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  • Activists aiming to steer Israeli government funding to non-Orthodox

    Ben Sales|Jul 4, 2014

    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...

  • Search for abducted teens faces complicated political landscape

    Ben Sales|Jun 27, 2014

    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...

  • At prayer vigils, Israelis gather in moment of unity over kidnapping

    Ben Sales|Jun 20, 2014

    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...

  • At Herzliya Conference, a split on importance of Israeli-Palestinian conflict

    Ben Sales, JTA|Jun 20, 2014

    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...

  • Bitcoin makes aliyah: Cryptocurrency finds Israeli fans

    Ben Sales|Jun 20, 2014

    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...

  • Israel vows big investment in world Jewry project-details not clear

    Ben Sales, JTA|Jun 13, 2014

    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...

  • Israeli Lunar XPrize team shoots for the moon

    Ben Sales|Jun 6, 2014

    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...

  • Amid furor over draft, initiatives aim to put haredi men to work

    Ben Sales, JTA|May 16, 2014

    TEL AVIV (JTA)-When Moshe Friedman turned 31, he made what was for him a radical decision: He left school and launched a start-up. Plenty of Israelis jump from graduate school to the high-tech sector, but for Friedman the leap was longer. A descendant of rabbis, he had studied at leading haredi Orthodox schools where many of his peers would spend decades, never intending to work. Friedman soon found himself caught between two worlds. Largely secular venture capitalists were reluctant to fund...

  • With peace talks stalled, Israelis and Palestinians resort to old moves

    Ben Sales, JTA|May 9, 2014

    JERUSALEM (JTA) - Nine months of negotiations were supposed to propel Israelis and Palestinians into a future of peace. Instead, the collapse of talks is threatening to make the future look much like the past. Israel's decision last week to suspend negotiations - a day after the signing of a reconciliation between the Fatah faction of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas - has prompted both sides to resort to their old ways. For the Palestinians, that means focusing on...

  • Stymied by Israeli bureaucracy, Ukrainian has been making aliyah for three years

    Ben Sales, JTA|Apr 4, 2014

    LOD, Israel (JTA)-Sitting in his sister's living room in this town outside Tel Aviv, Yuriy Yukhatskov says he's glad to be far from his home city of Kiev. Yukhatskov, 44, says that what he sees as the pervasive anti-Semitism in Ukraine's capital would grow only worse with the country's recent unrest. He fears that last month's revolution could lead to a government unfriendly to Jews. Israel feels foreign to Yukhatskov, but he's grateful to be able to walk to synagogue wearing his kippah without...

  • Hadassah crisis opens divisions between the hospital and women's organization

    Ben Sales, JTA|Mar 28, 2014

    JERUSALEM (JTA)—The Sarah Wetsman Davidson Hospital Tower stretches 223 feet skyward, welcoming visitors in a bright, expansive lobby strung with banners celebrating both the State of Israel and its premier hospital, the Hadassah Medical Organization. Opened in late 2012 at a total cost of $363 million, the tower is the largest building project undertaken at Hadassah in 50 years and a symbol of the hospital’s ambitions for the future. Now that future is in peril as the hospital, saddled with nearly $370 million in debt and an annual def...

  • Can an Israeli-Palestinian coalition push leaders to make a deal?

    Ben Sales, JTA|Mar 14, 2014

    TEL AVIV (JTA)—Two years ago, Israeli supermarket mogul Rami Levy invited Palestinian gas and oil magnate Munib al-Masri to one of his grocery stores. A working-class boy who had become the West Bank’s wealthiest man, al-Masri already had turned his attention to a new challenge: encouraging a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the partnership was not to be. Levy, the owner of the supermarket chain Rami Levy Hashikma Marketing, has three stores in Israeli West Bank settlements, and al-Masri decided he could not work wit...

  • Israel's abortion debate: pro-choice seems to be the only choice

    Ben Sales, JTA|Mar 7, 2014

    JERUSALEM (JTA) -- A billboard in central Tel Aviv features a black-and-white photo of a distressed woman above a caption in bold red letters that reads, “The pain and remorse from my abortion accompany me every day.” The billboard is an advertisement for Efrat, an anti-abortion outfit that dubs itself “The Committee to Rescue Israel’s Babies” and offers financial support to pregnant women in an effort to persuade them not to terminate their pregnancies. Efrat has never protested outside a gynecological clinic, nor has it sought to restrict...

  • No lost sleep over boycott threat

    Ben Sales, JTA|Feb 14, 2014

    TEL AVIV (JTA)-Of the 200,000 wine bottles Yakov Burg produced last year, 16,000 went to Europe. The possibility of a boycott and repeated rumblings that Europe is planning to label goods produced in the settlements could decrease that number, but Burg isn't worried. The CEO of Psagot Winery, which is located in a settlement of the same name in the hills of the central West Bank, Burg prides himself on running a Jewish-owned business in the West Bank, even welcoming groups of Christian Zionists...

  • Anne Heyman's legacy lives on in Rwanda

    Ben Sales, JTA|Feb 14, 2014

    AGAHOZO-SHALOM YOUTH VILLAGE, Rwanda (JTA)-Anne Heyman's death during a horse-riding competition in Palm Beach, Fla., on Jan. 31 shocked and devastated many in the Jewish world. But it was Heyman's work in Rwanda that so many of her admirers will remember most. A former assistant district attorney in Manhattan who made a career shift to philanthropy around the time she began having children, Heyman learned during a visit to the Tufts University Hillel in 2005 about children who were left...

  • A growing movement of corporate philanthropy

    Ben Sales, JTA|Jan 31, 2014

    TEL AVIV (JTA)- When the Israeli mobile maps start-up Waze accepted a buyout from Google for more than $1 billion in June, each of the company's 100 employees walked away with an average of $1.2 million from the sale. An even bigger check, though, went to Baruch Lipner, a Canadian Israeli who hasn't worked in the high-tech or finance industries for a decade. The acquisition put $1.5 million on his desk. A veteran of the venture capital world, Lipner is now the sole employee of Tmura, a...

  • Meet the Israeli bureaucrat who decides who can marry in the Jewish state

    Ben Sales|Jan 17, 2014

    JERUSALEM (JTA)-To be married in Israel, immigrants must prove their Jewish ancestry to the country's chief rabbinate. Couples can solicit a letter from their hometown rabbis or present their parents' Jewish marriage contracts. Sometimes they even bring a Yiddish-speaking grandmother before a rabbinical court. In the end, every claim has to pass through one man: a midlevel bureaucrat named Itamar Tubul. Tubul, 35, is the soft-spoken rabbi who heads the chief rabbinate's personal status...

  • Russian immigrants a rare case of successful aliyah

    Ben Sales, JTA|Jan 10, 2014

    TEL AVIV (JTA)-Growing up in the Urals, Pavel Polev was a precocious ice skater and a member of the Soviet Union's national youth figure-skating team. But in 1992, at age 15, Polev's life was upended when he joined the massive wave of Jews immigrating to Israel from the crumbling Soviet Union. After serving a mandatory three years in the Israel Defense Forces following high school, Polev took a job as a custodian. Two decades later, Polev is a successful small-business owner and rising...

  • Snowden revelations boost calls for Pollard's release

    Ben Sales, JTA|Jan 3, 2014

    TEL AVIV (JTA)-The disclosure last week that American intelligence spied on former Israeli prime ministers has given new momentum to the effort to secure a pardon for convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and several leading members of Knesset have called in recent days for Pollard's release following reports that documents leaked by former defense contractor Edward Snowden showed U.S. intelligence had targeted the email addresses of Ehud Barak and Ehud...

  • Bedouin want recognition, not relocation

    Ben Sales, JTA|Dec 27, 2013

    WADI AL-NAAM, Israel (JTA)-In this unofficial Bedouin town of 14,000 not far from Beersheva in the Negev Desert, families live in clusters of shanties with intermittent electricity provided by generators or solar panels. A communal structure has soft plastic walls and dirt floors, with a small pit at one end for an open fire that provides the room's only heat. Roads in many places are demarcated only by piles of rocks. For decades, Bedouin tribes like those living in Wadi al-Naam and similar set...

  • Unlikely right-left partnership floated to oppose Bedouin resettlement

    Ben Sales, JTA|Dec 20, 2013

    (JTA)—They can’t agree on the project’s goal. They can’t agree on who supports it. They can’t even agree on its name. But when it comes to the Israeli government’s plan to relocate 30,000 Negev Bedouin, representatives and allies of the Bedouin community agree with the right wing on one thing: the Prawer plan must be stopped. At a meeting this week, leaders of an alliance between Negev Bedouin and several left-wing groups adopted a proposal to join with “right-wing opponents” of a bill that would relocate tens of thousands of Bedouin from th...

  • Bill on Israel's African migrants has their advocates crying foul

    Ben Sales, JTA|Dec 13, 2013

    SAHARONIM, Israel (JTA)- A long chain-link fence with barbed wire seems to rise up out of the desert at the new Sadot facility in Israel for African migrants. Situated along Israel's barren border with Egypt and across the street from the notorious Ketziot Prison, which houses thousands of Palestinian prisoners, Sadot is slated to begin operations this month as an "open residence facility" for some 3,300 African migrants. In a large dirt field, long rows of railroad-style red-and-beige rooms...

  • Survivors in Israel say gov't must do more

    Ben Sales, JTA|Dec 6, 2013

    TEL AVIV (JTA)-Breakfast costs Dov Jakobovitz $2. Lunch costs him $2.25. Both are served in the public old-age home in south Tel Aviv where he lives. But the food is not to his liking. Jakobovitz longs for the dishes he ate as a child in Transylvania-gefilte fish, goulash, chicken wings-rather than the rice-and-salad fare more typical of the Israeli diet. A restaurant he enjoys in the center of the city serves such Ashkenazi fare, but he can't afford it. For dinner, he eats leftovers from...

  • Understanding the deal with Iran

    Ben Sales, JTA|Dec 6, 2013

    TEL AVIV (JTA)—For the first time in a decade, the United States and a coalition of world powers have reached an agreement with Iran to curb the country’s nuclear program. The deal requires Iran to limit its nuclear enrichment and freeze most of its centrifuges for six months, as well as halt construction on its plutonium reactor. In exchange, the U.S.-led coalition—including Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany—will roll back some of the sanctions on Iran. Both the United States and Iran have strongly praised the deal, but Israeli...

  • Israeli companies aim to zap brain diseases

    Ben Sales, JTA|Nov 15, 2013

    JERUSALEM (JTA)—It looks like a futuristic salon hair dryer. Connected to a computer by a bright orange strip, the half-cube with rounded corners sits comfortably atop the head, a coil of wires resting on the skull. As a doctor stands at the computer, the patient gets comfortable. A few seconds later, a brief electromagnetic pulse hits the head. Do this every weekday for six weeks, doctors tell Alzheimer’s patients, and you’ll feel your brain come back to life. The technique, known as transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, uses elect...

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