More than 1,000 people turned out Sunday for the first-ever Times of Israel gala at New York’s Waldorf Astoria.
Among the luminaries attending: lawyer Alan Dershowitz, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Israeli entertainers Gal Gadot and Miri Mesika, Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli and former Israeli President Shimon Peres.
Peres seemed to repudiate Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s calls for European Jews to
relocate to Israel.
“Come because you want to live in Israel,” Peres said on stage in conversation with Times of Israel founder David Horovitz. “Jews can live all over the world. Just keep your children Jewish.”
Horovitz was joined by others in the Jewish media, including those from Mid-Atlantic Media, a cosponsor of the event. Washington Jewish Week Editor-in-Chief Geoffrey W. Melada, Baltimore Jewish Times Editor-in-Chief Joshua Runyan and Jim Busis, publisher of The Jewish Chronicle of Pittsburgh, attended.
Peres did not name Netanyahu, who reiterated his call for Jews in Europe to immigrate to Israel after a synagogue shooting early Sunday morning in Copenhagen left a Jewish security guard dead. He had made a similar statement after the attack in January at a kosher supermarket in Paris, where four Jews were killed.
