A recent Gallop poll shows that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are virtually matched in a race for Jewish support. According to the recent poll, 48% of the Jewish Democratic voters favour Clinton to Obama’s 43%.

According to the poll, Clinton would win 66 percent of the Jewish vote to 27 percent for John McCain, in the general election, and Obama would win 61 percent to McCain’s 32 percent.

Houda Nonoo, a Jewish woman, was recently named as the Ambassador of the Kingdom of Bahrain to Washington, D.C, making her likely the first Jewish envoy from an Arab nation.

Ms. Nonoo was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that she was proud of this appointment, “first of all as a Bahraini.”

A moving torah dedication ceremony was recently held in an unlikely location, aboard the USS Harry S. Truman. The ceremony was held in the mimitz-class carrier’s hangar bay.

The Torah was one of the few scrolls from Lithuania to survive the Holocaust. Technically it is on-loan to the USS Truman by the United Jewish Federation of Tidewater for forty-one years or the life of the ship. It is estimated that less than 5 percent of Lithuania’s Jewish population survived the Holocaust.

The Portuguese Government paid late tribute to a diplomat who saved thousands of Jews. Aristides Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese Consul General in Bordeau, issued transit visas to over 10,000 Jews and 20,000 other refugees against the wishes of the Portuguese government in 1940.

Sousa Mendes was recalled and stripped of his position and pension. He also was forbidden from practicing law. Sousa Mendes stated, “I would rather be with God against man than with man against God.”