Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 376 - 400 of 462
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...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-The soldiers walk past us, two single-file lines between the gravestones, their blank, sunken faces barely visible in the darkness. The coffin appears, hoisted on their arms and wrapped in an Israeli flag. We follow in its wake. Within minutes, some 20,000 people have massed around the final resting place of Sean Carmeli, Texas native, IDF soldier, soon to be declared a Hero of Israel. We stand silent as the rabbi chants verses of psalms begging for mercy. We shrug off official...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-When the siren rang out in Jerusalem last week, the 41 teenage participants in a five-week summer Israel trip were already asleep, exhausted from a day that had begun with a flight from New York. Within minutes, they were awake, out of their rooms and in a fortified room. From their shelter, they could hear rockets explode overhead. It was July 8, the first day in Israel for participants in a trip organized by NCSY, the youth arm of the New York-based Orthodox Union and formerly...
SDEROT, Israel (JTA)—In the past week, Israel has endured a thousand rockets. Yet the only Israeli death so far from Hamas’ attacks was a civilian killed Tuesday by mortar fire while visiting soldiers near the Erez border crossing into Gaza.In many ways, Israel’s Operation Protective Edge—its third Gaza operation in six years—is much like previous Israeli campaigns in the territory. Israel has used airstrikes to exact a toll on Hamas and has massed troops on the Gaza border, threatening a ground invasion. So far, Israel has conducted nearly 1,...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—The air war has become a ground war. The Israeli population, always on edge, has become a nation in mourning. And a military operation that nearly ended after eight days has become a bloody invasion of Gaza that could last weeks and has Israeli officials divided over how it ought to end. With the death toll rising on both sides—more than 600 Palestinians and 30 Israelis were reported killed as of Tuesday—some Israeli leaders are calling for a cease-fire. But others argue that the only way to address the Hamas threat is to reocc...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-Get used to conflict. That's the message Israeli officials and security experts are relaying as the Israel Defense Forces conducts its third operation in six years against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Israel's missile defense capabilities have grown significantly since previous rounds of fighting in Gaza-Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09 and Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012-while Hamas has expanded its capability to strike deep at population centers in the Israeli heartland. But...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-Had the shrapnel fallen a foot to the right, gas station attendant Michael Savlov would have been destroyed along with the rest of the Dor Alon gas station in southern Tel Aviv. Savlov was with a customer in the station's office Thursday morning when a rocket from Gaza was intercepted overhead by Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system. The rocket exploded in the air, but shrapnel fell onto the gas station, only narrowly missing the gas tanks. "It was like a truck hitting...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-It's midnight here and two balding men in blue vests are on the move. Someone has sprayed tear gas at a club two blocks away. Outside a club known as The Mossad, located in a warehouse in the dilapidated Tel Aviv neighborhood of Florentin, groups of high-school students mill about sporting stylish haircuts, revealing clothes and dazed expressions. A boy in a black shirt and jeans lies passed out on the sidewalk as a woman in a blue vest makes sure he has not suffocated on his own...
MODIIN, Israel (JTA)-They were their mothers' sons. They were all of our sons. They were dear boys. They were martyrs for Israel. They were funny, clever, creative. They are the messengers of the Jewish people in heaven. The joint funeral Tuesday of Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach provided a capstone to a harrowing ordeal that over 18 days united Israelis in hope and prayer. When the teens were found dead Monday night, their bodies lying half exposed in a field near Hebron, the...
AYANOT, Israel (JTA) - An Iranian-Israeli director and a group of Iranian-born actors are making a movie in Farsi, the language of Iran. "Baba Joon," a story of familial conflict between three generations of Iranian Jewish men set to hit theaters next year, is the first Farsi movie ever to be made in Israel. Set in an Israeli agricultural village settled by Iranian immigrants, the film tells the story of Yitzchak, a Persian Israeli who, like his father, tends a turkey farm in a rural village in...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-At 3:30 Shavuot morning, more than 100 people are seated on folding chairs singing in Yiddish as men walk around with shots of vodka and cups of coffee. Up front, a man in a black frock coat and black hat is belting out the notes, his eyes closed. Except for the live instruments and free mingling of men and women, the scene would have been common in any of the many haredi Orthodox communities of Jerusalem. But in a room at City Hall in Tel Aviv, Israel's historically secular...
TEL AVIV (JTA) - Since the three teenagers were abducted last week, Israel's goals have been simple: Find them and punish their kidnappers. Realizing those goals, though, is far from a simple task. The international community has condemned the kidnappings, and Israel has spread its forces across Judea and Samaria to search for the teens. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to stop at nothing to find Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach. But the effort is taking place...
GIVAT SHMUEL, Israel (JTA)—On the rolling green fields of a suburban Tel Aviv park, hundreds gathered to pray for the imminent rescue of three kidnapped Israeli teenagers. Rabbis delivered speeches, singer Yonatan Razel performed two pieces based on liturgical invocations of God’s mercy, and a prayer was recited for the safe return of Gilad Shaar, Naftali Frenkel and Eyal Yifrach, who were kidnapped last week while hitchhiking from the West Bank settlement of Kfar Etzion. Nearby, the calm warmth of summer in Israel seemed to take the edge off...
HERZLIYA, Israel (JTA)—Naftali Bennett and Tzipi Livni don’t agree on much. Bennett, Israel’s economy minister, sees the West Bank as an inseparable part of the Jewish state and wants Israel to annex its settlements there. Livni, the justice minister, says Israel can remain a Jewish democracy only by evacuating settlements. But on one thing they agree: Israel must break its status quo with the Palestinians. Bennett and Livni were two of the five politicians who presented a range of responses to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict last Sunda...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—Blocks away from the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and the headquarters of two major banks, in the corner of the lobby of a boutique hotel, Nimrod Gruber sticks his hand into an ATM. A few seconds later, a QR code prints out. Gruber takes the slip of paper and walks away, no cash in hand. He’s not worried. He owns the ATM, and there’s nothing like it in the Middle East. It identifies users by scanning their palms, and instead of dispensing dollars, euros or shekels, it dispenses Bitcoin. “It shows up in your account in 30 seconds...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—Its leaders call it a “historic development,” a “paradigm shift” and a “change in the relationship” between Israel and Diaspora Jewry. But when it comes to the details of the Joint Initiative of the Government of Israel and World Jewry, key questions have yet to be answered, including what it will do and who will fund it. Conceived last year as a partnership between the Israeli government, the Jewish Agency for Israel and major Diaspora Jewish bodies, the initiative aims to strengthen Diaspora Jewish identity and connections b...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—One small step by Israelis could become a giant leap for the State of Israel. At a Tel Aviv University laboratory, a team of 20 Israelis is building a spacecraft they believe will make Israel only the fourth country—after the United States, Russia and China—to touch down on the moon. The project, known as SpaceIL, looks like a long shot. The three-legged hexagonal craft appears too puny for interstellar travel, measuring just 3 feet tall and 2 feet wide. Of the initiative’s three founders, only one holds an academic degree...
