Why the Head of the SS's Jewish Desk, Baron von Mildenstein and top German Zionist official Kurt Tuchler went visited and stayed in Palestine together

When the Zionist Movement was eager to work with the Nazis

My eye was caught by this interesting article that appeared on Ynet, the on-line version of Israel’s largest newspaper, Yediot Aharanot, on 21^st January 2018.

When History Today published, in January 1980 a front page article, ‘A Nazi Travels to Palestine’ there was uproar from the Zionists in Britain.  The last thing these people wanted was a reminder of the days when Zionists and Nazis were the best of friends.

This particular episode concerns the visit that the head of the Jewish desk at the SS, Baron von Mildenstein paid to Jewish Palestine in the company of Kurt Tuchler of the German Zionist Federation together with their wives.

After the ascent of Hitler to power the Zionist Federation of Germany [ZVfD] had focussed on winning over the Nazis to the Zionist cause.

On 21^st June 1933 the ZfVD sent a memo to Hitler explaining that there was an ideological congruity between Nazi and Zionist ideology.  Although they don’t like to admit it now, the fact is that there was little disagreement between the Nazis who argued that Jews were not part of the German Volk (people) and the Zionists who agreed that the Jews formed a separate people.

This headline of the Daily Express, was quoted by the Nazis to portray the Jews 'declaring war' on the Nazis rather than the other way around.  It is reminiscent of Israeli propaganda which portrays attacks on the Palestinians as being a question of Israeli 'self-defence'

 In their memorandum the ZVfD wrote: 

On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race, we wish so to fit our community into the total structure so that for us too, in the sphere assigned to us, fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible... Our acknowledgement of Jewish nationality provides for a clear and sincere relationship to the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we do not wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we, too, are against mixed marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group... 

Cartoon in the Zionist Press concerning Ha’avara — ‘don’t worry Hitler, the Jews of Palestine are helping you.’

. . . fidelity to their own kind and their own culture gives Jews the inner strength that prevents insult to the respect for the national sentiments and the imponderables of German nationality; and rootedness in one's own spirituality protects the Jew from becoming the rootless critic of the national foundations of German essence. The national distancing which the state desires would thus be brought about easily as the result of an organic development. 

Thus, a self-conscious Jewry here described, in whose name we speak, can find a place in the structure of the German state, because it is inwardly unembarrassed, free from the resentment which assimilated Jews must feel at the determination that they belong to Jewry, to the Jewish race and past. We believe in the possibility of an honest relationship of loyalty between a group - conscious Jewry and the German state... 

John Mann the boorish MP who hectored Ken Livingstone for mentioning Nazi support for the Zionists

The Nazi state and the Zionist Jewish Agency struck a deal to destroy the Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany - when Ken Livingstone referred to this he was called an antisemite

 For its practical aims, Zionism hopes to be able to win the collaboration even of a government fundamentally hostile to Jews, because in dealing with the Jewish question no sentimentalities are involved but a real problem whose solution interests all peoples, and at the present moment especially the German people. 

The realisation of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. Boycott propaganda —such as is currently being carried on against Germany in many ways-- is in essence un-Zionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build... Our observations, presented herewith, rest on the conviction that, in solving the Jewish problem according to its own lights, the German Government will have full understanding for a candid and clear Jewish posture that harmonizes with the interests of the state.’

The full memo can be found in Lucy Dawidowicz’s Holocaust Reader pp. 150-153.

Rabbi Prinz, one of the leaders of the German Zionists, wrote a book Wir Juden in 1934 when he explained their attitude when Hitler came to power.  At the time the vast majority of Jews reacted wit horror to the rise to power of the Nazis.  Almost immediately an international Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany took hold and began to be organised.  The main element in the Jewish community opposed to this boycott, apart from the bourgeois Jewish leaders, were the Zionists.  They wanted to make deals with Nazi Germany not fight it which is why at the Zionist Congress of 1933 in Prague there was no resolution condemning the Nazis.  Prinz wrote:

‘(The Jews) have been drawn out of the last recesses of christening and mixed marriages. We are not unhappy about it... The theory of assimilation has collapsed. We are no longer hidden in secret recesses. We want to replace assimilation by something new: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and the Jewish race. A state, built according to the principles of purity of the nation and race can only be honoured and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind.’

Prinz admitted that:

“It was morally disturbing to seem to be considered as the favoured children of the Nazi Government, particularly when it dissolved the anti-Zionist youth groups, and seemed in other ways to prefer the Zionists. The Nazis asked for a 'more Zionist behaviour.” [Joachim Prinz, Zionism under the Nazi Government, Young Zionist (London, November 1937), p.18]

Berl Katznelson, a founder of Mapai and editor of its paper Davar second only to Ben Gurion, saw the rise of Hitler as “an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have”.  [Francis Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, p.91. Tom Segev, The 7^th Million p.18 attributes this quote to a report by Moshe Beilinson, a cofounder of Davar, to Katznelson.

The attitude to the Nazis by the Zionists was businesslike throughout the war.  In particular the Zionists opposed any place of safety for German Jews if that place was not Palestine.  Ben Gurion summed up this attitude after Krystalnacht, when the British offered 10,000 places for German Jewish children in what becamse known as the Kindertransport.  The Zionists were opposed to this.  Why can’t they be taken to Palestine was their cry, knowing full well that the Arabs were opposed to the horrors in Germany being used as a pretext for building up the Zionist settlement in Palestine.

David Ben-Gurion, Chair of the Jewish Agency and first Prime Minister of Israel - placed the 'history of the People of Israel' above the rescue of Jewish children from the Holocaust

In a speech to Mapai’s Central Committee on 9^th December 1938, Ben Gurion said:

‘If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.’ [Yoav Gelber, Zionist policy and the fate of European Jewry 1939-42, Yad Vashem Studies, Vol. 12.] 

Anti-semitic cartoon in Goebbel's Der Angriff which accompanied the articles by Mildenstein

 Baron von Mildenstein was particularly favourable to Zionism, seeing it as the solution to the ‘Jewish problem.’  The consequence of the visit and the favourable impression he had gained of these nationalist Jews was that he penned a series of 12 articles in Goebbel’s paper, Der Angriff in 1934.  The Nazis were so pleased by the visit that they struck a coin to commemorate the visit with a Star of David on one side and a swastika on the other.

A Nazi Travels to Palestine

The unique, juxtaposing coin, sold in a recent Israeli auction, contains the remarkable story about an unlikely friendship between two Germans—a Jew and a Nazi—and about the forgotten moment in history when it might have still been possible to save the Jews of Europe from extermination.

Itay Ilnai, 21 January 2018 

The auction organized by Israeli collectors’ house CollecTodo several days ago was unusual. On the occasion of the 10th of Tevet fast day, which was selected by the Chief Rabbinate as the general Kaddish day in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, a number of historic relics from that period were offered for sale.

Z

They included an oil painting created at the Theresienstadt concentration camp, a prayer for the Jews of Europe composed by then-Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog, and documents related to the murder of Rudolf Israel Kastner.

The most unique item, however, was a small brass coin—just 3.5 centimeters in diameter. One side of the coin features a Star of David surrounded by a caption in German. The other side is engraved with a swastika, the Nazi party’s symbol.

The coin the Nazis struck One side features a Star of David, the other side is engraved with a swastika

At the end of a bidding battle, the unique coin was sold for $850 to a Jewish American collector, whose identity was kept secret.

 “The people who competed for the medallion didn’t do it for financial reasons,” says Anat Katz-Harari, the owner of the collectors’ house, who organized the online auction. “But they did seem very insistent, unwilling to give up, and kept raising the price. In my opinion, it’s completely emotional. They wanted the medallion because they feel connected to its story.”

The news about the coin with the spine-tingling combination between a Star of David and a swastika stirred a row in certain circles. Jewish American blogger Richard Silverstein, for example, implied on Facebook that the coin was proof of the cooperation between Zionism and Nazism, which he said was being silenced and denied. Others saw it as blasphemy.

The real story behind this unbelievable collector’s item, however, seems to be a reflection of a forgotten moment in history when it might have still been possible to save the Jews of Europe from extermination. It’s also a story about a government mouthpiece, which was backed by one of the most successful propagandists in history, Joseph Goebbels. Above all, it’s a story about a brave friendship between two Germans—a Jew and a Nazi.

In a car from Germany to Palestine

It may be slightly difficult to understand today, but in the beginning of the Nazi rule in Germany, way before anyone could have imagined the horrors that would be committed by the German people, there were some Zionist Jews who saw Hitler’s political doctrine as an advantage. The Nazis didn’t conceal their desire to get rid of Germany’s Jews, and some Zionists saw it as an opportunity to boost the rate of Jewish immigration from Germany to the British Mandate of Palestine. One of them was Dr. Kurt Tuchler, a German Jewish judge and an active member of the Zionist Federation of Germany.

Even before Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor, the Federation decided to contact Nazi Party officials who they thought might support the Zionist goal. Tuchler turned to Leopold von Mildenstein, who was in charge of the Jewish Desk at the in the security service of the SS and was known for his journalistic writing.

 “In those years, Mildenstein became famous for his travel stories,” says filmmaker Arnon Goldfinger, Tuchler’s grandson.

Joseph Goebbels, the Reich's minister of propaganda (Photo: Getty Images)

Tuchler sought to join Mildenstein on a trip to the Land of Israel, which was still under British rule at the time, in a bid to suggest the place as an attractive destination for Jews. “He wanted to keep him company and influence him to write his travel story from a Zionist perspective,” Goldfinger explains. “He saw it as a mission.”

And so in the spring of 1933, Tuchler and Mildenstein got in a car with their wives (who were both called Gerda) and embarked on a journey from Germany to the Land of Israel.

Mildenstein returned from Palestine excited by what he saw. In his writings, he described how Jews were working the land, drying up swamps and fulfilling the Zionist idea, and praised Zionism for benefiting both the Jews and the world.

The Reich’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, was also very keen about the narrative presented by Mildenstein. As horrible and unbelievable as it may seem from our perspective, the story Mildenstein brought from Palestine matched not only the Zionist stance but also the Nazi one. The bottom line of his articles was clear: Zionism is a way of solving Germany’s “Jewish problem.”

Goebbels used Nazi mouthpiece Der Angriff ("The Attack" in English), which he had set up in 1927, to convey this insight to the Germans. In 1934, the newspaper published a series of 12 articles by Mildenstein titled “A Nazi travels to Palestine.” Goebbels likely saw the series as his newspaper’s flagship project, using it as a means of advertising.

As part of the project, the Nazi Party produced a series of small brass coins. One side of the coins featured a Star of David with the caption “A Nazi travels to Palestine,” and the other side featured a swastika with the newspaper’s name, Angriff. These coins, used to promote the “Zionist” articles from the Land of Israel, were given as a free gift to anyone who purchased a subscription for the mouthpiece. “A sort of sales promotion,” Goldfinger explains.

Image from Arnon Goldfinger's film 'The Flat.' A Nazi newspaper in grandmother's house

It’s unclear how many of these coins were produced, but today we know that only few of them survived. Goldfinger himself, who dealt with the Tuchler-Mildenstein story in his award-winning feature documentary film “The Flat,” has one of the coins. The film was born after Goldfinger’s grandmother, Greda Tuchler, died and her family was surprised to find a Nazi newspaper in her apartment—the same newspaper that had published Mildenstein’s articles. Gildfinger’s research revealed that his grandparents had kept in touch with the Mildensteins, even after the Holocaust.

A missed opportunity

“It’s very hard for us to understand, because we know history,” Goldfinger explains. “But my grandfather and Mildenstein were both Germans from a pretty close socioeconomic class, they were both open minded, and after their journey together they became good friends. They developed a shared language, largely thanks to their wives, and remained good friends.'

Goldfinger is one of the few people in the world who owns the “A Nazi travels to Palestine” coin. “I was shocked by the existence of such a medallion, and then I ended up buying one myself in an online auction,” he says, refusing to reveal how much he paid for it.

Prof. Shaul Ladany. ‘The Nazis wanted to encourage the Jews to leave Germany’ (Photo ;Tal Shahar)

Another person who owns one of these coins is Professor Shaul Ladany, a Holocaust survivor, racewalker and two-time Olympian who survived the Munich massacre. Ladany, a passionate collector of medallions related to the Land of Israel, says he searched for years for the specific medallion combining a Star of David and a swastika.

“It’s a very rare medallion. For years, I used to visit Germany on different occasions, walk into stores for coin and medal collectors and inquire about this medallion. Everyone was surprised to learn that such a medallion even existed. None of the merchants had heard about it. I searched for it in Canada, Australia and the United States too.” 

Ladany believes the coin represents a missed opportunity. “Mildenstein’s series of articles described the Jewish Yishuv in bright colors. He wrote about the establishment of Jewish life here, about the institutions being built, etc. The Nazis wanted to encourage the Jews to leave Germany. In the beginning, they didn’t necessarily want to get rid of the Jews through extermination, as they did later on. Today we know that if more Jews had immigrated from Germany at the time, the majority of German Jews may have survived.”

Haneen Zoabi and the Lessons from Kristallnacht

Guardian letter 14.11.08.

Interior of Fasanenstrasse synagogue in Berlin after Kristallnacht - today mosques and churches are burnt in Israel

Germany and the Jews, Israel and the Palestinians. One Must Compare

what does this remind you of?

We live in a society that cultivates the feeling, from kindergarten to old age, that every stranger is an enemy.

Ilana Hammerman Nov 20, 2015 9:19 PM

Demonised by Zionism - left and right

November 9 marked the 77th anniversary of Kristallnacht – the Night of Broken Glass. This was the radiant name the Nazis gave their pogrom against Germany’s Jews on the night of November 9, 1938. The rioters carried out the destruction, abuse and killing in the heart of cities and towns, in streets and homes, in full view of ordinary people.

Hating Arabs is not racism; it's morality

Many Germans were appalled by the scale of the madness, cruelty and barbarism, but they didn’t lift a finger. Apart from a few who hid Jewish neighbors in their homes, or had the courage to help the wounded, most saw what was happening, heard the cries and turned away. They were frightened. They shut themselves up at home. They closed their windows.

The Zionist conclusion from the holocaust

A German woman, Erna Stanger, testified that she looked out her window and saw three cars standing outside the apartment of her Jewish neighbor, one Mr. Zeligman. “A man walked up and down the street and ordered people to close their windows,” she said. “I moved away from the window, shut it, and after that I couldn’t see anything. But I heard shouting, apparently from Zeligman.”

Zionists learn the lesson of Kristallnacht - Mavet La'aravim (Death to the Arabs)

This testimony was one of many collected by Manfred Franke, a German who was just 8 at the time. As an adult, based on his memories and investigations, Franke reconstructed the events of that night in his hometown. He presented his results in a book “Mordverläufe," later dramatized as “Cases of Murder – November 9, 1938: A Protocol of Fear, Brutality and Death.”

Hebron settlers draw the appropriate conclusions from the Holocaust

That small town remains a town of ordinary, generally fair-minded people. That too is documented in the book. The day after the pogrom, for example, Manfred’s parents forbade him to pick up marbles from the floor of a destroyed shop on their street. “Don’t take anything,” his mother told him. “We’ll get you other ones. These belong to the Jew.”

Israeli Jewish neo-Nazis wear the slogans of their European counterparts - 'Good night, left side'

Haneen Zoabi, an Arab Knesset member, was invited to speak at a ceremony in Amsterdam marking the 77th anniversary of that pogrom of civilians against civilians. Zoabi compared the silent majority in Germany of that era to the silent majority in Israel today, in light of what Palestinian civilians and institutions face.

Israel Jewish neo-Nazis

The majority says nothing

“Most Germans apparently didn’t support it, but they said nothing. When two churches and dozens of mosques are set on fire in Israel, and hundreds of Beitar fans shout ‘death to the Arabs’ at every soccer match, when a family is burned to death, the majority still keep silent …. Kristallnacht didn’t happen out of the blue. It was a consequence of what had gone on before,” she said.

“We see a similar development in Israel in recent years. Statements that justify violence against Palestinians, and the majority says nothing. And gradually, one step at a time, the public comes to accept what it hears day after day.”

Kristallnacht - Burning Synagoge

The news website Ynet reported Zoabi’s speech under the headline “The speech of incitement.”

That night I received a phone call from the television program “Talk of the Day.” They told me Zoabi’s speech would be an item for discussion on the show the next morning, and I would be interviewed at the beginning to express my views. In the four minutes I was awarded to “express my views,” I was asked if I agreed with Zoabi’s Holocaust comparison.

I said the comparison wasn’t to the Holocaust, and Zoabi wasn’t the issue. I said people standing by silently while fellow citizens suffered was an appropriate topic for discussion.

Damage to Jewish shops in Kristallnact

I tried to explain why, but when my four minutes were up, the floor was given to the panel members, who immediately targeted Zoabi. All she looks for are provocations, that woman from the Marmara protest ship! This time she’s crossed a red line! Why do they even give her a stage for such slanderous remarks?! That was just some of it.

Haneen Zoabi after an attack at an election hustings

I realized I had failed to explain anything. Four minutes weren’t even enough to explain a simple historical fact: Kristallnacht took place in the midst of the German civilian population, more than two years before the start of the mass murder of Europe’s Jews in extermination camps outside the population centers.

And it goes without saying that I didn’t have time to describe the social and political processes in the years leading up to that pogrom, to which Zoabi was undoubtedly referring when she said Kristallnacht didn’t happen out of the blue. She was right.

Visiting Dachau

In those years, communist, liberal and democratic institutions and newspapers were shut down, and tens of thousands of opponents of the Nazi regime, not necessarily Jews, were arrested, imprisoned and tortured.

There was opposition to the Nazis in Germany at the time – and we should remember and learn from the fact that the Nazis came to power after the democratic November 1932 election in a democratic country. But once in power they put down the opposition mercilessly. Opponents of the regime, for example, were sent to Dachau, the first concentration camp, which was built less than two months after the Nazi-led government was formed.

Just a few days before my four-minute interview, I visited the memorial at Dachau. It documents the fate of the political prisoners, and I hoped for an opportunity to describe their courage and the price they paid for it. But go speak four minutes about the dissidents and others who had forsaken their ideals.

Go describe the photographs etched in your memory of “innocent” people who walked the streets of German cities past signs that proclaimed “Don’t buy from Jews!” Try telling anyone that those photos swim back into view when you see slogans in your own city, Jerusalem, like “Jewish workmanship,” “Don’t buy from Arabs” or “Death to the Arabs.”

Try saying that there is no real civil resistance to statements and actions that keep getting more and more extreme, even though many people feel the pain, and that no objector in Israel is endangered by the kind of risks that threatened political dissidents in Germany.

And especially, go try saying deep things about what you can compare and what you can’t compare. Only then can you express your painful and disturbing opinion that the silence in Israeli society about what has been done for decades to the Arab population in our midst and in our neighborhood, on both sides of the Green Line, can and should be compared to the silence of the silent majority in Germany between 1933 and 1938.

We are overdue in remembering the sentence engraved on a sign at the entrance to Yad Vashem’s permanent exhibit: “A country is not only what it does but also what it tolerates.”

Those words were written by Kurt Tucholsky, the German-Jewish satirical poet and publicist. Most visitors who pass the sign on their way to the pictures of horror and death in the ghettos and camps don’t know that the writer left Germany in 1929, was stripped of his citizenship in 1933 and took his life at the end of 1935.

That is, his words could only have been spoken in the early years of the Nazi regime, when Germany’s laws and actions were still a long way away from the imprisonment of Jews in ghettos and their transportation to death camps. Kurt Tucholsky was a leftist and dyed-in-the-wool pacifist. If he were living in Israel today, he almost certainly would want to apply that sentence here. He’d want it to be the lesson learned from the National-Socialist chapter of modern history in general, and of German and Jewish history in particular.

Try saying all this in four minutes. Then go one step further. Quote Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor: “Many people — many nations — can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy.’”

As Levi put it, “For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager. Here is the product of a conception of the world carried rigorously to its logical conclusion; so long as the conception subsists, the conclusion remains to threaten us. The story of the death camps should be understood by everyone as a sinister alarm-signal.”

“Everyone,” he wrote. And who of us can be included among them, we who grew up and live in a society that cultivates the feeling, from kindergarten to old age, that every stranger is an enemy? And the greatest enemies are the Arabs who live alongside us.

If they had let me say all this, I would have said yes, there is room for comparison. Some people, rightly, protest that ours is a political-national conflict that did not exist in Germany.

But to them it must be said that no conflict has ever justified one nation’s permanent military and civilian control over millions of people of another nation, the denial of their human and civil rights, the expropriation of their land, the demolition of their houses, the trying of hundreds of thousands of them in military courts and the incarceration of them in detention camps and prisons.

This control, which was a covert ideology for many years, is now the product of an overt, official, nationalist and racist ideology. Yes, there is a basis of comparison between a society that allows all these things to happen, by deed or indifference, and a society that could allow the pogrom 77 years ago to happen. Though we may hope that no concentration camps await in the end.

The Real Face of Pinkwashing - Look What Happens When a Gay Couple Walk Hand in Hand in Jerusalem

In the Wake of the Murder of Shira Banki Israeli Bigotry Comes to the Fore

Israel likes to portray itself as the gay capital of the civilised world.  'Go to Tehran or Gaza where they hang gays' Netanyahu tells his anti-Zionist critics.  The reality is that most Israelis oppose any form of equal rights for gays, the major nationalist party in the Coalition, HaBayit HaYehudi believes being gay is an 'abomination'.

Students at the High School where Shira Banki was a student

One of the Jewish Home's MK's Bezalel Smotrich organised in 2006 a 'Beast Parade' featuring donkeys and animals in a portrayal of the 'abomination' of being gay.

Bezalel Smotrich - organised 'beast parade' in Jerusalem - part of governing coalition

The YNet video is interesting because it shows the true attitudes of Israelis to gays.  You cannot separate off racism against Arabs and Palestinians from other forms of bigotry.  The attack on Jerusalem's Gay Pride demonstration should be condemned without hesitation by all civilised people but it also means conclusions should be drawn that Jewish Israeli gays should support Palestinians who are under attack from the settlers and those who believe in a 'Jewish' state.

The murderer - Ultra Orthodox Schlissel had only just been released after similar crime in 2005

The backward attitude of Arabs is often brought to the fore, but this is not the same.  Firstly Palestinian like the wider Arab society is a product of the same imperialist forces that created Israel. Israel is an advanced capitalist society unlike Gaza and the West Bank which are primarily agricultural societies.  It is only in the past decade or so in Europe that discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation has been outlawed and in countries like Ireland only this year that the right to gay marriage has been legalised (in Israel there is no such right).

What is true is that anti-gay attitudes in Arab society was largely introduced by western colonialism, as it was in Africa.  But in Israel, although anti-gay attitudes are just as common in Arab as Jewish areas there is one difference.  The attacks on gay people come from Jewish Orthodoxy and nationalist groups not Palestinians.

Tel Aviv Rally Against Murder of Shira Banki

But just in case you were taken in by the Pinkwashing of Israel, here is another story.  A publicly funded Haredi (Ultra Orthodox) School has Disinvited the President of the Israeli State Reuven Rivlin for his condemnation of the attacks that killed Shira Banki:

Haredi school disinvites Rivlin over gay parade comments

Shas MK condemns decision to cancel president’s visit to Jerusalem school, which was reportedly ordered by rabbinic leadership

An ultra-Orthodox school disinvited Israel’s president Reuven Rivlin from its opening ceremony for the new school year next week over his support for the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade in the wake of last month’s stabbing attack at the event.

Rivlin has generated a hail of criticism online over his denunciation of racism and homophobia in Israeli society following the attack on the parade that left five wounded and 16-year-old Shira Banki dead, and the arson attack by suspected Jewish terrorists in the West Bank village of Duma that same day that killed 18-month-old Ali Saad Dawabsha and his father Saad.

“President Rivlin has become a ‘persona non grata’ at the school,” reports Army Radio, who broke the story.  The publicly funded Kehilot Yaakov school in the northern Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramot, disinvited Rivlin “at the instruction of its rabbis,” according to an official at the Jerusalem Municipality who notified the President’s Residence Monday of the cancellation.