” Prigozhina told Curbed. “But others say, ‘I’ll do anything to get out there.'” 

New York agent Alexander Zakharin was Prigozhina’s first client.  

Zakharin, who says he closed $34 million in total sales this year, told Insider that Prigozhina pitched herself to him. They initially connected when he showed her apartments for rent during her own house hunt in 2020. Though she didn’t end up taking one of his listings, she reached out in 2021 with ideas on how to rebrand his TikTok presence. Zakharin took her up on it. 

Prigozhina brings her clients a “fresh perspective” and a set of eyeballs free from the “rut” of being an agent, he said. When Zakharin first started uploading videos, he merely recorded minimal pans across an apartment, showing off basic features like square footage and light.

But Prigozhina directed Zakharin to play with appliances, move around the space, and show himself having fun in the homes for sale. Leaning on her studies at the New York Film Academy, she even cajoled Zakharin to put himself in front of the camera. The videos, she told him, needed a character for the audience to follow. 

Over three months in 2021, Prigozhina helped Zakharin grow from 100,000 followers to 400,000 — and he now boasts nearly 770,000. 

“Alexander has a big personality,” Prigozhina told Curbed.

Zakharin said Prigozhina’s $700/week fee is worth it. Just last month, he added, he showed Upper East Side pieds-à-terre in the $1 million range to a California woman who first messaged him because her 14-year-old daughter follows him on TikTok. 

Prigozhina’s business took off when other agents saw Zakharin’s social media footprint grow, he said. They asked him who was behind the scenes helping him out, and he gladly shared her contact information.

Now she organizes shoots and films content with multiple agents at a time. Curbed’s Read described how some agents “gamely dart behind furniture” and make “oversize hand gestures” with Prigozhina’s direction to show, for instance, an Upper West Side building where rents start just shy of $6,000/month. She even told one agent to “fling himself lightly on the bed to show its bounce.” 

Views don’t necessarily translate into deals, or even offers. The Curbed report said one $6 million apartment featured in a TikTok video that’s attracted 145,000 views has sat on the market for at least 66 days. 

But Zakharin believes investing in a social-media presence with the help of an expert like Prigozhina is one way to lay the groundwork to find buyers for future apartments for sale. 

“The more they see you, the more they remember about you,” he told Insider. “Whether it’s January 2023 or January 2024.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Wednesday said a U.S. promise to provide the Patriot surface-to-air missile defense system was an important step in creating an effective air shield.

“This is the only way that we can deprive the terrorist state of its main instrument of terror – the possibility to hit our cities, our energy,” Zelenskiy told a White House news conference, standing next to U.S. President Joe Biden.

The Patriot system is “a defensive system, it’s not escalatory, it’s defensive” Biden told reporters. “We’d love not to have them used, just stop the attacks.”

Zelenskiy and other senior Ukrainian officials have long pleaded with allies to provide more anti-aircraft and anti-missile systems to help counter Russian missile strikes against power generating plants and other critical infrastructure.

Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken had earlier said the United States would provide $1.85 billion in additional military assistance for Ukraine, including a transfer of the Patriot Air Defense System.

The Patriot is considered to be one of the most advanced U.S. air defense systems and offers protection against aircraft, cruise and ballistic missiles. It typically includes launchers along with radar and other support vehicles.

The United States has sent about $50 billion in assistance to the Kyiv government as it defends itself against an invasion by Russia that began 10 months ago.

Sam Bankman-Fried will be taken to an airport in The Bahamas on Wednesday evening, a person familiar with the matter said, after the FTX founder was taken to prison following a courthouse appearance where he consented to be extradited to the United States.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan last week charged the 30-year-old cryptocurrency mogul with stealing billions of dollars in FTX customer assets to plug losses at his hedge fund, Alameda Research, in what U.S. Attorney Damian Williams called “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.”

Bankman-Fried left the courthouse, surrounded by guards with assault weapons, and entered a vehicle, according to Reuters Video. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Bahamas said in a statement that the foreign minister had signed off on allowing Bankman-Fried’s extradition to the United States.

Bankman-Fried was arrested on a U.S. extradition request last week in The Bahamas, where he lives and where FTX is based. He initially said he would contest extradition, but Reuters and other outlets reported over the weekend that he would reverse that decision.

Bankman-Fried decided to agree to extradition in part out of a “desire to make the relevant customers whole,” according to an affidavit read in court on Wednesday and dated Dec 20.

Dressed in a suit, Bankman-Fried stepped up to the witness box in court, where he spoke clearly and steadily as he was sworn in.

“Yes, I do wish to waive my right to such formal extradition proceedings,” he told Judge Shaka Serville.

Bankman-Fried’s defense lawyer, Jerone Roberts, said his client was “anxious to leave.”

The judge said he was satisfied that all legal requirements for extradition had been met and that Bankman-Fried had not been “forced, coerced or threatened” into making the decision.

“I therefore formally commit you to custody while you await your extradition,” Serville said.

The hearing was adjourned after the statements.

During Wednesday’s hearing, Bankman-Fried’s lawyer, Roberts, requested that the “rule of speciality” be followed. This rule, which is in The Bahamas’ extradition treaty with the United States, says a person can be tried only on the charges for which they are extradited.

Bankman-Fried’s U.S.-based defense lawyer, Mark Cohen, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

Bankman-Fried has acknowledged risk-management failures at FTX, but has said he does not believe he has criminal liability.

Bankman-Fried rode a crypto boom to become a billionaire several times over and an influential U.S. political donor, before FTX’s crash wiped out his wealth and tarnished his reputation. The collapse was driven by a wave of customer withdrawals amid concerns over commingling of funds with Alameda.

The $32 billion exchange declared bankruptcy on Nov. 11, and Bankman-Fried stepped down as CEO the same day.

He has since been detained at The Bahamas Department of Corrections in Nassau, known as Fox Hill prison. The U.S. State Department in a 2021 report described conditions at the facility as “harsh,” citing overcrowding, rodent infestation and prisoners relying on buckets as toilets.

Local authorities say conditions have since improved.

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President Joe Biden stood with Volodymyr Zelenskiy at the White House on Wednesday during the Ukrainian leader’s first wartime visit to urge Americans and the world to keep backing Kyiv in 2023, when congressional approval for aid will be harder.

The United States has sent about $50 billion in assistance to Kyiv as Europe’s biggest land conflict since World War Two drags on, killing tens of thousands of people, driving millions from their homes and reducing cities to ruins.

But some Republicans, who will take control of the House of Representatives on Jan. 3, have expressed concerns about the price tag, and European countries have suffered due to energy problems and the hit to the global economy.

“As we head into the New Year, it’s important for the American people, and for the world, to hear directly from you Mr President about Ukraine’s fight and the need to continue to stand together through 2023,” said Biden at a news conference.

Neither NATO nor the European Union have been more united than about Ukraine, he added.

“The United States will stand up for our shared values, the values of freedom,” said Zelenskiy, wearing his trademark olive green pants and sweater.

“I believe that despite any changes in the composition of Congress, bicameral and bipartisan support will be maintained.”

Zelenskiy, who will seek more support during the trip, is due to address a joint session of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives and meet Democratic and Republican leaders there.

Some hard-line Republicans have urged an end to the aid for Ukraine, instead calling for an audit to trace how the money previously allocated has been spent.

Zelenskiy has repeatedly called on the West to supply more advanced weaponry, ranging from modern battle tanks to missile defence systems, but Western allies have been cautious, keen to minimise any risk of provoking wider conflict with Russia.

Zelenskiy earlier presented Biden with a medal offered by a captain of a HIMARS rocket unit and expressed gratitude for the U.S. president’s role in helping Ukraine and rallying support.

Some in Moscow expected the invasion of Ukraine to achieve a rapid victory but it is instead passing its 300-day milestone.

On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the United States would provide another $1.85 billion in military aid for Ukraine including a Patriot air defence system to help it ward off barrages of Russian missiles.

Ukraine has come under repeated Russian missile and drone strikes targeting its energy infrastructure, leaving millions of people without electricity or running water in the dead of a freezing winter.

The Patriot missile is deemed to be one of the most advanced U.S. air defence systems, offering protection against attacking aircraft as well as cruise and ballistic missiles.

Zelenskiy’s political adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said the visit would allow Ukraine to explain the need for more advanced weaponry.

“…Weapons, weapons and more weapons,” he told Reuters in written comments about goals for the trip. “In particular, armoured vehicles, the latest missile defence systems and long-range missiles.”

Zelenskiy has made a point of staying close to his people with daring trips to battlefronts and addresses to the nation nightly. , countless calls with world leaders and videolink speeches to parliaments and international institutions.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Washington was seeing no sign that Russian President Vladimir Putin was willing to engage in peacemaking.

The Kremlin said on Wednesday it saw no chance of peace talks with Kyiv. In a call with reporters, spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that continued Western arms supplies to Ukraine would lead to a “deepening” of the conflict.

Russia says it is waging a “special military operation” in Ukraine to rid it of nationalists and protect Russian-speaking communities. Ukraine and the West describe the Kremlin’s actions as an unprovoked war of aggression.

Putin was defiant on Wednesday at an end-of-year meeting of top defence chiefs, saying Russian forces were fighting like heroes in Ukraine, would be equipped with modern weapons and would achieve all Moscow’s goals.

Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24 aiming to capture the capital Kyiv in days, a goal that quickly proved out of reach.

Moscow then focused on advancing along eastern and southern fronts but has suffered a string of battlefield defeats since the summer.

Putin said there were no financial limits on what the government would provide in terms of equipment and hardware, but the army had to learn from and fix the problems it had experienced in Ukraine.

He gave his backing to a plan by his defence minister to boost the size of the armed forces by more than 30% to 1.5 million combat personnel.

Putin also said he still considered Ukrainians to be a “brotherly” people.

He blamed the war on “third countries (seeking) the disintegration of the Russian world”, revisiting a familiar theme. The West has rejected this as nonsense, calling Russian actions in Ukraine an imperial-style land grab.

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Play ransomware attacks target Exchange servers with a new exploit that bypasses Microsoft’s ProxyNotShell mitigations.

Play ransomware operators target Exchange servers using a new exploit chain, dubbed OWASSRF by Crowdstrike, that bypasses Microsoft’s mitigations for ProxyNotShell vulnerabilities.

The ProxyNotShell flaws are:

• CVE-2022-41040 – Microsoft Exchange Server Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability
• CVE-2022-41082 – Microsoft Exchange Server Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

they impact Exchange Server 2013, 2016, and 2019, an authenticated attacker can trigger them to elevate privileges to run PowerShell in the context of the system and gain arbitrary or remote code execution on vulnerable servers.

Microsoft addressed both vulnerabilities with the release of Patch Tuesday updates for November 2022 security updates.

The exploit was used by attackers to bypass URL rewrite mitigations for the Autodiscover endpoint implemented by Microsoft in response to ProxyNotShell. Then the ransomware gang leveraged legitimate Plink and AnyDesk executables to maintain access, and performed anti-forensics techniques on the Microsoft Exchange server in an attempt to hide their activity.

“CrowdStrike recently discovered a new exploit method (called OWASSRF) consisting of CVE-2022-41080 and CVE-2022-41082 to achieve remote code execution (RCE) through Outlook Web Access (OWA). The new exploit method bypasses URL rewrite mitigations for the Autodiscover endpoint provided by Microsoft in response to ProxyNotShell.” reads the analysis published by Crowdstrike. “After initial access via this new exploit method, the threat actor leveraged legitimate Plink and AnyDesk executables to maintain access, and performed anti-forensics techniques on the Microsoft Exchange server in an attempt to hide their activity.”

In the attacks investigated by the experts, the threat actor cleared Windows Event Logs on affected backend Exchange servers to prevent investigation on the PowerShell commands used by the attackers.

CrowdStrike security researchers were working to develop proof-of-concept (POC) code in an attempt to reproduce the one used in recent Play ransomware attacks. Simultaneously, a researcher from
HuntressLabs discovered an attacker’s tooling via an open repository and shared it through a MegaUpload link.

The leaked tools included a Python script, poc.py, that when executed, led CrowdStrike researchers to replicate the logs generated in recent Play ransomware attacks.

CrowdStrike researchers Dray Agha replicated the exploit method attack on Exchange systems that were not patched against ProxyNotShell, but could not replicate the attack on patched systems.

Organizations are recommended to apply Microsoft’s November 2022 security updates immediately, disable remote PowerShell for non-administrative users, and to deploy endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools.

Users that cannot apply the KB5019758 patch immediately should disable OWA until the patch can be applied.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, ransomware)

The post Play ransomware attacks use a new exploit to bypass ProxyNotShell mitigations on Exchange servers appeared first on Security Affairs.

Of all the freakish candidates Republicans ran in the midterms, Kari Lake has got to be the freakiest. As you know Lake has sued, demanding either she is named the rightful winner of the Arizona Governor’s race or that a new election be held.

Neither will happen. Most of her litigation was dismissed. Eight of ten counts are no more. However, Lake will be allowed to present evidence on two of the charges this week. Those are: “alleged intentional interference by election officials affecting Maricopa County ballot printers.” And: “Chain of custody violations.”

In allowing Lake to go forward, Judge Peter Thompson also said she’d have to present compelling evidence that any printer malfunctions were “intentional.” The Judge also said she’d need to show the outcome of the election was impacted directly by printer issues.

The Judge also brought up the fact that he could impose penalties on Lake’s team if it is found that this is a frivolous lawsuit.

It is doubtful (meaning next to impossible) that Lake’s team will ever be able to do this. That is also what most expert legal minds are saying. The trial is expected to last two days and will start on Wednesday. Although I’d have preferred the whole thing had been dismissed outright, I do see the value of listening to the evidence ( or lack thereof) , and I’ll tell you why.

This will effectively stop Lake’s team in her tracks from howling that no court saw the evidence. This judge, known to be a quality judge but a cautious one, is giving her a chance to make her case. If there is any evidence — which there is not — she has to produce it.

Of course, when the last two counts are dismissed, that won’t prevent Lake from continuing to shriek about the unfairness of it all. This is one Lake that will never be serene. But that doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

“Wrack and ruin” means destroyed or ruined, and that is precisely what has become of Kari Lake’s political career. In a way, we should be relieved she showed her true colors because now everybody sees who and what she is.

The post Kari Lake is drowning in it appeared first on Palmer Report.

The husband — who she said abused, stalked and threatened to kill her — died last year. The children he accused her of abducting, by fleeing Southern California for Israel in 2014, have all become adults.

But when Lerai Nichols went on a Mediterranean cruise this fall, she was nonetheless arrested for kidnapping and, after seven weeks in detention at a hotel on the Greek island of Crete, faced extradition to the U.S. on federal felony charges.

“It’s an absolute nightmare,” Nichols said. “The system that was in place to protect us, it hurt us instead.”

From Nov. 2 to Dec. 15, Nichols was detained at the hotel, awaiting extradition for what the U.S. Department of Justice calls kidnapping — and what she describes as saving her children from their violent father. Greece eventually let her return to Israel, and she will fly on Wednesday to the United States to resolve the case.

When she arrives at Los Angeles International Airport on Thursday morning, she will be greeted by authorities who will handcuff her and bring her straight to San Bernardino County Superior Court.

There, Nichols said in a recent interview, she will plead no contest to misdemeanor charges she believes should have been thrown out in 2019, after she was partially vindicated in an Israeli court.

The San Bernardino County District Attorney’s office, which is prosecuting Nichols, declined to comment on the case. But a deputy D.A., Kurt Rowley, wrote to Nichols’ lawyer on Dec. 7 that the offer he made, to dismiss all kidnapping charges and reduce the felony child abduction to a misdemeanor, represented “liberal leniency, given the seriousness of the charges, the underlying conduct, and the strength of the evidence.”

“Any additional leniency would not serve the interests of justice and will not be considered,” Rowley added.

Aspects of the story remain murky, and her ex-husband is not around to share his side. But her detainment reveals the limits of an international agreement to protect children: It does not necessarily extend to a parent who violated the law for the sake of their well-being.

An unhappy home

Lerai Nichols. Courtesy of Lerai Nichols

Nichols, who is Jewish, lived east of Los Angeles with two sons and a daughter. She fled to Israel with the three children in 2014 — then adolescents — after a family court judge in California ruled she had to split custody with her husband.

The decision followed years of contentious custody battles. Over the course of the proceedings, the children were placed in foster care for a year by the San Bernardino County Department of Children and Family Services, and Nichols was deemed a vexatious litigant by the judge presiding over their case, meaning she either repeatedly filed unmeritorious motions or engaged in tactics the court found frivolous.

According to Nichols, now 60, her ex-husband abused and stalked her, and threatened to kill her and the children, and bury them in his backyard. She also says he killed their dog.

During her last year in California, she said her sons, then about 14 and 13, told her that their father threatened to kill her, them and their younger sister. “It’s going to be him or us,” Nichols recalled them saying. “And you need to take us away, because we’re going to kill him.” 

“I knew at that point that what they were saying was true,” she added.

Defying the court 

In Israel, the family settled in the town of Hod Hasharon, northeast of Tel Aviv, and Nichols found work as a private English teacher. But absconding to another country with children in defiance of a joint custody order is a felony — child abduction. A U.S. warrant for Nichols arrest was filed soon after.

Her ex-husband filed a case in Israel to regain custody under the Hague Convention on Child Abduction, an international agreement that governs such disputes. According to a translation of the ruling, the Israeli court denied Nichols’ request to modify custody in her favor, but ruled that the children did not have to return to the United States. Nichols said she had hoped that would be enough to vindicate her in the U.S. and cancel her Interpol warrant.

But the case was still not behind her.

She and her daughter, who turned 18 in April, embarked on Oct. 31 on a Mediterranean cruise that departed from Haifa, she said. When the ship reached Crete, she received a message: They had to report to the local immigration authorities.

Her daughter flew to the United States to meet with the San Bernardino D.A., Nichols said, and encouraged her mother to take a plea deal rather than draw out the case further by fighting the charges.

That’s what Nichols did: She said she will plead no contest to three misdemeanor charges of child abduction — one for each child. She will not face incarceration or probation, her attorney said.

Rowley, the deputy D.A., pointed out in the Greek extradition filing that the children’s father, Patrick Nichols, was deprived of custody permanently because two of the children became adults during his lifetime and he died before his daughter turned 18. Rowley argued that Lerai Nichols made no attempt to adhere to guidelines designed to accommodate desperate parents — for example by informing authorities of their move.

“The facts of the case present extreme and sophisticated criminal measures taken to deprive a parent of the custody of his own children,” Rowley wrote in the filing, an excerpt of which he repeated in an email to Nichols’ attorney, James Tierney.

In an interview, Tierney defended Nichols’ decision to leave the country for her children’s safety, but granted that the Hague Convention did not confer legal immunity onto parents facing criminal charges.

He’s hoping that her court appearance, where she will enter her plea — as soon as Thursday — will finally close the book on the children’s traumatic experience, and his client’s legal entanglement.

“As soon as that happens,” he said, “this will all be behind her.”

The post Fearing for her kids, she fled with them to Israel — 8 years later, the U.S. plans to arrest her appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — The congregational arm of Reconstructionist Judaism has endorsed reparations for Black Americans, approving a resolution that calls for “ongoing learning,” “deep reflection” and “teshuvah,” or repentance. 

But the resolution approved by Reconstructionist congregations earlier this month does not mention financial compensation for those who have been harmed by American slavery and its lasting effects. 

“The goal of this resolution is to establish a moral position around reparations,” said Rabbi Micah Geurin Weiss, whose title is assistant director for thriving communities and tikkun olam specialist at Reconstructing Judaism, the movement’s official name. “We understand that as a religious movement we are uniquely positioned to do so.”

During a Dec. 11 Zoom call, representatives of 47 congregations voted in support of the resolution and 11 abstained. There were no negative votes. Reconstructing Judaism has 95 congregations and recognized havurahs, or groups that meet outside of traditional synagogues, with an estimated 50,000 members.

The vote was a penultimate step in a process that began nearly two years ago, when the movement’s 370-member rabbinical association passed a “statement of resolve on reparations and antiracism.” If approved in January by Reconstructing Judaism’s board of governors, the resolution will serve as a guide for rabbis and congregations, as well as the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and the movement’s affiliated enterprises.

Reconstructing Judaism, with which about 1% of American Jews are affiliated, is not the first major Jewish movement in the United States to express support for reparations, seen by advocates as an essential step in moving toward racial equity.

The Union of Reform Judaism passed a resolution at its 2019 conference backing the creation of “a federal commission to study and develop proposals for reparations to redress the historic and continuing effects of slavery and subsequent systemic racial, societal, and economic discrimination against Black Americans.” 

Reconstructing Judaism’s resolution calls for the same commission, which was first introduced in Congress in 1989 but has never come to a full vote. The resolution also urges movement congregations to engage in “ongoing learning about systems of oppression and structural racism, and about how these systems have caused, and continue to cause, harm in our communities.” It also urges them to join racial justice initiatives led by people of color, and to take “concrete steps to repair the harm” of racism and injustice. Those “concrete steps” are not specified, nor is a timetable laid out. 

Rabbi Deborah Waxman, president and CEO of Reconstructing Judaism, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the resolution and its demands could feel uncomfortable for some.

Related: The case for reparations, according to two Jews living in the first American city to offer them 

“For the Jewish people, engaging in this conversation means getting real about doing this work about racial justice, facing that reality rather than using it as a pretext to shy away,” she said. “This is about urging our communities and our movement at large to look at systemic racism really squarely, and for individuals to do their own reckoning and for communities to do their own reckoning.”

It is essential for that reckoning to take place in part because Reconstructing Judaism has a diverse membership, said Rabbi Sandra Lawson, the movement’s director of racial diversity, equity and inclusion.

“The Reconstructionist movement is doing the work of how do we deal with the fact that we have people in our communities whose families have been harmed and continue to be harmed,” said Lawson, who is Black. She added, “The solutions piece is what frightens people, I think.”

Lawson’s first Jewish community was at Congregation Bet Haverim, a Reconstructionist congregation in Atlanta, a city often referred to as the cradle of the civil rights movement.

“Our congregation includes descendants of both the enslaved and their enslavers. But telling the full truth means owning the responsibility we all share,” said Bet Haverim’s rabbi, Mike Rothbaum. “My Ashkenazi Jewish ancestors were racially ‘other’ both in Europe and when they arrived in the U.S., and yet, the developments of the 20th century allowed their descendants — myself included — to access whiteness and its privileges.

“That journey across racial borders reveals the arbitrary nature of race in the U.S.,” Rothbaum added. “It demands that we as Jews talk about it, both publicly and privately. If we can be honest in private, our next step is to publicly stand in solidarity with Black folks in Georgia who continue to face the repercussions of racial injustice — substandard healthcare, mass incarceration, underfunded schools, voter suppression, restricted access to employment and credit.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Reconstructionist Judaism moves to back reparations for African Americans appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — Israel’s National Library accepted 22 volumes of archives from the Irish Jewish Family History Database, which tracks over three centuries of Jewish life in Ireland.

The database, which was compiled by Stuart Rosenblatt, president of the Irish Jewish Genealogical Society, includes everything from burial and birth records, compiled by a Jewish midwife in the late 19th century; police registries of immigrants in the early 20th century; and other sources stretching from the 1700s until the present. 

“These volumes are a living history of people who have now no voice,” Rosenblatt said in a press release from the National Library, which held a ceremony celebrating the archives on Monday. “Births, marriages, deaths, census, alien registration, synagogue memberships, home and business addresses, grave details and inscriptions are just a sample in the 22 volumes for families to discover their rich Irish heritage. It is an honor for me to have my personal volumes in the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem.”

The first Jews to settle on the island were a small community of Sephardic migrants fleeing the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century, but Ireland saw a larger influx of Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as part of a wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe came to the United Kingdom, which Ireland was at the time a part of.

Today at most 3,000 Jews live in the republic of Ireland, including both citizens and non-citizens, and the Jewish population of the entire island, including Northern Ireland, has never been more than double that. But that population has included notable figures in Jewish and Israeli history, including Rabbi Isaac Herzog, the grandfather of current Israeli president, also named Isaac Herzog. The elder Herzog served as chief rabbi of the Irish free state, following its independence from Great Britain, and he would become the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel. His son Chaim Herzog also served as president of Israel in the 1980s. 

“Needless to say, I feel a strong sense of personal connection and pride as an Israeli Jew with a direct Irish connection and derive special pleasure from the arrival of these volumes to Israel,” President Herzog said according to the NLI, adding that he looked forward to examining the records in the future since he could not attend the ceremony. 

The physical volumes now housed in Jerusalem are one of only five copies of the record in the world, with the other four in Dublin.

“This extraordinary resource… will allow scholars, researchers, members of the Irish-Jewish community and their descendants, to deepen their understanding of their ancestry and heritage,” said Raquel Ukeles, the NLI’s head of collections. “This database marks another milestone in our unceasing quest for resources that document the histories and cultures of the Jewish communities throughout the world.” 

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Israel accepts a set of Irish-Jewish genealogical archives that date back to the 1700s appeared first on The Forward.

The Biden administration on Monday barred Customs and Border Protection officials from sharing information about the magnitude of illegal border crossings at the southern border without approval from the Department of Homeland Security, Breitbart reported.

The gag order points to the possible end of Title 42, a Trump-era rule that allowed agents to turn illegal immigrants away because of the pandemic, as reason to limit information coming from the border. The Biden administration’s directive specifically bans CBP officials from sharing data with media outlets as tens of thousands of migrants amass at the southern border.

Such an order is unprecedented as agencies post statistics frequently, Breitbart reported:

The source, not authorized to speak to the media, says the message is intended to curb routine disclosures of migrant apprehensions near the southern border. These are generally provided by Border Patrol chief patrol agents via social media and comments to journalists. The unprecedented directive was circulated on Monday and took immediate effect.

The order was sent under the title “DHS OPA guidance on social media coordination for the lifting of Title 42.” The order was later clarified to impose a ban on the direct communication with outlets or platforms regarding the release of migrant apprehension statistics without DHS approval. DHS OPA is the acronym for the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Public Affairs.

Title 42 was set to expire on Dec. 21, but Chief Justice John Roberts on Monday ordered that it temporarily stay in place. The Supreme Court will decide the rule’s fate in the coming days. A repeal of Title 42 could lead to a spike in illegal immigration.

The possible end to Title 42 comes as the Biden administration oversaw a record 2.4 million encounters in the latest fiscal year. Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday blamed Republicans for the border crisis.

The post Gag Order: Biden Admin Bars Border Officials From Sharing Data on Migrant Crisis appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.