Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 201 - 225 of 328
PARIS (JTA)-In a dark alley in a poor suburb of this city, five men with violence on their minds closed in fast on 17-year-old Netanel Azoulay and his older brother, Yaakov. "Dirty Jews, you're going to die!" one man yelled. The driving dispute quickly transformed into something physical, with one of the assailants wielding a saw. Azoulay-who, along with his brother, wears a kippah-nearly lost his finger and had his shoulder dislocated before passers-by broke up the brawl. The Feb. 21 incident...
(JTA)—Looking through the barbed wire of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, 14-year-old Nanette Konig could barely recognize her friend and classmate from Amsterdam, Anne Frank. Both girls had been caught by the Nazis in the Dutch capital and were sent to starve to death in a place Konig describes today as “hell on Earth.” Both were emaciated when they saw each other again in different sections of the same German camp in 1944. “She looked like a walking skeleton, just like me,” Konig, one of the few living friends of the teenage diarist,...
(JTA)-Five days after a municipal truck plowed through a Jewish cemetery near Paris in what authorities said was a freak accident, Isabelle Zenou arrived at the scene of the incident with a camera-and a theory. The March 20 devastation of 13 gravestones in the suburb of Pantin was not an anti-Semitic attack, according to city officials, France's CRIF umbrella of Jewish communities and even the country's chief rabbi. The driver drove over 13 headstones after losing control of his vehicle, the...
(JTA)-With old favorites knocked out of France's presidential race and the far-right National Front party making worrisome gains, many Jews are joining fellow voters in supporting Emmanuel Macron, the 39-year-old independent politician and surprising front-runner. A banker who is 18 years younger than the average age of past presidents in France, Macron was widely regarded as doomed only two weeks ago, as no president from outside one of the country's main parties has ever been elected. But...
(JTA)—A year after they submitted their application for asylum in the United States, Shahi and his mother expected to be let in. As Iranian Jews who applied for asylum through a federally recognized agency for refugee status, their case was expected to be simple. Shahi (not his real name) is in his late 20s and already has two sisters waiting for him and their mother. As of now, mother and son are in a third transit country. But the lives of Shahi’s family were plunged into further uncertainty on Friday when President Donald Trump signed an...
OSWIECIM, Poland (JTA)—I did a shameful thing on my first visit 20 years ago to the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In a guestbook outside an Auschwitz museum exhibit featuring information on 70,000 Polish non-Jews who were murdered here, I downplayed the significance of their deaths by writing: “Your pain is no credential here, it’s just the shadow of my wound.” Those words—a quote from a Leonard Cohen song that I abused as a high school student from Israel while touring the camp that my grandmother had survived...
(JTA)-Two days after delegates from more than 70 nations attended the Paris summit on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is clear that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was wrong to label the meeting "useless." Admittedly the France-initiated event, which neither Israel nor the Palestinian Authority attended, did not change the international community's understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nor did the gathering take any concrete steps to end the dispute. But it was...
(JTA)-Is terrorism softening European attitudes toward Israel? When a Palestinian terrorist used a car to ram and kill an Israeli soldier in eastern Jerusalem in 2014, the European Union urged "restraint" and, without condemning the attack, called it merely "further painful evidence of the need to undertake serious efforts towards a sustainable peace agreement." The statement by EU foreign relations chief Federica Mogherini was "a typical EU reaction, which blames the victim for getting...
(JTA)-Rachel Freier of Brooklyn officially became the first Hasidic woman to be sworn in as a judge in the State of New York. Freier, a mother of six and former lawyer who practiced commercial and residential estate law, was sworn in Thursday as the Civil Court judge in Kings County's 5th judicial district, CBS reported. Freier won in September the vote in the district, which encompasses the Brooklyn communities of Kensington, Sunset Park and Windsor Terrace, among others. The Hasidic performer...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-Though they are considered a caloric hazard in Israel, sufganiyot are a rare Chanukah treat for many Jews in Europe. When the holiday arrives, some Jewish communities in Russia, Ukraine and beyond arrange special community bakes. This keeps schools and kindergartens in supply of the jam-filled doughnuts that Jews deep-fry on Chanukah in celebration of the legend involving the miraculous use of oil during the Maccabean revolt. Other communities arrange for shipments from Israel...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-Forty years after his reporting exposed one of the worst war criminals in Dutch history, Hans Knoop is still celebrated in his native Netherlands as a hero. On Nov. 23, more than a million television viewers watched a public broadcaster's historical period drama on how Knoop, a Dutch Jewish journalist, unmasked the art collector Pieter Menten in 1976 as a monster who murdered hundreds of Polish Jews and stole their property with help from German Nazis. It was the highest rating f...
(JTA)-Using his M-16 assault rifle as a pillow, my father awoke abruptly from a dreamless sleep by the pleading voice of a young woman outside his tent in the Sinai. The woman, a uniformed volunteer, was urging reservists like him to forego shuteye to hear a musician whose name she did not know, but who had come from far away to perform for Israeli troops on the southern front of Israel's traumatic 1973 war with Egypt and Syria. Stumbling out of the khaki tent, my father and 12 other soldiers...
(JTA)-As a Jewish family originally from the Ivory Coast, Amy and George Camara and their four children felt somewhat immune to the rising anti-Semitic thuggery in France. The Camaras, relieved to leave their war-torn African country, settled in the northern French city of Lille in 2012. Because they fit no one's Jewish stereotype, they said they were able to live as Jews without fear-despite, in recent years, the rise in attacks on French Jews from a small segment of Muslim extremists. But the...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)—His name was never mentioned during the Netherlands’ main commemoration event for Kristallnacht, but Donald Trump was likely on everyone’s mind at the ceremony at the Dutch capital’s majestic Portuguese Synagogue. It wasn’t for any imagined parallels between Trump’s election as U.S. president and the campaign of violence that the Nazis unleashed 78 years ago against German and Austrian Jews, which many historians see as the opening shot of the Holocaust. Most European Jews, whose families still live in the shadow of that pogrom...
(JTA)—If the latest draft resolution at UNESCO on “Occupied Palestine” succeeded in the Palestinians’ aims to reclaim the world’s attention, then it was a Pyrrhic victory at best and a setback at worst. Part of an effort on Jerusalem initiated at UNESCO in 2015 by the Palestinian Authority, the Oct. 12 vote saw a comfortable majority of states, including Russia and China, pass language calling on Israel “to cease the persistent excavations and works in East Jerusalem, particularly in and around the Old City,” as one clause reads. Only six coun...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-A Holocaust survivor dubbed "Rotterdam's Anne Frank" in her native Netherlands published her wartime diary, which she wrote while hiding in the bombed-out city. "At Night I Dream of Peace," the Dutch-language diary of 89-year-old Carry Ulreich, hit bookstores in the Netherlands last week. The book generated strong interest from the national media, which likened and contrasted Ulreich's story with that of Frank, the murdered Jewish teenager from Amsterdam whose diaries in hiding w...
(JTA)-For Jews all over the world, the High Holidays are a time for closure and new beginnings. Not for Jacques Stuzalft, an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor from France. Haunted by his experiences on the eve of Rosh Hashanah when he was 10 years old, he relives his narrow escape from death each time the Jewish New Year comes around. "It's extremely emotional because it's a real nightmare, worse than a nightmare, to have lived through it all," he told France TV during a recent visit to the train s...
(JTA)-Like their constituents, the mainstream representatives of French Jewry are not known for passing up opportunities to express their opinion on subjects of national debate. And Jewish institutions in France, like those in the United States, regularly comment on a host of issues, including divisive ones that lie beyond their immediate purviews. The burkini ban was a notable exception. In May, CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish communities, came out in support of police officers who...
(JTA)-When Vladimir Putin grabbed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, the Russian president claimed it was to protect minorities from anti-Semitic fascists whom Putin maintained were behind the revolution that year that ousted his ally in Kiev, former President Viktor Yanukovych. But a physicist named Josef Zissels, who heads one of the groups representing Ukraine's fractured Jewish community of 350,000, wasn't buying it. In hundreds of media briefings and interviews, Zissels called the revolution "an...
PARIS (JTA)-Twenty-five years after he graduated from a public high school in the French capital, Stephane Tayar recalls favorably his time in one of the world's most thorough education systems. As for many other French Jews his age, the state-subsidized upbringing has worked out well for Tayar, a 43-year-old communications and computers specialist. Eloquent but down to earth, he seems as comfortable discussing the complexities of French society as he is adept at fighting-curses, threats and...
(JTA)-A century ago, passages from the Talmud were translated into Russian to be used as evidence in the anti-Semitic show trial of Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Jew charged with-and eventually acquitted of-murdering a Christian boy. The prosecution in that 1915 trial, which was decried internationally for its resemblance to medieval blood libels, cherry-picked quotes from the Talmud, a central text of Orthodox Jewish tradition, to argue that Beilis had killed the boy for religious purposes. Now the...
(JTA)—Only last year, Spain was still the undisputed bastion for the BDS movement in Europe. Some 50 Spanish municipalities had passed resolutions in recent years endorsing BDS—an acronym for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel—more than in any other European country. Relying on backing from a strong far left, the branches of Spain’s BDS movement were able to exert considerable pressure. Last August, BDS activists pressured the organizers of a reggae festival near Barcelona to demand that the American-Jewish singer...
PARIS (JTA)-The summer drizzle that soaked the French capital did little to dampen Yechiel Eckstein's enthusiasm as he arrived recently with his wife Joelle at the city's Great Synagogue for a private tour. But a run-in inside with a local community leader moments later-typical, perhaps, of this Israeli-American Orthodox rabbi's often strained relationships with the Jewish establishment-quickly changed the tone of the visit. Raised in Canada and living in Jerusalem, Eckstein, 64, was in Paris...
KAUNAS, Lithuania (JTA)-In this drab city 55 miles west of Vilnius, there are few heritage sites as mysterious and lovely looking as the Seventh Fort. This 18-acre red-brick bunker complex, which dates to 1882, features massive underground passages that connect its halls and chambers. Above ground, the hilltop fortress is carpeted with lush grass and flowers whose yellow blooms attract bees and songbirds along with families who come here to frolic in the brief Baltic summer. It's also a popular...
AMSTERDAM (JTA) — To the millions of tourists who visit Nice annually, the city in southeast France is an ultimate holiday destination that offers inviting beaches and luxury casinos, stunning architecture and world-class museums. Sandwiched between the Maritime Alps and the Mediterranean Sea, Nice is France’s largest tourist destination after Paris, with 5 million arrivals each year and the country’s second largest domestic airport. Nice sees $1.6 billion in annual tourism revenue -- 40 percent from its region known locally as Côte d’Azur...
