nation / world
Israeli court rules that online marriages must be honored
A district court in Lod, an Israeli city, ruled last week that Israel’s Interior
Ministry is required to recognize the marriages of couples who use a virtual
wedding service provided by Utah County in Utah.

If the decision stands, it would mean that couples who do not want to or
cannot have an Orthodox Jewish wedding could get the benefits of marriage
without leaving Israel, as they are currently required to do. Those include LGBTQ
couples, interfaith couples, and couples in which one partner is not recognized
by one of the established religious authorities and couples who are committed to
non-Orthodox Judaism.

Jewish marriage in Israel has long been controlled by the Orthodox establish-
ment. Until now, marriages not recognized by the Israeli religious establishment
had to occur abroad in order to be registered by the Interior Ministry. Cyprus in
particular emerged as a wedding destination.

Israeli couples lost the ability to travel abroad to get married when the
pandemic began in early 2020. Some of them turned to an online wedding service
launched in May of that year by the county clerk in Provo, Utah, as a service to
local couples who could not safely obtain a marriage license in person because of
COVID-19. H O L D C O U R T.

Biden administration accuses Russia of exploiting Jewish
suffering The Biden administration accused the Russian government of antisemitism and
of exploiting Jewish suffering through its claims that its war against Ukraine is a
“denazification” operation.

“To serve its predatory ends, the Kremlin is exploiting the suffering and
sacrifice of all those who lived through World War II and survived the Holocaust,”
the State Department said in a dossier.

The dossier was timed ahead of an informal session Monday afternoon of the
United Nations Security Council that Russia called to bolster its denazification
claim. Tass, the Russian news agency, last week quoted Dmitry Polyansky, the
deputy Russian envoy to the United Nations, as saying the session will “be our
response to Western colleagues, who express doubts about one of the main goals
of our special military operation in Ukraine, namely de-Nazification, and claim
that we are exaggerating the problem.”
The State Department dossier quotes historians and Holocaust remembrance
institutions, including Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, and the U.S.

Holocaust Memorial Museum, as denouncing the denazification claims as bogus.

It also emphasizes that the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish
and lost family to the Holocaust.

Ukraine says it will not allow in Uman pilgrims for
Rosh Hashanah
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More than four months into its devastating war against Russia, Ukraine is
sending a new message to the world’s Jews: Don’t come here for Rosh Hashanah.

Tens of thousands of Jews flood into Uman, a central city that is home to the
grave of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, a 18th-century Jewish luminary, annually for
the Jewish new year.

This year, their security cannot be guaranteed, Ukraine’s ambassador to Israel,
Yevgen Korniychuk, said in a statement posted on the embassy’s Facebook page.

— compiled by Selah Maya Zighelboim
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