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IN A CLASS OF THEIR OWN!
BRITAIN’S BIGGEST JEWISH NEWSPAPER 2 March 2017
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5 Adar 5777
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www.jewishnews.co.uk
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@JewishNewsUK
WE’RE GOING LA LA 10 reasons why the year’s biggest film is sooo Jewish Page 25
Don’t miss our four-page feature celebrating the winners of the Jewish Schools Awards Pages 9, 10, 11 & 12
Tragedy for the girl with the ‘magic heart’ Community left griefstricken after death of five-year-old with rare heart condition By Lisa Sanders @JewishNewsUK
Family, friends and classmates of a five-year-old girl from Borehamwood diagnosed with a rare heart defect have been left devastated following her death. Shani Berman (pictured, right), a bright and enthusiastic Year 1 pupil at Immanuel College Prep School, passed away last month after complicated open heart surgery. She was the youngest child of parents Simon and Juliet and sister to Tammy, age 11, and Joel, age 13. When Shani was six weeks old, doctors told her parents that their perfectly healthylooking baby had been born with a congenital heart defect called pulmonary atresia. This meant she had a large hole in her heart and was missing the valve that links the heart to the
pulmonary artery that takes blood to the lungs to be oxygenated. Around one in every 10,000 babies is born with some form of this condition. “We were in shock,” Simon recalled. “We thought they would do a scan and tell us she has a small hole in her heart that would probably close on its own in time. This was not the case.” Shani had her first operation as a baby. Surgeons at Great Ormond Street implanted a tiny Gore-Tex tube into her heart where the valve should have been. She seemed to be making good progress, so the doctors were cautiously optimistic. Then at 20 months Shani suffered from heart failure and spent two weeks in hospital trying to recover. “We were told at that point that she wouldn’t Continued on page 6
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Senior Christian leader: Apartheid Week ‘intimidates’ A leading figure in the Church of England has branded Israeli Apartheid Week “neither helpful nor constructive” in comments likely to reverberate throughout congregations across the country, writes Stephen Oryszczuk. Dr Michael Ipgrave, who is the Bishop of Lichfield and chair of the Council of Christians and Jews, made his observations this week, as events took place across British campuses highlighting perceived social injustices in Israel and the West Bank. He said: “Apartheid Week is not a helpful or constructive way to address the serious challenges of Palestinians and Israelis. Over time, it has become a source of great tension between Jewish students and others on UK campuses.” He added: “Rather than informing the dialogue around this complex issue, it can often close down dialogue and leave Jewish students feeling intimidated, vulnerable and insecure at a time of rising anti-Semitism in the UK and beyond.” University College London said an event organised by the Friends of Palestine Society had been cancelled because organisers had not followed the correct booking procedure. The scrapped Tuesday talk, entitled “Quad under Occupation”, had invited attendees to “explore the practices which sow the seeds of racial tension in Israel”. Continued on page 2
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