Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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MALMO, Sweden (JTA)-When Carinne Sjoberg dissolved the Jewish Community of Umea in northern Sweden, she knew it would send shockwaves far beyond the small congregation that she had spent decades building. The move in May owed to intimidation by neo-Nazis, making it the first time in decades that a Jewish organization in Western Europe acknowledged that it felt compelled to close shop over safety concerns. Neo-Nazis from the Nordic Resistance Movement, beginning in 2016, pasted stickers with...
(JTA)—German prosecutors have identified three suspects from a 2014 list of nine alleged Holocaust-era war criminals accused of shooting countless Jews. Kurt G., Herbert W. and Wilhelm Karl Friedrich Hoffmeister, allegedly members of the firing squads that murdered Jews in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust, have been under pretrial investigation for months for alleged war crimes and participation in genocide, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Eastern Europe director, Efraim Zuroff, told JTA on Thursday. Each case is being handled by a dif...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-More than 70 years have passed since Meijer van der Sluis first laid eyes on the love of his life. He was at a home for child survivors of the Holocaust, and he opened the door for her. He still remembers her short haircut and exactly what she wore that day. "It was a black army coat," van der Sluis, 91, of Amsterdam, recalls in a critically acclaimed documentary that aired last month in the Netherlands about his wife of 65 years, Tedje. "It hit me hard. I fell in love. It...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-As a seasoned ghost writer who specializes in biographies, Miriam Dubi-Gazan says there is no such thing as a boring life story. Her attention to detail, creativity and editing skills yield satisfying results even for clients whose resumes are not exactly the stuff of spy novels (think retired bankers, plastics manufacturers, midlevel civil servants and family doctors), she says. But Dubi-Gazan's own astonishing life story needs none of the tricks of her trade. Born in 1945 to...
(JTA)—A Ukrainian military prosecutor suggested that Jews seek bloodshed in his country, prompting calls for his dismissal by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and others. Col. Gen. Anatoliy Matios, Ukraine’s chief military prosecutor and a highly decorated officer who also holds the title of deputy prosecutor-general of Ukraine, spoke about at least one Jew in an interview that the Insider magazine published Monday. In it, he named a communist Jewish theoretician, Alexander Parvus, and said the revolution Parvus supported “drenched Slavs with blood...
(JTA)—A town in Estonia unveiled a plaque honoring a Waffen SS officer, spurring protests from the Jewish community. A nonprofit unveiled the plaque in Mustla for the local Nazi collaborator Alfons Rebane, who fought with the Germans against the Russians as part of the Nazi armed force. Across Eastern Europe, collaborators with the Nazis, including perpetrators of the Holocaust, are celebrated as heroes, often for their fight against what many in the region consider Soviet occupation. There is no evidence that Rabane was involved in the m...
COPENHAGEN, Denmark (JTA)-In 2015, a jihadist killed a Jewish guard outside this capital city's main synagogue, where Hannah Bentow was having her bat mitzvah party. Her sense of security as a Jew in Denmark was shattered, she told JTA last week. Bentow and dozens of teenagers stayed inside for long uncertain minutes as police pursued and later killed the man who gunned down the volunteer guard, Dan Uzan. But Bentow said her decision to leave for Israel as soon as she turns 18 was sealed and rea...
(JTA)-Josef Kopf survived Sobibor by killing a guard and staging the first successful escape from that death camp in Poland, where the Nazis murdered 250,000 Jews. But Kopf, whose unlikely escape in 1943 preceded by several months a full-scale uprising at Sobibor, did not live to see Nazi Germany's defeat. After the liberation in 1944, he returned to his hometown of Turobin to reclaim some possessions-and was never seen or heard from again. "We always assumed Josef was killed by a local, but we...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)—Each spring, the televised Eurovision song contest captivates the continent in ways that outsiders can never hope to understand. A sort of Olympics for patriotic power pop, Eurovision might attract the interest of, say, Jews outside of Europe only when the Israeli entry is a strong contender, like this year’s unorthodox number “Toy” by Netta Barzilai. But while Jewish pride is a sidebar at the $180 million Eurovision contest, it is front and center at Jewrovision—a Jewish version of the Eurovision song contest which took plac...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-The debate about wearing a kippah in Western Europe returned only a decade or so ago, but it has nonetheless come to follow a rigid pattern even in that short period of time. The cycle-there have been dozens of such cases-begins with an anti-Semitic assault. It prompts a Jewish community official to warn congregants not to wear the Jewish skullcap in a certain area or at certain periods to avoid inviting further violent attacks. This triggers a wave of indignation that often exce...
LONDON (JTA)-Keith Walker was having a sandwich in Parliament Square when he saw something that made him sit up straight and cut short his lunch. What did the 42-year-old activist for disabled people's rights find so fascinating? It was three billboards on wheels that circled around the square for several long minutes last week during one of its busiest days of the year. They carried text accusing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn of tolerating anti-Semitism in the party. Inspired by the...
KRAKOW, Poland (JTA)-At one of Poland's plushest synagogues, leaders of this city's small but vibrant Jewish community welcomed visitors from around the world to a celebration of what the hosts call their minority's "revival" in this country. The occasion for the party Sunday at Tempel Synagogue was the 10th anniversary of the adjacent Jewish Community Center of Krakow, located in the heart of the city's historic Jewish quarter, Kazimierz. Since its opening in 2008, the three-story building,...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)—When Barry Vingerling asked his employers at the Anne Frank House whether it was okay for him to start coming to work wearing a kippah, he did it mostly as a courtesy. “I hadn’t expected this to be an issue,” Vingerling, 25, told the Dutch-Jewish NIW weekly in an interview. “I work at the house of Anne Frank, who had to hide because of her identity. Should I have to hide mine in that same house?” His bosses’ answer to this question appeared to be “yes.” Suggesting at first that he wear a hat on top of his skullcap, they di...
WESTERBORK, Netherlands (JTA)-On a foggy Sunday, cheerful cabaret music pierces the silence that hangs over this former concentration camp, one of the largest facilities of its kind in Nazi-occupied Western Europe. Blasting from the recorder of an Israeli visitor last month, the music draws disapproving looks and remarks from several locals touring the grounds in respectful silence. They find the sound of music inappropriate at a place whose name in the Netherlands is synonymous with wholesale...
REYKJAVIK, Iceland (JTA)-At a windswept harbor of this Nordic capital, a bearded man wearing a black hat dips eating utensils into the icy water while hissing from pain induced by the bitter cold. Perplexed by the spectacle, a caretaker helpfully offers to let the man and his three companions use a washing basin to clean their dishes instead of precariously bending over the freezing water. "Thank you, but we need to do it in the sea," one of the men, 27-year-old Avi Feldman of New York, tells...
ENSCHEDE, Netherlands (JTA)-For most matzah bakeries, Passover is their lifeline and only claim to financial viability. After the weeklong holiday, during which Jews are commanded to consume matzah to commemorate their ancestors' hurried flight out of Egypt, demand for the famously tasteless cracker drops sharply. Except, that is, in the Netherlands. A centuries-old and proud Jewish community here has made matzah a household product that is sold in supermarkets and consumed year-round by...
VIENNA (JTA)-Until December, Milli Segal's main challenge as a producer of Jewish-themed events in Austria was balancing her duties at work with her hands-on approach to being a Jewish grandmother of four. As an organizer of prestigious Holocaust commemoration projects, Segal, 63, is on a first-name basis with some of the country's most senior politicians, and draws on 20 years of experience to prevent or solve most any complication. Last year alone, she headed the communications efforts around...
(JTA)-The row between Poland and Israel about the Holocaust reached new heights this week after Poland's prime minister said that the genocide had not only Polish, Ukrainian and German perpetrators, but Jewish ones as well. Addressing a new law that criminalizes blaming Poland for Nazi crimes, Mateusz Morawiecki said in an interview Saturday that the law's effects would not be as sweeping as its critics complain. "It's not going to be seen as criminal to say that there were Polish perpetrators,...
(JTA)-L'Oréal made history last week when it became the first major cosmetics firm to feature a Muslim woman wearing a head covering in a mainstream international ad campaign for hair products. The signing of Amena Khan, a British blogger on beauty, as the newest face of L'Oréal Paris generated a lot of positive publicity for the French firm, with CNN lauding the company for "breaking barriers" and "becoming more diverse" in an article that also flattered Khan for "empowering women." But the r...
(JTA)-In a deeply divided nation that is still reeling from a toxic presidential election last spring, as well as jihadist and racist attacks, Mennel Ibtissem's performances offered a rare vision of hope. The blue-eyed Muslim woman sang Arabic and French-language renditions of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" on national television in France while wearing a head cover. She was a favorite on the French edition of "The Voice" talent and reality show, seeming to embody the values of coexistence and...
(JTA)-In 2015, Ukraine's president signed a law whose critics say stifles debate on the historical record of World War II and whitewashes local perpetrators of the Holocaust. Law 2538-1 criminalized any rhetoric insulting to the memory of anti-communist partisans. And it celebrates the legacy of such combatants-ostensibly including the ones who murdered countless Jewish and Polish citizens while collaborating with Nazi Germany. The law generated some backlash, including an open letter by more...
VIENNA (JTA)-If Stephan Templ's trial and imprisonment in Austria were meant to silence his criticism of the country's Holocaust restitution system, then his prosecution was clearly a failure. Templ is an Austrian-Jewish historian of the Holocaust who has written critically about his country since 1995. In 2015, he was sent to jail for nearly a year on controversial fraud charges tied to his family's own claim for compensation-and spent his time in prison diving even deeper into his area of...
MIEDZYRZEC PODLASKI, Poland (JTA)-In a snowy woods near the border with Belarus, Jonny Daniels pulls muddy fishing waders over the pants of his tailored business suit and grabs a shovel from the trunk of his car. A London-born Israeli activist for Holocaust commemoration, Daniels, 31, had worn the suit for a meeting last year with Polish government officials in the country's east. And he put on the waders shortly after learning at that meeting of a village road made of Jewish headstones-which...
PARIS (JTA)—When Delphine Horvilleur, France’s best-known female rabbi, began appearing regularly in the media, her friends and relatives feared it would expose her to threats or attacks by anti-Semites. Several years later it appears they were only partially wrong. Horvilleur’s media profile does invite hate speech and abuse online—but mostly from other Jews. Following a reference to Jerusalem during a television interview last month, Horvilleur, 43, has again become the punching bag of the local branch of the Jewish Defense League and a vocal...
BIRMINGHAM, England (JTA)-Nine months after announcing that she is creating the world's first vagina museum, Florence Schechter is confident that she has heard every joke on the subject. Schechter, a Jewish comedian and communications professional in her 20s, is preparing to open the museum in Brighton, 50 miles south of London. When the news broke in the spring, it caught the attention of Conan O'Brien, who quipped: It will be "the first museum where you enter through the gift shop." The idea...
