Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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TEL AVIV (JTA)—Two years ago, Hadassa Margolese became a symbol of resistance to haredi Orthodox domination after she allowed her 8-year-old daughter to tell an Israeli reporter how religious men had spit on her as she walked to school. The report made headlines around the world and cast Margolese into the spotlight as a defender of the rights and values of the Modern Orthodox community in Beit Shemesh, a city of approximately 75,000 just off the main highway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv w...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—Israel’s religious services minister, Naftali Bennett, has unveiled a temporary platform for non-Orthodox prayer at Robinson’s Arch, the archaeological site adjacent to the Western Wall plaza used by egalitarian groups. The platform, which will include Torah scrolls, prayer books and prayer shawls and be open at all hours, does not reach the Western Wall itself. A ramp leads from the 4,800-square-foot platform to a smaller area adjacent to the wall. Bennett’s office described the new platform “as an interim but primary place of...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—Dr. Mehmet Oz sat down to talk with JTA on the Tel Aviv coast last week, but what he really wanted to do was go to the beach. Oz, the surgeon and well-known TV personality, was in Israel for the first time and had a packed itinerary. He traversed the country from the Red Sea to the Golan, lectured Israeli physicians in a northern Israeli hospital and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His host on this whirlwind tour was Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the author and sexpert who l...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—The show was supposed to be a celebration of glamour and glitz, but in the second episode it dropped a bombshell: One of the protagonists’ husbands died of cardiac arrest. The five stars of “Meusharot,” Israel’s version of the “Real Housewives” reality series, handled the news in their own ways. One grappled with her feelings about death. Another baked a cake to bring to the shiva. Jennifer Snukal tried a different approach, arranging a sexy photo shoot that aimed to produce an...
ERUSALEM (JTA)—Early in the morning o, at the beginning of the Hebrew month of Av, the Western Wall plaza was a cacophonous mess. Women of the Wall, the activist group that holds women’s prayer services each month at the site known as the Kotel, loudly sang festive prayers at a spot far from the wall itself. Police had barricaded them there, ostensibly for their own protection. A few feet away, a group of haredi Orthodox boys shouted at them, called them Nazis, blew whistles, waved signs and...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—We don’t know. That’s the operative phrase of the new round of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks announced last Friday and ostensibly set to begin in the coming days in Washington. We don’t know their parameters, or if Israel will freeze settlements, release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners or agree to negotiate based on its pre-1967 borders. We don’t know whether the Palestinian Authority has agreed to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. We don’t know how long Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will hold off on taki...
BEERSHEVA, Israel (JTA)—In four years, it’s slated to be bigger than New York’s Central Park and consist of open fields, a sports complex, and a lake and a river filled with recycled water. Now, though, Beersheva River Park looks like much of the area surrounding the desert city of Beersheva: a panorama of sand and dirt, with a bit of trash and, on a good day, some dirty water trickling through a gorge. In one patch of empty space, workers in hard hats walk up and down rows of stadium seats...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—No praying. No kneeling. No bowing. No prostrating. No dancing. No singing. No ripping clothes. These are the rules that Jews must abide by when visiting the Temple Mount, the site where the First and Second Holy Temples once stood, located above and behind the Western Wall in the heart of Jerusalem’s Old City. Although the area is under Israeli sovereignty, the mount—known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif—is controlled by the Islamic Wakf, a joint Palestinian-Jordanian religio...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—For the second time in less than three years, Egypt is erupting in chaos, with a popular protest movement leading to a swift change in the country’s leadership. For Israelis, the Egyptian military’s removal of Mohamed Morsi from the presidency last week is a cause for optimism. An Islamist and a leading figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, Morsi’s brief tenure saw a further estrangement between Israel and Egypt. The Brotherhood advocates Israel’s destruction and supports Hamas, the terrorist group that governs in Gaza. And while...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—The large white poster is topped by a screaming headline written in large black letters: “Hell.” Posted on a wall in Jerusalem’s haredi Orthodox Mea Shearim neighborhood, the sign describes a development that threatens the community with “extinction” and “makes all living hearts tremble.” Known as a pashkvil in Yiddish, the signs are common in Mea Shearim, most of them announcing upcoming funerals or opportunities for Torah study. But several now predict impending doom...
It’s a familiar pattern. The citizens of a Middle Eastern state explode with frustration against their corrupt, repressive government. They gather for noisy, impassioned demonstrations in their capital city. The authorities react violently. Images of middle-aged women and wheelchair-bound individuals being tear-gassed, clubbed, and sprayed with water cannon race across social media platforms like wildfire. The protests then spread to other cities. The authorities step up their repression. And then, inevitably, the country’s political lea...
By Ben Sales SDEROT, Israel (JTA)—A thick concrete bomb shelter sits by the side of a central street in this embattled southern Israeli town, but Naomi Moravia can’t get inside. Shelters like this one are crucial in Sderot, which is about a mile from the Gaza Strip and is the frequent target of cross-border missile attacks that send residents running for cover. But Moravia can’t run. She can’t even get up on the sidewalk. Pushing a lever on her wheelchair, she rolls down the street looking...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—As the budding protest movement in Turkey against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan struggles to gain a foothold, Israel is watching the developments with some measure of ambivalence. On the one hand, Erdogan has led Turkey away from a close alliance with Israel, using his perch to castigate Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians and curtailing once-cozy military ties with the Israel Defense Forces. A popular uprising that leaves Erdogan politically wounded could be w...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—Rabbi Shmuel Pappenheim of the haredi Orthodox organization Eda Haharedit shares little common ground with Reform Rabbi Uri Regev, a religious pluralism activist. But when news broke last week that Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Yona Metzger, was arrested on suspicion of fraud and money laundering, Pappenheim and Regev had the same reaction: Who cares? For Pappenheim, the chief rabbi is a political figure who has scant influence as a religious leader. And to Regev, he rep...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—For much of the past two years, Israel has taken a singular approach to the Syrian civil war: Stay as far away as possible. But with a recent string of victories by forces loyal to President Bashar Assad and the crumbling of the U.N. peacekeeping force that has kept the peace along the border for four decades, the tack is becoming considerably harder. Assad’s statement that he had decided to engage in military action against Israel, published June 10 in an interview with a Lebanese paper, was followed by a terse warning fro...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—Israel’s plans to move ahead with the funding of non-Orthodox rabbis appeared to be a landmark achievement for Reform and Conservative leaders, who have long chafed at their second-class treatment by the Israeli government. But even as they welcomed last week’s news that the Ministry of Religious Services was revamping its policies to permit non-Orthodox rabbis to receive government-funded salaries, Reform and Conservative leaders were cautious in their optimism—and perhaps...
PALMACHIM, Israel (JTA)—As construction workers pass through sandy corridors between huge rectangular buildings at this desalination plant on Israel’s southern coastline, the sound of rushing water resonates from behind a concrete wall. Drawn from deep in the Mediterranean Sea, the water has flowed through pipelines reaching almost 4,000 feet off of Israel’s coast and, once in Israeli soil, buried almost 50 feet underground. Now, it rushes down a tube sending it through a series of filte...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—Dov Lipman has staked his budding political career on his reputation as a moderate haredi Orthodox leader, someone uniquely positioned to broker compromise between Israel’s increasingly polarized secular and religious communities. The problem is that Israel’s haredi leaders say he’s not actually haredi. Once seen as a possible bridge between Israel’s growing haredi community and the secular majority, Lipman, a freshman member of Knesset from the centrist Yesh Atid party, has weath...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—It was supposed to be the car of the future, a near-silent, battery-powered vehicle that would wean the West off its dependence on Middle Eastern oil and save the environment in the process. And an Israeli company seemed destined to build it. Better Place, founded in 2007 by the exuberantly confident entrepreneur Shai Agassi, was trumpeted as the king of Israeli startups, a company that would keep the air clean and the streets quiet while saving money for its users. Six years a...
By Ben Sales JERUSALEM (JTA)—Haredi Orthodox youths mobbed the Western Wall plaza by the thousands to protest Women of the Wall as they held their monthly prayer service. The youths, many of them students from haredi Orthodox yeshivas, filled the Western Wall Plaza by 6:40 a.m. on Friday, May 10, about 20 minutes before Women of the Wall, a women’s prayer group that holds monthly services at the site, also called the Kotel, began praying. Because haredi Orthodox women had packed the wom...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—Twice in three days, Israeli warplanes entered Syrian airspace and fired on suspected weapons caches bound for Hezbollah—and nothing has happened in response. Some experts are predicting that will continue to be the case following airstrikes near Damascus last Friday and Sunday that are widely believed to be the work of the Israel Defense Forces. According to reports, the strikes targeted shipments of long-range, Iranian-made Fateh-110 missiles capable of striking deep into Isr...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—Following a court ruling in their favor, leaders of an organization pushing for women’s prayer rights at the Western Wall have withdrawn their endorsement of Natan Sharansky’s compromise proposal to expand the egalitarian section there. A Jerusalem District Court ruled two weeks ago that Women of the Wall members who pray together in the regular women’s section of the Western Wall are not contravening the law. That was teh ruling at the Heritage deadline. Members of the group have been routinely arrested or detained in recent...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—To get married in Israel, Dima Motel had to bring his family photo album and two of his ancestors’ birth certificates to a rabbinical court. Then an investigator quizzed his mother in Yiddish. Israel’s Chief Rabbinate often asks Russian immigrants like Motel to prove that they’re Jewish, sometimes requiring documentary evidence that can be hard to obtain. Those who won’t submit to the process or who can’t firmly establish their Jewish bona fides can’t get legally married in th...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—The museum dedicated to the memory of Yitzhak Rabin raises nearly half its money from labor leaders. It’s just not the labor you think. Members of U.S. labor unions raised $1.4 million for the Yitzhak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv last year, 45 percent of the center’s total 2012 fundraising. Since 2005, American unions have raised $12 million for the center. Labor leaders say programs at the center, which celebrates the slain Labor Party prime minister who signed the 1993 Oslo Accor...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—Natan Sharansky’s proposal last week to expand the space for non-Orthodox prayer at the Western Wall could be historic. But for most Israelis, changes at the Western Wall are of only trivial interest. Far more pressing are state restrictions on marriage and conversion, Sabbath bans on public transit, and haredi Orthodox exemptions from Israel’s mandatory draft. The haredi draft exemption was a central issue in January’s elections for the Knesset, and it has been a hot topic o...
