Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(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....
NEW YORK (JTA)—In the past seven years, the American Jewish population has grown 10 percent. It remains a population that is mostly liberal, college educated and overwhelmingly white. And it’s not getting any younger. This is all according to a new American Jewish population estimate of the 48 contiguous U.S. states put out by Brandeis University’s Steinhardt Social Research Institute. The center published similar studies in 2012 and 2015. “The cynicism about American Judaism, and this belief that we are a shrinking population, we are a vanis...
NEW YORK (JTA)—The number of hate crimes against Jews in New York City has risen significantly over the first nine months of this year, part of a citywide rise in such offenses. The New York Police Department has reported 311 total hate crimes through September, as opposed to 250 reported through the same period in 2018, according to Deputy Inspector Mark Molinari, who heads the department’s Hate Crimes Task Force. Molinari said 52 percent of the reported hate crimes, or 163, have targeted Jews. Over the same period last year, the NYPD rep...
NEW YORK (JTA)—Sitting at the front of a large room lined floor to ceiling with Jewish holy books, Rabbi Joseph Beyda’s voice broke as he processed, seemingly in real time, the idea that a trusted teacher had preyed on his students. “I think the overarching feeling of the administrators and the faculty and the board of the school is, we know you trust us, we take that trust very deeply, we dedicate our lives to it, we failed on this,” said Beyda, the principal of the Yeshivah of Flatbush’s Joel Braverman High School. “You could say it’s not our...
(JTA)-Like other local officials, Deborah Lauter can't say exactly what's causing the recent spike in hate crimes against Jews in New York City. It could be, in her words, "the rhetoric that's coming out of various elected officials." It could be animus among the city's diverse communities. It could be that the attacks are getting more press and therefore inspiring copycats. It could just be a hot summer when people need to blow off steam. "It's difficult to make generalizations," Lauter said....
(JTA)—As of this writing, Israel has not bombed Iran’s nuclear program. But according to an exposé in The New York Times that dropped Wednesday, it could still happen. And nearly did. The 10,000-word story details how close Israel came to attacking Iran, how Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush tried to deter the Israelis and what actually stopped the would-be bombing raid. It also tells the story of how President Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement and what that means for the future of the Iran-Israel-U.S. hate...
(JTA)-One of the most befuddling questions surrounding the Jeffrey Epstein saga is why Leslie Wexner, a billionaire entrepreneur, entrusted all of his money to Epstein, a secretive financier with no college degree. For those immersed in the Jewish world, there's an added question: How did Wexner-a prominent philanthropist seen as a champion of Jewish learning and ethical teaching, whose foundation has trained waves of rabbis, Jewish professionals and volunteer board leaders-end up so enmeshed...
(JTA)—President Donald Trump said “hate has no place in America” in an address to the nation following the mass shootings over the weekend in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. Trump pledged additional resources to the FBI to investigate domestic terrorism. He called for strengthening detection of early warning signs of shooters and for better background checks on gun owners. The president also condemned video games and social media for encouraging violent tendencies. He said “those who commit hate crimes and mass murders should face the death p...
