Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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It’s Switzerland in 1945 and the war has just ended. A group of deeply traumatized, ragged-looking Jewish teenagers recently liberated from Buchenwald have been sent to live in a former Swiss school building. A young Swiss woman named Klara cares for them, while her new husband, Johann, runs her family’s textile business, whose success is dependent on the work of unrepentant Nazis living in comfort in Swiss exile. Johann’s brother, Egon, home from the war after five years working as a Swiss border guard, is wracked by guilt for having to turn...
(JTA) - Dr. Vivian Fischer spent five hours Saturday walking toward Minneapolis's devastation from her home in a suburb immediately outside the city. The family physician put on gray scrubs, her stethoscope, a mask and gloves, filled a backpack with whatever she had at home - extra masks, medical gloves, asthma inhalers, bandages, tweezers to pick glass out of cuts and water, and went to see where she could help. She found countless people sweeping up the glass on the streets from storefront...
NEW YORK (JTA)-Had she received a better Jewish education, Marianne Williamson says, she might have become a rabbi. Instead, Williamson has become one of the country's best-known New Age self-help gurus, reaching millions of people over more than three decades in the public eye. She counts Oprah and Deepak Chopra among her pals. Now Williamson, the author of a dozen books-four of them New York Times best-sellers-wants to extend her influence to the highest office in the land: She has announced...
NEW YORK (JTA)-As its name suggests, relationships are key to members of the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysts and Psychotherapists. But there is one relationship some members want to sever: the one between the organization and Israel. At its 2018 conference, held June 14-17 at a Midtown Manhattan hotel, a vocal minority of the association's 2,200 members objected to next year's gathering being held in Tel Aviv, with some pledging to boycott it. The 100 people or so who...
NEW YORK (JTA)—Congregation Kolot Chayeinu in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood is removing its savings from JPMorgan Chase, making it the first U.S. synagogue to publicly divest from a bank or other corporation “to explicitly oppose the funding of fossil fuel and other related projects dangerous to the world in which we live,” according to a statement from the congregation. The move also puts Kolot at the forefront of Jewish organizations in doing “values-driven investing,” putting money where Jewish groups’ mouths are on climate chang...
NEW YORK (JTA)-I have roamed the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Egyptian wing many times, marveling at sarcophagi, statues of Horus and Ra, and portraits of young men on ancient panels who gaze back at visitors, looking shockingly familiar and contemporary. But on a Sunday just before Passover, I viewed the artifacts as I'd never before seen them: through the lens of the Exodus story, which we retell each year through reading the Haggadah. Nachliel Selavan, a Jewish educator and self-taught...
NEW YORK (JTA)-She was young, Jewish and the founder of a nonprofit organization that aids deprived children in Southeast Asia. He was a potential funder more than twice her age, promising donations and introductions to influential people. "He dangled a lot of carrots," she said in retrospect. But the fundraiser, who spoke on condition she not be named for fear of jeopardizing future professional prospects, received no donations from the man who promised so much. Instead he stroked her thigh, pr...
NEW YORK (JTA)-Organizers of the Women's March renounced the anti-Semitic views of Louis Farrakhan, but they stood behind one of its co-presidents who attended a speech last month by the Nation of Islam leader and seemed unperturbed by his attacks on Jews. Tamika Mallory, co-president of the Women's March, sparked an outcry when she posted a photo of herself and Farrakhan on Instagram following his Saviours' Day speech in Chicago on Feb. 25. In that speech, Farrakhan declared that "powerful Jews...
NEW YORK (JTA)-Nearly 80 years after being persecuted by the Nazi-allied Vichy French government, some 25,000 elderly Algerian Jews are being recognized for the first time as Holocaust survivors by the German government. Algerian Jews had their French citizenship stripped in 1940 by the Vichy government, which then ruled the area. Nuremberg-like laws banned Jews from working as doctors, lawyers, teachers and in government. Children were kicked out of French schools. On Tuesday, 78 years after th...
NEW YORK (JTA)-It shouldn't have been complicated. Shimon Abta, an expert Israeli cannabis agronomist, was sent by his employer to consult with American companies in states where medical marijuana is legal. He was living in Las Vegas and met an American Jewish woman on JDate. They married last year and together started becoming more religious. Both in their 30s, they are eager to start a family. But on Jan. 8, U.S. immigration officials told Abta to withdraw his application for permanent...
Jewish Federations of North America and its predecessor organizations have had a longstanding policy of not officially traveling beyond Israel’s 1967 borders. In reality, however, representatives have already done so. Top leaders of JFNA held a secretive meeting Wednesday to approve changing its policy of not traveling into Judea and Samaria to visit Jewish settlements or Palestinian communities. The conference call was led by JFNA Chairman Richard Sandler, who is executive vice president of the Milken Family Foundation in Los Angeles. P...
