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This Week:

• Finally, They Are All Home
• RJC in the News
• Preserving the Memory of the Holocaust
• Short Takes
• Week's Best Tweets

Finally, They Are All Home

It has been an emotional week in Israel. The IDF found, identified, and brought home the body of Ran Gvili, the last Israeli hostage kidnapped on October 7, 2023.

Amit Segal writes:

After 844 days, the final hostage, Master Sgt. Ran Gvili, is home. With the return of Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul—taken during Operation Protective Edge in 2014—this marks the first time in 4,208 days that there are no Israeli hostages in Gaza.

[O]ne thing I cannot stop thinking about is the ribbons.

If you’ve visited Israel since October 7, you’ve seen them: every street sign, fence, and telephone pole wrapped with a thin yellow string. In restaurants, offices, and countless homes, an empty place was set—inviting those still in captivity to remain present in everyone’s thoughts. After two years, the ribbons are faded and worn, but in the heart of every Israeli, they are just as tightly wound as on October 8.

Now, at last, we see them come down. The pins that have decorated every politician’s lapel are removed. The seats left empty for two years are filled. And that ribbon bound on every heart is finally untied.

Be sure to read Segal's insightful and heartfelt article in full.

JNS reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking before the Knesset plenum on Monday, announced Gvili's return and recited the Shehecheyanu prayer, a prayer of thanksgiving to G-d, "Who has granted us life, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this occasion.”

Ran Gvili was a hero. On October 7, 2023, he was recovering from a broken shoulder sustained in a motorcycle accident, but he put on his uniform and headed south, where he and his comrades evacuated some 100 survivors from the Nova festival massacre and fought at Kibbutz Alumim. Wounded and surrounded by dozens of terrorists attempting to conquer the kibbutz, Ran refused to evacuate and continued radioing information about the enemy forces. He died of his wounds, and his body was kidnapped into Gaza.

"Operation Courageous Heart," the IDF effort to retrieve Ran's body, involved thousands of soldiers. Intelligence from a captured Islamic Jihad terrorist led the search to a cemetery in northern Gaza.

The IDF unearthed and checked some 250 bodies, working non-stop for days with a team of dentists, doctors, and medical examiners to check remains until they identified Gvili. Dovi Safier writes movingly at Tablet Magazine about the IDF unit, Yasar Darom, that has spent more than two years making sure that every deceased hostage had a proper burial. Now they have found and returned Ran Gvili, the last one.

RJC in the News

JNS: US Jewish groups spent a lot more on lobbying in 2025 than in prior years

With US President Donald Trump back in the White House and pushing for peace in the Middle East following a ceasefire in Gaza, Jewish organizations boosted their lobbying in Washington, DC, in 2025, according to new disclosures filed with the US Congress.

…The Republican Jewish Coalition spent more money to lobby—$300,000–in the first nine months of 2025 than in all of 2024, when it spent $200,000.

Sam Markstein, RJC political director, told JNS that the higher spending was "due to the expansion of our government affairs department," which "increased lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill and the White House."

Breitbart: Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro Exposed for Hypocritical Attack on Vice President Vance over Antisemitism

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) faced backlash for criticizing Vice President JD Vance over a social media post that omitted a specific reference to Jews — despite posting a nearly identical message himself on the same day.

…Sam Markstein, National Political Director and spokesperson for the Republican Jewish Coalition, shared:

Thank you, Mr. Vice President. @VP @JDVance. And for all the knee-jerk reactors out there who love to make mountains out of literally everything, here's the @IDF's post for IHRD.

Markstein pointed to the official Holocaust remembrance post from the Israel Defense Forces, which read:

Today, we mark International Holocaust Day. We remember the 6 million victims murdered, honor the survivors, and carry the promise of never again.

JNS: NYPD investigating, after car repeatedly hits doors at Chabad headquarters in Brooklyn

New York City Police Department officers arrested a man who repeatedly rammed a car into an entrance to Chabad world headquarters in Brooklyn on Wednesday night. No injuries were reported.

…The Republican Jewish Coalition stated that it was "vile antisemitic violence, this time targeting the iconic 770 Chabad headquarters."

"Thank God nobody was hurt," the RJC said. "The coward responsible must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."

Preserving the Memory of the Holocaust

On Tuesday, we observed International Holocaust Remembrance Day, at a time when the Holocaust, the Jewish people, and the very definition of "genocide" are under attack.

Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, in an address to the Holocaust Education Trust in London adapted at The Free Press, said:

Keeping alive the awareness of the Holocaust is more vital than ever because the last witnesses are dying, and also because Holocaust denial, distortion, inversion, and perversion, combined with an eliminationist antisemitism, have made a spectacular comeback.

… The recognition and commemoration of the liquidation of an entire Jewish world in Europe became a universal measure of Western tolerance and democracy. The Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide in 1944, and out of the shock of Hitler's crimes, the Allies created a system of international law and human rights to ensure peace under a new organization, the United Nations. The open societies of the West almost unanimously agreed to and enforced a taboo on antisemitism and racism and the study and commemoration of the Holocaust in our calendars, our schools, expressed in new legal definitions and the language of antiracism. This was a moral triumph and coincided with a golden age for liberalism, humanitarianism, and tolerance in European societies and for Jewish life—for a while. It lasted 80 proud years, but it is now over.

… The degradation of the Holocaust is based on a neat but wicked inversion of Jewish history by which the tragedies of Jewish experience are used first against the Jews themselves and increasingly against our open societies.

Historian Deborah Lipstadt and Israeli author and activist Noa Tishby write at the New York Post:

[T]o understand contemporary Jew-hatred, we need to understand how much of it is framed through the prism of opposition — or "resistance," if you will — to "Zionism" and the State of Israel, the world's only majority Jewish nation.

The focal point for those who wish to carry out an organized, systematic slaughter of Jews today is therefore the dismantlement of Israel "by all means necessary."

The outcome of that would be a genocide of Israel's Jews – though among its advocates there may be variations on whether that would be the primary aim, or just a necessary evil.

Large sections of our societies have been groomed to support that goal and trained to view Israel as a unique source of evil in the world that must be destroyed if a better future is to be born.

…Today's antisemitism has shifted from a hatred of Jews, per se, to Israel-related Jewish hate.

Seth Mandel at Commentary asserts:

The "genocide" accusation is a form of Holocaust revisionism intended to inflate Israel's crimes while reducing those of the Nazis and have them both meet somewhere in the middle. But it turns out there is something darker at work here: The Holocaust itself—the reason we have the term "genocide"—is being replaced.

… Why? Because you cannot have both the "Israeli genocide" and the "Nazi genocide"; they are incompatible and can't coexist within a single category. So it appears enlightened Westerners are choosing the former and dispensing with the latter.

Accusing Israel of genocide is not merely an attempt to isolate the Jewish state diplomatically; it is part of an effort to erase the Holocaust from history.

… [Olivia Marks-Woldman, CEO of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust] told the Telegraph that Holocaust education "should not be conditional on anything." Which is exactly right, of course. Unfortunately, in some sick sense, anti-Zionists agree: They are essentially pushing to retain Holocaust education as long as it is made entirely about Jewish crimes. When someone says "Holocaust," these sociopaths want people to think Gaza.

Short Takes

JNS: Sa'ar hails Kazakhstan's entry to Abraham Accords

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar praised Kazakhstan's decision to join the Abraham Accords during a joint press conference with his Kazakh counterpart, Yermek Kocherbáiev, in Astana on Tuesday.

Noting that it is the first Central Asian country to join the circle of peace with the Jewish state, Jerusalem's top diplomat called it a "bold and moral move" by a "world leader in promoting tolerance and interfaith dialogue," emphasizing that Kazakhstan is a "natural partner" for the "shared vision of tolerance and cooperation" between Israel and moderate Muslim states.

Free Beacon: Palestinian Authority Continues 'Pay-To-Slay' Payments After it 'Scrapped' Program, State Department Tells Congress

The State Department formally determined this month that the Palestinian Authority paid more than $200 million to terrorists and their families in 2025, the same year PA president Mahmoud Abbas claimed he ended the "pay-to-slay" program, according to a nonpublic notice provided to Congress and obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon.

Rather than ending these payments, the PA shifted to a new system that it hoped to hide from international donors.

Greene: The Surprising History of America's Song

[Irving Berlin] came to the US when he was 5, his family fleeing violent anti-Jewish pogroms in their Russian village. His birth name was Israel Isidore Beilin. The immigrant child spoke not a word of English.

He began work at age 8, selling newspapers in the streets to support his family, who lived in a New York tenement. Despite never having taken a music lesson or learned to read music, his talent—his genius—arose almost miraculously. During his life he would write some 1,500 songs.

…"God Bless America," sung publicly for the first time on the CBS Radio Network by Kate Smith in 1938 as World War II was forming in Europe, summarized everything that this country meant to Berlin. He knew he never could have lived the life he lived had the US not welcomed his family.

As the song became a sensation, Berlin made a decision: He did not want to profit a penny from it, ever. He wanted it to be his gift to America.

He instructed his attorneys to establish the God Bless America Fund and to assure that in perpetuity every cent his song earned would go to Boy Scout and Girl Scout organizations, particularly in poor neighborhoods. The country had given him a chance when he was a boy; he wanted to repay that debt.

Tweets

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