Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) — A replica of the Ark of the Covenant, painstakingly constructed, its creators say, to the Torah specifications of the sacred vessel that was the First Temple’s central fixture, was displayed in Jerusalem on Sunday evening, during the intermediate days of the Sukkot holiday. The ark described in the Torah, which housed the Ten Commandments tablets among other holy objects, was hidden after the destruction of the First Temple, per rabbinic tradition. At Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, the r...
(JNS) — With the assassinations of Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Mohammed Deif in Gaza, along with Hezbollah’s Fuad Shukr in Lebanon, coupled with a major strike on the Houthis’ oil refineries in Yemen, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has clearly decided to escalate towards actually winning the war against Iran and its terror proxies. The timing is important. First, Israel has largely completed its intensive operations in Gaza, severely diminishing Hamas’s capacities and punishing the Palestinians living there for supportin...
(JNS) - American-Jewish actor Michael Rapaport said on Monday that the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre, and the wave of antisemitism that it triggered across the United States, were deeply personal for him and enhanced his connection with Judaism. Rapaport spoke to JNS on the sidelines of the annual Pulse of Israel conference in Jerusalem, where he received the "Leadership of Zion Award" from the hands of CEO and founder Avi Abelow. The comedian has emerged as a leading voice for Israel in Hollywood, at a...
(JNS) - There are no words to describe a trip to the extermination camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The camps are surprisingly well-preserved and are a living testament to the most heinous crime in modern human history: the systematic extermination not just of every Jew, but of the attempt to annihilate every single one to the extent that shockingly detailed records were kept on so many of the 6 million killed. Visitors to the camps witness the cruelest of inhumane living conditions of the...
(JNS) - Israel inducted a historic right-wing government Thursday, led by three-time Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu's return to power and the formation of a strong right-wing government is a tremendous achievement for a nation that has increasingly turned towards the right-wing values of strong security and protecting the Jewish character of the state. The 64-member Likud-led coalition, joined by Netanyahu's loyal right-wing and religious allies, puts to bed years of electoral...
(JNS) - Apparently in Israel, the fifth time is the charm. After repeated attempts by the opposition, by defectors from his own right-wing bloc, by the prosecution and the Supreme Court to prevent embattled former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from ruling, the electorate finally ended Israel's protracted political deadlock by voting overwhelmingly in favor of Netanyahu and his natural-and loyal-right-wing allies. With 87.6 percent of the paper ballots counted, Netanyahu's bloc is likely to...
(JNS) The Biden administration's ambassador to Israel Tom Nides has a tough act to follow. Predecessor David Friedman was the Trump administration's point person for major U.S. policy shifts in Israel's favor, including the move of the embassy to Jerusalem, recognition of Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights, and the signing of the historic Abraham Accords by Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. For Israel's center-right majority, the Trump administration provided a...
(JNS) - Noor Dahri just published a new book on the Israel Defense Forces. He is a counter-terrorism researcher and a former officer with the London Police. He has studied at Herzliya's International Institute for Counter-Terrorism and has lectured in front of Israeli security experts. Dahri is currently in Israel gathering research for his next book on Israeli security threats, traveling along Israel's often tense borders with Gaza, Syria and Lebanon. Details of his trip, including visits to...
(JNS) - Israel appears set to head back to the polls after a "change coalition" has failed to hold its razor-thin majority, barely a year after its formation. Elections are likely to be held on Oct. 25, just after the conclusion of the Jewish High Holidays. The elections would be the fifth in just three-and-a-half years. Meanwhile, according to the coalition's complicated rotation agreement, Alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid will tentatively become a caretaker "transitional" prime minister wit...
(JNS) - The sight of four Arab foreign ministers - from the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Egypt - accompanied by the U.S. Secretary of State and hosted by an Israeli foreign minister at the first annual Negev Summit at Kibbutz Sde Boker was more than just the fulfillment of founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion's vision to make the desert bloom. The summit demonstrates that the 2020 Abraham Accords pave a clear path to the end of the decades-long Arab-Israeli conflict. It also...
(JNS) — After a two-year hiatus due to the coronavirus pandemic, the annual Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations Mission to Israel kicks off Sunday in Jerusalem. The umbrella group, which represents more than 50 Jewish communal groups spanning from the right to left flanks of American Jewish life, gets unprecedented access to Israel’s top leaders. Scheduled to speak at this year’s conference are Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett; President Isaac Herzog; Foreign Minister and Alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid...
(JNS) — Just outside the entrance to the United Nations, a famous Jewish prophecy is engraved into the plaza’s Isaiah Wall: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares. And their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation. Neither shall they learn war any more.” Sadly, wars continue to be fought across the Middle East, and Israel still strives to maintain its Qualitative Military Edge over other nations in the region. Yet more and more, wars are changing form, and the effectiveness of conventional weapons...
(JNS) — The current Israeli government led by Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is taking the issue of climate change more seriously than ever before. Israel has brought a delegation of 140 members to the 26th U.N. Climate Change Convention in Glasgow, Scotland. Bennett pledged this week that Israel will no longer burn coal for electricity by 2025, and committed Israel to be a net-zero carbon economy by 2050. While the pledges, particularly the latter, will be extremely difficult for a nation that currently relies on abundant sources of n...
(JNS) - Part of a 140-member Israeli delegation to Glasgow, Scotland, to attend the 26th U.N. Climate Change Convention, Environment Minister Tamar Zandberg tells JNS how she assesses the role that the Jewish state can play in the global effort, and the environmental and economic benefits it will bring to the country. Q: Israelis generally don't take environmental issues seriously. There is litter and illegal dumping. Water sources are dirty. Air quality is often poor. Why start addressing the...
(JNS) - Journalists are expressing their outrage that the 12-story Al-Jalaa building housing the Gaza headquarters of Associated Press and Al Jazeera was targeted during retaliatory Israeli airstrikes on Saturday. Al Jazeera Jerusalem bureau chief Walid al-Omari said that by striking the building, Israel was acting "not only to sow destruction and killing, but also to silence those who broadcast it." Not exactly an objective assessment. AP CEO Gary Pruitt released a statement expressing that...
(JNS) — Mainstream media and pundits from across the political spectrum have been quick to assert that the violent riot on the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6 has permanently tarnished the Trump presidency. It remains to be seen what Trump’s historical legacy will actually be as a turbulent 2020 seems to be carrying over into a turbulent 2021, in which the stability of America’s democratic foundations will be put to the test. Yet for all the global and domestic chaos last year, one major geopolitical accomplishment stands out above all other...
(JNS) -President Donald Trump completed its reversal of a legacy U.S. policy prejudiced against Israeli settlements. The United States and Israel signed new bilateral agreements on Oct. 28 that further enhance the cooperation between the close allies in the areas of science, industrial research and agricultural. Yet perhaps more noteworthy is that legacy "geographic restrictions" have now been removed from existing agreements. U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman noted at the ceremony that t...
(JNS) — Israel is set to sign a historic agreement with the United Arab Emirates that would see the two Middle Eastern nations officially strike diplomatic relations and exchange embassies. The move represents a major validation of the Netanyahu inside-out regional peace doctrine. For years, Israel’s senior statesman has argued that it would not be a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians that would be the key to peace in the greater region, but rather that peace with the greater Arab world will increase the chances of an agr...
(JNS) - For the last several weeks, habitual critics of Israeli policies, dubious self-described Israel supporters and even some longtime friends have come out against Israeli plans to "annex" parts of the West Bank. Here are their arguments: The Palestinian Authority will collapse; Israel will effectively kill the two-state solution and eventually become a minority within its own bi-national state; the peace treaty with Jordan will be rescinded; normalization with Arab Gulf states will halt;...
(JNS) — Israeli media and their left-wing anti-Netanyahu allies have been anticipating for years the moment Benjamin Netanyahu would be dragged into a courtroom. Unable to beat Israel’s longest-serving prime minister at the polls, many have looked to a politically left-leaning legal system to get him out of office. Many pundits eagerly anticipated pictures of a guilt-ridden former prime minister, defeated at the ballot box, sitting depressed on the wooden benches of the Jerusalem District Cou...
(JNS)—With the presentation of its peace plan, titled, “Peace to Prosperity: A vision to improve the lives of the Palestinian and Israeli people,” the United States has essentially shattered the once-holy Oslo paradigm, having learned from the peace process’s failures and establishes a new path forward to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, Israel and the Palestinians have been locked in a diplomatic holding pattern conditioned on future Israeli withdrawals from territories central to its...
(JNS)-A total of 41 Democrats and 31 Republicans are in Israel on overlapping party tours to get a firsthand view of the complex security challenges Israel faces and to express their unconditional, bipartisan support for the Jewish state. The delegations are touring Israel's borders and gaining insight into Israeli advances in areas of defense, agriculture, commercial technology, and water desalination and conservation. In addition, the groups met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,...
(JNS)-Fifty-eight Jewish organizations gathered in New York City on Wednesday for a "National Consultation on Responses to Antisemitism" to address ever increasing anti-Semitic incidents in the United States, Europe and around the world. Organized by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish organizations and hosted at the offices of UJA-Federation of New York in Midtown Manhattan, the consultation was attended by Jewish leaders and included two members of the U.S. Administration,...
(JNS)-U.S. Ambassador to Israel David M. Friedman fired back at The New York Times on Wednesday over an article castigating him for claiming that Israel was "on the side of God" while speaking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the upcoming U.S. peace proposal. Speaking to a group of evangelical faith leaders at the Aish Hatorah World Center, overlooking the Western Wall plaza and the Temple Mount, Friedman said that, "apparently, there was nothing more offensive I could have said to...
(JNS)—There are no words for the experience of commemorating the horrific death, together with Holocaust survivors, on the sacred grounds of the Birkenau extermination camp, where more than 1 million Jews were sent to the gas chambers and crematoriums just 75 years ago. March of the Living, over the past 31 years, has brought nearly 300,000 Jews and members of nations around the world to see for themselves the site of one of the most heinous and sophisticated crimes in human history, and to walk the nearly two miles from Auschwitz to B...
