Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 26 - 50 of 328
MUNICH (JTA) — Walking alongside two young men around this city’s main synagogue, Charlotte Knobloch looks like a Jewish grandmother enjoying a stroll with her grandsons. Knobloch, the 89-year-old president of the Jewish Community of Munich and upper Bavaria and likely the only Holocaust survivor leading a large Jewish community today, is indeed a grandmother of seven. But the men are not related to her. They are police officers belonging to a security detail that was assigned to her years ago...
(JTA) — At least 90,000 descendants of Sephardic Jews have become citizens of Portugal or Spain since 2015, when those countries passed laws offering a naturalization process for such applicants, according to the most updated information data from the two countries. The laws were meant to atone for the Inquisition, a campaign of religious persecution unleashed at the end of the 15th century on the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had inhabited the Iberian Peninsula and flourished there. Spain has received at least 153,000 applications for citi...
(JTA) — About 150,000 Jewish victims of Nazi persecution are set to receive emergency funding of approximately $1,400 per person from Germany in the coming days, according to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. The funds, totaling about $200 million and referred to as the Supplemental Hardship Fund Payment, were negotiated in 2020 and originally planned to be distributed in two payments by the end of 2022. The recipients of the Supplemental Hardship Fund Payment are predominantly Russian speakers who had to flee the N...
( JTA ) - Gabriel Boric, a 35-year-old left-wing lawmaker who has been sharply critical of Israel and Chilean Jews who support it, was elected president of Chile in a landslide victory this weekend. Boric, who came to fame as a student leader, won with 56 percent of the vote, 12 points over his conservative rival, José Antonio Kast, a right-wing pro-Israel politician. The election left many Chilean Jews feeling uneasy because they had to choose between Boric, who has encouraged Chilean Jews to l...
(JTA) - A Swiss-Jewish artist has asked the Zurich Art Museum to return her paintings due to concerns that the museum features works bought for below-market prices from Jewish refugees in dire circumstances in the years leading up to and during the Holocaust. Miriam Cahn, 72, made her wishes known publicly this week, the Tachles Swiss-Jewish newspaper reported. "I no longer want to be represented at the Zurich Art Museum and would like to withdraw all of my work from it. I will buy them back at...
MUNICH (JTA) — Three political parties in Germany presented a coalition agreement which reiterated commitments to ensure Israel’s security and fight antisemitism and, for the first time, also pledged to promote Jewish life. The agreement, whose main focus is addressing climate change, was presented Wednesday by the coalition parties, which include the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the Free Democratic Party and the Greens, in Berlin. The coalition agreement determines the division of ministerial positions and major policy themes and mar...
(JTA) — Polish nationalists shouted “death to Jews” as they burned a book representing a historic pact protecting the rights of Poland’s Jews. The book burning Thursday at a rally in Kalisz, a city of about 100,000 inhabitants situated 120 miles southwest of Warsaw, was part of a series of nationalist events on Nov. 11, National Independence Day, which is the anniversary of when Poland regained its sovereignty in 1918. Videos and eyewitness accounts on social media show that Wojciech Olszański, a far-right activist, lit a red-covered book tha...
(JTA) - An impression of Adolf Hitler at Cambridge University has touched off a fight over the limits of free speech and has drawn Monty Python comedian John Cleese into the fray. The impersonation was delivered at a debate last week on whether there's such a thing as "good taste." Andrew Graham-Dixon, an art historian, impersonated Hitler as an example of bad taste, in order to argue that good and bad taste do exist. At the time, Keir Bradwell, the president of the Cambridge Union, a debating...
(JTA) - A prominent rabbi in the Netherlands compared her country's COVID-19 safety measures to the policies of Nazi Germany, drawing harsh rebuke from Jewish groups. Tamarah Benima, an outspoken 71-year-old Reform rabbi from Amsterdam, made the comparison on Nov. 4 in a speech in the northern Dutch city of Leeuwarden. She left the Dutch Union for Progressive Judaism on Nov. 9, the rabbinical council of the umbrella group wrote in a statement. "Scientists worldwide apparently allowed themselves...
(JTA) - French President Emmanuel Macron has inaugurated near Paris what is believed to be the world's first museum on the wrongful and antisemitic persecution of the late army captain Alfred Dreyfus. The new museum, inaugurated on Tuesday in the suburb of Médan, features at least 500 documents including photographs, court papers and personal objects from the 8-year ordeal that ended in 1906 with Dreyfus' exoneration from trumped-up espionage charges and convictions. Some of the documents are...
(JTA) - The dozens of Jews who escaped the Nazis by hiding in the sewers of Lviv became local and international lore almost immediately after World War II. "In the summer, when the rain seeped in, there was a lot of water everywhere," Krystyna Chiger recalled in testimony in 1947, when she was 11. "Then we had to lean very low on the stones right next to the wall so that the water would not flow on us." But the location of the underground hideouts remained unknown until recently, when a team of...
(JTA) – At a political rally in Berlin in June, a young Jewish gay man wearing a turquoise kippah launched his campaign to represent one of Germany's most ethnically diverse constituencies in parliament. The man, 34-year-old Marcel Yaron Goldhammer, promised to stoke the "embers of unity, justice and freedom" during his announcement speech in front of about 200 people in the southeastern Berlin neighborhood of Neukolln. But he's not running for a liberal party, or one promoting m...
(JTA) - A century ago, communists shuttered the synagogues of Tomsk, one of the oldest cities in Siberia. It was a painful blow, especially to the local community of Jewish Cantonists - former soldiers who had been recruited against their will or abducted into the Russian Tsar's army and forbidden from practicing their faith. After many years of forced service and persecution, many of them returned to Judaism in Tomsk, a city of about 500,000. This week, local Jews feel a circle has been...
(JTA) — Several Israeli philanthropists have helped bring to Abu Dhabi dozens of asylum seekers, including female athletes, fleeing Taliban rule in Afghanistan. The rescue operation led by Aaron G. Frenkel, an aviation professional who had helped airlift thousands of Jews out of the Soviet Union, ended on Sept. 6, as 41 asylum seekers from Afghanistan reached Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. The Euro-Asian Jewish Congress detailed the operation in a statement Sunday. Frenkel, who is the chairman of the Congress, teamed up with the g...
(JTA) — Al-Qaida had planned to carry out a massive terrorist attack on Israeli dance clubs in 2002 but was thwarted with the help of U.S. intelligence operatives, a former FBI agent said. Ali Soufan, who with other agents had monitored al-Qaida for the FBI both before the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 and afterward, said the information was obtained by the operatives during interrogations of a Palestinian man apprehended in Afghanistan, the Israeli newspaper Yediot Acharonot reported Friday in an article about Soufan. Zayn a...
(JTA) — Israeli leaders rarely criticize a law passed by an ally government as outright “antisemitic.” But that’s what Foreign Minister Yair Lapid did on Aug. 14 in response to a newly passed law in Poland that indirectly makes it impossible for Jews and others to sue for property stolen from their families in World War II. “Poland today approved — not for the first time — an immoral, antisemitic law,” he said in a statement. Poland, which faces continual criticism throughout the European Union for its restrictive abortion and media policies,...
(JTA) — The owners of a Ukrainian cafe housed in a former synagogue said they worked two lightning bolts into the logo to advertise the reenergizing qualities of the coffee there. Instead they waded into a political minefield because they ended up reproducing the symbol of the SS, Nazi Germany’s murderous elite force. On Tuesday, the owners said the whole thing “is a case of a font gone wrong” and apologized to “anyone whose feelings may have been hurt.” It was a trial that was never fully implemented, they said, and will drop the logo. Cafe...
(JTA) - Even before its $8.35 million renovation, the Manchester Jewish Museum was a remarkably eye-catching institution. Housed in a former synagogue on a busy road in an industrial part of northern England's largest city, it stood out from the car washes, supermarkets and hardware stores of Cheetham Hill Road thanks to its red-brick facade. The look marries Victorian architecture and the Moorish style favored by the members of the Portuguese-Spanish Sephardic Jewish community that built it in...
(JTA) - Amid the Taliban's total takeover of Afghanistan this week, some had specific concerns about one person: that country's last remaining Jew, 62-year-old Zebulon Simantov. Simantov, who has in recent years lived in Kabul's only synagogue, said earlier this year that he would leave before the Taliban arrived, possibly for Israel. He has also said that the Taliban jailed him during the fundamentalist Muslim group's last hold on power in Afghanistan, and that they tried to convert him and reg...
(JTA) - For Chabad-Lubavitch, major events aren't over until they take a group photograph. The tradition, covering the international Hasidic movement, creates much more than a souvenir. It has also generated a visual record of Chabad's growth from a small group in the 18th century in what was then the Russian empire to a global movement with branches today in dozens of countries. Last month in Kazakhstan, the photo opportunity yielded something else: a fine for violating rules against large...
AMSTERDAM (JTA) - A disoriented teenage girl lies on Anne Frank's bed as people swarm the family house. But these people are not Nazis; they're modern-day tourists. And the girl on the bed isn't Anne, but Kitty - the imaginary friend to whom she addressed her now world-famous diary. Magically resurrected from the page and transported into modern-day Europe, Kitty is appalled by how society has fetishized her best friend Anne, hawking cheap merchandise and endless inaccurate reinterpretations of...
(JTA) — Vladimir Putin clearly likes to talk about Jews and Israel. This time he suggested that Israel offered a good model for his designs on Ukraine. The Russian president’s previous remarks about Jews include the joke he told at a panel on energy in 2017, about a smartass Israeli soldier who was quizzed by his commander on how to engage multiple enemies. The soldier’s advice: Send more troops. In 2019, hearing about the financial challenges of a rabbi in Crimea, Putin joked: “So the Jews have problems with finances!” Then he told the rabbi...
(JTA) - Standing poolside in Barcelona, Eden Blecher and Shelly Bobritsky beamed with pride and satisfaction as they struggled to catch their breath. The two athletes from Israel on Sunday had just clinched the fourth slot in the Women Duet category of the Artistic Swimming Qualification Tournament in that city in Spain, assuring their participation in the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo. But the commentator who narrated the tournament for TV3, the state broadcaster of Catalonia, the separatist Spanish...
(JTA) — Parents in Brazil are protesting a school’s teaching of Anne Frank’s famous Holocaust diary, citing what they say is sexual content inappropriate for seventh graders. In a letter sent to the management of the Sao Paulo branch of Escola Mobile, a network of private schools, more than 90 parents complained about Frank’s descriptions of female genitalia and her attraction to women, according to Revista Oeste magazine. The parents were complaining about passages in the latest edition of the official diary of Anne Frank. Her father, who was...
AMSTERDAM (JTA) - In Germany, a man wearing a kippah was beaten on the street. In Austria, a student was harassed on the train for reading a book mentioning Jews in the title. In London, a nurse said she was threatened at her hospital for wearing a Star of David necklace. And in Belgium, an Orthodox Jewish woman was told "Get away, dirty Jewess" by a man with whom she tried to share a park bench. The full dimensions of Europe's current surge in antisemitic activity are not yet clear, but by...
