Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 451 - 475 of 478
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...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—Minutes after a terrorist attack killed three at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, doctors and nurses at the city’s hospitals faced a harrowing scene—severed limbs, burned bodies, shrapnel buried in skin. For Boston doctors, the challenge presented by last week’s bombing was unprecedented—but they were prepared. Many of the city’s hospitals have doctors with actual battlefield experience. Others have trauma experience from deployments on humanitarian missions, like the one that followed the Haitian earthquake, and have le...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—Natan Sharansky said the implementation of his plan to expand the non-Orthodox prayer site at the Western Wall could begin in as little as one month. In an interview April 11 with JTA, Sharansky sounded cautiously optimistic about his proposal to create an egalitarian space equal in size to the current men’s and women’s sections combined. The Jewish Agency for Israel chairman was charged last year with finding a solution to mounting tensions over women’s prayer at the Western...
TEL AVIV (JTA) — When Yityish Aynaw immigrated from Ethiopia to Israel at age 12, she was thrust into an Israeli classroom. An orphan lacking Hebrew skills, Aynaw says she relied on other kids and her own sheer ambition to get through. Ten years later Aynaw, 22, is the first Ethiopian-Israeli to be crowned Miss Israel—a title she hopes to use to showcase Israel’s diversity. “Israel really accepts everybody,” she told JTA. “That I was chosen proves it.” Ethiopian and other African-Israe...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—President Obama had three goals for his first presidential trip to Israel. He wanted to persuade Israelis that the United States is committed to preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. He wanted to promote the renewal of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, albeit without any specific “deliverables.” Most of all, however, he wanted to charm the pants off the Israeli people. He dropped Hebrew phrases into his speeches. He quoted the Talmud. He invoked the story of Passo...
HERZLIYA, Israel (JTA)—Four weeks ago, militants in Gaza landed a rocket near the Israeli city of Ashkelon. Three weeks ago, Egypt raised its state of emergency in the Sinai Peninsula, warning of an increase in jihadist activity there. Two weeks ago, a rock thrown by a West Bank Palestinian critically wounded a 3-year-old Israeli girl. And last week, Israel plans to ask the United States for support should it strike Syrian weapons convoys en route to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Along both its n...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—He’s had to bite a few bullets to get there, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will lead Israel’s next government. Barring a last-minute surprise, Israel’s new governing coalition was to be sworn in this week: a center-right grouping of Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud-Beiteinu faction, the centrist Yesh Atid party, the religious nationalist Jewish Home party, the center-left Hatnua led by Tzipi Livni and the tiny, centrist Kadima. In total, the coalition will include 7...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—When President Obama visits Israel next week, Gavriel Yaakov wants him to jump-start the peace process. “I’m excited,” said Yaakov, 67, sitting in a Tel Aviv mall. “I want negotiations to get to an agreement on a long-term peace with the Palestinians.” Yaakov said he trusts Obama, but his friend, Yossi Cohen, is more skeptical. “I’m not excited,” said Cohen, 64, who charged that the president supports Islamists and “hasn’t done anything” to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon. “No one has helped,” Cohen said. “Whoever thinks there...
AIRPORT CITY, Israel (JTA)—An Israeli soldier sits in an office chair in an air-conditioned metal chamber staring at two screens side by side. One shows a map with a moving dot. The other displays a video feed. Next to the soldier are three more identical stations. The soldier isn’t an air traffic controller but a pilot, and his aircraft is called an unmanned aerial system, more commonly known as a drone. Welcome to the next generation of the Israeli Air Force. Israel long has relied on sup...
MAJDAL SHAMS, Israel (JTA)—At first glance, the identification cards of young Druze men looked identical to those of any Israeli, with a number, photo, name and address. The only difference is the citizenship line: Instead of listing “Israeli,” most of the Druze cards are blank. “If someone takes citizenship, he’s labeled as an extremist,” said Wafa Abusela, 19, sitting with his friends in a cafe in Majdal Shams, a Druze city in the northwest corner of the Golan Heights. “People won’t talk to hi...
