JTA: New group fosters Jewish-Kurdish friendship and supports independence for Kurdistan

Several prominent Jews in Europe and North America joined an organization fostering Jewish-Kurdish friendship which is supportive of independence for Iraqi Kurdistan.

The Jewish-American lawyer Alan Dershowitz joined the honorary board of the Brussels-based Jewish Coalition for Kurdistan last month, along with Irwin Cotler, a former justice minister of Canada, and Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, two well-known hunters of Nazis from Germany, the group’s founder and president, Joel Rubinfeld, told JTA Wednesday.

Also on the honorary board of the Jewish Coalition for Kurdistan are Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and Charles Tannock, a British lawmaker at the European Parliament and foreign affairs and human rights spokesman for the UK Conservative delegation.

The unveiling Wednesday of Rubinfeld’s group is among several high-profile actions supportive of Kurdish national aspirations by Jews following the September independence referendum in Kurdistan, the autonomous region in northern Iraq.

On Friday, Bernard-Henri Lévy, a French-Jewish philosopher and longtime supporter of Kurdish independence, will attend a screening at the United Nations headquarters in New York of his documentary film on the subject titled “Peshmerga,” which is the Kurdish-language name of the Kurdish combatants. Levy is not a member of the Jewish Coalition for Kurdistan.