Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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AMSTERDAM (JTA)-The Netherlands' main Jewish weekly is the kingdom's oldest commercial magazine and one of its most reputable publications. Which is why many Dutch were shocked to read a column Tuesday by its editor announcing that she is leaving for Israel because of rising anti-Semitism here. "I am leaving for the only country where getting called a dirty Jew simply means I have to take a bath," wrote Esther Voet, the longtime editor in chief of the 155-year-old Nieuw Israelietisch Weekblad....
PALMA DE MALLORCA, Spain (JTA)-On this island south of Barcelona, Jews celebrate Purim these days pretty much as they do most anywhere else in Europe. There's the reading of the Book of Esther at the small synagogue near the marina, followed by a costume party bringing together the different contingents of Palma's Jewish population of several hundred: unaffiliated Israeli families, retired British sun lovers, Sephardic locals and French businessmen, to name a few. But only 50 years ago, Purim wa...
(JTA)-Though he may be one of France's best-known puppet makers, Michel Nedjar insists he does not really create the acclaimed and haunting figures that he calls his "Purim puppets." A former tailor's apprentice whose life's work last week went on display at the prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Lille, Nedjar says he merely "exhumes" his puppets to reconnect to his brethren who were murdered in the Holocaust, to his lover and mentor who died of AIDS - and to his Jewish roots. The talk of...
(JTA)-Participants in a street celebration in the Belgian city of Aalst paraded giant puppets of Orthodox Jews and a rat atop money bags. Dutch Chief Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs condemned the float Sunday at the annual Aalst Carnaval street celebration as "shocking." It contains "typical, anti-Semitic caricatures from 1939," he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The umbrella groups representing Flemish and French-speaking Jews in Belgium, FJO and CCOJB respectively, complained to the federal UNIA wat...
(JTA)—Even before he was old enough to vote, Justyn Trenner was already a supporter of Britain’s Labour Party. Trenner, now a 54-year-old financial adviser from London, had felt at home there thanks to Labour’s mild socialism and anti-racist agenda. That had made it a favorite for many British Jewish voters like him. But he and other Jews have become politically homeless. Trenner feels like he’s been driven out of Labour by the proliferation of anti-Semitic hate speech in the party ranks following the 2015 election of Jeremy Corbyn as its lea...
(JTA)-To the many employees and partners of Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, who died Wednesday at the age of 67, he was a man of vision whose enormous drive to succeed both facilitated and complicated his relentless efforts on behalf of the Jewish people. As head of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, or IFCJ, the New York-born rabbi raised more than $360 million in donations-mostly from Christians-for projects benefiting needy Jews and Arabs in Israel and beyond. To many thousands of o...
(JTA)-For most of her adult life, Rachel Riley was only vaguely aware of her Jewish ancestry. A moderately famous daytime game show television host, Riley, 33, is one of countless unaffiliated Jews in the United Kingdom-a country with 250,000 Jewish citizens and where synagogue attendance is at a historic low. "When I was a kid my mum would give us pepperoni pizza," she told The Times of London in an interview published Saturday, pointing out that she didn't keep kosher. On Chanukah, she added,...
LONDON (JTA)-Like countless world-class pianists, Nelly Ben-Or began playing piano at the age of 5 and never stopped. That discipline helped Ben-Or, 86, became an international concert pianist and the person most widely recognized for adapting the Alexander technique for posture and movement improvement for musicians. But unlike most of her peers, much of Ben-Or's musical training in her native Poland took place while her family was hiding in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, where her mother, Antonina...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-Despite its rustic charms, the dream home that Roxane van Iperen and her partner bought nearly ruined their marriage. Van Iperen, a 42-year-old novelist, underestimated the amount of renovating needed on the countryside estate east of Amsterdam. She bought the place in 2012 with Joris Lenglet as a home for the couple and their three children. "We almost separated by the time it was done," she recalled in a November interview on the NPO1 television channel. But amid "the arguing,...
(JTA)—In a genetic study of 6,589 people from five Latin American countries, about a quarter displayed traces of what may be Sephardic Jewish ancestry. Geneticist Juan-Camilo Chacón-Duque and his colleagues published their findings last week in Nature Communications magazine, in an article titled “Latin Americans show wide-spread Converso ancestry and imprint of local Native ancestry on physical appearance.” Converso is the Spanish-language word for people who converted from Judaism to Christianity during the Inquisition in Spain and Portug...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)—The last time that a stranger directed an anti-Semitic insult at me, I was carrying supplies for my son’s birthday party. It was on a Sunday afternoon on Dam Square. Carrying Star of David party decorations in a see-through bag, I paused to snap some pictures on my cellphone of an anti-Israel rally. I was busy sending them to a friend who had inquired about such events in the Netherlands when a bearded man sporting a Moroccan accent said loudly in my direction: “Cancer Jew. You’re all made up, you’re fake. You’re fake dogs....
KRIMPEN AAN DE IJSSEL, Netherlands (JTA)-For two years, the world's only seaworthy life-size replica of Noah's Ark has been wowing passengers traveling along Holland's Maas River. Built according to the specifications detailed in the Hebrew Bible, the 390-foot-long vessel towers to a height of 75 feet. It boasts enough wood to fell 12,000 trees. And its distinct form dominates the coastline of the small town hosting it deep in southern Holland's so-called Bible Belt. Dwarfing even some...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-Nothing about the appearance of object MB02280 at this city's Jewish Historical Museum suggests it is the capital's priciest Chanukah menorah, worth more than the average local price of a duplex home. Shaped like the body of a violin, it is only 16 inches tall. Its base cradles eight detachable oil cups intended to function as candles on Chanukah, when Jews light candles to commemorate a 167 BCE revolt against the Greeks. They are set against the menorah's smooth, reflective...
BRUSSELS (JTA)-Will security at American Jewish institutions now mirror that of Europe, with its police protection, armed guards, panic rooms and sterile zones at synagogues? It's a possibility that is being debated more seriously than ever before following the Tree of Life Congregation shooting Saturday in Pittsburgh in which a gunman killed 11 people. Rabbi Jack Moline, president of the Interfaith Alliance, told The Washington Post that posting armed guards outside synagogues in some places wo...
(JTA)—Moshe Aryeh Friedman may be mild-mannered, but the Antwerp rabbi certainly has a knack for publicity. An anti-Zionist activist from New York, Friedman, 47, has been accused—falsely, he has said—of denying the Holocaust during a 2006 conference organized by then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran. He has since repeatedly riled the Jewish community of the Belgian city where he has lived with his family since 2011. In 2013, Friedman got a judge to force a Jewish school for girls to admit two of his boys—a blow directed at a co...
(JTA)—A state-funded sports complex was built on a disused Jewish cemetery in southeastern Poland, several Jewish groups complained. The complex, comprising a basketball and soccer court, was inaugurated on Sept. 6 at a ribbon- cutting ceremony in Klimontow, a town located 20 miles northeast of Krakow, according to the municipality’s website. It said the project has received more than $90,000 in government funding. But according to the Shem Olam Holocaust museum near Hadera in Israel, the complex is located atop the former Jewish cemetery fo...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-Wandering the ornate streets of the city of Fes in northern Morocco, Noam Vazana heard several men singing a tune so familiar that it made her stop in her tracks. Vazana, a successful 35-year-old Israeli musician living here, was visiting her ancestors' country of birth for a performance at the Tanjazz festival in Tangier when she heard the tune. She began following the men through alleyways to a square where hundreds of locals were singing that same Arabic-language song at a...
WARSAW (JTA)-In the small park behind the only synagogue in this city to have survived World War II, Yoram Sztykgold looks around with a perplexed expression. An 82-year-old retired architect, Sztykgold immigrated to Israel after surviving the Holocaust in Poland. He tries in vain to recognize something from what used to be his childhood home. "It's no use," he says after a while. "To me this could be anywhere." Sztykgold's unfamiliarity with the part of Grzybowska Street where he spent his...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-Last year, Ron Simpson was still managing talent for a living. But within just a few months Simpson, a 34-year-old Jewish marketing professional and producer from Amsterdam with no experience in running a restaurant, launched an international chain of eateries with a partner. It is so wildly popular and innovative that seasoned food critics are celebrating it as a cultural symbol and zeitgeist indicator. As it turns out, all Simpson and partner Julien Zaal needed to take this...
(JTA)-A former guard at a Nazi concentration camp was deported to Germany overnight from the United States, where he had lived for decades. Jakiw Palij, 95, had lived in Queens, New York. He served as a guard at the Trawniki concentration camp near Lublin, Poland, during World War II, and may face prosecution in Germany for his actions. Members of New York's congressional delegation last year urged the Trump administration to deport Palij, whose citizenship was revoked in 2003 based on his...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-On July 19, Evelien Gans, one of the Netherlands' foremost scholars on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, jumped to her death from her fourth-story Amsterdam apartment, where she lived alone. Gans, 67, a retired professor at the University of Amsterdam who had struggled with clinical depression for years, prepared her suicide with characteristic meticulousness. She left a carefully worded note for her life partner, Frank Diamand, and a last will and testament for her sister. Yet...
(JTA)-It's been nearly three years since Jeremy Corbyn became the leader of Britain's Labour Party, and he has riled British Jews more than any other politician in recent history. Last week, Great Britain's three leading Jewish newspapers united in publishing a front-page editorial warning that a Corbyn premiership would constitute an "existential threat to Jewish life in this country." In May, the previous president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews said Corbyn has "anti-Semitic views"...
DEVENTER, Netherlands (JTA)-Four years ago, Tom Furstenberg proudly carried into his synagogue its first Torah scroll since the Holocaust, when local Nazis destroyed the building's interior. The scroll's introduction in 2014 was an important moment for the Beth Shoshana Masorti community that Furstenberg helped establish in 2010 in this city of nearly 100,000 residents located 60 miles east of the capital Amsterdam. After all, it was proof that Jewish life had finally returned to a place where i...
(JTA)—The company that manages an apartment complex in France has ordered a Jewish family to remove a mezuzah from the doorframe. The Foncière Bergé Corp. cited its regulations last week in a letter to the Saada family in Montpelier, in southern France, according to what appears to be a copy published on Twitter. During a July 5 inspection of the company’s real estate, “a mezuzah was encountered on your doorframe,” Fabienne Nourigat of its rental department wrote to the family in a letter dated July 6. “We remind you that no personal ob...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-You can call a taxi, order a hamburger, rent a film and buy a book with a few clicks of a smartphone. So why shouldn't it be as easy to score a set of tefillin? That, at least, was the question that led to the launch last month of Wrapp-an app its creator calls "the Uber of the tefillin world." It connects those who have tefillin-leather straps attached to a set of two small boxes containing scripture on parchment-with Jews who need them for morning prayers or other rituals. And...
