The million or so immigrants that came to Israel from the former Soviet Union during the 1990s have sometimes been accused of having tenuous ties to Judaism, but a recent survey shows they feel passionately about their religious identity.

An overwhelming 93 percent of Israelis with a background in the FSU said they regularly celebrated holidays like Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashana and Passover, according to a poll released by a Jewish group on Wednesday.

The survey commissioned by Shorashim, an organization that facilitates statesanctioned conversions for Russian-speaking Israelis to Judaism, gauged the community’s relationship with religion.

Some 68% of respondents identified as secular, 17% said they were traditional and 12% said they were religious or ultra-Orthodox.

Marriage has been a troublesome issue for Russianspeaking Israelis. Many are either not recognized as Jewish by the state and therefore cannot get married in the rabbinate, or they oppose its monopoly on conducting marriages and divorces. As a result, some 69% of respondents said they tied the knot in civil ceremonies or outside the country.

Approximately 51% said they were open to the possibility of undergoing official conversions to Judaism.

“These are hundreds of thousands of Jews who under communism experienced spiritual oppression by the communist regime,” Shalom Norman, an official with Shorashim, said.

“Our main goal is to support the strengthening of the Jewish component in society in Israel and ways of facilitating that for hundreds of thousands of olim.”

The survey conducted by Maagar Mochot sampled 501 adults aged 18 and over who identified as being from the FSU. The margin of error is 4.5%.

Iran’s Basij Press is claiming a purported Gospel of Barnabas, discovered in 2000, will prove that Islam is the final and righteous religion, causing the collapse worldwide of Christianity.

Turkey confiscated the text, written on animal hide, in an anti-smuggling operation. Turkish authorities believe it could be an authentic version of the Gospel of Barnabas by the apostle known for his travels with the apostle Paul.

Basij Press contends the text was written in the 5th or 6th century and predicts the coming of Muhammad and the religion of Islam.

The Christian world, it says, denies the existence of such a gospel.

Another known “Barnabas Gospel” dates to the late 16th century, which would post-date Muhammad.

In the Barnabas text held by Turkey, chapter 41 states: “God has hidden himself as Archangel Michael ran them (Adam and Eve) out of heaven, (and) when Adam turned, he noticed that at top of the gateway to heaven, it was written ‘La elah ela Allah, Mohamad rasool Allah,’” meaning Allah is the only God and Muhammad his prophet.

The Turkish army has taken possession of the text because the “Zionists” and the governments of the West are trying to suppress its contents, Basij Press claims.

According to the Barnabas Gospel in Turkey’s hands, Basij Press says, Jesus was never crucified, He’s not the Son of God and He, Himself, predicts the coming of Muhammad. The book even predicts the coming of the last Islamic messiah, the report says.

“The discovery of the original Barnabas Bible will now undermine the Christian Church and its authority and will revolutionize the religion in the world,” the Basij report says. “The most significant fact, though, is that this Bible has predicted the coming of Prophet Mohammad and in itself has verified the religion of Islam, and this alone will unbalance the powers of the world and create instability in the Christian world.”

The Basij report concludes that the discovery is so immense, it will affect world politics, and that the world powers have become aware of its impact.

Turkey plans to put the Bible on public display. Though Turkish authorities believe it could be an authentic version of the Gospel of Barnabas, others believe it only goes back to the 16th century and is a fake because it would have been written centuries after Muhammad’s life.

Erick Stakelbeck, host of the Christian Broadcasting Network’s “Stakelbeck on Terror” show and a close observer of Iranian affairs, said Iran is highlighting the book because it sees Christianity as a threat.

“The Iranian regime is committed to stamping out Christianity by any means necessary, whether that means executing Christian converts, burning Bibles or raiding underground churches,” he explained.

“In promoting the so-called Barnabas Bible – which was likely written sometime in the 16th century and is not accepted by any mainstream Christian denomination – the regime is once again attempting to discredit the Christian faith. Record numbers of young Iranians are leaving Islam and embracing Christ, and the mullahs see Christianity as a growing threat to their authority.”

The Vatican has requested to see the text, but it is unknown if Turkey has provided access.

Iranian ayatollahs regularly declared that Islam is the last and only righteous religion sent by God.

Grand Ayatollah Jafar Sobhani, in a recent statement, proclaimed that since the Quran was the last holy book and provides the most complete religion to the world, and Muhammad the last prophet, there is no authority to abide by other books. The Quran clearly indicates that only those who have accepted the true religion of Islam are the guided ones, he said.

As reported recently, a former intelligence officer in the Revolutionary Guards revealed that tens of thousands of Bibles were confiscated and burned in Iran under the order of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The mullah said the Bible is not a holy book and its burning is morally acceptable.

Khamenei said: “In light of the realization of the divine promise by almighty Allah, the Zionists and the Great Satan (America) will soon be defeated. Allah’s promise will be delivered and Islam will be victorious.”

On Wednesday afternoon in Baghdad, a few thousand kilometers away from the Prime Minister’s Jerusalem Residence, the world powers known as the P5+1 – the US, China, Russia, France, Britain and Germany – sat down for much anticipated talks with the Iranians about their nuclear program.

At the same time, just a few hundred meters away from the Prime Minister’s Residence, 100 or so people loudly demonstrated for the rights of Ethiopian immigrants and against discrimination.

And all the while, for two hours on a mild afternoon, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu – with a small black kippa on his head – sat in the covered courtyard of his home with 16 rabbis, academics, Bible scholars, archeologists and linguists, and discussed the meaning of the Book of Ruth, which will be read on Shavuot on Sunday in synagogues around the world. His wife, Sara, sat next to him, and his two sons sat on a bank of chairs set to the side.

There was something at once heartening and slightly humorous about Netanyahu setting aside precious time in the late afternoon to talk about Biblical figures Tamar and Yehuda, Naomi and Boaz, Ruth and David, while Iran loomed so large, and domestic issues beckoned so seriously.

It was heartening in that it is uniquely elevating seeing the prime minister of the Jewish state taking time out to study the Bible, the heart of Jewish existence. One cannot talk about Jewish historic rights to this place, which the prime minister does constantly, without appreciating and understanding the Bible.

And the scene was slightly humorous in that there is no other way to describe watching Avshalom Kor, the legendary radio linguist with the bass voice and perfect Hebrew pronunciation, read chapters from the Book of Ruth, while in the background chants from the Ethiopian protesters grew louder and louder and threatened to drown him out.

Netanyahu – try as he may to set aside some time for Bible study to block out the everyday – could not totally succeed. The outside world seeped in, even as he tried hard to ignore it.

Still, the attempt was praiseworthy because it put into wider perspective the matters on the agenda that seem so overwhelmingly critical at the moment – Iran and domestic problems the Ethiopian protesters raised.

Or, as Rabbi Yehuda Ben-Yishai, whose daughter Ruth was killed with her husband and three children in a terrorist attack in Itamar last year, put it at the meeting, the Bible is a chronicle of how – despite it all – “we came out of it all right.” He said the Bible was a chronicle of finding the “light” in very complicated and complex situations.

Kor wanted to read only a few verses from the Book of Ruth, but the prime minister urged him on to read more.

This is better then the usual matters he has to deal with, Netanyahu quipped as the session – originally scheduled for an hour – went 60 minutes longer than planned.

“The Bible is a parable for humanity,” Netanyahu said at the outset in English, giving a powerful sound-bite to the cameras invited to film just the opening of the study circle. “If the Jews are able to cross the river of time, and in their vast odyssey cross the chasm of annihilation and come back to their ancestral home, that means there is hope for humanity.”

The PMO, along with the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, organized the event, a reincarnation of a tradition David Ben-Gurion began, when as prime minister he hosted a regular Bible study circle, and also Menachem Begin adopted when he was prime minister. It is dedicated to Sara Netanyahu’s father, Shmuel Ben-Artzi, a noted Bible teacher and enthusiast who passed away in November.

A tale is told that one Saturday evening Begin was studying the weekly Torah portion with his group, when a call came in from the White House. US president Jimmy Carter was on the line. Begin is said to have replied that he was in the middle of studying verses from Deuteronomy, and that Carter should call back in a couple of hours.

Apocryphal or not, the story sends a message that certain things are important, like calls from the US president, and other things are even more so. That seemed the message Netanyahu was trying to send as well.

Wednesday’s meeting, the first of a number of study sessions that are to take place throughout the year, was more symbol than substance, more message than meat.

And Netanyahu made clear what the message was: “Ben-Gurion and Begin believed that the Bible should be the heritage of the entire nation – secular and religious, young and old, men and women. The Bible is the foundation of our existence. It unites the Jewish people, as it has throughout the generations. It also serves not only as a foundation but also as a map and compass,” he said.

“The Bible is always relevant vis-à-vis today’s problems and challenges. It inspires, it is a source of life for our people and I think that it is important to expand Bible study and love of the Bible among all parts of the nation.

This is also the goal of this circle.” Wednesday’s format was neither university lecture, nor yeshiva shiur (lesson).

Micha Goodman, the dynamic head of the Ein Prat Academy for Leadership and a lecturer on Jewish thought at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, handed out a short source sheet and then began the discussion by explaining how the Book of Ruth – the story of the Moabite convert Ruth – contradicted the Biblical injunction of never letting Moabites and Ammonites enter the ranks of the Jewish people.

On the Shavuot holiday that celebrates the giving of the Torah, Goodman said, the book the sages selected to be read contradicted a tenet of the Torah. And therein lay the irony and the paradox that others sitting to the left and right of the prime minister then addressed.

Granted, when a group that includes rabbis like Benny Lau and Yeshivat Har Etzion co-head Yaakov Meidan, archeologists like Adam Zertal, linguists like Hebrew Language Academy head Moshe Bar-Asher, and Judaic studies scholars like Hebrew University’s Nili Wazana, get together, the discussion is bound to be illuminating. In a group like that, everyone has what to say – especially when they feel compelled to say something intelligent since they were invited by the prime minister expressly for that purpose.

But the significance of the afternoon was less in the insights given – talk about how the Bible is both law and spirit, full of complexities reflecting life’s contradictions and compromises – and more in the very fact that Netanyahu decided to resurrect Ben-Gurion and Begin’s tradition. While an absorbing discussion ensued, Wednesday’s prime ministerial study circle shed more light on Netanyahu – his psyche, world view and the way he sees his role – than it did on the Book of Ruth.

Archaeologists recently discovered the first artifact constituting tangible evidence of the existence of the ancient city of Bethlehem, which is mentioned in the Torah, according to an Israel Antiquities Authority statement released Wednesday.

The artifact, a bulla, or piece of clay for sealing a document or object, may prove the existence of Bethlehem dating back to the First Temple Period.

The dramatic discovery was made while sifting soil from archaeological excavations the Israel Antiquities Authority is conducting in the City of David, in the “Walls around Jerusalem National Park.”

The bulla, measuring 1.5 cm, was discovered bearing the name of the city, written in ancient Hebrew script. The dig is underwritten by the Ir David Foundation.

A bulla would be impressed with the seal of the person who sent the document or object, and its integrity was evidence that no one had viewed or opened the document who unless authorized.

Three lines of ancient Hebrew script appear on the bulla, including the words: Bishv’at, Bet Lechem and [Lemel]ekh.

Eli Shukron, director of the excavation on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, stated that the discovery appears to show that “in the seventh year of the reign of a king (it is unclear if the king referred to here is Hezekiah, Manasseh or Josiah), a shipment was dispatched from Bethlehem to the king in Jerusalem.”

Shukron dated the bulla to the seventh or eighth centuries BCE during a period in which bullae were used for taxation of shipments in the Kingdom of Judah.

He emphasized the bulla’s significance as, “this is the first time the name Bethlehem appears outside the Bible, in an inscription from the First Temple period, which proves that Bethlehem was indeed a city in the Kingdom of Judah, and possibly also in earlier periods.”

In the Torah, Bethlehem is first mentioned in the verse “in Ephrath, which is Bethlehem”, it was on the way to Bethlehem that Rachel died and it is the site where she was buried (Genesis 35:19; 48:7). The descendants of Judah settled there, among them the family of Boaz (Book of Ruth).

Bethlehem became a more central biblical city with the anointing of David, son of Jesse, as king (1 Samuel 16).

For the first time, the Bible and New Testament have been translated to an Inuit language. A group of Inuit Christians in the Canadian territory Nunavut have completed the 34-year translation project this week, translating the holy religious texts into the local Inuktitut.

The task wasn’t easy necessitating creative linguistic gymnastics to bridge the 2,000-year temporal divide in addition to the vast distance separating the Arctic peoples and the Middle Easterners, who wrote the holy books.

One of the main difficulties the translators faced was the translation of objects that aren’t found in the Arctic such as certain trees that don’t grow in the treeless Arctic.

Another example is the translation of shepherd, which appears in the Bible often. In Inuktitut a shepherd tends to children of dogs, not goats and sheep, which aren’t found in Nunavut. Plant and animal names were the biggest difficulty and in many cases general terms such as ‘tree’ were used. In other cases English lone words were used such as in the case of ‘camel.’

“It’s just like you have one word for snow but we have many words for snow,” explained a clergyman who was a member of the translating team.

A surprising difficulty the translators faced was the complete absence of a term for ‘peace’ in Inuktitut. In order to circumvent this language gap, the translators had to use complete sentences to the get equivalent ideas across.

The translation is not simply an intellectual exercise for an elite few. Some 90 percent of the citizens of Nunavut are Christians and the territory boasts the highest church per capita rate in Canada.

The translation project was funded by the Canadian Bible Society and the Anglican Church costing $ 1.7 million. The translation will be launched in a ceremony at the igloo-shaped St. Jude’s Anglican Cathedral in Iqaluit, Nunavut’s capital on June 3.

Most Israeli Jews would probably agree that the heart of Israel is Jerusalem, the heart of Jerusalem is the Old City, and the heart of the Old City is the Jewish Quarter — captured by Israeli troops precisely 45 years ago, an event marked on Jerusalem Day this Sunday.

And yet today’s Jewish Quarter, formed from the ruins and rubble that existed here after the Six Day War, has become a place entirely unlike the country at whose spiritual center it is supposed to exist.

On a recent morning in the Quarter, several contingents of American teenagers were herded across a spotless open square in the direction of the Western Wall. A bearded man sat at a table with a few sets of phylacteries and a banner with a Nike swoosh next to the English words, “Tefillin: Just Do It.”

In a narrow street nearby was the Temple Institute — an organization dedicated to preparing plans for the building the Third Temple — and its gift shop, which does a brisk business in Temple posters, puzzles and balsa wood models. In a different alley, two women with hair covered in severe kerchiefs, their hands resting on stroller handles, conversed in English.

“People dreamed of Jerusalem for 2,000 years. There is a special atmosphere here, and it helps us study,” said Arieh Weintraub, 23, a yeshiva student in a black yarmulke who was taking a break outside the domed Hurva Synagogue on one side of the square.

The unique nature of the Jewish Quarter can be summed up best in two numbers: 3,000, the number of residents, and 2 million, the number of annual tourists.

Trying to navigate the needs of residents and those of visitors “never goes off the agenda,” said Daniel Shukron, secretary of the official body in charge of the Jewish Quarter, the Company for the Reconstruction and Development of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City. (To residents, it is simply “the Company.”)

“It is not easy to find the balance, and no one is happy, which we think means we’re probably doing something right,” Shukron said.

In the other three quarters of the walled Old City, identified with Arab Christians, Armenian Christians, and Muslims, a visitor can sense an authentic and old pulse of life. Families in those quarters have been there, in some cases, for centuries. The Armenians, for example, have had a more or less uninterrupted presence in their quarter dating back 1,600 years.

But life in the Jewish Quarter was ruptured when Jordanian troops captured it in 1948 and expelled all of its residents. Today the reconstructed Jewish Quarter — which is cleaner and more modern than the others, and has a far higher number of tourist sites, excavations and museums, and where many residents are foreign-born — feels less like a Jewish neighborhood than a Jewish theme park.

In the Jewish Quarter there are those gripped by fevered visions of the future, like the people who run the Temple Institute, while others seem to be reenacting a fantasy of the past — Eastern Europe, filtered through the unmistakable prism of Jewish New York. The present, to an observer, can feel artificial and rootless.

The paratroopers who arrived in the Jewish Quarter in 1967 found an area that had been largely in ruin since the Jordanian conquest 19 years before. That provided a nearly blank slate on which the Israeli government could construct the Quarter anew.

The government officially expropriated the land within the Quarter’s boundaries, relocating Arab families who had moved in since the Jews left, and transferred the entire area to the Company for the Reconstruction and Development of the Jewish Quarter, which was to serve both as the contractor and landowner.

The government had contradictory aims — it wanted both to resettle the Quarter with Jews and to create a symbolic landscape and ideological mecca in which archaeology, memorials to the 1948 fighting, and rebuilt institutions from before that war would emphasize the Jews’ historic claim to Jerusalem.

The result, according to a paper published last year by two prominent Israeli geographers, Rehav Rubin and Doron Bar, has been “a new landscape whose connection to the pre-1948 neighborhood is extremely vague.”

Before 1948, the Quarter had been a neighborhood in decline, eclipsed by the modern development in the new city and populated largely by religious Jews whose poverty prevented them from leaving.

The new Jewish Quarter created a revised memory of the old one. Synagogues and yeshivas were rebuilt, the extreme poverty was expunged, and “tourists began to be told highly sentimental stories about the special atmosphere that pervaded the neighborhood,” according to Rubin and Bar.

The Jewish Quarter is home to significant ruins linked to other cultures, but most of those were not developed. Critics have pointed as an example of this policy to the Nea Church, built by the emperor Justinian and one of the city’s great landmarks in Byzantine times, the neglected ruin of which is not open to the public and is barely marked.

What has emerged, the researchers wrote, is “an ideologically driven cultural landscape that links the Israelite kingdom and the Second Temple period with the founding of the modern State of Israel.”

In the midst of this complicated landscape live the 3,000 residents of the Quarter, who veer between praising the otherworldly atmosphere of the neighborhood and complaining bitterly about its inconveniences, chief among them an acute lack of parking.

A recent decision by the Company to more than double parking prices led to calls from some residents for a “revolt” against the Company — a body whose officials are not elected and answer not to Jerusalem’s mayor but to the Housing Ministry, and which is therefore, residents say, opaque and all but unaccountable.

The Company’s secretary, Shukron, says there are plans to alleviate the parking crisis by constructing a new 800-car parking garage accessible via a tunnel under the walls. But the planned start of construction is still distant, and considering the sensitivities of the Old City and especially of the word “tunnel” in a place where tunneling has sparked deadly riots, it is almost certainly more distant still.

In the meantime, though, the Company is constructing an elevator and a moving sidewalk to ease access for visitors to the Western Wall, and is also rebuilding another historic synagogue, Tiferet Yisrael. Like the Hurva, rebuilt and inaugurated in 2010, the synagogue was destroyed by the Arab Legion in 1948, and its reconstruction is part of the restoration of landmarks that existed in the Quarter before it fell. And like the Hurva, its reappearance will do nothing to encourage or ease normal life in the neighborhood.

Nonetheless, many of the Quarter’s residents would rather be nowhere else. “Those who live here feel it is the greatest blessing,” said Aura Wolfe, who moved in 12 years ago.

She defined the Quarter simply as “the center of the world.”

“With all the headaches, like the parking, there’s a feeling of being surrounded by an energy that is unlike any other place on earth,” she said.

In the first years of reconstruction after the Six Day War, the population was drawn from Israel’s mainstream — most residents were religious or secular Zionists, and they included a number of artists and writers and government officials, including the military hero and cabinet minister Yigal Alon.

Bernard Spolsky, a retired linguistics professor, moved into the Jewish Quarter with his wife and two children in 1979.

The streets had yet to be paved, and when they bought an apartment it was a third-floor walk-up located 10 minutes on foot from the parking lot.

“It was worth the inconvenience,” Spolsky said. He remembered wandering the streets in those years, walking down the steps to the Western Wall, enjoying the sense that the landscape was significant — the ancient wall, the Temple Mount to the east.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, however, the population had already begun to shift. The Quarter saw an influx of ultra-Orthodox Jews, many of them English-speakers, willing to pay high real estate prices and suffer the Quarter’s inconveniences in order to be in the historic neighborhood and close to the Western Wall holy site.

Over the years, Spolsky said, the modern Orthodoxy practiced by his family and many of their friends was eclipsed by more extreme forms of practice. A landmark, he said, was a decision in the 1990s by the Quarter’s rabbi that English could not be taught after 4th grade because of a 19th-century prohibition that was, the rabbi had decided, still in effect. The neighborhood became more ultra-Orthodox. Stores catered to tourists, not to residents, and the Company seemed preoccupied with projects like rebuilding the Hurva and not with solving the parking problem.

“They didn’t face the issue: Was it going to be a museum, or a place where people would live?” Spolsky said.

Their children grown, he and his wife finally left the Quarter last year, moving to an airy apartment in the new city with an elevator and ample parking.

Many others have left over the years, and today the Jewish Quarter has an ultra-Orthodox majority, according to the Company. The neighborhood’s focal point, the Western Wall, is run by an ultra-Orthodox organization, the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, that enforces strict gender segregation and modesty rules and restricts religious practice according to its own interpretation of Jewish law. That means that the disputed heart of Israel’s capital, an enclave which Israel had intended to be a symbol of the triumph of Zionism and the state, is now largely in the hands of people who identify with neither.

Mazal Hess was born in the Jewish Quarter in 1926.

Her childhood memories are unsentimental — of large families crowded into small rooms, of dark alleys barely lit by kerosene streetlamps, of rushing through the streets to be home before dark, of the knowledge that they were cut off from the new city by the largely hostile Arab population that surrounded the Quarter.

“The Quarter was poor, and it was frightening at times,” Hess, 85, remembered this week. She spoke from her home on the kibbutz in northern Israel where she moved in 1943.

“Those who could leave left,” she said of those years before 1948. “Those who stayed were, as always, those who had nowhere to go.”

When the Quarter returned to Israeli hands after 1967, she and the members of her extended family went to visit but stayed put in their new homes.

“Those who were born there did not want to go back,” she said.

The European Union needs to become more integrated with a common finance policy and a central government, German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said Wednesday (16 May).

“I would be for the further development of the European Commission into a government. I am for the election of a European president, he said at an event in Aachen, reports Reuters.

“I am in favour of being more courageous on Europe,” said Schaeuble, who is one of the German government’s most pro-European ministers.

He said this is a longterm response to the current eurozone crisis, which many have said has been exacerbated by the fact that the EU lacked the tools – such as a central transfer system – to effectively deal with it.

“We certainly won’t manage it in this legislative period,” said Schauble referring to the creation of a finance ministry but noted that for a currency union, a part of finance policy needs to be harmonised.

That should be the “lesson” learned from the current crisis.

He said he wants to widen citizens participation in EU politics beyond voting for MEPs to voting for the president of the European Commission, noting that the recent French presidential elections, including a three-hour TV debate between the two candidates, attracted interest far beyond the country’s borders.

His comments come as the eurozone is in its most difficult period since its sovereign debt crisis began over two years ago.

Politicians are openly talking about the prospect of Greece having to leave the euro following the 6 May election which saw most of the population reject the tough terms attached to the two bailouts the country has had.

Some EU leaders, including European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, have indicated that Greeks should see the follow-up elections, due on 17 June, as a referendum on whether they want to stay in the euro.

Political messages on the future of Greece and the 17-nation eurozone have multiplied in recent days leading to a febrile atmosphere in the markets.

British leader David Cameron is due to step into the fray Thursday (17 May).

He will tell a business audience in England that the eurozone has to head towards political and fiscal union or risk a “potential break-up,” reports the Financial Times.

“Either Europe has a committed, stable, successful eurozone with an effective firewall, well-capitalised and regulated banks, a system of fiscal burden sharing and supportive monetary policy across the eurozone or we are in uncharted territory which carries huge risks for everyone.”