Jewish émigré’s son poised to become Peru’s president
The son of a Polish-Jewish immigrant from Germany has a slight lead in Peru’s presidential elections.
With 95.5 percent of votes counted as of press time, 77-year-old former World Bank executive Pedro Pablo Kuczynski had a lead of 0.28 percentage points over Keiko Fujimori.
Before the election, polls had suggested Fujimori would win. She is the daughter of the jailed former president Alberto Fujimori.
Kuczynski is a former prime minister of Peru and economist for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. He also served as co-chairman of First Boston in New York City, an international investment bank.
His father, Maxime, was born in Poland and moved with his family to Germany. He fled to Peru in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. The candidate’s mother, Madeleine Godard, was of Swiss-French descent. — jta
U.K. Jews blast Trump rhetoric before visit
Ahead of Donald Trump’s planned visit, leaders of Britain’s Jewish community condemned what they called the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s “divisive and troubling” rhetoric.
Trump, set to visit Britain on June 22, told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month an Indiana-born judge with Mexican heritage overseeing a lawsuit against Trump University has an “inherent conflict of interest” given Trump’s stance against immigration from that country.
Trump is coming to Britain for the opening of a new hotel he owns in Scotland.
Jonathan Arkush, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said Trump’s “recent comments have been divisive and troubling,” the Jewish News reported. “The world has long looked to the United States as a beacon of progress, tolerance and free thinking. Some of Mr. Trump’s remarks undermine these values.”
The chief executive of Britain’s Liberal Judaism association, Rabbi Danny Rich, told the Jewish News: “I fear that some of Donald Trump’s rhetoric is part of a growing intolerance and inability to discuss things rationally that we are currently seeing in political debate all around the world.”
In New York last month, some 500 liberal Jews announced an alliance that would campaign against Trump throughout the summer and autumn months.
Jonathan Greenblatt, the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, last month told the Forward that “we haven’t seen this kind of kind of mainstreaming of intolerance at this level” for decades. — jta