Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 301 - 325 of 462
CLEVELAND (JTA)-An issue of historical concern to American Jews drew waves of applause when Donald Trump Jr. preached about it Tuesday night from the stage of the Republican National Convention. It wasn't Israel, Iran or the fight against anti-Semitism. It was a call for the government to assist with private school costs, referred to as "school choice." Echoing Republican orthodoxy, the son of the party's nominee said it would promote competition and raise educational standards. American public...
CLEVELAND (JTA)- On the day Donald Trump wrapped up the Republican primaries, Marc Zell was ready to resign his position as vice president of Republicans Overseas, the party's expatriate group. Zell, who lives in Israel, was put off by Trump's inconsistent statements regarding the country. In particular, he felt insulted when Trump, at a Republican Jewish Coalition forum last December, said, "You're not going to support me because I don't want your money." He felt that the Republican...
NEW YORK (JTA)-Voters who have their hearts set on supporting a left-wing secular Jew running an insurgent campaign still have a candidate. Jill Stein, the 2012 Green Party candidate, is making another run. And this year, with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both earning historically low popularity ratings, she hopes she can attract at least some of Bernie Sanders' 13 million Democratic primary voters. With a far-left platform, Stein advocates government-guaranteed full employment, a national...
NEW YORK (JTA)-Being an American Jew, more than anything else, means remembering the Holocaust. That's what nearly three quarters of Jewish Americans said, according to the Pew Research Center's landmark 2013 study on American Jewry. Asked to pick attributes "essential" to being Jewish, more Jews said Holocaust remembrance than leading an ethical or moral life, caring about Israel or observing Jewish law. If anyone personified that consensus, it was Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor who...
NEW YORK (JTA)-Three months after Israel's Chief Rabbinate rejected his authority to perform conversions, one of America's most prominent Modern Orthodox rabbis joined with Natan Sharansky to advance a message: The rabbinate needs to become more open. But not too much more. A widely respected rabbi in New York's Orthodox community, Haskel Lookstein saw his credentials called into question when a conversion he performed was deemed invalid by a rabbinical court in the Tel Aviv suburb of Petach...
NEW YORK (JTA)-Eve Goldberg's son, Isaac, was in a panic. He had to get out of college. Isaac Goldberg Volkmar had been at the University of Rhode Island for less than a semester in 2009 when he called his mother desperate to escape. He had joined a fraternity, where his brothers got him to take the pain medications Percocet and OxyContin. After a few months the New York teen knew he was addicted and needed help. From there, Isaac was in and out of rehab in Pennsylvania and New York. He...
NEW YORK (JTA)-Instead of visiting the Western Wall, they visited Ellis Island. Instead of hiking in the Negev Desert, they took a day trip to a Habonim-Dror summer camp. Instead of basking in the sun on the Tel Aviv beach, they watched clips of the Three Stooges mocking the Nazis. And instead of Birthright, a 10-day trip meant to acquaint American Jews with Israel, a cohort of Israeli graduate students participated in a 10-day trip to get to know American Jews. The trip, which began June 18,...
(JTA)-Here a plan, there a plan, everywhere a peace plan. Conditions in Israel and the Palestinian Authority may not exactly seem conducive to peace-Israel just formed what may be its most right-wing government ever, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is aging and becoming less popular. Yet peace plans have been coming at the region from all sides. No less than three Israeli-Palestinian peace proposals have been put forward in recent weeks, spanning a range of countries, leaders...
PARDES HANNA, Israel (JTA)-When Yoel decided, at age 8, to begin observing Shabbat, there was one problem: It meant he couldn't join most of Israel's youth soccer teams, which played games on Saturday. Yoel, now 12, has always lived in the increasingly large gray area between Israel's starkly divided religious and secular Jewish societies. His father observes Shabbat, his mother doesn't. He attended a religious elementary school, but transferred to a secular school this year. He enjoys how...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—He was an outspoken politician with little military experience, appointed by a rival and promising to bring a new approach. Current and former officials at the Defense Ministry called his appointment an “enigma,” fretting that “it will take some time until he understands how things work” and that “he’ll have to undergo basic training.” The subject of that criticism wasn’t Avigdor Liberman, the hard-line nationalist with scant army experience who was offered the defense portfolio in a surprise move Wednesday. It was Amir Peretz,...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-On one hand, most Israelis say their financial situation is good and getting better. On the other hand, they're worried they won't be able to provide for their children. On one hand, they want significantly more government spending in a wide range of public services. On the other hand, they say they pay too many taxes. These are among the confused results of a wide-ranging economic survey obtained by JTA ahead of its publication Tuesday by the Israel Democracy Institute think...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-For a leader often accused of not wanting to talk peace with the Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sure does a lot of talking about wanting to talk to the Palestinians. In a series of three statements this month, Netanyahu repeatedly stressed the need for peace with the Palestinians. He called the peace process one of his highest priorities and hinted that a renewal of talks might be underway. Responding to a question about the peace process on Twitter on...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-On an army base in northern Israel, a scrawny nerd with glasses shakily patrols in the dead of night. Suddenly he's ambushed by a group of militants in kaffiyehs, and he's forced to fight for his life, using everything from a gun to a knife to a desk lamp, until he's left with blood dripping down his face. This isn't the most recent flare-up in the Israeli terror wave. It's a scene from the recent horror film "Freak Out," starring Itay Zvolon-who is famous in Israel for a...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-The Israeli Supreme Court decision on Jewish conversion changes almost nothing. But down the line, it could change a lot. Under the March 31 ruling, the state of Israel must recognize Jewish conversions performed in private Orthodox conversion courts not run by its Chief Rabbinate. A network of such courts, called Giyur Kahalacha, or "conversion by Jewish law," began operating last year. The ruling concerned whether three people who had converted in non-Rabbinate courts could...
JERUSALEM (JTA)-At least 21 people were injured in a bus bombing in Jerusalem, police said, in the first such attack in Israel in years. A city bus exploded and went up in flames Monday evening, April 18, on a major thoroughfare in the southern end of the capital. The blast set a second bus and a car nearby on fire. Two people were seriously injured in the attack, with seven moderately injured and 12 lightly injured. An explosive device was planted in the rear half of the bus, which was stopped...
JERUSALEM (JTA)-During the five-plus years of Syria's civil war, Israel has striven to stay neutral-supporting neither the government of President Bashar Assad nor the rebels, and certainly not the Islamic State. But on one issue, senior Israeli politicians have gladly taken sides: Israel keeping the Golan Heights. Facing reports of an international call for Israel to leave the territory as part of a settlement of the Syrian crisis, the Israeli Cabinet met Sunday on the Golan. The unprecedented...
KFAR SABA, Israel (JTA)-One family lost their son in late July 2014. The other lost theirs on the first of August in the same year. One family has lobbied the United Nations and crossed an ocean in hopes of bringing their son's remains back. The other mostly stays home. One family is sure their son is dead. The other is plagued by uncertainty. But one thing unites the Goldin and Shaul families: Of the 67 sets of Israeli parents who lost sons in the Gaza War two years ago, only theirs have not...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-It began as an all-too-common story: A Palestinian assailant in the contested West Bank city of Hebron stabs and wounds an Israeli soldier. Israeli forces shoot him dead. But hours after the incident Thursday, a political and moral firestorm engulfed Israel. A video showed a soldier executing the already incapacitated attacker. One day later, after condemnation from the highest reaches of Israel's government, a second video appeared to show that the attacker might have still...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-Nearly half of Jewish-Israelis want to expel Arabs from the country. That's one of several findings from a new survey of Israeli attitudes on religion, politics and Jewish identity conducted by the U.S.-based Pew Research Center. Coming just three years after Pew's much-discussed study of Jewish-Americans, the Israel study depicts a country divided by religion and ethnicity, where Jews of opposing religious outlooks rarely associate and marriages that cross the Jewish-Arab divide...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-In a survey that spanned politics, religion and interfaith relations, one statistic stood out: nearly half of Israel's Jews support expelling the country's Arabs. The Pew Research Center's study of Israelis' attitudes, which had its findings released Tuesday, had asked respondents whether they agreed that "Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel." Forty-eight percent of Israeli Jews agreed, while 46 percent did not. Among self-described right-wing Jews, 72 percent...
PETACH TIKVAH, Israel (JTA)-Only after Yonatan Azriaev grabbed the terrorist's arms and threw him against a wall of soft drinks did he think he was about to die. Azriaev, a member of the Breslov Hasidic sect, had been handing out religious pamphlets in the open-air market here when he stepped inside a shop at around 4 p.m. Tuesday hoping to give one to the cashier. Then he felt sharp blows to his back and shoulders. Feeling like he was punched, Azriaev said he figured he was being attacked by...
HULA VALLEY, Israel (JTA)-Thousands of cranes sit in pairs in a field here, their outlines approaching the horizon. Then, all at once, they take flight, a cloud of black-and-white feathers filling the sky. Shai Agmon isn't interested in most of these. All he cares about is one pair near the front, slightly shorter than the rest. Most of the birds are common cranes, but these two are demoiselle cranes-a rare find in these parts. "They can't sleep in the desert and can't stop in southern Israel,"...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-After years of false starts, Israeli negotiators went to Geneva last week for talks aimed at ending a long-running conflict with a regional adversary. It's not the Palestinians. It's Turkey. Once a key partner of Israel, Turkey in recent years has been a thorn in its side. It supports Israel's foes, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan often uses international forums as opportunities to slam the Jewish state-particularly its treatment of Palestinians. But in December,...
KFAR CHABAD, Israel (JTA)-In an otherwise deserted field at the center of this rural Israeli village, a Brooklyn brownstone presents an incongruous sight. If it looks like it would fit perfectly in Crown Heights, that's because it already does. The three-story apartment house topped by three gables is a brick-for-brick reconstruction of 770 Eastern Parkway, the storied headquarters of the late Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and his Chabad-Lubavitch movement. The address is...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—Israel’s government approved a compromise to expand the non-Orthodox Jewish prayer section of the Western Wall, putting to rest the decades-long fight between Women of the Wall and Israel’s haredi Orthodox religious establishment. The deal achieves what had been an elusive goal: an interdenominational consensus on Judaism’s holiest site with official recognition. The non-Orthodox prayer section at the wall will become much larger and more accessible. But haredi control of the Orthodox section will also be solidified, though...
