Gearing up for Holocaust remembrance

Holocaust Remembrance Day is upon us, and the tabloids break out their survivor finery for the occasion on Wednesday. But amid the stories of survivors and their offspring, Iran still makes front page news.

Yedioth Ahronoth and Israel Hayom lead off with Yom Hashoah coverage. Yedioth runs a photo essay of Holocaust survivors and their grandchildren or great-grandchildren with the headline: “We won.” It runs little feel-good vignettes, such as the friendship of an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor and a 19-year-old German volunteer at her old age home whose grandfather was a Nazi soldier.

Israel Hayom gives the breakdown of official ceremonies for this year’s commemorations of the Holocaust, which is dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the end of the war. “No matter how hard you try to remember the events of the Holocaust, to commemorate them and learn from them, you can’t digest them truly,” the paper says.

Haaretz runs a Page 3 feature on the story of a rabbi and an archbishop who worked together to save the Jews of the Greek city of Volos during the Holocaust. All in all it takes a far less bombastic approach to covering the somber day.

With no shortage of elation, Israel Hayom reports that US President Barack Obama won’t be making the decisions on Iran alone after a Senate committee approved a bill giving Congress increased oversight of any comprehensive nuclear deal. The paper’s reporter calls it a “great blow” to Obama, who “very much wanted to play alone on the Iranian field” but now has to share it with Congress. The White House said Obama was likely to sign the bill.

“There was no negotiation between the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the White House,” a Senate source tells the paper. “The White House asked to preserve its honor when it saw that it was going to lose and prefers to present it as a sort of compromise. It’s a great achievement for the Senate and a big failure for the White House, which made a great effort to prevent Democratic representatives from joining in [making] the law.”

On the Iranian front Haaretz reports on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, asking the Kremlin not to go ahead with the sale of advanced S-300 air defense missiles to Iran. Netanyahu’s request was brushed off, with Putin assuring Jerusalem that the missiles were for defensive purposes only and didn’t constitute a threat to Israel’s security, Haaretz reports.

White House visitor lists published by the Obama administration show that US Ambassador Ron Dermer didn’t hold a single meeting with White House aides in 2014, Haaretz reports. Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister’s son, opposition leader Isaac Herzog, former prime minister Ehud Barak and Channel 2 anchor Yonit Levy, all did, however. The paper says the revelation that Dermer didn’t pay a single visit to the White House “exposes the disconnect between Dermer and Obama’s advisers,” but the paper notes that the list isn’t complete and that it doesn’t include covert meetings or ones in adjacent buildings.

Yedioth Ahronoth reports that Iranian authorities are livid after a Yedioth reporter entered the country and wrote about reactions to the nuclear deal between world powers and Tehran. Even though Orly Azoulay has already reported from the Islamic republic once before, covering the elections in 2005, the paper reports that publication of the article stirred up outrage over how she received permission to enter the country.

“She has nothing to do here except spy,” the paper quotes an article by Lenz Iran quoting a member of the Iranian parliament’s foreign affairs and defense committee saying of Azoulay. “The question is about our intelligence system.” According to the article, each ministry is trying to foist responsibility for the intelligence “failure” on the other.

Despite the public outrage, coverage of a Health Ministry report linking air pollution and higher rates of cancer in the port city of Haifa gets shunted to the back pages in the Hebrew press. Yedioth Ahronoth only gets around to reporting that there were 780 cases of cancer in the past decade linked to air pollution, 30 of them children, on Page 10. Israel Hayom only runs on Page 10 the fact that the odds of getting cancer in Haifa are 16% higher than the national average. Haaretz only publishes it on Page 8, giving it slightly more importance to parents uniting to push back against the number of vacation days in Israeli schools.