First Read For March 7

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Another win for Israel in baseball tournament

2-0.

That is the record of the Israeli team in the World Baseball Classic after two games.

Following a 2-1 victory over South Korea in Seoul on Monday, the Israelis on Tuesday beat Chinese Taipei 15-7.

Israel, which faces the Netherlands on Thursday, “looks set” to qualify for the final round of eight teams, JTA reports.

Knesset members: Bring Ethiopia’s Jews home

Four Knesset members who returned Monday from a visit to two cities in Ethiopia where many residents with Jewish roots live said they intend to increase pressure on the government to speed up the aliyah of the remaining members of the country’s Jewish community.

The Jerusalem Post reports that Deputy Knesset Speaker Hilik Bar described the “shocking” conditions he witnessed in Gondar and Addis Ababa, where some 9,000 so-called Falash Mura suffer from a lack of food and medicine, and receive no assistance from the Israeli government.

“Israel is ignoring and not fulfilling the government decision, from November 2015, to bring all those waiting to Israel, and from August 2016, to bring 1,300 by the end of that year,” Bar said. Only 63 Ethiopian immigrants were brought to Israel last year.

Centuries-old Jewish document to return to Mexico

What is believed to be the oldest Jewish document of the New World will be returned to Mexico this month, more than seven decades after it disappeared, The Guardian reports.

The document, a 1595 autobiography of Spanish-born Luis de Carvajal, who was put on trial during the 16th-century Inquisition in Mexico on suspicion of being a “converso” Jew, in Spain’s colony of Mexico, disappeared from Mexico’s national museum 75 years ago and resurfaced at auctions in 2015 and 2016. It was subsequently lent to the museum of the New York Historical Society by the Mexican government.

Spanish-born de Carvajal was put on trial during the 16th-century Inquisition in Mexico, suspected of being a Jew. According to Swann Galleries in New York, where the manuscript was on sale last June, Carvajal gave in under torture and was burned at the stake in 1596.

The manuscript will return to Mexico’s Museum of Memory and Tolerance after its exhibition in Manhattan.

Israel bars boycotters

Israel has enacted a law that bans entry to foreigners who publicly call for boycotting the Jewish state or its settlements, JTA reports. The Knesset passed the law by a vote of 46-28 on Monday.

The ban applies to any foreigner “who knowingly issues a public call for boycotting Israel that, given the content of the call and the circumstances in which it was issued, has a reasonable possibility of leading to the imposition of a boycott – if the issuer was aware of this possibility.” It includes those who urge boycotting areas under Israeli control, such as the West Bank settlements.

New Waze to protect animals in Israel

In honor of UN World Wildlife Day last week, the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel and Waze  launched a new venture aimed at reducing the number of wild animals that are run over on Israel’s roads annually, according to the israel21c.org website.

The number of animals losing their lives on the country’s roads has climbed into the thousands in recent years

The new campaign calls on Israeli drivers to use Waze, the world’s largest community-based traffic and navigation app, to report sightings of wild animals run over in open spaces and outside urban areas. The reports will be used to map the roads that are most dangerous to wild animals and provide the data required for creating safe

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