World news roundup: Putin moves exams post-Shavuot

Reforms to pensions for Polish Shoah survivors, Putin agrees to delay school exams until after Shavuot: the latest Jewish news from around the world.

• Russia

Vladimir Putin has intervened to force the rescheduling of school exams after Russian Jews appealed about their timing – over Shabbat and Shavuot. Officials denied the initial request because Russia ‘is a secular state’. The exams will now take place on 16 June. Students were pleased with the extra revision time.

• Poland

From October, a change in Polish law will allow Holocaust survivors not living in Poland to receive monthly pension payments of $135. Survivors of Polish descent previously had to have a Polish bank account or someone in Poland willing to transfer the money to them in order to receive the benefits.

•  Australia

A child sexually assault victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, says the Australian Jewish community turned its back on him, despite a court having returned a guilty verdict on the perpetrator, a former Yeshiva director. ‘When the offender is one of your own, the response is very different,’ he said.

• United States

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has refused to condemn remarks made by Rabbi Yaakov Perlow at a dinner he attended last week. Perlow, a leader of Agudath Israel, said Conservative and Reform Judaism was ‘oblivious’ and that it had ‘fallen into a pit of intermarriage and assimilation.’

• South Africa

An 80-year old South African businesswoman who turned her hand to writing late in life is about to see her first play premiere. Carole Eglash-Kosoff wrote ‘Human Spirit,’ a play about anti-apartheid activists, back in 2006, after her mother, husband and brother all died within four weeks of each other. 

• Egypt

Following a purge of Islamists in Egypt, the court that recently sentenced hundreds of people to death has defended the decision, calling them ‘demons’ who used mosques to promote the teachings of ‘their holy book, the Talmud’. It comes after the Muslim Brotherhood was ousted in a military coup last year.