Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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JERUSALEM (JTA)-Michael Douglas hadn't heard of the Genesis Prize when he found out that he'd won it. In fact, the Oscar-winning actor was surprised to discover he was even in the running for an award designed for those who inspire fellow Jews. His father, actor Kirk Douglas, is Jewish. But his mother, actress Diana Dill, is not-Douglas thought that would disqualify him. "I felt that they made a mistake because my mother is not Jewish," Douglas told JTA in an interview Wednesday in Jerusalem....
HERZLIYA, Israel (JTA)-When Israel's coalition government formed last month, its constituent parties all but ruled out establishing a Palestinian state in the near future. But that doesn't mean they can agree on what to do instead. Speaking at the Herzliya Conference this week, Israel's premier diplomatic and security policy gathering, senior Israeli government officials struck different and sometimes conflicting tones on what Israel's policy should be toward the Palestinians. Even within the...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-In 2003, two years after the website was founded, the editors of Wikipedia faced a dilemma: How should they refer to the part-fence, part-wall Israel was building along the West Bank border? The article's first iteration-published amid the bloody second intifada, or Palestinian uprising-called it a "security fence" and focused on Israeli support. Within a half-hour, another editor added a sentence about a United Nations condemnation. Later that day, the phrase "apartheid wall"...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-From the wrong angle, it looks like a bunch of unevenly stacked tuna cans, as if someone in the grocery store did a bad job. Look at it from the other direction, and its shape becomes clear: The cans are, in fact, a sculpture of a giant open hand holding a bag of clementines. That's the idea behind "Come and See What Cans Can Be," an exhibit of seven installation artworks constructed almost entirely from canned food. On display at the atrium of Ra'anana Park, in a Tel Aviv suburb,...
TEL AVIV (JTA) – Seven weeks after he won reelection, Benjamin Netanyahu finally secured a fourth term as prime minister. With 90 minutes to go until a Wednesday night deadline to form a governing coalition, Netanyahu concluded an agreement with the religious, pro-settler Jewish Home party that gives him the narrowest of parliamentary majorities – 61 of the Knesset's 120 seats. Along with three other right-wing and religious factions - United Torah Judaism, Kulanu and Shas - the five-party Lik...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-When the ground began to shake, Inbar Irron was among a dozen Israelis in Nepal who ran outside the building where they had been sitting-and straight into a cloud of dust. When their vision cleared, they saw a devastating scene: Much of the village of Manegau, where they had come to volunteer for four months, had crumbled to the ground. Miraculously, none of the villagers was hurt. But many of their homes had been reduced to rubble. Irron's group-sent by the Israeli NGO Tevel...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-While Israel mobilizes to aid victims of Nepal's earthquake and locate missing citizens, the Jewish state is paying special attention to the safety of 26 Israeli babies born of surrogate mothers in Nepal. Hundreds of Israeli couples choose surrogate pregnancy-where a couple's embryo is implanted in another woman, who carries the pregnancy to term. Here's why Israelis opt for surrogate pregnancies, and why so many choose surrogate mothers in places like Nepal. Why do Israelis choos...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-For help facing its worst drought in centuries, California should look to a country that beat its own chronic water shortage: Israel. Until a few years ago, Israel's wells seemed like they were always running dry. TV commercials urged Israelis to conserve water. Newspapers tracked the rise and fall of Lake Kinneret, Israel's biggest freshwater source. Religious Israelis gathered to pray for rainfall at the Western Wall during prolonged dry spells. However, the once perpetual...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-This city's Rabin Square was full of young men wearing large knit kippahs and women in long skirts and long sleeves cheering as right-wing politicians declared their opposition to Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. On Sunday night, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ascended the stage to address the crowd, he needed their votes. On Tuesday he got them. "[A]s long as I am prime minister, and as long as Likud is in government, the nationalist camp is in government," he said...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-The key word in Yair Lapid's political vocabulary might be "but." His Yesh Atid party is not right-wing, he says, but it isn't left-wing either. He wants to withdraw from the West Bank, but disavows both a unilateral pullout and bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. He wants Israel to allow civil unions, but would maintain the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate's control over marriage. And on Sunday, he wouldn't directly criticize Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to the...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-Former Israeli President Shimon Peres said he is confident in France's ability to fight anti-Semitism on its own soil. Immigration to Israel, he said, should be encouraged for positive reasons, not only as a response to persecution abroad. "We call on Jews to immigrate to Israel when there's no crime and no other reason," said Peres, speaking exclusively to JTA from his Peres Center for Peace office overlooking the Mediterranean. Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister...
LOD, Israel (JTA)-He says he's a leader of a "Zionist settlement" movement, but Raz Sofer's home is no West Bank outpost. Sofer, 25, is the manager of a 100-member student village in this mixed Jewish-Arab city in central Israel. The village, comprised of several apartment complexes, offers students cheap rent in exchange for volunteer work with Lod's poor residents, many of them Arab-Israelis. Sofer is fluent in Arabic and is proud of the students who volunteer in Arab kindergartens or run...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-This government was supposed to be different. During the last election campaign in 2012, Israelis seemed to tire of the existential issues that have plagued the country for decades. Barely anyone talked about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Long-simmering social tensions over the rising cost of living and the economic burdens of the underemployed haredi Orthodox community were going to finally get their due. The Knesset's arrivistes-former television personality Yair Lapid and...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—After a gruesome attack by two Palestinian cousins left four dead at a Jerusalem synagogue, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu singled out one person for blame: Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. In a statement issued by his office, Abbas denounced the Tuesday morning attack, saying he “condemns the killing of civilians no matter who is doing it.” But over the past few weeks, as a string of violent attacks have unsettled Jerusalemites, Abbas has issued statements some see as encouraging violence against Israe...
JERUSALEM (JTA)-It's 3 p.m. on a Thursday and the Jerusalem light rail is packed with secular and religious, Jew and Arab, as it heads east from the city's Central Bus Station. From there it passes some of the city's most crowded venues, stopping at the Mahane Yehuda open market and coursing down Jaffa Street until it hits the city center, where the train cars empty out onto a thoroughfare loud with foot traffic. By the time it reaches the station in the Arab neighborhood of Shuafat, the train...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-SodaStream, the Israeli at-home seltzer machine company, announced last week that it would be closing its West Bank factory and moving the facility's operations to southern Israel next year. Here's what you need to know about SodaStream, the controversy that has bubbled up in its midst and what the actress Scarlett Johansson has to do with it. What is SodaStream? SodaStream is an Israeli company that makes and sells seltzer machines for home use. Since it was founded in 1991, the...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-The Israeli government has adopted a major reform expected to ease the path to conversion for hundreds of thousands of Israelis now prohibited from marrying in the Jewish state. In the most significant response in decades to the estimated 400,000 Israelis who are not considered Jewish by the Chief Rabbinate, the Cabinet expanded authority for conversion beyond a small group of approved haredi Orthodox courts. Since only Orthodox Jewish marriage is permitted in Israel, such...
JERUSALEM (JTA)-An anonymous White House staffer apparently isn't the only one who thinks Benjamin Netanyahu is shy about taking chances. A piece this week in The Atlantic magazine by journalist Jeffrey Goldberg ignited a firestorm with its revelation that an Obama administration official had called the Israeli prime minister "a coward" and "chickenshit." But on Netanyahu's home turf, Israeli political leaders also have criticized him as risk averse and focused solely on his political survival....
(JTA)-With its panoramic views of Jerusalem, plush seating area and decorative elements, this could be almost any other room at the Inbal Jerusalem Hotel. Except the floor is made of AstroTurf, the walls are made of transparent cloth and the roof is a bamboo mat. Welcome to one of a dozen private sukkahs built on the porches of the five-star hotel's Penthouse Suites. These hotel sukkahs represent the vanguard of holiday hotel luxury in Jerusalem. The sukkah suites carry a price tag of...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—For approximately a half hour at the beginning of her El Al Israel Airlines flight last week from New York to Tel Aviv, Elana Sztokman watched as the haredi Orthodox man seated next to her rushed up and down the aisle searching for someone willing to switch seats so he wouldn’t have to sit beside her. On the same route several hours later, another El Al flight was delayed as haredi men stood in the aisles refusing to sit next to women. After takeoff, the men resumed their protest until other seats were found for them. A pas...
BEERSHEBA, Israel (JTA)-Handcuffed to a wooden chair in the middle of the night, Rafat Awaysha still wasn't sure what crime he had committed. He had announced a demonstration against the war in Gaza in a July 11 Facebook post. Soon afterward, he received a call from the police, who came to his dormitory and took him in for questioning. Released after an hour, Awaysha, the head of the Arab-Israeli Balad party student group at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, thought the ordeal was over. But...
OR YEHUDA, Israel (JTA) -- Something that looks like a can of soda could be Israel's high-tech answer to the network of tunnels that Hamas has created under the Gaza border. A sensor known as a geophone can detect underground movement based on the sound generated by the movement, the Israeli defense firm manufacturing the device says. The firm, Elpam Electronics, says the geophone is capable of finding the location of a person crawling as far down as 32 feet. Israel has grappled with the danger...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-The United Nations probe into the Gaza conflict hasn't even begun, but Israel already is convinced that it won't end well. In a resolution adopted by a vote of 29-1 with 17 abstentions, the U.N. Human Rights Council moved last month to establish a commission of inquiry "to investigate all violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory." The United States cast the sole vote against. Last week, Israeli Prime...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-After the missiles have stopped, after the troops have come home, even after most of the wounded are out of the hospital, Israelis will still be feeling the burden of Operation Protective Edge-this time in their pockets. With the recent expiration of a temporary cease-fire, the operation may not be over. (Another temporary cease-fire was put in place starting at midnight Monday.) But through last week, including both direct military expenses and indirect hits to the Israeli...
RAMLE, Israel (JTA)-In her living room in the Israeli town of Ramle, Sarah says she wants a peaceful life. At 79, she deserves one. A Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor, Sarah was sent to a Nazi concentration camp in Serbia as a child, arriving in Israel at age 17. Her entire family perished in the Holocaust. Now she watches from her armchair as her family is threatened once again. Sarah-not her real name-is now a Muslim, and her daughter lives in Gaza City. "The whole city is in ruins," Sarah...
