Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(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...
CHICAGO (JTA)-Josh Nelson sat onstage in front of 5,000 people, accompanied by eight other musicians and perched next to a ginormous video screen bearing the words to one of Judaism's central prayers, the Shema. It was the largest Shabbat service in America and the apex of the Reform Jewish movement's biennial conference, which ended here on Sunday morning. The service had a vibe that was half Jewish rock concert, half revival tent. Thousands of worshippers sat in cushioned chairs while...
(JTA)-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced this week that the United States will no longer consider Israeli Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria to be illegal. Here's an explainer about what the settlements are, how they are viewed in Israel and around the world, and what this announcement might mean. What are the settlements? How many Israelis live there? In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel captured large swaths of territory from neighboring countries. Israel took the Sinai Peninsula and the...
This is a developing story. (JTA)—Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the Jewish National Security Council staffer whose firsthand account of the July phone call between President Donald Trump and the president of Ukraine is at the center of the impeachment inquiry, testified in the impeachment hearings on Tuesday. Here are the biggest takeaways from his testimony to the House Intelligence Committee. Vindman was thrice offered the position of Ukrainian defense minister. He rejected the offers. This minor bombshell has not yet been reported. Steve C...
This is a developing story. NEW YORK (JTA)—An Orthodox man was stabbed multiple times on his walk to synagogue for morning prayers. The man was approaching the synagogue Toshnad Heichel Torah Utfila in Spring Valley, New York, when a man got out of a car, began beating him and stabbed him. The assailant fled the scene before police and first responders arrived, according to Aaron Hershkowitz, an assistant to the synagogue’s rabbi. The incident occurred at approximately 5:45 a.m. “Upon arrival it was quickly determined that the individual had b...
NEW YORK (JTA)-One of the most active times of day at the West Side Jewish Center begins precisely at 1:40 p.m., when 60 or so middle-aged men trudge in, mutter through the afternoon prayer service with their coats on, maybe throw a couple dollars of charity into a metal cup and walk back to their jobs. The whole thing is over in about 15 minutes. Other than that and two shifts of morning prayers, the building is mostly empty during the day. On a recent weekday afternoon, two men studied Jewish...
NEW YORK (JTA)-Days after a series of attacks against Jews across Brooklyn, the Anti-Defamation League announced that it would double funding for a school program combating hate. But city officials say more than education is needed to stop the rash of attacks, which have spiked across this city in 2019. That's because the problem is hard to diagnose. Is it the local effect of a national rise in anti-Semitism? The resurfacing of old resentments? Are Jews being scapegoated for the impact of...
(JTA)—A Palestinian student at Benedictine University called on a Holocaust survivor to condemn the establishment of Israel, and then walked out on his speech after he did not do so. Following a speech last week by Professor Harold Kasimow, who survived the Holocaust as a child, Benedictine senior Ayah Ali asked a question which drew a parallel between Kasimow’s experiences and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Ali, according to her Twitter feed, is affiliated with the Chicago-area school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palesti...
NEW YORK (JTA)-Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and billionaire media mogul, appears to be preparing to run for president. Bloomberg, 77, flirted with presidential runs in past election cycles before declining to run. As recently as March, he ruled out a presidential campaign this year, writing that he was "clear-eyed about the difficulty of winning the Democratic nomination in such a crowded field." But now he is registering to run in the Democratic primary in Alabama, whose...
(JTA)—As of Wednesday morning, Israel’s embassies and consulates across the globe are on strike. “No consular services will be provided and no one will be allowed to enter,” one ambassador posted on Twitter. Those services include passport renewal and assistance to Israelis living abroad. Why has Israel’s entire foreign service shut down? In a word: taxes. Israeli diplomats get lump-sum expense stipends meant to cover a range of personal and official expenses. The Finance Ministry now says it wants the diplomats to submit individual receipts...
(JTA)—Jared Kushner, the point man on the Trump administration’s Middle East peace plan, appeared to endorse a unity government between Israel’s two largest parties. In a rare interview Tuesday, President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law also shot back at Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden for saying Kushner was ill equipped to be negotiating Mideast peace. Regarding the unity government, Kushner was asked if he had called on the party leaders—Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Gen. Benny Gantz—to find a way...
SARASOTA, Florida (JTA)-Most American Jewish day schools go all in on Chanukah, in part to remind their students that Jews have a winter holiday of their own. But when December rolls around at the Hershorin Schiff Community Day School in southwestern Florida, you're almost as likely to see kids drawing Christmas trees as menorahs or dreidels. That's because the school asks its students to design their own holiday plates-and almost half the students at this Jewish day school are not Jewish....
