Join our Community

Support ToI and remove all ads

Learn more

English
Français
עברית

Get The Daily Edition
Account
Sign In
- Sign in
- Join our Community

Open Search form

Israel & the Region
Jewish Times
Israel Inside
Tech Israel
Real Estate Israel
The Blogs
Podcasts
Video
Newsletters
Partners

Input search

English
Français
עברית

Latest Articles
Latest Alerts
Israel & the Region
Jewish Times
Israel Inside
Tech Israel
Real Estate Israel
The Blogs
Podcasts
Video
Newsletters
Partners
Community
- Join our community
- Sign in
- About The Times of Israel
- Advertise on The Times of Israel
- Contact us
- Download our App
  - For IOS users
  - For Android users
- Get the Daily Edition
- Follow us
- © 2026 The Times of Israel , All Rights Reserved
  
  Terms and conditions Privacy policy Your Privacy Rights

Input search

The Daily Edition

What Matters Most On Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Facebook
Twitter

View previous edition

View next edition

Blue and White leader Benny Gantz (left) and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sign their unity government agreement on April 20, 2020 (courtesy)

Gantz: We prevented fourth elections, will fight coronavirus

After impasse of over a year, Netanyahu and Gantz agree to form a government

Deal will see PM step down in 18 months, but dovetails with most of his demands including annexation and judicial appointments, paves way for largest cabinet in Israel’s history

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plants an olive tree at the Netiv Ha'avot neighborhood in the Elazar settlement in the West Bank, on January 28, 2019. (Marc Israel Sellem/Pool)

Unity deal allows PM to begin advancing West Bank annexation from July 1

US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman speaks during the Kohelet Forum Conference at the Begin Heritage Center, in Jerusalem, on January 8, 2020. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)

US envoy Friedman hails new government as J Street decries annexation plans

MK Benny Gantz, head of Blue and White (left) and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, head of Likud, sign their unity government agreement on April 20, 2020. (GPO)

Analysis: Coalition deal

Gantz tries, likely fails, to lock Netanyahu into eventually handing over power

While Blue and White leader hopes his time as PM will come in 18 months, resurgent Netanyahu can advance annexation, and has a guarantee of elections if High Court disqualifies him

Israel media reviewAll pact up with nowhere to go: 7 things to know for April 21

By Joshua Davidovich

Rotation, annexation et al: Key elements of the Netanyahu-Gantz coalition deal

Times of Israel PodcastLISTEN: What the heck just happened in Israeli politics?

A composite image of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) and Benny Gantz at polling stations in Jerusalem and Rosh Haayin, respectively, during the Knesset Elections on March 2, 2020. (Marc Israel Sellem/POOL, AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

Live updates (closed)

TV poll: 62% of public support unity deal, only 31% think PM will honor rotation

Channel 13 survey shows 57% of Blue and White voters back government; 48% of public believe Gantz made greater concessions, compared to 23% for Netanyahu

8:18 pm

In Haredi community shocker, top rabbi said overruled in bid to reopen yeshivas
7:52 pm

Amir Peretz: Labor returning to the national leadership
7:39 pm

Interior minister orders businesses given 3-month exemption on property taxes

Author interview

Renee Ghert-Zand

Hitler’s Jewish neighbor lived under Nazis’ noses, is now locked down in the UK

In ‘Hitler, My Neighbor,’ Edgar Feuchtwanger, now 95, recalled the day he went strolling as a boy with his nanny in Munich, and they passed the Nazi dictator… who tipped his hat

Jozef Walaszczyk, who died aged 102-years-old on June 20, 2022 and saved more than 50 Jews during the Holocaust, tells his story at a restaurant in Warsaw, January 28, 2020. (Cnaan Liphshiz/ JTA)

Holocaust Remembrance DayLove, danger fill epic WWII story revealed by Poland’s oldest rescuer of Jews

By Cnaan Liphshiz

This building will house a Jewish day school in Dortmund, Germany -- the first Jewish school in the city since the Nazis closed the last one 80 years ago. (Courtesy of Ohr Torah Stone)

Jewish day school in Germany to reopen 80 years after being shut down by Nazis

The day I left Bergen-Belsen

They were shipping us to Theresianstadt, but when my 9-year-old brother jumped from the train to find food, he discovered the Russian army

Jews who rescued Jews during the Holocaust

Against all reason, they took enormous risks. Here are 2 such inspiring stories, part of a Yad Vashem exhibit now online

Florence Berkowitz-Siegelberg

Germany’s remorse

I believe the reparation payments to Holocaust survivors like my parents helped us take a step on the long path to healing

Betsalel Steinhart

The Torah scroll in Tarnogrod

I spotted four columns of Hebrew text on parchment full of holes and blackened with age and dirt hanging up upside-down in a Polish library. What was I to do?

I didn’t realize how much my grandmother’s trauma affected me

What do you say when your child asks what a gas chamber is? I had hoped to ease my children into the family history, and keep away from the ’victim narrative’

Of memory smashed and made whole

It was a night of blood and a brutal attack on a woman that provoked an entire clan to pick themselves up, cross the ocean, and make a new life for themselves in the West

‘Everything boils down to luck’: A Holocaust lesson for today

’One day my father went to Brussels and got caught by the SS. One day you go to the supermarket and you get caught by the virus’

Why I won’t watch the Holocaust remembrance ceremony this year

The prime minister who would deliver the central address still shares his official residence with a man who wants me dead

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Blue and White party leader Benny Gantz in the Knesset, November 10, 2019. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Analysis

Haviv Rettig Gur

Israel’s new ‘unity’ government is neither united nor likely to govern well

The deep distrust between Netanyahu and Gantz shapes every facet of the new coalition deal, transforming the nascent government into a two-headed hydra of contradictory impulses

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's hands clasped as he chairs the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, March. 8, 2020. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty, Pool)

New cabinet to be the largest in Israel’s history

Yair Lapid (left) and Benny Gantz speak to supporters in Tel Aviv, on February 20, 2020. (Tomer Neuberg/Flash90)

Gantz’s former allies fume over coalition deal with Netanyahu

Miriam Grottas Masry delivers a package to a Holocaust survivor ahead of the Passover holiday. (Courtesy)

Analysis

For Israel’s Holocaust survivors, coronavirus is the plague of loneliness

As Israel marks Holocaust Remembrance Day, 189,500 survivors are trapped indoors and fearful. They have ‘lived through worse,’ but facing pandemic alone at home is major hardship

People stand still at the Mahane Yehuda Market in Jerusalem, as a two-minute siren sounds across Israel to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 21, 2020 (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)

Siren blares in Israel, opening (virtual) Holocaust Remembrance Day events

By ToI Staff and AP

Participants logged onto a Holocaust Remembrance Day event organized by the "Together - Vouch for Each Other" group on April 20, 2020. (Courtesy)

Group seeks to mainstream Holocaust commemoration in Arab community

(Left, 2020) The hostel at Sha`ar Menashe is home to dozens of Holocaust survivors.
Right: 2010 – The yard attracted smokers every hour on the hour, when they received the allotted cigarette. Today, as the population of tenants dwindles and grows older, the yard is empty most of the time (Courtesy Gili Yaari)

The survivors who ‘didn’t survive’: Photographer captures Shoah psych patients

By Jessica Steinberg

Harvard University epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch (Kent Dayton)

Interview

Harvard prof advising Netanyahu: Don’t ease lockdown without solid fallback plan

Top epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch spoke to PM on Saturday, just before rules were eased, told him to develop ‘clear plans for how you reimpose restrictions’ if infections soar again

Staff move a patient to a new ward at the Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, March 22, 2020. (Yossi Zamir/Flash90)

48-year-old father of 14, previously healthy, among dead as toll climbs to 182

Israelis barbecue in Jerusalem as Israel celebrates its 71st Independence Day on May 9, 2019. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Netanyahu said to favor curfew on Independence Day, Ramadan nights

Dr. Eitan Dickman, left, at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York. (Lorraine Carita)

Interview

With a New York hospital at capacity, an ER vice-head shares how his team copes

By Cathryn J. Prince

Dr. Eitan Dickman says Maimonides Medical Center in densely-populated Borough Park has doubled its number of beds as medical staff deal with the emotional toll of COVID-19

Emergency medical workers arrive at Cobble Hill Health Center, in Brooklyn, NY, April 17, 2020. (John Minchillo/AP)

‘Under siege’: Overwhelmed Brooklyn care home tolls 55 dead, likely from virus

By Bernard Condon, Matt Sedensky and Jennifer Peltz

US gravediggers carry the casket of someone presumed to have died from coronavirus as they are buried without any family present at Mount Richmond Cemetery in the Staten Island borough of New York, April 7, 2020. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Jewish cemetery races to keep up as New York virus deaths mount

By David Goldman and Matt Sedensky

Antisemitic graffiti written on the Beth Jacob Congregation of Irvine on October 31, 2018, in Irvine, California. (Allen Berezovsky/Getty Images/AFP)

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Two-thirds of US Jews feel less safe than a decade ago – survey

By Raphael Ahren

New ADL poll, conducted before height of coronavirus pandemic, finds more than 54% of American Jews say they’ve witnessed anti-Semitic comments

Ramapo police officers escort Grafton Thomas from Ramapo Town Hall to a police vehicle, December 29, 2019, in Ramapo, New York. (AP Photo/Julius Constantine Motal)

Judge: Monsey Hanukkah stabbing suspect not fit to stand trial

By AP

Orthodox Jewish men talk on Forshay Road in Monsey, NY, December 29, 2019, down the street from the scene of a stabbing rampage that occurred the night before, during a Hanukkah celebration. (AP/Allyse Pulliam)

Anti-Semitic violence worldwide in 2019 was highest in 5 years – report

By Cnaan Liphshiz

Palestinian municipal workers disinfect the parking lot of a hospital in the West Bank city of Ramallah, March 12, 2020 (Flash90)

Analysis

Israeli-Palestinian virus cooperation imperiled amid unity gov’t, annexation bid

Collaboration continues, but goodwill dissipates as number of Palestinians infected in Israel climbs, and coalition deal paving way for extending sovereignty is signed

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas speaks after a meeting of the Palestinian leadership, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, January 22, 2020. (AP Photo/ Majdi Mohammed)

Abbas orders easing of virus lockdown for Palestinians in West Bank

By Stuart Winer and Jacob Magid

Medical staff prepare to test people in their cars with COVID-19 symptoms, at a drive-through testing site outside a medical biology laboratory in Anglet, southwestern France, April 20, 2020. (Bob Edme/AP)

Spread of coronavirus by children further doubted after French case

By AFP

Volunteers from the Ezrat Achim organization in Beit Shemesh prepare food for distribution to Israelis who are homebound due to the COVID-19 pandemic. (Courtesy)

Analysis

Amid coronavirus shutdowns, Israelis seek meaning through volunteer work

Sick of staying home for weeks on end, increasing number of people are looking for ways to help friends and neighbors

Health Ministry Director General Moshe Bar Siman-Tov is seen at a drive-through site for coronavirus testing samples collection, in Tel Aviv, on March 20, 2020. (Gili Yaari/Flash90)

Health chief warns of a ‘second wave’ of coronavirus infections

By Nathan Jeffay

Illustrative: A recovered coronavirus patient (center) donating plasma for Israel's experimental antibodies treatment, and (right) Eilat Shinar. (Magen David Adom)

33 sick Israelis treated with antibodies from recovered COVID-19 patients

By Nathan Jeffay

Members of a privately funded non-governmental organization working with county officials disinfect a street in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya, April 9, 2020. (AP/Brian Inganga)

Interview

Pandemic set to crush developing economies, Israel’s World Bank envoy says

Poorer countries rocked by plummeting commodity prices, drop in remittances, skyrocketing debt and weak safety nets, with dire consequences for global public

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus attends a daily press briefing on COVID-19, at the WHO headquarters in Geneva, March 11, 2020. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP)

WHO head warns worst of coronavirus is still to come

By AP

A woman walks past closed storefronts in downtown Jerusalem, April 20, 2020. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

25,000 businesses in Israel could close by end of 2020 – report

Magen David Adom medical team members, wearing protective gear, handle a coronavirus test from patients in Jerusalem, April 17, 2020. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)

US grants Israeli prof a patent for tech that could lead to virus vaccine

Tel Aviv University’s Jonathan Gershoni says his technology targets the mechanism coronavirus uses to infiltrate human cells, making it particularly effective

A screen from the new temperature testing system by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems (courtesy)

Coming soon across Israel: Futuristic temperature testers using defense tech

By Nathan Jeffay

Then-health minister Yaakov Litzman at a press conference about the coronavirus at the Prime Minister's Office in Jerusalem, March 11, 2020. (Flash90)

Health minister recovers from COVID-19 after weeks-long illness

By ToI Staff and Jacob Magid

Join The Times of Israel Community!

Help support our journalism and enjoy the site ADS FREE - for as little as $6 a month

JOIN US

More Headlines

Anti-Semitic graffiti found on Beth Israel Sinai in Racine, Wisconsin, September 22, 2019. (Joyce Placzkowski via JTA)

Judge frees man charged with coordinating neo-Nazi plot to deface US synagogues

By Michael Kunzelman

A photo taken on May 10, 2016 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un watching a military parade and mass rally on Kim Il-Sung square in Pyongyang. (AFP/Ed Jones)

South Korea plays down report North’s Kim in ‘grave danger’ after surgery

By AFP

A fireball lights up the night sky near Damascus during an attack on a target near the capital on February 13, 2020. (Screen capture: Al-Ikhbariyah Syria TV)

Syria reports Israeli airstrike on targets in Homs province

By AFP and ToI Staff

Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Maj. Gen. Esmail Ghaani is seen in this undated photo released by the official website of the office of the Iranian supreme leader. (Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader via AP)

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard says it has upgraded anti-warship missiles

By AP

A 5G mast erected by telecom operator 'Proximus' that was set on fire, in Peltheide, Limburg province, Belgium, April 19, 2020. (YORICK JANSENS / Belga / AFP)

Conspiracy theorists torch 5G towers, claiming link to virus

By Kelvin Chan, Beatrice Dupuy and ARIJETA LAJKA

Shel Silverstein's houseboat, the 'Evil Eye.' (Christian Klugmann via JTA)

Houseboat Shel Silverstein lived in for almost 10 years on sale

By Emily Burack

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, center, joins other participants as they take part in the Celebrate Israel Parade, June 2, 2019, in New York. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle)

NY’s Celebrate Israel parade called off as city cancels events through June

Illustrative photo: A page from a 13th century Hebrew Bible from Burgos Spain, showing the opening verses of Psalms on the left and the end of the Book of Ruth on the right. (Israel National Library via AP)

Danish Bible Society’s translation omits dozens of references to Israel

By Cnaan Liphshiz

A photo tweeted by a city councilman in the Hague that references the yellow stars Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust, to protest an application for monitoring coronavirus carriers. (Arnoud van Doorn/Twitter via JTA)

Dutch-Muslim politician tweets Jewish yellow star to protest virus surveillance

By Cnaan Liphshiz

Katie Rosenberg campaigns in Wausau, Wisconsin, June 27, 2019. (B.C. Kowalski, Wausau City Pages)

Wisconsin mayor who isn’t Jewish is hassled by anti-Semites anyway

A view of the Lowenstrasse synagogue in Zurich. (Wikimedia Commons via JTA)

Former chief rabbi of Zurich, who was a US Marines chaplain, dies at 80

Employees are pictured at the headquarters housing Alibaba, Iran's largest online travel booking service, in the capital Tehran, February 17, 2020. (ATTA KENARE / AFP)

In virus-hit Iran tech sector, women fight to keep hard-won jobs

By Lucie PEYTERMANN

View Edition by Date

March	April 2020					May
Mo	Tu	We	Th	Fr	Sa	Su
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30

The Times of Israel

Daily Edition

Free to Your Inbox

The email is either missing or invalid.

By signing up, you agree to our terms You hereby accept The Times of Israel Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, and you agree to receive the latest news & offers from The Times of Israel and its partners or ad sponsors.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Israel & the Region
Jewish Times
Israel Inside
Tech Israel
Real Estate Israel
The Blogs
podcasts
video

terms and conditions
privacy policy
Your Privacy Rights
about us
advertise with us
Jobs at The Times of Israel
contact us

Community

Join our community
Sign in

Get the Daily Edition

Enter your email address

Follow us on Facebook Follow us on Instagram Follow us on Whatsapp Follow us on X Follow us on Youtube Follow us on Telegram Follow us on Threads Follow us on Bluesky

© 2026 The Times of Israel, all rights reserved

Concept, design & development by

Developed by

Powered by

Never miss breaking news on Israel

Get notifications to stay updated

You're subscribed

Register for free
and continue reading

Registering allows you to manage your newsletters and alerts and helps us improve your experience. It takes just a few seconds.
Already registered? Enter your email to sign in.

Email address

Please use the following structure: example@domain.com

Or Continue with

By registering you agree to the terms and conditions. Once registered, you’ll receive our Daily Edition email for free.

Send me The Times of Israel Daily Edition

Register to continue

Email address

Or Continue with

Log in to continue

Email address

Something went wrong.
Please try again in a few minutes..

Sign in or Register

Email address * Password *

Incorrect password. Please try again or choose an option below.

I forgot my password / Send me a sign in link

Or Continue with

check your email

Check your email

We sent an email to you at .

It has a link that will sign you in.

Click the link in that email to complete your registration.