Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 401 - 425 of 462
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
(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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
MAFRAQ, Jordan (JTA)-The purple plastic sacks fill two rooms in the otherwise sparsely furnished headquarters of a Jordanian NGO, awaiting distribution to Syrian refugees already lined up on the sidewalk. They contain an array of staple dry goods-lentils, pasta, powdered milk, tea-as well as a range of hygiene products like soap and detergent, enough for 250 refugee families. But before the goods were handed out, one thing will be removed-the word "Jewish." Going sack by sack with a pair of...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—Israel’s peace talks with the Palestinians remain mostly shrouded in secrecy, but one thing is certain: The Palestinian prisoner release that paved the way for their resumption is increasing tensions in Israel’s governing coalition. Israel completed the second stage of the four-part release on Tuesday, setting free 26 prisoners who had committed crimes—mostly murders—before the Israeli-Palestinian peace process began in 1993. The first stage of the prisoner release occurred in August. The government approved the release i...
BEIT SHEMESH, Israel (JTA)—It was only when her sons came at her with knives that she realized keeping quiet was not going to work. For nine years, her rabbis had told her not to speak up about her husband’s verbal, physical and sexual attacks. They assured her that the abuse would pass, that if she obeyed his every wish—folding his napkin just so or letting him do as he liked in bed—the attacks would end and he would stop telling their grown sons she was a bad mother. But when her sons began t...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—I didn’t need to ask directions. Stepping out of the Jerusalem Central Bus Station, I saw them, men in hats and coats walking together slowly, a steady stream moving east along one of Jerusalem’s central thoroughfares to the funeral of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. At 5 p.m., an hour before the funeral, the streets were already closed to cars, the capital’s rush-hour rigmarole giving way to foot traffic that was softer but no less intense. From a distance it looked homogenous. Aerial...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the Israeli sage who founded the Sephardic Orthodox Shas political party and exercised major influence on Jewish law, has died. Yosef died Monday at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem. He was 93. He served as Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi from 1973 to 1983, and extended his influence over the ensuing decades as the spiritual leader of Shas, which politically galvanized hundreds of thousands of Sephardic Israelis, though Yosef himself never served in Knes...
JERICHO, West Bank (JTA)—The Intercontinental Hotel Jericho’s towering brick palazzo, flanked by a row of palm trees leading to an ornate archway entrance, seems the very epitome of desert luxury. But inside, the hotel lobby—replete with marble floors and plush armchairs—stands empty on a recent weekday morning, save for a lone tourist rushing through wrapped in a towel. General manager Hisham Nammari said the hotel’s 181 rooms are sometimes full during the summer and that business is generally...
TEL AVIV (JTA)— Daniela Hayoum arrived at a Tel Aviv post office at 7 a.m. and took a number. The line of people waiting for gas masks was long and Hayoum stepped away to run errands. She returned in the afternoon to find hundreds of Israelis crowding under a hot sun on the building’s wide steps, some holding umbrellas and others food. On the street below, medics treated a woman suffering from the heat. On the sidewalk, men sold cold water and bagels. Hayoum began to push her way through. “Th...
