Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 26 - 50 of 79
(JTA) — Jewish groups are criticizing Pope Francis for appearing to accuse both Israel and Hamas of “terrorism” in their ongoing war that started Oct. 7. “This is what wars do,” the pope said at his general audience in St. Peter’s Square on Wednesday. “But here we have gone beyond wars. This is not war. This is terrorism.” Francis’ comments followed separate meetings with Jewish relatives of hostages held by Hamas and Palestinians with family in Gaza on Wednesday. His remarks come a month after he called on Hamas to free the hostages being he...
(JTA) — Over the course of a week, three synagogues across the United States were tagged with anti-Israel and antisemitic graffiti. The vandalism follows weeks of similar defacement at a variety of American Jewish sites, including cemeteries, Chabad Jewish centers, and Jewish buildings on university campuses. The incidents occurred more than a month into the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, which has come alongside a reported spike in antisemitism nationwide. The recent vandalism targeted synagogues affiliated with three different r...
(JTA) — Three Ivy League universities have announced steps to fight antisemitism after weeks of turmoil on their campuses and others. Harvard University has put together a group of advisors to address antisemitism on campus, and both the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University announced that they would convene task forces on antisemitism. The announcements come as those schools and many others have contended with complaints that their administrations have not taken sufficient action to protect Jewish students or condemn Hamas f...
(JTA) — Police at Cornell University were called to the school’s kosher dining hall, and the campus Hillel warned students to stay away from it, after anonymous antisemitic posts on a Greek life website that included threats to “shoot up” the building and kill and rape Jewish students. The posts, whose text has circulated widely on social media, were published Saturday and Sunday under pseudonyms including “hamas,” “jew evil,” “jew jenocide,” “hamas warrior” and “kill jews.” The posts have titles such as “jewish people need to be killed,” “e...
(JTA) - An historic wartime photography partnership from the 1940s - often credited as the first to capture many of the horrors of the Holocaust - is getting the Hollywood treatment. Kate Winslet stars in "Lee" as model-turned-wartime-photojournalist Lee Miller, who often worked alongside David E. Scherman, a Jewish photographer portrayed in the film by Jewish actor and comedian Andy Samberg. The film debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival last weekend. Miller, then employed by...
(JTA) — A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against the multinational food company Unilever tied to Ben and Jerry’s 2021 announcement that it would stop selling ice cream in what it called “Occupied Palestinian Territory.” Unilever is the ice cream maker’s parent company. The lawsuit, which was thrown out on Tuesday, claimed Unilever misled American investors by not immediately sharing the news of the boycott with them. The boycott, which sparked discussion across the Jewish world, is not in force: In December 2022, following a separate,...
(New York Jewish Week) — A kosher ice cream chain in Brooklyn is voluntarily recalling all of its ice cream and pareve frozen desserts after it was linked to a recent listeria outbreak from another kosher ice cream manufacturer. The recall was announced by the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday and lists more than 90 frozen treats sold by the Ice Cream House, a chain of kosher dairy eateries in Brooklyn that was recently featured in an episode of the Netflix reality show “Jewish Matchmaking.” The chain has salads, sandwiches and pizza...
(JTA) — A Jewish couple has grounds to sue the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services after a state-funded adoption and foster care agency denied them services because they are Jewish, a Tennessee appeals court ruled Thursday. The decision is the latest development in a long-running battle that began in 2021, when Elizabeth and Gabriel Rutan-Ram turned to the Holston United Methodist Home for Children in Greenville, Tennessee for foster parent training. The couple hoped to foster, and later adopt, a child. According to a lawsuit the couple...
(JTA) - A Russian court has extended the pretrial detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich for another three months. In a hearing on Thursday at Lefortovo District Court that was closed to press, a judge ordered Gershkovich to remain in detention until at least Nov. 30, a court spokeswoman said. Investigators from the FSB, a Russian state security agency, had requested the extension. Gershkovich, 31, is the American-born son of Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union. He was...
(JTA) — A vacant West Hartford, Connecticut, synagogue building, shuttered in 2018, could soon turn into 49 apartments — including affordable housing, a local newspaper has reported. Agudas Achim, an Orthodox congregation established in 1887 that primarily served Romanian immigrants, moved to its third permanent location in the building in 1969. Five years ago, it merged with another congregation, United Synagogues, and the building went up for sale the following year. Now the property, which the city appraised at about $2.5 million, is und...
(JTA) - For the first time in 800 years, the British city of York, whose Jewish population was decimated in a medieval pogrom, will be home to a rabbi. Rabbi Elisheva Salamo arrived in York from California last week after decades of pulpit work in the United States, Switzerland and South Africa. She will take a part-time pulpit at the York Liberal Jewish Community, which is affiliated with a denomination akin to the American Reform movement. The congregation was founded in 2014 and now has...
(JTA) — Emily Talento grew up with Jewish friends and relatives on Long Island, attending Passover seders, bar and bat mitzvahs and Shabbat dinners. When she arrived at Cedarville University, a private Baptist university in Ohio, she found herself explaining Jewish traditions to her many classmates who had never met a Jew before. Now, Talento is continuing her Bible studies at a religious university. But it’s safe to say that she won’t encounter the same lack of knowledge about Jews this time. That’s because she’s one of eight Christian...
(JTA) — Speaking at an event geared toward Jewish voters on Tuesday night, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said, “The charge of antisemitism is one that cuts me.” Kennedy, the anti-vaccine theorist and Democratic presidential candidate, was responding to mounting backlash against his claim that COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted” to avoid Jews and Chinese people. That remark, made without evidence at a campaign event earlier this month on the Upper East Side, led to criticism from a range of figures including Jewish leaders and Democrats in Congress. He...
(JTA) - In the second season of "The Nanny," the sitcom she wrote and starred in, Fran Drescher's character, Fran Fine, refuses to enter a hotel where the busboys are striking. "I'm sorry, but the Fines don't cross picket lines," she tells her companion, the father of the family she works for. "It's against our religion." The laugh line was one of many moments when Drescher served her signature mashup of brashness, Jewishness and liberal politics, throughout her early 1990s series and beyond....
(JTA) - British soccer icon David Beckham is known globally for his bevy of championships as well as the "bend" he could put on the ball during 20 seasons of play. But on Sunday, approximately 600 people in a London synagogue saw him exhibit a different talent: saying "Hamotzi," the Jewish blessing over bread. That moment of Hebrew came during an interview Beckham gave at St John's Wood Synagogue about his Jewish heritage as well as his career. According to accounts in British Jewish...
(JTA) — The prolific Jewish actor Ed Asner died nearly two years ago, but his final film will hit select theaters on Friday. In “Tiger Within,” he plays a Holocaust survivor who becomes the unlikely friend of a homeless teenager who was raised by a Holocaust denier. The movie was filmed in the summer of 2018, and Asner, the Emmy award-winning actor best known for his roles as Lou Grant on the “Mary Tyler Moore Show” and Carl in the Pixar animated film “Up,” died in 2021 at the age of 91. “Tiger...
(JTA) — Israeli actress Gal Gadot, best known for her role as Wonder Woman in the eponymous 2017 film and franchise, will receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame next year, joining the more than 2,700 members of the entertainment industry who have been immortalized with a Hollywood star. Gadot will be the first Israeli actress to receive a star on the Walk of Fame. Haim Saban, the Israeli media mogul, creator of the “Power Rangers” TV show and major Democratic donor, received a star in 2017. Other Jewish figures awarded stars for 2024 incl...
(JTA) - British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran came close to setting the attendance record at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on Sunday, drawing a crowd of 89,106 concertgoers. The current record-holder? A celebration of Talmud study in 2012 that filled the seats and stands with 93,000 people, most of them Orthodox men. That gathering, called the Siyum HaShas, marked the completion of the seven-and-a-half year cycle of Daf Yomi, the practice of studying one double-sided page of Babylonian Talmud...
(JTA) — The city of Miami Beach has agreed to pay $1.3 million to a small Orthodox synagogue that accused it of discrimination by sending inspectors more than once a week on average for two years At the same time, Congregation Bais Yeshaya D’Kerestir agreed to make changes to its parking and noise practices. The agreement brings to a close an extended dispute over whether the congregation, which meets in a single-family home owned by its rabbi, Arie Wohl, was a religious institution or a private gathering. The congregation argued that because i...
(JTA) — A new Bible translation that eschews gendered pronouns for God is now available through Sefaria, the online library of Jewish texts, prompting backlash on social media from some who see the change as a sacrilege. The Revised Jewish Publication Society edition of the Bible, which the 135-year-old Jewish publishing house has released in partnership with Sefaria, is the first major update to the JPS translation of the Tanakh in nearly 40 years. So far, only the books comprising the Prophets, the Hebrew Bible’s second section, are available...
(JTA) - On Wednesday morning, Alfred Moses, 94, sat in a small white armchair at a round wooden table in a Manhattan office building as a historian gingerly turned the pages of a more than 1,000-year-old book in front of him. Two weeks earlier, Moses had paid a record-setting sum for the book - more than $38 million in total. But this was the first time he had ever seen it. The book was the Codex Sassoon, the world's oldest nearly-complete copy of the Hebrew Bible, and Moses had purchased it on...
(JTA) — Citing “a major crisis in Jewish education,” Israel’s Diaspora ministry plans to pour about $40 million into training educators at Jewish schools in the United States and Canada. Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister of Diaspora affairs, announced the initiative, called “Aleph Bet” after the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, on Monday. He hopes enrollment will increase at Jewish day schools, fearing that “we are losing large parts of the Jewish people,” and said the initiative would “focus on training teachers for Jewish educatio...
(JTA) — At least two American couples have been caught by Israeli customs for attempting to smuggle a total of more than 650 pounds of Fruit Roll-Ups into Israel, as the country experiences a dire shortage of the snack due to a TikTok craze. A video posted on Tuesday by Mako, an Israeli news website, appears to show a customs official at Ben Gurion International Airport sifting through at least three open suitcases each filled with hundreds of the colorful, sugary treats. An American-accented voice off screen, in a mix of Hebrew and English, e...
(JTA) - The Jewish author of best-selling children's book series "A Series of Unfortunate Events" has been tapped to write a horror film based on the legend of the Golem of Prague. Daniel Handler, known by his pen name "Lemony Snicket," will write the movie for independent Jewish production company Leviathan Productions, from veteran film producer Ben Cosgrove and Josh Foer, a freelance journalist, the co-founder of the adventure travel brand Atlas Obscura and co-founder of Sefaria, the...
(JTA) — The prize dubbed the “Jewish Nobel” will be going to Barbra Streisand later this year, in a return to its tradition of honoring Jewish celebrities for their lifetime of achievements. The iconic actor and singer is getting the Genesis Prize, which has been awarded since 2013, in recognition of her contributions to a number of fields, including the arts and philanthropy. The prize was endowed by a group of Russian Jewish billionaires, three of whom stepped down from the board of a related foundation, the Genesis Philanthropy Group, after...
