The superpower prefers solving nuclear issue diplomatically.

Assad and Abdullah try to quell tensions over Hariri tribunal.

Six IAF servicemen killed in Romania helicopter crash laid to rest.

Six IAF servicemen killed in Romania helicopter crash laid to rest.

Modern English translation of the full text of the Parshah.

Got no more than five minutes? The Parshah in a Nutshell is an ultra-short, one-page synopsis of the weekly Torah reading, peppered with links to related stories, essays and articles.

Hayom Yom, an expression which translates as 'Day by Day,' is a collection of concise thoughts, often relevant to the season or portion of study when it appears, which gives the reader food to sustain the soul each day of the year.

Today's Psalms: Chapters 90 - 96

Today's Lesson: Shemita Chapter 9

Six servicemen to be buried Friday at various locations in the country.

A rocket fired from Gaza has landed in a residential area of Ashkelon, causing damage to cars and
buildings.

A man has been charged with the manslaughter
of an 83-year-old strictly Orthodox woman from Stamford
Hill.

Police found Evelyn Kelmenson
with her legs bound by duct tape in the top-floor bedroom of her three-storey
house on Leweston Place on January 1 2009, after her niece   had
 raised the alarm.

A year later, police offered a £20,000 reward
for information.

Kuba Dlugosz, 32, a Polish national of no
fixed abode, appeared in custody at Havering Magistrates Court on Wednesday. He
is also charged with burglary.

He will appear again in court in
November.

Several people treated for shock; damaged caused to buildings, cars.

Two Palestinians have called for Hamas to end
its attacks against Israel and make
peace.

Mahmoud Hamdan told an audience in London: “I want to convey a
message to Hamas: stop the violence and stop the blame cycle. We want to live in
peace.”

His colleague Malaka Samara said: “During the
second intifada, they said 'we are an Islamic group ' and that 
Islam was the representative religion of Palestine. I don’t think
this is right. I don’t trust them.

“I don’t want them to be the main political
party in Palestine to lead the Palestinians to a big
tragedy, not to have peace and not to have conciliation on the other side. They
are wrong and they don’t represent Islam as a
religion.”

The two were part of a group of Israelis and
Palestinians from Combatants For Peace (CFP) who have been brought on a tour
of  the
UK  by Amnesty International and
Encounter. They were speaking at the Frontline Club in Paddington, alongside
Israelis Idan Meir and Neta Osnat.

CFP was formed by Israelis who served in the
Israel Defence Force and some of their former Palestinian adversaries in an
effort to break the cycle of violence and build better understanding between the
two peoples.

A packed audience of 100 people heard the
four give short accounts of how they became involved in CFP and their dedication
to try to achieve peace,  not necessarily for them but for their
children.

A  member of the audience  asked
if  the Palestinian pair would challenge Hamas about violence,
as they had done with Israel.

Malaka Samara said she had voted for Hamas
when she was at university but had never met any of its
leaders.

“Yes, of course I am ready to challenge
anyone from Hamas,” she replied. “I have read a lot of books about my religion.
This is not a religious conflict and we need to understand that ourselves. I
voted for them because I thought they were different from normal
people.”

Then she went on to condemn their stance on
Islam.

A question was asked about boycott,
divestment and sanctions. Idan Meir was unequivocal: “Personally, I don’t
believe in any boycotts.” But he added that the entire boycott  issue was “complicated. Boycotting Germany
made it the monster it became in the 30s. Boycotting Iran will make it much worse and that’s why
boycotting Israel is not the solution,” he
said.

However, he was in favour of boycotting
all produce that came from West Bank
settlements, as were his fellow panellists.    

This week, about 100 moderate Orthodox rabbis and teachers, women, signed "statement of principles” outlining an open, accepting approach to homosexuals who want to maintain ties with their Orthodox community, family and friends.

When I was growing up I was told that manners were particularly important for Jewish children. It was essential not to offend the ‘English’ people around us. This baffled me. Surely I was as English as anyone else?

I was reminded of this when I read Christina Patterson’s article, headlined The Limits of Multi-Culturalism in the Independent this week. Ms Patterson thinks her Charedi neighbours in Stamford Hill are bad mannered. And she doesn’t seem to think they are as British as she is.

She complains about their bad driving. She didn’t like it when someone honked her in a car park. A man serving her in a shop “handled my money as if it had been dipped in anthrax”, and omitted to say “please” and “thank you”. A small boy moved when she sat next to him on the bus.

She wants women with “double-decker pushchairs and vast armies of children” to stand aside on the pavement and let her pass.

She wrote: “I would like to say to all these people that I don’t care if they wear frock-coats, and funny suits and hats covered in plastic bags, and insist on wearing their hair in ringlets (if they’re male) or covered up by wigs (if they’re female), but I do think they could treat their neighbours with a bit more courtesy and just a little bit more respect,” in a breath-taking example of do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do.

I scanned Ms Patterson’s article for proof that, as she says, “goyim were about as welcome in the Chasidic Jewish shops as Martin Luther King at a Ku Klux Klan convention”.

Had she been abused, spat at, banned from shopping in Jewish shops? No. There were no examples of anything that a Jew would recognise as prejudice or discrimination. Ms Patterson just imagines that terseness and diffidence implies hatred and disdain. It irritates her, she says.

Her article then takes a wild leap to her Muslim neighbours, their horrible hijabs and niqabs, their evil female circumcision.

She puts mutilating children on a par with driving a Volvo while using a mobile phone, suggesting that these alien groups can’t keep to the laws that govern a “civilised society”.

Faith schools teaching “sexist, racist, dangerous, violent and yes, ill-mannered, nonsense” are to blame. And if getting rid of them means sacrificing “lovely little C of E schools [that] were once an excellent place for children to learn about the religion that shaped their culture, art and laws”? Well, so be it.

I regularly shop in Stamford Hill, and I do not wear especially modest clothes. None of the shopkeepers would know that I was Jewish, yet I have never felt that I was treated rudely or with contempt.

Maybe that’s because I do not assume that the shopkeeper hates me.

I understand that an Orthodox man may prefer not to engage in conversation with a woman who is not his wife. I understand that for many their first language is Yiddish.

I’m liberal enough that it doesn’t bother me.

I see examples of rudeness and bad manners and law-breaking all the time.

People talking on mobiles while driving (hell, I’ve even done that myself, sorry Ms Patterson). Mums pushing wide buggies along narrow pavements. People who swear and shout and push into queues.

Some of those people are white, some are black and some are Muslim, Christian or Jewish. And it’s really very tempting to think “All white people are rude”, “all men are bastards” and “all left-leaning liberals are anti-semites.”

But I don’t think that. I never ever allow myself to think that. Because that would be worse than bad-mannered.

That would be downright wrong.

‘When I was Joe’ by Keren David is published by Frances Lincoln Children’s Books at £6.99

Lost in all the incendiary rhetoric are some basic facts about the conversion procedures of most US Reform and Conservative rabbis.

The majority have privately whispered that the Rotem bill on conversion is retrograde.