Ten Iranian Jewish families – 40 Iranian Jews in all -- began new lives Tuesday night when they came home to Israel. “How they were brought to Israel and information about who they are is classified information,” Jewish Agency spokesman Michael Jankelovitch said in an exclusive interview with Israel National News.

“This is a new initiative,” said Jankelovitch, “a joint project of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews headed by Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein and the Jewish Agency for Israel.”

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A total of 200 Iranian Jews made Aliyah (immigrated to Israel) this year, triple the number from just a year ago, when only 65 Jews made Aliyah to Israel from Iran.  According to Jankelovitch, the majority of the Jews who left Iran permanently this year came to Israel.

A man greets his relative who just arrived from Iran to Israel, his new home.
(Photo: Flash 90)

A woman greets her relative, who arrived from Iran to live in Israel.
(Flash 90)

One million dollars – fully half of the budget for this year’s project, came from the Fellowship, said Jankelovitch, adding that the entire sum has been exhausted.  “The organization is now embarking on a new campaign to raise funds to continue the work for 2008,” he added.

A Silent Nightmare
Their lives are at stake...Learning the Hebrew language has been banned. There are no more Jewish day schools have been closed down - all of them.

Why Iranian Jews, and why now?

“Because their lives are at stake,” answered Jankelovitz simply. “They are in a unique situation because of the regime. There are increased cases of discrimination. Learning the Hebrew language has been banned. Jewish day schools have been closed down – all of them. There are no more Jewish day schools in Iran,” he said.

Jewish children have to go to school on Shabbat, and on all Jewish holidays including Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

“They come with nothing but the clothes on their backs and a small suitcase with almost no money at all,” said Jankelovitch. “Their money is worthless because of the exchange rate. People live in a beautiful house which they sell and it is not even worth $10,000.” 

In order to balance that hardship, each new immigrant from Iran, including the children, receives a grant of $10,000. A family of five thus receives a total of $50,000 with which to begin their new lives in addition to the usual basket of new immigrant benefits received by everyone else who comes to make Israel their home.

Leaving 'Takes Guts'

Although there is no problem leaving Iran permanently to live elsewhere, emigrants cannot travel directly to Israel, said Jankelovitch. Nor is America an option at this point due to the political situation. The U.S. has imposed strict sanctions against Iran in the hopes of forcing the Islamic Republic to abandon its headlong rush toward development of what both the U.S. and Israel suspect is a nuclear weapon which could be aimed at the Jewish State.

A new immigrant from Iran displays her new and old identity papers.
(Photo: Flash 90)

Despite the growing hardships, however, there are still 28,000 Iranian Jews who have remained in the Islamic Republic.

“People are afraid of the unknown,” Jankelovitch told Israel National News bluntly. “Leaving the town you know, friends and neighbors, takes guts.” Every effort is being made to convince those left behind to leave while they still can.

“All the information for an Iranian Jew who wants to know about making Aliyah is available online, in Farsi,” he said. (The website created for this purpose is at http://www.israel-iran.org) “There is a free flow of information,” he added. “Iran is not a backward, third world country. There is word of mouth, people can go to internet cafes.”

There is no fear of being "tracked down" for accessing information about moving to Israel, he said. “We hope more, many more will come next year. Israel wants Iranian Jews to come home.”

The man who purchased the Hevron Peace House from its Arab owner lost his patience with government claims that its residents are living there illegally, and spoke out this week to confirm that the sale was conducted legally.

The buyer is a religious United States Jew of Syrian descent whose ancestors were thrown out of Hevron by the Arab pogrom of 1929. "B"'s great-grandfather and other relatives who were in Hevron at the time of the attacks managed to escape without injury, he said. 

Having paid $700,000 for the building in a legitimate transaction, he expressed outrage with “Israeli democracy” that the government is relating to the Jewish presence in his building as an “invasion.” 

We have given the government videotapes and pictures proving that the building was purchased honestly, he emphasized, videotapes in which the former owner is seen receiving money, counting it, and then signing documents granting the rights to the building to the buyer. 

The process of selling and buying the 4,000 sq. meter structure, took several years to conclude, said Jewish community spokesman David Wilder in a statement after the purchase in March 2007. The Peace House, as it has been renamed, overlooks the road between Hevron and Kiryat Arba, 

The Jordanian businessman who owned the building risked his life in the expensive transaction without realizing it, explained Wilder, because he thought the building was being sold to another Arab. "B." also said he never dealt with the seller. "We had people working for us to handle that," he told Ha'aretz this week. "But I have pictures and video footage that prove everything in legitimate. The Israeli authorities also have the material. They know it's all kosher."

The sale itself was conducted through a third party office in Jordan, said Wilder, who added that selling Arab property to a Jew is a capital crime punishable by death in the Palestinian Authority.

Wilder cited an interview by a CNN journalist in Hevron in which an Arab woman said she wanted proof of the sale in order to put the former owner on trial.

Another Arab resident of the city told an IDF Army Radio reporter at the time, "If the Jews really did buy it, all the more power to them. But we will find the seller and chop him up into tiny pieces."

A year ago, added Wilder in the March statement, an Arab who sold his house to Jews was murdered by Fatah gunmen in Jericho who called him a traitor.

Twenty Jewish families now live in the building which “B” purchased, and plan to stay despite efforts by Palestinian Authority Arabs and by the Israeli government to drive them out.

A 43-year-old legal struggle is now one step away from its end after police and Border Guard forces evicted some 30 people from the Kfar Shalem neighborhood in Tel Aviv. Another 30 people still remain on what was once a 56-dunam (14-acre) disputed area.

A recent Supreme Court decision turning down the residents' final appeal paved the way for the police to evict them from their homes on the privately-owned land.  The police arrived in force early this morning (Tuesday), expecting violent opposition - but their fears were largely not actualized.  Three protestors were arrested, but no major violence; the residents' belongings were uneventfully loaded onto trucks - eyewitnesses at the site did not know where these trucks would be headed - and the buildings were gradually demolished, one by one.

The story began in 1948, when the newly-established State of Israel settled Jews from Yemen on the lands of what had been the hostile Arab village of Salama; Israeli forces had conquered the area in order to stop Arab sniper fire at the Jewish neighborhoods of Yad Eliyahu, Ezra and HaTikvah.  The new Jewish neighborhood was named Kfar Shalem.

In 1965, the government passed a law stipulating relocation and compensation for the families, but it took years - and the killing by police of a resident during an attempted forced eviction in 1982 - before implementation of the law began.  In the early 90's, it was learned that part of the land was actually privately-owned by a British citizen, meaning that the government's allocation of it to the new immigrants had been in error.  Many of the families in Kfar Shalem were generously compensated by the State at that time when they were relocated to another area, but their neighbors living next-door were left out of the arrangement because their homes were on privately-owned parcels.

The legal situation became more entangled when a woman named Ruma Efrati purchased the land - at a discount, because of the fact that the land was occupied - and began to make plans to build a large housing complex there.  After years of legal delays, the Supreme Court recently ruled that she may exercise her right to have the residents removed, regardless of whether the sides reach an agreement regarding compensation.

A Haaretz report of this past summer quotes Dr. Sandy Kedar, a lawyer who teaches at Haifa University, saying that though the eviction may be on solid ground in terms of dry law, "If you look at what is happening in Kfar Shalem and compare it, for example, to Kibbutz Galil Yam, then it can be argued that this is a discriminatory policy verging on illegality."  The reference is to a decision by the government earlier this year enabling residents of state-owned kibbutz land to sell the land for an enormous profit - while those of Kfar Shalem are given nothing.

Resident Speaks With Arutz-7
Dudi Balasi, whose family arrived from Yemen 60 years ago and was settled in Kfar Shalem, told Arutz-7 that the entire affair is a scandal involving an "evil alliance" of government (specifically, the Tel Aviv Municipality) and real estate business interests operating at the expense of citizens who fell victim to a government mistake for which no one wishes to take responsibility.  "Even more than that," he said. "I have been paying rent to the Amidar government housing agency for many years - even though in 2002, this very property that I have been paying for was sold to Mrs. Efrati.  So why did they take money from me?"

Asked if Amidar had offered to return his rent money, Balasi said, "Who wants rent? What we demand is alternate housing, period."

Balasi said that his father's brother's daughter had been one of the famous Yemenite Children who disappeared in the early 50's: "My uncle brought her to the hospital one day, and was suddenly told that she had died..."

Asked where he would now live, Balasi said, "The bulldozers only destroyed part of our house, because it was built precisely on a line dividing up the various parcels of land. So we're left with two small rooms, and I'm waiting for a tent to arrive."

The City's Response
A staffer at the Tel Aviv Municipality Spokesman's office told Arutz-7 that it had no statement to make, as it it not a party to the dispute.  Asked if the municipality would aid the displaced residents, she said, "Those who need help will receive it; representatives of our social welfare department were at the site today."

It was released for publication that the killers of two IDF soldiers and perpetrators of the Ariel Junction shooting were caught last month.

A Hamas cell in the Shechem region was nabbed in a joint Shabak (General Security Service) and IDF operation. The terrorists admitted responsibility for the shooting attack near Migdalim on January 7, 2005, in which two IDF soldiers were murdered.

The terrorists also admitted that they carried out several shooting attacks against Israelis in Shechem and the environs, including the shooting attack at the Ariel Junction, this past October 24, in which a soldier was seriously wounded and a civilian wounded lightly.

The men revealed that they had taken advantage of eased restrictions and the ability of PA Arabs to travel the roads near Jewish communities freely to carry out reconnaissance for days in the area. They then bought a GMC van with Israeli license plates from an Israeli Arab, and used it in the shooting attack itself.

The terrorists who carried out the Ariel shooting attack were Abdallah Kuka, 19, who drove the van; Amin Kuka, 32; and A'mar Tanbur, 23 – both of whom carried out the shooting from the vehicle’s open windows. Riad Arafat, 34, carried out the reconnaissance and Suhil Kuka, 21, helped the terrorists hide and destroy evidence following the shooting.

After shooting an IDF soldier and civilian waiting at a bus stop, the terrorists continued to drive toward the Arab village of Jamma’in, south of Shechem, where they set the van on fire and got in a waiting PA Arab taxi.

Amin and Suhil Kuka, also carried out the murder of two IDF soldiers at Migdalim. The two dressed in IDF uniforms, stopped a vehicle and opened fire at the Israeli passengers inside. Two IDF soldiers, St.-Sgt. Yosef Atia and 2nd Lt. Ariel Buda, were killed in the attack and two other soldiers were lightly wounded.  The other members of the cell took supporting roles in that attack.

According to IDF sources, “The exposure of the terrorist cell and the incriminating evidence uncovered against it, indicate that despite its pretensions to the contrary, Hamas operatives are - at present - intensively planning to perpetrate attacks against Israelis in Judea, Samaria, the Gaza Strip, as well as in Israel proper.  Hamas’s actions are manifested in the planning of terrorist attacks, and the maintaining of attack capability and organizational strength, all of which are designed to strengthen Hamas as the leader of Palestinian terrorism.”

Israel’s Air Force struck rocket-launching terrorists Tuesday after a day of eleven rockets and several mortar shells fired from Gaza at western Negev Jewish towns.

An air strike Tuesday night destroyed an Islamic Jihad rocket launcher and wounded two terrorists. The strike took place fifteen minutes after a rocket was fired toward the Zikim army base. No injuries or damage were caused by the rocket.

Other rockets hit the Erez Crossing and Kibbutz Kfar Aza Tuesday. Three rockets landed south of Ashkelon. No injuries or damage were reported.

Six rockets were fired at Negev towns earlier Tuesday, landing around the rocket-battered town of Sderot. Mortar shells were also fired at IDF personnel around the Gaza security fence. No injuries or damage were reported.

A Kassam rocket fired by terrorists in northern Gaza Wednesday morning fell short of its target in Sderot and landed inside Gaza. It is unclear whether damage or injury was caused by the rocket.

Counter-Terrorism Efforts in Judea and Samaria
IDF forces arrested at least 13 wanted terrorists in Judea and Samaria overnight. The men were handed to interrogators for questioning.

Soldiers were targeted by IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in Shechem, with terrorists opening fire on soldiers in Kabatiya, south of Jenin. No injuries were reported in any of the attacks.

Attacks on the Road
A Jewish woman was wounded in a rock attack on the car she was driving in Samaria, southeast of Kalkilya.

Arabs threw two Molotov Cocktails at a police car traveling on the main Jerusalem-Modi’in Highway, Route 443. There has been increased left-wing pressure to open that highway to PA Arab traffic, something Jewish motorists say will increase the already-frequent attacks.

Fatah Terrorists Break Out of Egyptian Prison
Around 60 Fatah terrorists jailed in Egypt since they fled Hamas retribution when the Islamist group took control of Gaza have now escaped.

Egyptian police succeeded in catching 40 of the escapees.

Of the 130 Fatah men who fled to Egypt when Hamas came to power, 23 VIPs have been granted residency by Egypt and settled there. The others are kept in an internment camp.

Out of Zion has come the world’s tiniest Bible, engraved in gold on silicon, to illustrate the science of nanotechnology.

More than 300,000 words and 1,200,000 letters, including vowels have been placed on less than half a square millimeter, allowing the tiny Torah to fit inside the first dot of the first letter of a traditional Torah scroll.

“We took a piece of silicon and evaporated a very small layer of gold over it, about twenty nanometers thick,” explained Ohad Zohar, a Ph.D. student at the Technion, on Israel National Radio’s Yishai Fleisher Show. A nanometer is about a billionth of a meter.

Click here to hear the interview with Zohar on Arutz-7's Israel National Radio

“We then used a focused ion beam to inscribe the Biblical text on it,” Zohar said. “What the focused ion beam does is shoot gallium ions, focusing the charged particles on the substrip [of gold]. It digs little holes and each hole is a pixel for whatever picture you would like. In our case this is the Tanach [Five Books of Moses, Prophets and Writings –ed.].”

Photo courtesy of the Technion

“What did you make this for?” asked Fleisher.

“It is not for ordinary use, of course,” Zohar said. “To read it you need very expensive equipment. You cannot read it with a magnifying glass or even the best optical microscope. You need an electron microscope to read it. It is not intended to replace any storage devices out there. We did this as part of a massive educational program aimed at mostly high school students to explain different methods of storing information and spark an interest in Nanotechnology.” The project was sponsored and conducted at the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute at Haifa's Technion Institute of Technology.

“What does the future hold for such technology?” Fleisher asked.

“The current technology is predicted to continue shrinking and doubling capacity for many years until some ultimate limitation is reached,” Zohar said. “Storing the same amount of information will take four times this area on a modern hard disk, and about 140 times this area on a triple layer DVD. Our nano-bible is [currently] a record holder. But in the future we can think about putting information, one bit per atom, on a substrip. On our Bible, we used 14 nanometers diameter for the smallest dot we had. So if we use an atom, the diameter will be only one tenth of a nanometer – two hundred times smaller. This is interesting. It is 160,000 times denser than our Bible.

Photo courtesy of the Technion

“Also, the information for our Bible is encoded in small holes 20 nanometers deep, but the chip itself is half a millimeter thick. To achieve higher storage densities we will have to utilize the volume of the storage media and not only its surface. One working example we are familiar with is the storage of our genetic information in DNA molecules. If we could achieve a comparable storage density, we could fit a billion copies of the bible in the volume of our chip.”

Zohar sees the Bible project as a modern throwback to the etching of the ancient text. “We carved it in stone – silicon and gold. We did it the ancient way – just much, much smaller,” he said.

“The nano-Bible project demonstrates the ability of miniaturization at our disposal. We are working hard at present on photographing the nano-Bible using the Scanning Electron Microscope, with the aim of enlarging the photo by 10,000 times and displaying it on a giant wall in the Technion’s Faculty of Physics. In this picture, which will be 7 meters by 7 meters, it will be possible to read the entire Bible with the naked eye (the height of each letter will be some 3 millimeters). Near this picture, the original – the nano-Bible itself, which is the size a grain of sugar – will be displayed,” Zohar said.

Click here to hear the interview with Zohar on Arutz-7's Israel National Radio

Terrorist factions based in Damascus are working to convene a summit of all Palestinian Authority terrorist groups early next year. The meeting, in Syria, would also include the participation of several Arab states.

The intention of the multi-party meeting is to promote unity among the various PA
The initiative for the meeting came from two terrorist factions active in the PA but with headquarters in Syria.
factions. The most critical split has developed between Hamas and Fatah, following the armed takeover of Gaza by Hamas in July of this year and the PA's Fatah leadership using political manipulation to freeze out Hamas officials since January 2006. Fatah, led by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, currently maintains power in Judea and Samaria, while Hamas controls Gaza.

The initiative for the meeting came from two terrorist factions active in the PA but with headquarters in Syria, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). Maher A-Taher, a spokesman for the PFLP said that their recent efforts are focused on ending the Hamas-Fatah clash, because it has been damaging to the Arab cause. A-Taher claimed that negotiations between Hamas and Fatah are already underway, but that Abbas needs to show greater receptivity.

In November, DFLP head Nayef Hawatmeh announced that he and the PFLP had developed a plan to mediate the conflict between Hamas and Fatah. Including ten points, the plan calls on Hamas to give up exclusive control in Gaza, for each party to end media incitement against its rival, for an end to political arrests, and for new presidential and parliamentary elections.

In the context of efforts to promote unity among PA terrorist groups, senior Palestinian Authority negotiator, Fatah's Ahmed Qurei, met with terrorist mastermind Hawatmeh during a recent visit to Syria.

A spokesman for Hamas, Sami Abu Zuhri, said earlier this month that the DFLP and the PFLP "were not qualified to act as mediators between Hamas and Fatah." He called the two organizations "biased" in favor of Fatah because of their inaction over “Fatah's crimes against Hamas in the West Bank.”

Junior staff members at Jerusalem's Hebrew University decided to cancel classes between 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. Wednesday in a sympathy strike with their more senior colleagues after the Council of University Presidents turned to the National Labor Court with a petition to force professors back to the classrooms. 

The move has opened an unprecedented rift between the presidents, who are recruited from the professors' rank and file, and their former colleagues. Faculty associations at a number of universities expressed harsh criticism of the decision.

Legal threats have never before been used by university administrations in labor disputes.The current standoff stems from a weeks-long deadlock between professors and Finance Ministry over the deterioration in the value of their salaries in the past six years, which have not been raised with the standard of living.

The strike, which began with the start of the school year, now threatens to torpedo the entire first semester, which will create a domino effect that may destroy working relationships between Israeli and foreign universities, who depend on funding for joint research projects with international institutions. Senior officials have also raised doubts as to whether it is viable to hold a second semester when most courses are based on a two-semester time frame.

If it continues, it will also destroy students' ability to graduate on time and proceed to the next step in their education, in many cases on to graduate programs in other universities. For others, it may mean lost employment opportunities.

At Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Faculty Association voted 360-10 Tuesday to denounce the university's administration and the Council of University Presidents, according to Ha'aretz.

Professor Menachem Magidor, president of the university, decided after the vote that the struggle wasn't worth it and told reporters that if the senior staff called for his dismissal, he would quit. "I have no intention of holding on to my position if the senior staff does not support me," he said.

Professor Asher Cohen of Tel Aviv University, a member of the negotiating team that has for weeks tried to work out a wage agreement with the government, said the decision by university presidents to take legal action would backfire.

"We will honor the court orders," he said, but we will stop coordinating with the university. For example, we won't approve new curricula, we won't participate in university committees or in national committees," he said. Such a move would also paralyze funding mechanisms at the institutions.