The death of Dov Berish Englander who died in August while using the sea as a mikveh was “accidental”, a coroner has found.

Mr Englander, from Stamford Hill, had waded out to sea at an Aberystwyth beach to perform the ritual when he was dragged under by a large wave, the inquest heard.

Former City stockbroker Nicholas Levene has been jailed for 13 years for “unprecedented” fraud, running a Ponzi scheme worth £32m.

The former deputy chairman of Leyton Orient defrauded a string of investors, many of them Jewish or Israeli, and blew £18m on parties and holidays, as well as numerous properties in Israel.

Good-looking women are more likely to be submissive and conformist, a Hebrew University study has found.

The research, done in conjunction with the Open University, hypothesised that women are judged by what they look like. That means that women who are judged to be attractive should theoretically also be perceived as having socially desirable personality traits.

The Jewish vote remained firmly with Obama in this election, with early exit polls showing 69 per cent of the Jewish electorate voting Democrat, 30 per cent voting Republican, and one per cent for other candidates.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has said that he has not given up on the right of return for Palestinians, rowing back on his comments to Israel’s Channel 2 two days previously.

Labour MP Denis MacShane has resigned from Parliament after being found guilty by the Parliamentary standards committee of falsifying expenses. He was chair of the all-party Parliamentary inquiry into antisemitism.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has suggested that he has no right of return to Israel.

Asked whether he wanted to live in Safed, the town now in northern Israel that he left in 1948, President Abbas said: “I visited Safed before once. But I want to see Safed. It's my right to see it, but not to live there.”

A row has broken out between Bicom (British Israel Communications and Research Centre) and Hebrew University professor Amiram Goldblum over a poll which said Israeli Jews would “support apartheid”.

Twenty-two organisations, including Christian Aid, The Methodist Church of England and the Church of Sweden, have released a report recommending that the EU stops importing goods made in Israeli settlements.

It was always going to be difficult for President Obama’s Chief of Staff Jack Lew to keep Shabbat, but making his observance that bit easier is his special Shabbat helper – the president himself.

Mr Lew told New York Jewish newspaper The Forward: “I saw the president on many occasions on Friday afternoons look at his watch, and ask: ‘Isn’t it time for you to get going?’”

Sixth-formers who toured Auschwitz-Birkenau with Nick Clegg last Thursday came away impressed by the Deputy Prime Minister’s commitment to Holocaust education.

Mr Clegg joined 200 students from the south-east on the 100th trip to the death-camp sites organised as part of the Holocaust Educational Trust’s “Lessons from Auschwitz” programme.

Israeli police officers have been ordered to disconnect their computers from the internet following fears of a possible attack on their computer system.

Following an intelligence tip-off indicating that a virus attack would be carried out using a CD or USB stick, an order was issued at 10.30 this morning to avoid inserting any hardware into computers, and all computers were taken offline.

A talk by Israeli ambassador Daniel Taub at Edinburgh University, organised by the Politics and International Relations Society and attended by 150 students on Wednesday evening, was disrupted by chanting students waving Palestinian flags.

Peter Jenkins, Britain’s former representative on the International Atomic Energy Agency, has told the debating union at Warwick University that a just war is not a Jewish notion.