St. Petersburg Seminary and Yeshiva

08/12/2026

The Fall 2026 course schedule can be found here: https://www.sptseminary.edu/course-schedule

07/19/2026

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07/19/2026

07/17/2026

Malaysian Prime Minister Vows Immediate Deportation of Israeli Nationals

Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has stated that any Israeli national found within Malaysia will be deported immediately and without delay. The Prime Minister's firm remarks follow circulating rumors suggesting that an Israeli citizen had been participating in activities at a private residential community in the state of Johor.

Addressing the situation, Prime Minister Anwar emphasized that the relevant authorities are treating the matter with the utmost seriousness. He asserted that the government will not hesitate to take decisive action should the allegations be substantiated. "If we find an Israeli national, we will deport them immediately. This is because Malaysia does not recognize Israel as a state," Anwar stated.

Under Malaysia's existing immigration policies, individuals holding Israeli passports are strictly prohibited from entering the country without obtaining special authorization.

In response to the ongoing concerns, the Ministry of Home Affairs has launched a formal investigation into the matter.
In related efforts to maintain border and internal security, the Immigration Department recently conducted inspections on 266 foreign nationals residing in Forest City.

Authorities have since confirmed that all individuals checked were in possession of valid, legal documentation in compliance with the country's regulations.

07/16/2026

In Milan, Italy, a Holocaust memorial depicting Primo Levi and Anne Frank with the words "Memory is no longer enough" was vandalized with the words "N**i Zionist Colonists." Equating the victims of the N**is with N**is - because they are Jewish.

A public Holocaust memorial is a platform for reflection; what has happened before, and where we are now as a society.

Vandalizing it not only insults the victims, their memory, and history. It is a hate act on Jews and on democracy as a whole.

The incident was condemned by our affiliate community in Italy, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI): "This is a cowardly act, the result of an increasingly entrenched climate of prejudice and hatred toward Jews, where history is being overturned and words are disfigured."

07/15/2026

Michael Katz was critically wounded in an Iranian missile strike on his home in Haifa in April. This morning he died of his injuries, more than three months later. That same attacked killed at least four other people that day.

May his memory be a blessing.

Michael Katz is survived by his wife, Nina, his two sons, and six grandchildren. “From now on, I will live my life as half a human being, after 55 years of marriage,” Nina Katz said in mourning.

07/14/2026

In the sealed and starving Warsaw Ghetto, children walked to school with their books hidden under their coats, because if the wrong person saw them, learning could cost a life. The schools themselves did not officially exist.
When Germany occupied Poland, the assault was not only on Jewish bodies but on Jewish and Polish minds. The occupiers understood that to destroy a people you must also destroy its future — so they shuttered secondary schools, then closed Jewish schools in Warsaw altogether, and aimed to reduce a literate, cultured population to a pool of disposable laborers. Education was to be extinguished.
It was not. Across occupied Poland, and with extraordinary intensity inside the Warsaw Ghetto, teachers and students built an entire shadow system of learning in defiance of the ban. The Poles called the clandestine classes komplety. Unemployed teachers from the prewar schools gathered small groups of children in apartments, in basements, in the back rooms of soup kitchens, and taught them — reading, history, mathematics, literature, the very heritage the N**is meant to erase. Students carried their books concealed beneath their clothing as they made their way to class, knowing that to be caught could mean a beating, arrest, or worse.
Inside the ghetto, elementary lessons were often hidden within the children's kitchens run by welfare agencies, where a meal for a starving child could double as a cover for a lesson. For older students, a network of secret high-school classes operated in private homes. The teachers had no salaries, no buildings, no textbooks beyond what could be smuggled or remembered. They had only the conviction that a child's mind was worth the risk.
The most astonishing example was a secret medical school. Officially, the Germans had permitted the ghetto to run "Sanitary Courses in Fighting Epidemics" — basic hygiene classes meant to contain the typhus the overcrowding had unleashed. Beginning in 1941, the organizers quietly transformed these courses into a full clandestine medical faculty, teaching the standard European curriculum to hundreds of students in a building near the ghetto's edge. The reasoning was breathtaking in its hope: if so many Jewish doctors were being murdered, new ones would have to be trained to replace them — which meant assuming there would be a future in which doctors were needed. The Germans, who inspected so much, never inspected the sanitary courses. The medical school ran for more than a year.
Nor was the defiance confined to the ghetto. Across occupied Poland, a vast clandestine education network operated under the Polish Underground State, eventually teaching well over a million children at the primary level and tens of thousands more at secondary and even university level; at the underground University of Warsaw alone, hundreds of professors taught thousands of students in secret. This was a form of resistance every bit as real as smuggling weapons, and historians have a name for it: spiritual resistance. It looked backward, defying the attempt to annihilate a culture and its memory. It steadied the present, giving children and teachers a few hours of structure, dignity, and normalcy amid horror. And above all it looked forward, insisting — against all visible evidence — that there would be a tomorrow worth preparing for.
The cost was terrible. Most of the children who recited their lessons in those hidden rooms, and most of the teachers who taught them, were later murdered. The great deportations to Treblinka in 1942 tore through the ghetto and emptied the secret classrooms. The future the teachers had bet on did not arrive for the overwhelming majority of their students.
And yet the act itself was a victory the N**is could not undo. Some of those students did survive, and some of the medical students went on to become the doctors their teachers had imagined. The ghetto's physicians even turned their suffering into knowledge, conducting a careful scientific study of the effects of starvation on the human body — research that was preserved and published after the war, so that something useful might be salvaged from so much death.
In a place engineered to convince its prisoners that they were less than human and had no future, ordinary teachers answered with chalk and memory and stolen books. They taught children to read in the shadow of the crematoria. It was, in its quiet way, one of the bravest things human beings have ever done — to look at the end of the world and decide to hold class anyway.

07/14/2026

For years, Hamas’s role in obstructing humanitarian aid has too often been minimized, excused, or ignored, even as Israel has been blamed for Gaza’s humanitarian crisis.

Now, UN Deputy Special Coordinator Ramiz Alakbarov is “strongly” condemning the obstruction of humanitarian operations by Gaza’s “de facto authorities,” referring to Hamas.

According to Alakbarov, armed personnel affiliated with those authorities forced their way into a food distribution point, entered a World Food Programme warehouse, reportedly assaulted truck drivers, intimidated aid workers, and disrupted the delivery of life-saving assistance.

This acknowledgment matters, but it comes far too late.

Anyone who genuinely cares about Gaza’s civilians must confront the reality that Hamas has repeatedly exploited humanitarian suffering, endangered aid workers, and provoked the misery of the very people it claims to represent.

07/14/2026

👉The year was 1940 when Jeanne Daman, a young woman in Belgium, finished her training to become a teacher.
She had grown up a kind girl with a deep love for children. Becoming a teacher was her dream.
Jeanne was Catholic. She had never even met a Jewish person in her life. The troubles of the Jewish people were not her troubles.
But Jeanne had a strong sense of right and wrong. And that would soon change everything.
By then, the N**is had taken over Belgium. And they began passing cruel new rules.
One of those rules said that Jewish children were no longer allowed to go to school with everyone else.
So the Jewish community started its own little school in the city of Brussels. It was a kindergarten, and it was called "Nos Petits." That means "Our Little Ones."
The school needed a teacher. And a woman named Fela asked young Jeanne if she would come and help.
Jeanne said yes.
Soon she was caring for hundreds of small Jewish children. She grew to love them dearly.
But then came the darkest days of the war.
The N**is began rounding up Jewish families and sending them away, to places from which they would never return.
Jeanne watched in horror as it happened. Some of her own little students became orphans overnight, their parents simply taken.
She would never forget standing there, helpless, as children were torn away from her.
From that moment on, Jeanne knew she could not just stand by. She had to act.
So this gentle young teacher became something far more dangerous. She became a rescuer.
The school was no longer safe. Keeping so many Jewish children in one place was like painting a target on them.
So Jeanne began to hide them.
She found brave, kind Belgian families, along with convents and schools, who were willing to secretly take a Jewish child into their homes.
Then Jeanne would personally bring the children to their new hiding places.
She gave each child a brand new name and a fake life story to memorize, so no one would ever guess they were Jewish. She drilled it with them again and again, because one slip could mean death.
She stayed in touch with every child she placed. And if a hiding spot became dangerous, she would quietly move the child somewhere new.
She helped find money to pay the families. She helped create the forged papers that kept the children safe.
Jeanne did all of this knowing exactly what would happen if she were ever caught. She would be arrested, or worse.
Yet she did it anyway, day after day after day.
By the time the war finally ended, this one young woman had helped save the lives of around two thousand Jewish children.
Two thousand.
And when the fighting was over, Jeanne did not simply walk away. She stayed, and helped find the hidden children, working to reunite the ones who still had family left to return to.
Think about that for a moment. Two thousand children, who grew up, and had children of their own, and grandchildren after that. A whole forest of human lives, every branch of it growing from the courage of one schoolteacher who refused to look away.
Most of us will never be asked to be that brave. But all of us can decide whether a story like hers gets remembered, or quietly forgotten.
So here is my question for you today. We are taught that heroes are born special. But Jeanne was just an ordinary young teacher who made one brave choice, and then kept making it. What would you have done, in her shoes?👈