TONDANO, Indonesia: In a remote corner of the Indonesian archipelago, a modest synagogue stands in a tiny Jewish community that has found acceptance despite rising intolerance in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country.
The red-roofed building on Sulawesi island is the only synagogue in the nation of 255 million people. Here, unlike other parts of the country, the Jewish community feels safe to practice its faith openly.
“We can wear the kippah (Jewish skullcap) in the mall or anywhere we want, it’s not a problem,” Yobby Hattie Ensel, a Jewish leader from the nearby city of Manado told AFP.
In Tondano, the Shaar Hasyamayim synagogue sits close to several churches and residents of different religions live, work and worship alongside each other without incident.
Indonesia has long been praised for its moderate, inclusive brand of Islam — and this enclave of diversity is a testament to that.
But across the archipelago, intolerance has risen in recent years as more conservative forms of Islam have become popular, driven by increasingly vocal hard-line groups.
Outside the safe haven on Sulawesi, those who refuse to hide their faith have faced hostility.
Yaakov Baruch, an Orthodox Jew who runs the Tondano synagogue, revealed how he was threatened with death in a busy Jakarta mall as he walked along with his pregnant wife.
“From a few floors up, they shouted at me ‘crazy Jew’,” he told AFP, adding the group of men then ran toward him and demanded he remove his skullcap. “They said to me: ‘We don’t want you to use your kippah in this country. If you continue to use it, we’ll kill you’.”
In 2013, the country’s only other synagogue in the city of Surabaya was demolished. It had been the site of anti-Israel protests for years, and was sealed off by hard-liners in 2009 and left to decay.
Indonesian Rabbi Benjamin Verbrugge concedes any flare-up of tensions in the Middle East provokes hostility toward the local faithful.
“Problems between Israelis and Palestinians are a liability for me — when someone is stabbed there, it makes me uneasy here,” he said.
Faced with such open hostility, the Jews in the capital worship in secret.
Last month, Verbrugge, head of the United Indonesian Jewish Community (UIJC), held celebrations for the festival of Purim, traditionally one of the most joyous days in Judaism’s calendar, hidden in a small hotel room with a handful of fellow worshippers.
The UIJC estimate there are around 200 practicing the faith in the country, believed to be the descendants of traders from Europe and Iraq who came to Asia to trade. The organization was set up to bring the nation’s Jews together.
The Jewish population in Indonesia is believed to have peaked at around 3,000 in the years before World War II, according to Rotem Kowner, a professor from the University of Haifa in Israel.
The fact that those remaining are scattered across the archipelago means Verbrugge has to defy rules that forbid Jews from using electrical gadgets on the Sabbath to lead group prayers online via the LINE messaging app.
The small community also faces more practical challenges, such as the fact kosher food is not widely available in Indonesia, said Phinechas, a local convert to Judaism. “I try my best to be a good Jew but I can’t manage it 100 percent,” he added.
Faith-based tension has been mounting in Indonesia, undermining its pluralist reputation.
Christian churches and mosques where Muslim minorities pray have been closed due to pressure from hard-liners.
Successive governments have been criticized for failing to tackle the radicals for fear of being accused of attacking Islam.
Due to their small number and the fact most live in the shadows, the nation’s Jews have not been a major focus of hard-liners’ anger in Indonesia and have largely escaped the serious attacks directed at other minorities.
But having a low profile also brings problems. According to the law, freedom of worship is guaranteed for all religions, including Judaism, but in practice Jews cannot be honest about their faith.
Authorities allow Indonesians to put six different religions on their all-important ID cards — Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism.
ID cards are vital for accessing government services, and for doing things such as registering marriages and births, meaning most Jews lie and put “Christianity” on the documents.
The Religious Affairs Ministry said in 2013 people who do not follow one of the six authorized faiths can choose to put nothing on their cards, but Indonesian Jews AFP interviewed had all put “Christian” to avoid drawing attention to themselves. Despite the challenges, Indonesian Jews nevertheless insist they are an integral part of the nation.
Baruch said: “(The) Jewish community of Indonesia, we were in this country far before the country was born. It means we are part of this country as well.”
In Muslim Indonesia, tiny Jewish community lives on
In Muslim Indonesia, tiny Jewish community lives on
OpenAI’s ChatGPT faces massive outage with thousands of users impacted
BENGALURU, India: Microsoft-backed OpenAI said on Friday night it is facing an issue that has resulted in its popular chatbot ChatGPT being unavailable.
The company said in a statement on its website that it was investigating the issue and working to restore functionality as soon as possible.
Over 19,403 users had been impacted by the outage as of 7:13 p.m. ET (0013 GMT on Saturday), according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
OpenAI did not immediately responded to a request for comment.
Syrian state news agency reports Israeli strike in Aleppo region
- The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, reported that the strikes had targeted military installations
DAMASCUS: Syrian state media reported an Israeli strike Saturday on the countryside of Aleppo and Idlib that injured soldiers and caused damage.
“At around 00:45 after midnight, the Israeli army launched an air aggression from the direction of southeast Aleppo, targeting a number of sites in the countryside of Aleppo and Idlib,” the official SANA news agency said.
The report added that the attack had “resulted in the injury of a number of soldiers and some material losses,” without providing further details.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, reported the strikes had targeted military installations.
The war monitor also said members of the Iranian revolutionary guards and pro-Tehran factions were based in the area.
Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes in Syria, mainly targeting army positions and Iran-backed fighters including from Hezbollah.
The Israeli military has intensified its strikes on Syria since it launched its war on Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon.
Israeli authorities rarely comment on the strikes but have repeatedly said they will not allow arch-enemy Iran to expand its presence in Syria.
UK government appoints former Blair negotiator Jonathan Powell as national security adviser
- Powell, who was chief of staff to former PM Tony Blair from 1997 to 2007, was an architect of the Northern Ireland peace process
- He faced criticism for his part in the UK’s decision to participate in the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq
LONDON: The UK’s Labour government has appointed Jonathan Powell, an architect of the Northern Ireland peace process, as its new national security adviser.
Powell, who served as chief of staff to former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair for a decade between 1997 and 2007, was deeply involved in the UK’s decision to participate in the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.
In 2014, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron appointed him the UK’s special envoy to Libya, in an attempt to promote dialogue between rival factions embroiled in the nation’s civil war.
Many political figures in the UK welcomed Powell’s latest appointment at a time of escalating international conflicts. Some expressed hopes that he will be able to help British authorities forge a positive relationship with Donald Trump when he takes over as US president in January.
However, Powell faced criticism for his role in the UK government’s decision to join the invasion of Iraq two decades ago, and for later promoting the need to engage in dialogue with extremist groups. In 2014, at the height of Daesh’s bloody occupation of large swaths of Iraq and Syria, he argued that UK authorities should open channels of communication with them.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Powell’s experience of negotiating the Northern Ireland peace agreement and his other work related to some of the world’s most complex conflicts make him “uniquely qualified to advise the government on tackling the challenges ahead, and engage with counterparts across the globe to protect and advance UK interests.”
Powell said he was honored to be given the role at a time when “national security, international relations and domestic policies are so interconnected.”
Trump’s shunning of transition planning may have severe consequences, governance group says
- Trump's transition team have yet to sign agreements required by the Presidential Transition Act, which mandates that the president-elect’s team agree to an ethics plan and to limit and disclose private donations
- The delay is holding up the federal government’s ability to begin processing security clearances for potentially hundreds of Trump administration national security appointees
WASHINGTON: A good-governance group is warning of severe consequences if President-elect Donald Trump continues to steer clear of formal transition planning with the Biden administration — inaction that it says is already limiting the federal government’s ability to provide security clearances and briefings to the incoming administration.
Without the planning, says Max Stier, president and CEO of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, “it would not be possible” to “be ready to govern on day one.”
The president-elect’s transition is being led by Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon, the former wrestling executive who led the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term. They said last month that they expected to sign agreements beginning the formal transition process with the Biden White House and the General Services Administration, which acts essentially as the federal government’s landlord.
But those agreements are still unsigned, and the pressure is beginning to mount.
The delay is holding up the federal government’s ability to begin processing security clearances for potentially hundreds of Trump administration national security appointees. That could limit the staff who could work on sensitive information by Inauguration Day on Jan. 20.
It also means Trump appointees can’t yet access federal facilities, documents and personnel to prepare for taking office.
The agreements are required by the Presidential Transition Act, which was enacted in 2022. They mandate that the president-elect’s team agree to an ethics plan and to limit and disclose private donations.
In that act, Congress set deadlines of Sept. 1 for the GSA agreement and Oct. 1 for the White House agreement, in an effort to ensure that incoming administrations are prepared to govern when they enter office. Both deadlines have long since come and gone.
Stier, whose organization works with candidates and incumbents on transitions, said on a call with reporters on Friday that a new administration “walks in with the responsibility of taking over the most complex operation on the planet.”
“In order to do that effectively, they absolutely need to have done a lot of prework,” he said, adding that Trump’s team “has approached this in a, frankly, different way than any other prior transition has.”
“They have, up until now, walked past all of the tradition and, we believe, vital agreements with the federal government,” Stier said.
In a statement this week, Lutnick and McMahon said Trump was “selecting personnel to serve our nation under his leadership and enact policies that make the life of Americans affordable, safe, and secure.” They didn’t mention signing agreements to begin the transition.
A person familiar with the matter said that the congressionally mandated ethics disclosures and contribution limits were factors in the hesitance to sign the agreements.
Trump transition spokesperson Brian Hughes said Friday that the team’s “lawyers continue to constructively engage with the Biden-Harris Administration lawyers regarding all agreements contemplated by the Presidential Transition Act.”
“We will update you once a decision is made,” Hughes said.
The Trump team’s reluctance has persisted despite Biden’s White House chief of staff, Jeff Zients, reaching out to Lutnick and McMahon to reiterate the important role the agreements with the Biden administration and GSA play in beginning a presidential transition.
“We’re here to assist. We want to have a peaceful transition of power,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. “We want to make sure they have what they need.”
The unorthodox approach to the presidential transition process recalls the period immediately after Trump’s Election Day victory in 2016. Days later, the president-elect fired the head of his transition team, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and tossed out a transition playbook he’d been compiling.
But Stier said that, even then, Trump’s team had signed the initial agreements that allowed the transition to get started — something that hasn’t happened this time.
“The story’s not finished. But they’re late,” he said. “And even if they manage to get these agreements in now, they’re late in getting those done.”
UN probe says women, children comprise the majority of Gaza war dead
- The report detailed a raft of violations of international law since Oct. 7
GENEVA: The UN on Friday condemned the staggering number of civilians killed in Israel’s war in Gaza, with women and children comprising nearly 70 percent of the thousands of fatalities it had managed to verify.
In a fresh report, slammed by Israel, the United Nations human rights office (OHCHR) detailed a raft of violations of international law since Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7 attack in Israel sparked the war in the Gaza Strip.
Many could amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity and possibly even “genocide,” it warned, demanding international efforts to prevent “atrocity crimes” and ensure accountability.
“Civilians in Gaza have borne the brunt of the attacks, including through the initial ‘complete siege’ of Gaza by Israeli forces,” the UN said.
“Conduct by Israeli forces has caused unprecedented levels of killings, death, injury, starvation, illness and disease.”
It pointed to “the Israeli government’s continuing unlawful failures to allow, facilitate and ensure the entry of humanitarian aid, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and repeated mass displacement.”
Israel’s mission to the UN in Geneva “categorically” rejected the report, decrying “the inherent obsession of OHCHR with the demonization of Israel.”
“Gaza is now a rubble-strewn landscape,” Ajith Sunghay, head of the UN rights office’s activities in the Palestinian territories, said via video-link from Amman.
“Within this dystopia of destruction and devastation, those alive are left injured, displaced and starving.”
Friday’s report also found that Hamas and other armed groups had committed widespread violations that could amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, including seizing hostages, killings, torture and sexual violence.
Those violations, it said, were especially committed in connection with the October 7, 2023 attack, which resulted in 1,206 deaths, mostly of civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
The report also tackled the contentious issue of the proportion of civilians among the nearly 43,500 people killed in Gaza so far, according to the health ministry in the Palestinian territory.
UN agencies have been relying on death tolls provided by the authorities in Hamas-run Gaza due to lack of access. This has sparked harsh criticism from Israel but the UN has repeatedly said the figures are reliable.
The rights office said it had now managed to verify around 10,000 of the more than 34,500 people reportedly killed during the first six months of the war.
“We have so far found close to 70 percent to be children and women,” Sunghay said, highlighting the stringent verification methodology that requires at least three separate sources.
He said the findings indicated “a systematic violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law.”
He said 4,700 of the verified fatalities were children and 2,461 were women.
The rights office found that about 80 percent of all the verified deaths in Gaza had occurred in Israeli attacks on residential buildings or similar housing.
Children between the ages of five and nine made up the largest group of victims, with the youngest victim a one-day-old boy and the oldest a 97-year-old woman, it said.
Israel says its operations in Gaza target militants and are in line with international law.
But Friday’s report stressed that the verified deaths largely Gaza’s demographic makeup rather than that of combatants.
This, it said, clearly “raises concerns regarding compliance with the principle of distinction and reflect an apparent failure to take all feasible precautions to avoid, and in any event to minimize, incidental loss of civilian life.”
UN rights chief Volker Turk called on all countries to work to halt the violations and to ensure accountability, including through universal jurisdiction.
“It is essential that there is due reckoning with respect to the allegations of serious violations of international law through credible and impartial judicial bodies,” he said.
“The violence must stop immediately, the hostages and those arbitrarily detained must be released, and we must focus on flooding Gaza with humanitarian aid.”
