Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA) — In a supermarket here, Ohad David made a beeline for the most expensive olive oil in the store. He took three bottles of the award-winning Midnight Coratina brand, which goes for about $3 per ounce. It has “medium potency, green fruitiness and a green-leaf, grassy bouquet,” according to its description on the website of Ptora, the boutique olive oil factory that makes it. But David, a 40-year-old insurance agent and father of five, did not buy the oil for its taste. Like thousands of Ort...
(JTA) - The past few years have been tumultuous at 10 Downing St., the residence of the British prime minister in London. Last week, Liz Truss, who lasted just over six weeks in the role, became the third prime minister to resign since 2019. But the succession of Conservative Party leaders has kept some things steady: they have all had strong ties with mainstream British Jewry and professed a right-leaning foreign policy that is staunchly pro-Israel and hawkish on its enemies in the region. Rish...
(JTA) - Why haven't Russian troops more forcefully attacked Dnipro, the Ukrainian city that is a spiritual center of the Chabad Hasidic Orthodox movement? According to one provocative Ukrainian Jewish oligarch, the answer is an ancient Kabbalistic curse against Russia's Vladimir Putin. Hennady Korban, who was stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship last month, told NV, a Ukrainian broadcaster, that he had initiated the curse, known as Pulsa Denura, against Putin - and that the Russian leader knew...
(JTA) - Negotiating the bomb-scarred roads of eastern Ukraine is the easy part of Ilya Pulin's day as he delivers food and medicine across eastern Ukraine as a volunteer. The difficult part, he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, is finding and paying for fuel in the war-torn country. Since Russia invaded in February, "fuel prices have doubled. There are hour-long lines at petrol stations. And until a few days ago there was a five-gallon ration per person," said Pulin, a 38-year-old Jewish...
JERUSALEM (JTA) - Joe Biden became the first U.S. president to attend the Maccabiah Games on Thursday. The audience at the opening ceremony of the 21st Maccabiah games showered Biden with affection as thousands cheered "Joe" repeatedly and shouted things like "we love you Mr. President" at Teddy Stadium in Jerusalem. Biden, flanked by Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Israeli President Isaac Herzog, waved a baseball cap emblazoned with the letters USA for several minutes as the crowd...
JERUSALEM (JTA) - After releasing a joint statement that demonstrates unity on the need to counter the Iranian nuclear threat, U.S. president Joe Biden and Israeli prime minister Yair Lapid gave statements that demonstrate radical differences in their approach to doing so. The document released on Thursday, the second day of Biden's visit to Israel, is a 1,500-word statement titled "The Jerusalem Declaration on the U.S.-Israel Strategic Partnership." It states that the United States is...
JERUSALEM (JTA) - Joe Biden dispensed with both social distancing and the chair arranged for him Wednesday as he embraced two Holocaust survivors, then knelt to speak with them during his first trip to Israel as U.S. president. "I'm very excited about the meeting and also a little scared of it," Rene Quint, 86, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency ahead of the scheduled encounter - a brief conversation that she and another survivor, Giselle Cycowicz, 95, were scheduled to have with Biden at Yad...
TEL AVIV (JTA) — Joe Biden kicked off his 10th trip to Israel — and first as U.S. president — on Wednesday by declaring that the relationship between the two countries is “bone-deep.” Biden told Israeli President Isaac Herzog “I am home,” according to Herzog’s office, and he attempted to prove it right away. Speaking at Ben Gurion Airport, Biden recounted his extensive personal history with Israel, including a 1973 meeting with then-prime minister Golda Meir that is a favorite — if sometimes embroidered — anecdote. “Now as president, I’m pro...
(JTA) — Pinchas Goldschmidt, who left Russia following its invasion of Ukraine, is no longer the chief rabbi of Moscow after 30 years with the title. The board of the Moscow Jewish Religious Society voted last month to support a contract extension for Goldschmidt, even though he had been in Israel for some time. But the RBC, a Russian news organization, reported Wednesday that the group, which represents Goldschmidt’s congregation and office, said he no longer had a role there. “The contract has ended. … There is no question of success...
(JTA) – For many Britons, Boris Johnson's tenure as prime minister will have been defined by scandals like the one that forced him to resign on Thursday. For Jewish Britons, the memories might well include a broken menorah. Elected in 2019, the Conservative Party leader announced Thursday that he would step down after his cabinet collapsed amid his latest scandal - the way Johnson handled the case of a senior official who had been accused of sexual abuse. Johnson has also come under criticism f...
(JTA) — More than four months into its devastating war against Russia, Ukraine is sending a new message to the world’s Jews: Don’t come here for Rosh Hashanah. Tens of thousands of Jews flood into Uman, a central city that is home to the grave of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, a 18th-century Jewish luminary, annually for the Jewish new year. Even in the first year of the pandemic, when global travel ground to a halt and the gathering was officially banned, Jewish pilgrims sought to make their way to Uman. This year, their security cannot be guara...
(JTA) — Ahead of his first presidential visit to Israel, Joe Biden congratulated Yair Lapid on becoming prime minister on Thursday, following the resignation of his predecessor Naftali Bennett. “Congratulations to @YairLapid, Israel’s new Prime Minister, and thank you to Alternate Prime Minister @NaftaliBennett for your friendship over the past year. I look forward to seeing you both in July to celebrate the unbreakable U.S.-Israel partnership,” Biden wrote on Twitter shortly after Lapid assumed the premiership. Biden is scheduled to visit I...
BUDAPEST (JTA) — For the last few months, a lakeside palace linked to a major political scandal in Hungary has been home to Jewish refugees from Ukraine. Just before Passover, six weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Hungarian government signed off on an effort to makes the palace in Balatonőszöd, a resort town on the the lakes of Lake Balaton some 80 miles away from Budapest, kosher for the holiday. Now, the palace will be renovated to accommodate at least 664 people with a kosher kitchen able to feed hundreds more daily, according to a s...
(JTA) — The head of the Jewish Community of Porto, Portugal said that a criminal investigation stemming from the organization’s role in vetting Jews with Sephardic ancestry for Portuguese citizenship amounts to antisemitic persecution by officials. In an unusually harsh letter to lawmakers last week, Gabriel Senderowicz said the probe was perpetrating a “Holocaust against families.” And in a sign of splits among the country’s Jews, a former leader of the Jewish community of Lisbon dismissed Senderowicz’s allegations as baseless and “absurd.” S...
BUDAPEST (JTA) — Antisemitic sentiment is especially prevalent in Italy and Hungary, according to multiple surveys. But a first-of-its-kind index combining different measures of Jewish experience found that they are also the best countries in Europe for Jews to live in. The index, unveiled Monday, is based on a study that combines polling data and policy information to create a single quality-of-life metric for Jews in the 12 European Union countries with sizable Jewish communities, according to Daniel Staetsky, a statistician with the L...
(JTA) - Amid controversies concerning the Vatican's Holocaust-era record, Pope Francis and the head of Israel's state museum on the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, met for a first-of-its-kind talk. Yad Vashem Director Dani Dayan met with the pope Thursday at his office in the Vatican. During their 30-minute talk, they spoke about ways to "bolster collaborative activities" in areas of "Holocaust remembrance, education and documentation, and to discuss efforts to fight antisemitism and racism worldwide,"...
(JTA) — French President Emmanuel Macron has appointed as prime minister Élisabeth Borne, a former cabinet minister whose father, Joseph Bornstein, was a Polish Holocaust survivor who died by suicide when she was 11. Borne, a 61-year-old former Socialist Party politician who previously had served as labor minister, is the second woman to hold the post and one of several people with Jewish roots, including Laurent Fabius and Leon Blum. Joseph Bornstein and his three brothers, Isaac, Albert and Leon, were born to Polish-Jewish immigrants in Be...
(JTA) - The series "Heirs to the Land" that dropped on Netflix last month looks, at first glance, like just another installment in the fast-growing genre of Spanish period dramas. In some ways it is, featuring the familiar mix of romance, violence and a liberal dramatization of key historical events in medieval Spain that have made international hits out of several recent Spanish productions such as "Isabel" and "El Cid." But "Heirs to the Land" also takes a deep dive into what it meant to live...
(JTA) - French prosecutors indicted two men for assaulting a Jewish man, Jérémie Cohen, seconds before he ran under the wheels of a tram and was fatally wounded. One of the two suspects, aged 27, is accused of "intentional violence in public." The other one, aged 23, is being charged with "intentional violence which led to involuntary manslaughter," according to a statement Friday by the prosecutor's office of Bobigny, the Paris suburb where the incident occurred on Feb. 16. The indictment d...
NOF HAGALIL, Israel (JTA) - During Veronika Maidanova's first two days attending school in Israel, the 8-year-old felt completely lost. "Everyone spoke Hebrew and I didn't understand anything," she recalled, weeks after fleeing her native Ukraine for the safety, but unfamiliarity, of Israel. Then her mother heard about a school focused on new immigrants where 90 percent of students speak Russian. She quickly enrolled Veronica in the Shuvu Renanim school in Nof Hagalil, a city of 41,000 in the...
(JTA) — When it comes to consuming matzah, the Jews of the former Soviet Union are in a league of their own. At the top of the chart are Azerbaijan’s 8,000 Jews, who this year are expected to consume 10 tons of the unleavened bread cracker that Jews eat on the week of Passover to commemorate their ancestors’ hurried flight out of Egypt. That’s a provision of 2.7 pounds per person – a ratio that’s nearly three times what’s on stock for the average soldier in the Israeli army. In Russia, home to about 155,000 Jews, the rate of consumption i...
(JTA) - Fleeing Odessa with 300 Jewish orphans, Rabbi Shlomo Baksht was terrified that Russian bombs would hit his convoy's three buses. Twice during the 27-hour trip from the city in Ukraine's south to the Carpathian mountains in its western part, the drivers hired by Baksht's group, Tikva, had to stop and the children needed to leave the bus quickly due to sirens. "Now it's calm and safe," said Baksht, whose 15 counselors and 300 children traveled during Shabbat to reach the Carpathian...
(JTA) — Ambo Anthos, the Amsterdam-based publishing house that printed the Dutch-language translation of a controversial book alleging that a Jew had betrayed Anne Frank, has apologized for not reviewing the material more critically and ceased printing new copies of it on Monday. The book “The Betrayal of Anne Frank,” published earlier this month by the Canadian author Rosemary Sullivan, hypothesizes that the teenage diarist and her family were turned over to the Nazis by Arnold van den Bergh, a notary and a member of the Jewish Council, which...
(JTA) – The Simon Wiesenthal Center, named for the famed Nazi hunter who died in 2005, defines itself as "a Jewish global human rights organization researching the Holocaust and hate in a historic and contemporary context." The center's associate dean, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, has helped to defuse antisemitism controversies involving celebrities for decades, such as the recent one surrounding Nick Cannon in 2020, in which Cooper personally engaged in several dialogue sessions with Cannon. Other W...
(JTA) - A team of researchers said they have identified the person who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis 80 years ago: a Jewish notary forced to work for the Nazis. The man identified by a cold-case team that has been working for six years to identify the persons responsible for the discovery of the Franks by Nazi authorities in occupied Amsterdam was Arnold van den Bergh, a notary and a member of the Jewish Council, which the Nazis established to better control Dutch Jews. The...
