Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 101 - 125 of 462
(JTA) - Like many synagogues, Temple B'nai Hayim used to rely on the High Holiday season to survive financially. The small Conservative synagogue in Southern California would receive the lion's share of its revenue in the run-up to the holidays: Members sent in their annual dues, which included entry to High Holiday services, and non-members purchased tickets just for the High Holidays. But with the option of holding regular in-person High Holiday services off the table due to the coronavirus,...
(JTA) — In early June, as anti-racism protests swept the country in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Beth Hillel Temple in Kenosha, Wisconsin, signed onto an interfaith letter supporting peaceful protest and condemning “a broken societal system which disproportionately affects communities of color.” This week, Kenosha became an epicenter of renewed protest after a police officer shot a Black man, Jacob Blake, seven times in the back. And on Wednesday night, the 93-year-old synagogue’s driveway was graffitied with the words ...
(JTA) — When reports emerged two weeks ago about federal agents seizing protesters from the streets of Portland and putting them in unmarked vans, Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum sued to get federal officers off the street. A judge rejected Rosenblum’s request for a preliminary restraining order against the agents last week. But the lawsuit is ongoing, as is a criminal investigation Rosenblum opened into federal agents who injured a protester. On Wednesday, the Trump administration made an agreement with local officials to withdraw the...
(JTA) - This week, as he prepares to open Camp Modin and administer coronavirus tests to its hundreds of campers and staff, Howard Salzberg is still fielding 50 calls a day from parents who want to send their kids. That's because Modin, a small, unaffiliated Jewish camp in Maine, is one of the only Jewish overnight camps to open in the United States amid the coronavirus pandemic. So Salzberg and his wife, Lisa, who co-own and run the camp, must deal with a continuing deluge of interest from...
(JTA) — The Anti-Defamation League, along with the NAACP and other civil rights groups, is calling on corporations not to advertise on Facebook in July because of the social media platform’s unwillingness to police hate speech. The campaign, which launches Wednesday with a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times, charges that Facebook has not done enough to combat hate and disinformation on its platform. It points to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s repeated refusal to moderate posts for misinformation, even as extremists have used the platform to incit...
(JTA) — More than 800 rabbis and cantors, including the leaders of three major denominations, signed a statement in support of peaceful protest against racism and in memory of George Floyd. The statement invoked Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, an iconic Jewish civil rights activist who marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. It was written and distributed by the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, a political advocacy organization that has a long history of civil rights activism. “Mr. Floyd was a victim of the nation’s long history...
(JTA) — Right-wing conspiracy theorists are increasingly claiming that George Soros is funding recent protests and riots across the United States in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. According to the Anti-Defamation League, “aggressive language towards Soros has exploded on social media” this week. Negative tweets about the billionaire Jewish philanthropist rose from 20,000 per day on May 26 to 500,000 per day on May 30. The posts, according to the ADL, mostly allege (without evidence) that Soros is funding riots across the country, an...
(JTA)—At the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, and as recently as a couple weeks ago, some Jewish camps had hoped they could run for part of the summer. For a growing number of camps, that hope now appears to be vanishing. Two Conservative Ramah camps look increasingly likely to cancel their sessions this year. And two state governments—Georgia and Connecticut—have, for now, prohibited overnight camps from running in their states. Each of the states is home to several Jewish camps. While neither of the Ramah camps—in Wisconsin and California...
(JTA)—The network of 10 Conservative Jewish Ramah camps in North America will lose approximately half of their collective annual revenue if they all need to cancel camp and refund tuition—a total shortfall of $27 million. But Ramah leadership is confident that even without the 2020 season, the camps will be around for 2021. “If we don’t run our camps, we’re going to mitigate about half of our expenses, but that leaves a lot of money to be raised,” said Rabbi Mitchell Cohen, the director of...
(JTA)—The Conservative Jewish youth group United Synagogue Youth is canceling its summer travel programs for teens, the latest in a string of canceled Jewish summer programs. The announcement comes as several Conservative Ramah summer camps are set to announce that they are canceling their sessions amid the coronavirus pandemic. Some two-dozen camps, including those run by the Union for Reform Judaism, already have announced that they will cancel this summer. “It is with a heavy heart that we share this news with you, that due to the cur...
(JTA)-Nearly all Reform Jewish summer camps, and at least one Conservative camp, will remain closed for the 2020 summer due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency has learned. The landmark decision, made Thursday afternoon, will affect 15 Reform overnight camps across the country, which collectively served some 10,000 campers in 2019. The Reform movement, the largest in the United States, is the first to suspend its official summer camp network. It's the first time...
(JTA)-Every summer, JCC Ranch Camp in Colorado gives hundreds of kids an outdoorsy Jewish experience. There's hiking, mountain biking, ropes courses and horseback riding, along with the traditional camp staples of team sports, arts and crafts, meals in a communal dining hall and hours of hanging out on acres upon acres of green space. Crucially, the kids enjoy independence from their parents-and the same for parents from their kids. Not this year. Like a growing group of Jewish camps across the...
By Ben Sales NEW YORK (JTA)—In the weeks after it became clear that the coronavirus pandemic would spark a lasting economic crisis, the Jewish world’s leading funder group put together a memo with some back-of-the-envelope projections for how much Jewish nonprofits stood to lose. The tally: at least $650 million, according to the internal document from the Jewish Federations of North America, which was based on estimates from several American Jewish umbrella organizations, such as the Foundation for Jewish Camp and the JCC Association of North...
(JTA)-Rena Munster was looking forward to hosting a Passover seder for the first time. In past years, her parents or another relative hosted the meal. But this year she had invited her parents, siblings and other extended family to her Washington, D.C., home. Her husband, an amateur ceramics artist, was making a set of dishes for the holiday. And she was most excited for her family's traditional day of cooking before the seder: making short-rib tzimmes, desserts that would pass muster...
NEW YORK (JTA)—Some 38,000 people work at Jewish community centers across North America, staffing preschools, camps, gyms, classes, activities for seniors and more. Because of the coronavirus crisis, a lot of them are going to lose their jobs. “The cuts are going to be painful and deep,” said Doron Krakow, CEO of the JCC Association of North America. “They are going to go into what I would call a hunker-down mode, which means that they’ll be subject to the kind of staff reductions that we are reading about affecting other industrie...
(JTA)—Aboud Dandachi isn’t Jewish. Or Israeli. Or Italian. Or sick with coronavirus. He’s a Muslim from Syria living in Canada. But when he read the Jewish Telegraphic Agency story about an Italian boy whose bar mitzvah was curtailed because of the rapidly spreading virus, Dandachi responded in a way he figured Jews might appreciate: He donated $18 in honor of Ruben Golran to the Canadian branch of the Jewish National Fund to plant a tree in Israel in the teen’s honor. “This is what I know how to do,” said Dandachi, 43, of Toronto. “I’ve had f...
JERSEY CITY, N.J. (JTA)-Two months after his wife was murdered in the attack on this city's only kosher grocery store, owner Moshe Ferencz was back behind the counter this week. The store, which has partially reopened in a new location, still doesn't have regular hours. But the reopening signals an important moment for Jersey City's small but growing community of Orthodox Jews. "Everyone was shocked beyond belief," said Chesky Deutsch, a member of the local Hasidic community who acts as an...
This is a developing story. NEW YORK (JTA)—More than 50 Jewish community centers in 23 states have received emailed bomb threats since Saturday. None of the threats have been found to be credible, though local law enforcement agencies have been notified. Officials do not know who sent the threats. They targeted Jewish community centers in New York, New Jersey, California, Texas and elsewhere throughout the country. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has learned from officials familiar with the threats that most of the JCCs affected received identica...
(JTA)—One flyer reads “Holocaust = fake news.” Another says “America is not for sale.” And another: “Diversity destroys nations.” These are just a few of the 2,713 pieces of propaganda distributed in the United States by white supremacist groups in 2019, according to a report published Wednesday by the Anti-Defamation League. The flyers, posters and bumper stickers—many using traditional American color schemes and iconography to advance racist, anti-Semitic and anti-LGBTQ ideas—appeared in every state except Hawaii and touched hundreds of colle...
NEW YORK (JTA)—In a meeting Tuesday with Orthodox Jewish leaders in Brooklyn, U.S. Attorney General William Barr pledged to track and prosecute hate crimes more aggressively on the federal level while also blaming the rise of anti-Semitism on what he called “militant progressivism.” Barr’s concrete proposals for stopping anti-Semitism included an enhanced system for reporting hate crimes, as well as better tracking of white supremacists on social media. He pledged that the Trump administration and his Justice Department would have “zero t...
(JTA)—Half of American adults are unaware of basic facts regarding Nazism and the Holocaust, including the number of Jews who were killed and how Nazis came to power. Those are some of the findings of a new study by the Pew Research Center released on Tuesday, about a week ahead of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The study asked nearly 13,000 respondents, Jewish and non-Jewish adults and teenagers, four questions about the Holocaust. Most knew that the Holocaust took place between 1930 and 1950, and that Nazi ghettos w...
NEW YORK (JTA)-A local NAACP official in New Jersey has been suspended from his position for six months after giving a speech castigating Orthodox Jews in Jersey City and the largely Jewish city of Lakewood. James Harris, the chair of the education committee for the Montclair, New Jersey branch of the civil rights organization, has apologized for his remarks. Harris gave a speech at a Dec. 30 community meeting on gentrification in which he called Hasidic Jews unfriendly and blamed Hasidic...
NEW YORK (JTA)-An estimated 25,000 people marched across the Brooklyn Bridge and held a rally on Sunday to protest rising anti-Semitism in and around New York City. The rally comes following a spate of attacks on Jews-including, most recently, a stabbing attack at a rabbi's home in the New York City suburb of Monsey and a shooting in a Jersey City kosher supermarket that claimed four lives. There has also been an unending stream of verbal and physical assaults on Jews in neighborhoods of Brookly...
NEW YORK (JTA)-Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg, whose home was the site of a stabbing last month on the holiday of Chanukah, delivered an invocation at Governor Andrew Cuomo's State of the State address. Joseph Gluck, the man who stopped the attacker by throwing a coffee table at his head, was also in attendance and received a standing ovation. The attacker injured five people at Rottenberg's home in Monsey, New York, on Dec. 28, including the rabbi's son. One of those wounded, Joseph Neumann, remains...
(JTA)-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has won his party's leadership primary with 72.5 percent of the vote. Challenger Gideon Saar got 27.5 percent, according to Haaretz. Turnout for the primary was 57,677, or 49 percent of the total number of registered members. Saar, a popular Likud stalwart and former interior minister, had aimed to dethrone Netanyahu after the prime minister was twice unable to form a government following consecutive rounds of elections this year. Netanyahu's...
