Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 26 - 35 of 35
NEW YORK (JTA)-At the federation movement's General Assembly in Jerusalem in early November, the chairman of the network did something unusual for Jewish power gatherings: He devoted the bulk of his speech to nursery school. Calling Jewish preschool the "seedbed of our community," the chairman of Jewish Federations of North America, Michael Siegal, pledged to raise $1 billion over the next decade for a Jewish revitalization plan with tuition-free Jewish preschool as its centerpiece. By offering...
NEW YORK (JTA)-Chava, a student at a Chabad seminary, has lived in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn for six years, but it's only in the past few days that she started carrying pepper spray in her handbag. Her younger brother gave her the deterrent after news hit of a string of recent attacks against Orthodox Jews, seven of them in Crown Heights. The assaults, believed to be part of a national wave of so-called "knockout game" attacks in which black teens punch random white strangers for...
NEW YORK (JTA)-The biblical David used a slingshot to kill Goliath, thus earning the attention of King Saul. Today, Jewish organizations are trying to use Slingshot, an annual guide of the 50 "most innovative organizations and projects," to capture the attention of donors. The ninth installment of the guide was released Thursday. Launched in 2005 by a group of donors in their 20s and 30s, the guide evaluates North American Jewish organizations based on "their innovative approach, the impact...
NEW YORK (JTA)-When Susan Katz Miller's Episcopalian mother and Jewish father married in the 1960s, they did exactly what most religious leaders advised intermarried couples to do: They chose one religion and stuck to it. Katz Miller's mother put her religious tradition aside, learning to make matzah balls and shepherding her four children through bar and bat mitzvah lessons. But when Katz Miller married her Episcopalian husband, she didn't want to choose. Instead, she and her husband raised...
NEW YORK (JTA)—When Eric Woodward started rabbinical school at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, he assumed he would be be the only student who grew up celebrating Christmas along with Hanukkah. But midway through his training, when Woodward started a discussion group for students of interfaith families, more than 20 people showed up. Not all were children of intermarriage like Woodward, who was raised in Los Angeles by a secular Jewish mother and non-practicing Catholic father. Some were Jews by choice. Others had parent...
NEW YORK (JTA)-When his cousin died unexpectedly a few years ago, Hal Miller-Jacobs was recruited to oversee the funeral arrangements and wound up helping with the tahara-the traditional preparation of the body for burial. For the first time in his life, the 76-year-old computer professional joined with other volunteers in carefully washing, cleaning and dressing the body in a simple white shroud. "It was probably the most moving Jewish experience I ever had in my life," Miller-Jacobs said. But...
NEW YORK (JTA)—For several months during the spring of his 10th grade year, Jack Millman had an unusual Saturday ritual: He and his mother would ride around metropolitan New York and buy up vast quantities of raw chicken. Millman and his mother, Ann Marks, didn’t cook the poultry. Instead they put it on ice and shipped it overnight to a lab in Arizona, which tested it for antibiotic-resistant strains of the E. coli bacteria. The study, which included 213 samples of raw chicken purchased at 15...
Edward Schnitzer remembers his father dropping him off every week for Sunday school and hanging out at the men’s club while the kids sat in a classroom. “I don’t remember any of it with the family together,” he says. But for his daughters, who are 10 and 7, Hebrew school is family time: Schnitzer and his wife, Cindy, join the girls—and about 30 other families in Temple Shaaray Tefila’s Masa program—in the basement social hall for a two-and-a-half-hour session, participating in activities and discussions, singing and sitting together for...
In a move likely to give the fledgling Jewish educational technology field a much-needed shot of capital and know-how, an Israeli nonprofit and an American publishing company best known for its Hebrew school textbooks are teaming up to create the first incubator focused on developing Jewish educational games, apps, software and other high-tech resources. Israel’s Center for Educational Technology (CET) and the Springfield, N.J.-based Behrman House announced the joint project June 4—the news was closely guarded until then—at CET’s annual...
On a warm Sunday morning last month in Washington Square Park, parents were leisurely pushing strollers, sunbathers were strewn about on the grass, and people of all ages were lounging on the wooden benches and sipping coffee. Meanwhile about 15 sixth graders darted around in groups of two or three, their heads bent over iPhones and iPads, shouting out things like, “I just found the foreman. He gave me the money!” “We have to go back to Rose,” and “The shtarkers are after us!” The kids, students at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue’s religious sch...
