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BERLIN (JTA) — A child survivor of the Holocaust interrupted the trial of a former Nazi concentration camp guard to give the 93-year-old defendant a hug.

Bruno Dey is charged as an accessory in the murders of 5,230 people at the Stutthof concentration camp near what is today Gdansk, Poland. He is standing trial in Hamburg.

Moshe Peter Loth, 76, a co-plaintiff in the case, approached Dev during the trial last week and said, “Watch out everyone, I’m going to forgive him.”

Loth then hugged Dey. Loth said later that both men cried.

In testimony at the trial, Loth said that his mother had been deported to Stutthof and that he was born there — a fact he reportedly learned only recently. After the camp’s liberation, Loth spent years with a Polish family and was later reunited with his family in Germany. They later immigrated to the United States.

Loth said a lifetime of abuse and hardship made him “full of hate, until I recognized that I had to forgive.”

Dey, a guard at the camp between August 1944 and April 1945, is being tried in a youth court because he was a teenager at the time.

The court allowed Loth to question Dey, who repeated his testimony that he had not volunteered for duty in Stutthof and that he was shocked by what had happened there.

According to an interpreter, Loth asked Dey’s forgiveness for having been angry and filled with hate.

The defendant replied: “Absolutely. I have no hate.”

Dey later said it was a relief for him to meet and apologize to Loth.

In 2015, a similar event unfolded in a German courtroom when Auschwitz survivor Eva Kor publicly forgave former camp guard Oskar Groening. Kor, a Romanian-born U.S. citizen who died in July at 85, urged Groening to set an example by publicly denouncing neo-Nazi activity.

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JERUSALEM (JTA) — The leaders of Israel’s seven universities are expressing their outrage over the University of Toronto’s Graduate Student Union conflating a kosher food program with support for Israel.

“Just when we thought that we’d seen it all regarding the ascent of anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism on campus, the Graduate Student Union at the University of Toronto (U of T) took this theater of the absurd to new heights by characterizing kosher food as ‘pro-Israel,’” Ron Robin, chairman of the Committee of University Heads of Israel, said in a statement released Tuesday. Robin is president of the University of Haifa.

The Graduate Student Union’s external commissioner, in response to a Jewish student’s request for the union to officially support the Kosher Forward Campaign, suggested that the Executive Committee might be reluctant to advance such a motion to its board of directors. The commissioner said since Hillel is “pro-Israel,” supporting the motion would go against the “will of the membership.”

The union later apologized for “unintentionally caus(ing) harm toward the Jewish community.”

In 2012, the union voted to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS, movement against Israel.

“(T)he classification of kosher food as ‘pro-Israel’ illustrates just how far the BDS movement has come in terms of zeroing in on its actual objective — suppressing the freedom of speech and freedom of religion of Jews, not merely leveling criticism at the State of Israel and its policies,” Robin said.

The committee is made up of the presidents, rectors and directors-general of the Israeli universities.

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(JTA) — Pieces of Jewish gravestones used to pave sidewalks in Prague will be given to the Jewish community to return to the city’s Old Jewish Cemetery.

Headstones from the 19th-century cemetery were cut into cobblestones during roadwork ahead of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to Czechoslovakia in 1987, Radio Prague International reported. The cemetery is no longer used for burials.

The Czech Jewish community has called for the removal and return of the stones for years. Stones uncovered during future excavation work will be returned under the memorandum signed by Prague City Hall, according to Radio Prague International.

A project called Finding the Lost Face of Jewish Cemeteries will try to help identify the fragments, the station reported.

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JERUSALEM (JTA) — The off-duty Israeli police officer who fatally shot an Ethiopian-Israeli teenager in a Haifa-area park will be charged with negligent homicide rather than manslaughter, the higher charge the victim’s family was seeking.

The Israeli Prosecutor’s Office and the Police Internal Investigations Department told the family of Solomon Tekah, who was killed at 19, of its decision on Tuesday.

An investigation found in July that the officer fired at the ground and that the bullet ricocheted into Tekah’s body.

The officer said that he shot his gun after feeling threatened while attempting to break up a street fight in the suburb of Kiryat Haim, in northern Israel, on June 30. The teens involved in the altercation threw stones at the officer and injured him before he used his gun, according to the Justice Ministry.

The name of the officer, whose family was with him at the park when the shooting took place, remains under a gag order.

The Tekah family had urged the prosecutors to charge the officer with manslaughter rather than negligent homicide. Its attorney, Zion Amir, told Ynet that the family is disappointed with the decision and feel as if Solomon “was killed for the second time.”

“The decision was made after a thorough examination of the incident, including the fact that the officer opened fire not in accordance with police protocols he was well aware of, and did not take any other alternatives measures which were available to him,” the Justice Ministry said in a statement.

The officer will have a pre-indictment hearing, where he can address the accusations, before final charges are made.

Members of the Ethiopian-Israeli community and their supporters demonstrated for two days following Tekah’s funeral. The protests at times turned violent.

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