Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA)—One week before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, dozens of European officials arrived in Poland for a large commemoration event at Auschwitz. The delegation from the Brussels-based European Jewish Association visited the former Nazi death camp, located about 20 miles from Krakow, on Tuesday. Few of the officials, however, took time from their busy agendas to meet with elderly Holocaust witnesses, whose numbers decrease every year. One exception was Jan Jambon, the prime minister of the Flemish state in Belgium. On Monday, J...
LONDON (JTA)—Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party has defeated Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party by a large margin in Britain’s general elections on Thursday, exit polls indicate. The Conservatives received 368 seats out of 650 according to the polls by BBC, ITV and Sky News, with Labour lagging far behind with 191. Actual results from voting stations are expected to begin trickling in at about 2 a.m. local time on Friday. Many British Jews have said the elections are particu...
(JTA)-The U.N.'s leading cultural body was scheduled to vote this month on whether to remove a Belgian carnival that had hosted a float seen as mocking Jews from its list of important human cultural expressions. But the carnival's organizers decided they wouldn't wait for a possible censure and instead gave up the designation on its own. On Sunday, the city of Aalst said it wanted to withdraw the Aalst Carnival from the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. It...
(JTA)—The U.N.’s leading cultural body was scheduled to vote this month on whether to remove a Belgian carnival that had hosted a float seen as mocking Jews from its list of important human cultural expressions. But the carnival’s organizers decided they wouldn’t wait for a possible censure and instead gave up the designation on its own. On Sunday, the city of Aalst said it wanted to withdraw the Aalst Carnival from the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. It would be the first time an item had been removed...
(JTA)-The day after he turned 100, Jozef Walaszczyk prepared to attend yet another Holocaust commemoration ceremony in his native Warsaw. Walaszczyk is Poland's oldest living Righteous Among the Nations – a title given by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust museum to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust – and he attends several such events each year. But he was in for a different experience when a Ferrari pulled up to his apartment building Thursday to take him to the eve...
(JTA)—Jordan reclaimed two pieces of land leased by Israel as part of a 1994 peace agreement. King Abdullah II announced Sunday that Jordan would “impose our full sovereignty on every inch” of the properties known in Jordan as Ghumar and Al-Baqoura, and in Israel as Tzofar and Naharaim, also known as the Isle of Peace. Thousands of Israelis visited Naharaim and its peace park on Saturday for a final look before Israeli troops closed off the territory. Reports said that Jordan would allow farmers to harvest what they planted in Tzofar befor...
(JTA)-Ukraine is in the news now for its ties to the Trump impeachment scandal, but this year also marks the fifth anniversary of a turbulent revolution that roiled the country and ousted its then-president. In 2014, anti-government demonstrations became violent, and clashes with police led to the deaths of dozens of protesters. Ukraine's parliament voted to oust President Viktor Yanyukovych, and voters elected Petro Poroshenko-who was replaced earlier this year by Zolodymyr Zelensky, the...
ODESSA, Ukraine (JTA)—Alina Feoktistova always knew she was Jewish, but the first time she sought contact with the community was to see if it could pay her tuition. Feoktistova’s family couldn’t afford to send her to college, but the local Jewish community provides an alternative in the form of the Jewish University of Odessa, an accredited institution that offers tuition and room and board at no charge. Founded in 2003, the university features five-year programs in a number of fields, including foreign language, early childhood educa...
(JTA)-A Muslim man from Albania who saved Jews during the Holocaust will attend an event in Poland honoring rescuers from across Europe. Xhemal Veseli, 93, who is among a handful of Muslim rescuers alive today, will travel to Warsaw with Albania's foreign minister, Edmond Panariti, whose family also saved Jews from the Holocaust. They will attend in Warsaw an event titled "An Evening for the Righteous" on Nov. 14. "In the remarkably fragmented and aggressive world we live in today, religion...
(JTA)-The identity of the German synagogue attacker may have sounded familiar to American Jews, who have endured multiple attacks by far-right extremists over the past year. But the suspect's identity was more surprising for Jews in Western Europe. The murder of two people in Halle on Yom Kippur was the first lethal anti-Semitic assault in decades in that region by a far-right extremist. Most of the terrorist attacks against Jews there over the past 30 years have been carried out by radical...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)—Following a protracted legal fight, the family of Irma Klein last year finally got Dutch restitution officials to recognize that the Nazi occupation forced Klein to sell her Wassily Kandinsky painting to this city’s municipal Stedelijk Museum for a fraction of its worth. That was in 1940, several months into the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, when Klein and her husband sold “Painting with Houses” for the modern-day equivalent of about $1,600 because they needed money t...
(JTA)—When Israel announced that it would deny entry to Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, the decision struck many as an unprecedented step. But Israel has blocked multiple lawmakers from coming in recent years. The difference this time is that it’s lawmakers from the United States who are being declared persona non grata. That’s a significant difference, given the closeness of the U.S.-Israel relationship—a link so crucial to Israel that the country’s diplomacy vis-à-vis the United States is often conducted according to its own set of rul...
(JTA)-Those close to Dvir Sorek, the 19-year-old student who was murdered Thursday in a West Bank terrorist attack, described him as a unique young man. One of his friends from the West Bank settlement of Ofra, where Sorek's family lives, described him to Ynet as "an upstanding person, a poet, a musician with a special connection to nature." This is perhaps the reason that he chose to give an unusual goodbye gift to his teachers at the West Bank religious seminary, or yeshiva, he attended:...
BUDAPEST (JTA)-When journalists ask Agnes Keleti about her health, she gently smiles and slowly extends her right hand in apparent gratitude for the question. Keleti yanks anyone who is foolish enough to grasp her hand with enough force to throw them off their balance. Then she replies: "I'm fine, thanks. Yourself?" Such agility, defiance and humor are traits that helped Keleti, 98, survive the Holocaust in hiding and become Hungary's most successful living athlete. She has no fewer than 10...
\BUDAPEST (JTA)-More than 2,000 Jewish athletes from 42 countries and thousands of spectators gathered at a stadium in the Hungarian capital for the opening of the 15th European Maccabi Games. With 180 athletes, Israel sent its largest ever delegation to Tuesday's opening ceremony of the event, which is the 15th edition of a tournament that take place every four years at a different European city. This year's games, which takes place at several venues, includes 20 categories, including...
(JTA)-In the capital of Lithuania, an institution formerly known as the Museum of Genocide Victims barely mentions the murder of nearly all the country's Jews by Nazis and locals, focusing instead on the years of abusive Soviet rule. In Kaunas, Lithuania's second-largest city, another so-called museum hosts festivals and summer camps on the grounds of a former concentration camp for Jews known as the Seventh Fort, where the victims are not commemorated. In the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, a...
(JTA)—No matter their political affiliation, all sides can agree that Boris Johnson, who has secured his Conservative Party’s vote to become the United Kingdom’s next prime minister, is a colorful character. As the mayor of London, a position he held for eight years until 2016, Johnson was lampooned by the media for his buffoonery. In one incident, he was wearing a helmet and waving British flags when he got stuck on a zip line that was supposed to be his dramatic entrance into the Olympic Park that year. Also in ’16, his first year as foreign...
(JTA)-An estimated 50,000 people have visited the resting place of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, ahead of the 25th anniversary of his passing. The pilgrimage to the burial site in Queens, New York, known as the Ohel has taken place over the past week ahead of the anniversary Saturday, the 3rd of Tamuz on the Hebrew calendar, according to a spokesman for the late rabbi's Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement. Schneerson headed the movement from 1950 until his passing in 1994-a...
(JTA)-In a few months, Simone Azoubel will realize a lifelong dream and move to Israel with her husband. A 56-year-old Jewish woman from Recife in northern Brazil, Azoubel is brushing up on her Israeli slang as she prepares for her aliyah, the Hebrew word for immigration by Jews to Israel. The preparations are hectic, but Azoubel finds time to reflect on how much of her identify and life trajectory she owes to her grandmother-namely, the older woman's deathbed revelation of her own Jewish...
PARIS (JTA)-As a French celebrity philosopher, Alain Finkielkraut belongs to a tiny group of VIPs who get to lead normal, paparazzi-free lives despite having film star-like recognizability here. Unlike most countries, France makes celebrities out of intellectual heroes. They're revered, quoted and featured regularly on primetime television and even in film. But unlike many celebrities, intellectual stars are spared the spying and harassment from the media and over-eager fans. French VIP...
(JTA)-Theresa May, who announced her resignation on Friday as the prime minister of the United Kingdom, will be remembered as one of her country's shortest-serving and least popular leaders. Blamed by supporters of Britain's departure from the European Union for delivering what they consider half measures, she was loathed also by opponents of that plan for her efforts to push it forward. Ultimately, her desperate balancing act came to an end following the umpteenth failure in Parliament of one...
KRAKOW, Poland (JTA)-At the age of 93, Holocaust survivor Ed Mosberg is saying his goodbyes to the city of his birth. Flanked by two physicians who accompanied him all the way from New Jersey, Mosberg, who made his fortune in construction after surviving several Nazi concentration camps, traveled here Tuesday as he has done for at least 20 years to participate in the commemorative March of the Living through the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz near Krakow. But suffering from recently diagnosed...
(JTA)—For most of his adult life, Sammy Ghozlan has worked with French authorities fighting crime. Ghozlan, 75, started as a police officer, ascending through the ranks to become a police commissioner in the Paris area. And since 2002 he has headed one of French Jewry’s most prominent watchdog groups. The National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism, or BNVCA, specializes in documenting hate crimes against Jews and helping victims bring offenders to justice. Ghozlan, who moved to Israel in 2015, “generally had confidence in the Frenc...
(JTA)-Two Jewish billionaires have pledged a total of $122 million toward the restoration of Paris' Notre Dame cathedral, which was ravaged in a fire. Lily Safra, a Brazilian philanthropist, said she would give $22 million to fund the restoration efforts of the iconic church, which was badly damaged Monday, Correio 24 Horas reported. And Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, the French owner of L'Oreal, pledged another $100 million, according to CBS. The donations account for about 17 percent of the...
(JTA)-Portugal used to be little more than a sunny holiday destination to Adam Perry, a 46-year-old Londoner who works in procurement. But following the United Kingdom's 2016 vote to leave the European Union, Perry, who is a Sephardic Jew, applied for citizenship in the Iberian nation. Since 2015, legislation there and in Spain allows for the naturalization of descendants of refugees persecuted 500 years ago. Amid growing uncertainty over Brexit, whose deadline is March 29 (for now), applying...
