A German Town Hides Its Stumbling Stones
Heidenau's CDU and AfD voted to keep Nazi victims' names off the sidewalk.
Gallant says the foreign warnings never reached him. Former defense minister Yoav Gallant told Army Radio on Sunday he first heard of the reported Egyptian and Emirati warnings "from the media." The one alert the Shin Bet got, in September 2023, said Sinwar "will cause the prisons to quake." Officials tied it to Elizabeth Tsurkov, a researcher kidnapped in Iraq. If the warnings went unshared, Gallant said, that is "a very serious flaw." 1
E1 waits until after the election. Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara pushed the bid deadline for 1,234 E1 units a month, past the Oct. 27 vote. A second E1 tender, for 2,167 units, is set to open Oct. 25. Bezalel Smotrich said she is "interfering in the election campaign." On a Ynet podcast, he said Israel should "go to war in Judea and Samaria, to do there what we did in Gaza." 23
Yair Golan wants an Arab party in government. "It is natural, right, appropriate and democratic," the Democrats chair told Kan. His party called that its platform, not the bloc's. The High Court reviews the bans on Ra'am and the Joint List Thursday. 4 The backstory →
Heidenau is hiding its stumbling stones. The council in Heidenau, a Saxon town of 17,000, voted Sept. 25 to ban Stolpersteine, the sidewalk plaques naming Nazi victims, and send future memorials to the North Cemetery. The CDU and the far-right AfD co-sponsored it, calling the stones "disrespectful." Five are already laid. Twelve new ones had been requested, among them Fritz and Martha Goldstein, expelled to Poland in 1938. 5
Our view: the respect argument is real when Jews make it, and Charlotte Knobloch won it in Munich in 2004. She calls Heidenau "absolutely the wrong approach." The AfD, a party that challenges Germany's culture of Holocaust remembrance, is making it now. 5 Moving the names to a cemetery means the neighbors never have to walk past them, and we think that is what this vote is for.
Today is 17 Tishrei, the third day of Sukkot. 6 In the common kabbalistic order, Jacob leads the ushpizin, the seven biblical guests said to join every sukkah meal, and Moses leads tomorrow. The Zohar says that if you invite them without feeding the poor, they walk out. 7
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