The Jewish Week | International News

Krakow — At four crowded tables in the ground-floor meeting room of the Jewish Community Centre here, some hundred people attended the first-night seder during Passover last week.

It was the “biggest community seder in Poland,” says Jonathan Ornstein, the JCC’s New York-born director.

It’s another sign that the only such American-style JCC in the country is succeeding.

Sometime in the summer of 1942, as the Nazi noose tightened around the Jews of Poland, Stanislaw Grocholski, a poor farmer who lived in a small village in the southeast part of the country, heard a disturbing rumor — some members of a Jewish family in the region, an old friend among them, had been spotted in one of the nearby fields.

Grocholski, a church-going Catholic, knew what the rumor meant — the Jews had escaped from their nearby town, Urzejowice, on the eve of a “resettlement” order and were hiding to save their lives.

Yet another warning for local Jewish organizations to increase their vigilance due to events overseas went out this week, as the gruesome murder of four French Jews, three of them children, sent shockwaves around the world.

The New York Police Department had a visible presence outside major institutions such as large Manhattan synagogues, prompting some other organizations to demand the same level of protection.

(JTA) -- Israeli President Shimon Peres launched a Facebook page during a visit with company founder Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook headquarters in California.

As part of the launch Tuesday, Peres held a live chat with web surfers from around the world. His page calls on people from around the world to be his friend and "speak up" for peace.

Peres was to give a public speech Tuesday night at San Francisco'sTemple Emanu-El.  He also is slated this week to tour the headquarters of Google as the guest of co-founder Sergey Brin.