Former hostage Sasha Troufanov recalls reaching a turning point in Hamas captivity, when faith helped him overcome fear and accept that his fate was in G-d’s hands.

 

Survivor of Hamas captivity Sasha Troufanov appeared alongside his wife and fellow survivor Sapir Cohen in Idan Harel's documentary film "Thirsty Souls," which aired on Channel 14. Troufanov recounted how his faith intensified in captivity, and how it gave him strength.

"When I got to the situation of October 7th," Troufanov related, "I didn't have the tools to contend with this challenge." When everything was taken from him, he had to face questions he couldn't run from.

He recalled the difficult times when he needed that faith. "I got to captivity with gunshot wounds on my legs, a bleeding head, and a torn shoulder, a terrible physical condition. That state is actually what led me to think better mentally. This realisation that I can't choose my fate. After the hellfire in Khan Yunis, where I nearly died, they took me and put me in some cage. Before that, I was with the terrorists, and they let me walk around in a small space, and suddenly I'm in a small cage; it is an unpleasant situation. You say to yourself: 'How did this happen?'"

At that moment, Troufanov decided to change his mindset. "I said: 'You know not to look at things simply. Try to dissociate from what's happening now and understand that it's a way to make you better.' In half an hour of sitting by myself, I had a switch in my head. The terrorists no longer scared me so much, and the worry about what would happen didn't bother me. I just thought that 'if G-d will give you this life, you won, and if not, you had 27 good years and a few bad months. Everything is okay."

Fearing a loss of Likud voters to Otzma Yehudit, the Prime Minister held clarification talks with Itamar Ben Gvir and MK Tally Gotliv.

 

Secret messages have been exchanged in recent days between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Otzma Yehudit chairman and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, as well as the party's No. 2, MK Tally Gotliv, ynet reported.

The exchanges come against the backdrop of an extensive campaign being waged by Ben Gvir among right-wing voters, in which he claims that Netanyahu intends to form the next government without him.

Otzma Yehudit's campaign is aimed at drawing votes from Likud's electoral base. Initially, Likud sent reassuring messages to Ben Gvir, urging him to stop the attacks.

When the campaign continued, Netanyahu held a direct conversation with Ben Gvir and made clear that if he forms the next government, it will be based on the current coalition's composition and its guiding principles.

As part of the effort to ease tensions, Netanyahu also met with MK Gotliv in an attempt to outline a framework for understandings. However, Gotliv made clear that she was not persuaded by his explanations. “At the meeting with the Prime Minister, he tried to convince me that Itamar was wrong and that he would not sit with Eisenkot," Gotliv wrote immediately after the meeting. “I told him that Ben Gvir was right, and that the Prime Minister has always preferred to rely on left-wing and centrist parties. The Prime Minister pushed me down to 20th place so that I would not prevent a government with Eisenkot instead of Ben Gvir. Fortunately, the people decide. You, the right-wing voters, should vote for Otzma Yehudit, which will keep Netanyahu on the right."

Meanwhile, Likud's leadership is closely monitoring the independence Otzma Yehudit is demonstrating and the possibility that Ben Gvir's party could finish the election with a significant number of seats.

Ben Gvir's party denied the report. “This is completely fake news. There has been no conversation between Minister Ben Gvir and the Prime Minister in recent weeks, nor were any such messages sent. The opposite is true. There are growing reports of concern, including over the past weekend, that the Prime Minister's Office conveyed messages to several countries around the world that Otzma Yehudit will not be part of the next government."

$6 billion deal between Anthropic — the American AI company — and Israeli startup Decart has fallen apart, because they will not relocate to the USA

 

A reported $6 billion deal between Anthropic — the American AI company behind Claude — and Israeli startup Decart has fallen apart.

According to Globes, one of the major sticking points was Anthropic’s reported demand that Decart’s three founders — brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev — along with much of the company’s Israeli team, relocate from Tel Aviv to San Francisco.

They refused.

Instead, the founders reportedly chose to keep building Decart in Israel and keep its core team there — even with a deal on the table that could have made each of them extraordinarily wealthy.

Bloomberg confirmed that Anthropic walked away from the acquisition talks after due diligence, although neither company has publicly confirmed the exact reason the deal collapsed.

So for now, the $6 billion deal may be gone.

But Decart remains independent.

#decart #startupnation #anthropic #telaviv

Its team remains in Israel.

And so does the technology they’re building.

These Jewish Children you will see never blocking traffic

 

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"Pervert" Berland is in Uman watch how his crazed Chassidim make a big deal about him

 

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Motzei Rosh Hashana in Uman ... beating each other up!

 מי כעמך ישראל

Not to worry! 

Reb Nachman will pull them out of gehinnom by their peyos!

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CHINESE ENTITIES PROVIDED IRAN SATELLITE IMAGERY BEFORE DEADLY U.S. BASE STRIKE:

 U.S. officials say Iran obtained high-resolution satellite images from Chinese entities before and after its July 17 ballistic missile attack on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, which killed three U.S. service members and wounded four others. 

The U.S. has linked the imagery to the strike, according to The Wall Street Journal, though officials have not accused the Chinese government itself of direct involvement. Beijing has denied the allegations and demanded evidence.

Yitzchak Almekais, 45 Found Dead in Uman ..Homicide Suspected

 

Ukrainian authorities are investigating the death of a British Jewish father of seven who was found dead in a forest near the gravesite of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov in Uman during Rosh Hashanah.

The victim, identified as Yitzchak Almekais, 45, had been staying in Uman for the holiday pilgrimage, which drew tens of thousands of Jewish worshippers from Israel and around the world.

According to initial reports, Hasidim who entered the nearby wooded area found him lying on the ground without a pulse or signs of breathing. Emergency responders pronounced him dead at the scene.

Local police have opened an investigation and are examining all possibilities, including a possible homicide. Reports from the scene raised suspicions of foul play, but Ukrainian authorities have not yet officially ruled the death a murder.

Aharon Ben Haroush, who heads United Hatzalah’s Uman branch, said volunteers are working with local authorities to secure the release of Almekais’ body for burial as soon as possible.

Norway is preparing to criminalize Jews for buying from Jews.

 

Oslo’s bill would ban imports of goods made by Jews in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem and send violators to prison for up to three years. The foreign minister expects the Storting to pass it this fall.

Consultation closes September 19.

Read that again. Not “label the wine.” Not “boycott.” 

Jail.

For commerce with the non-Muslim Jewish communities in the historic Holy Land.

They call it international law. It is a Judenfrei trade code with a Nordic stamp. The same campaign that demands Jews vanish from Hebron, Shiloh and the Old City now wants the receipt to be a crime.

The Nazi death camp guard, who lived for years in Queens undetected

 

Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan was a former Nazi death camp guard living in Queens.

She was the perfect American neighbor — sweet, hardworking and the ideal homemaker. Everybody liked her. 

She was also a Nazi.

The new movie “The Housewife,” which had its world premiere this week at the Toronto International Film Festival, tells the strange story of Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, a notoriously cruel Nazi death camp guard who hid out undetected for years in New York, before finally being caught.

But the history of this major event is fascinating — and frightening.

When New York Times reporter Joseph Lelyveld, operating on a tip from Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, arrived at Ryan’s Maspeth, Queens, door in 1964, the war criminal among us said, “My God. I knew this would happen. You’ve come.”

The vicious woman hailed from Vienna, Austria, where she worked as a servant and eventually in a brewery. She later moved to Berlin in the 1930s and embraced rising Naziism. 

Enthusiastic and needing money, Ryan applied for a job at the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp in Germany in 1939 and then was transferred to Majdanek in Poland in 1942.

She rose the ranks to assistant warden, and earned a bone-chilling nickname: “the stomping mare,” because she’d kill women with her steel-spiked boots. Hot-tempered Ryan would also whip prisoners to death and drag children by the hair. Grotesquely, she was awarded the War Merit Cross for her brutality.

After the war, a court in Austria, lacking evidence for her many murders, convicted Ryan of crimes against human dignity for non-fatal abuse and sentenced her to just three years in prison. She was released after four months for time served.

She then resumed a perfectly normal life. And while working at a hotel in 1957, she met Russell Ryan, an American Air Force mechanic. They married in Canada in 1958, and in 1959 finally moved to Queens, where she was accepted and popular. In 1963, Hermine — a former Nazi prison guard — received her American citizenship.

When Lelyveld went to the Ryans’ home for his story, he discovered that Russell knew nothing about his wife’s gruesome role in the Holocaust. He stayed with her anyway. 

After the story ran, shocked neighbors couldn’t believe what they were reading. Who would think the nice lady next door used to work at a concentration camp?

Hermine was defiant.

“I was punished enough. I was in prison three years. Three years, can you imagine? And now they want something again from me?,” she said to the reporter.

“This is the end of everything for me.”  

“The Housewife” misleadingly speeds up what happened next. If you assumed a known Nazi would be swiftly kicked out of the country, you’d be wrong. An investigation began, but she wasn’t stripped of her citizenship until 1971, when the government determined she’d lied on her application about her Austrian conviction.

During her deportation trial in 1972, there were many harrowing testimonies. A 51-year-old woman named Mary Finkelstein, who spent seven weeks at Majdanek, said that she’d seen another inmate “clobbered like the seals are clobbered in North America” by Hermine. 

Finkelstein also said once when Hermine noticed a prisoner slouching, she “clobbered her” with a stick and shouted, “Du schwein, du fluchte, Jude, stehgerade.” (“You pig, you damn Jew, stand up straight”).

Hermine, who was complicit in the murders of more than 1,000 people, was finally deported to West Germany in 1973 where she was tried for her deadly acts at Majdanek — the first US citizen to be extradited for war crimes.

She was sentenced to life in prison in 1981 and died in 1999 at age 79. 

What Shirinian’s decent film does to lead us off the scent and build suspense is make Hermine the main character and have Lelyveld (played by Tye Sheridan) first pursue Russell (Luke Evans). The reporter believes the husband is the Nazi — not the wife. 

That’s not a bad idea, but Watts’ performance is so grand that even a viewer with no knowledge of Ryan will catch on pretty fast that she’s the bad guy.

The obviousness of her guilt waters down the movie’s most powerful point: Evil doesn’t always look or sound like evil.

And it can be living right next door.