Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 101 - 125 of 135
JERUSALEM (JTA)—Diaspora Jews can’t vote in Israeli elections. It’s been proposed and, so far, consistently shot down by Israeli lawmakers. And, let’s be honest, the average Israeli voter rarely, if ever, thinks about Diaspora Jews. And they base their votes on the same issues that voters in other countries do—for example, the economy, education, health care and security (OK, so the last one is more an Israeli thing). So it should come as no surprise that most of the candidates in Israel’s national elections on April 9 are not really worr...
(JTA)—Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan blamed “the wicked Jews” for the crisis over anti-Semitism and the Women’s March. “The most beautiful sight that I could lay eyes on [was] when I saw, the day after Trump was elected, women from all over the world were standing in solidarity, and a black woman is the initiator of it,” said Farrakhan, referring to Tamika Mallory, a leader of the Women’s March who has lionized Farrakhan and refused to condemn his pervasive anti-Semitism. “The wicked Jews want to use me to break up the women’s movement,...
JERUSALEM (JTA)-A team of scientists at a biotech company in Israel claimed that they will have a cure for cancer-all cancer-within a year. Sadly, their claims were shot down by fellow scientists. In recent articles in Israel and the United States, Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd., or AEBi, which was founded in 2000 from the ITEK Weizmann technology incubator, announced that a new treatment being developed by the company would offer a complete cure for cancer with "no or minimal...
JERUSALEM (JTA)-There's a new political power in team in Israel, and it hopes to defeat longtime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in upcoming elections. Benny Gantz, a former head of the Israeli army, announced Tuesday that he will combine his new political party, Israel Resilience, with one led by fellow former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Moshe Yaalon. This is a significant partnership: Since its formation last month, and before he issued any kind of political platform, Gantz's party...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—Israel struck Iranian targets in Syria, hours after an Iranian-made ground-to-ground missile was fired by an Iranian force in Syria at northern Israel. The targets struck by Israel Defense Forces warplanes late on Sunday night include munitions storage sites, an Iranian intelligence site, an Iranian military training camp, and a military site located in the Damascus International Airport, the IDF said. Russia’s defense control center in Syria said that four Syrian soldiers were killed and six wounded in the attacks. Syrian mil...
(JTA)—Linda Sarsour defended the legality of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel during her speech on stage in Washington D.C. at the third Women’s March. Her critique of anti-BDS laws came hours after rejecting the anti-Semitic statements of Louis Farrakhan. Sarsour, a leader of the Women’s March movement, called herself “a proud Palestinian-American woman” and said that “there are no perfect leaders” in her remarks in Saturday. She said that “the media can talk about any controversy they want”—a reference to claims o...
(JTA)—Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Florida would take action against Airbnb for its decision to remove listings of rooms and homes for rent in West Bank Jewish settlements. Airbnb announced in November 2018 that it would remove the listings of some 200 apartments and homes for rent in Jewish settlements in the West Bank, but not in Palestinian communities, and said that it consulted with experts to learn about the historical disputes in the region in order to make a decision about whether it should be doing business in “the occupied ter...
(JTA)—The Southern Poverty Law Center and a major Reform synagogue in New York have disassociated themselves from this year’s Women’s March. Top leaders of the main organization have been accused of engaging in or condoning anti-Semitism, of not cutting ties with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and of failing to heed the concerns of its thousands of Jewish backers. Jen Fuson, a spokeswoman for the Alabama-based SPLC, told the Daily Beast that “other projects were a priority.” She said the organization would be involved in local mar...
(JTA)-Actress Carol Channing, who originated the starring role in "Hello Dolly!" on Broadway and won a Tony Award for her portrayal of the boisterous widow, has died. She was 97. Channing was the daughter of a Jewish mother and a Christian father and identified as "part Jewish." At 16, she learned that her father was multi-racial, with an African-American mother and a German father. She wrote in her memoir of her five-year marriage to her first husband, Theodore Naidish, that she learned to...
(JTA)-A Jewish judge in Miami was named to the Florida Supreme Court at the Jewish day school where he attended kindergarten, finishing the ceremony by reciting a Jewish prayer. The appointment of Robert Luck, 39, was announced Monday at the Scheck Hillel Community School in North Miami Beach. Luck's children attend the school. Florida's new governor, Ron DeSantis, was on hand for the announcement, which featured a large Israeli flag displayed behind the lectern, The Associated Press reported....
(JTA)—Manny Yekutiel opened his eponymous Manny’s in November, calling the Middle Eastern cafe and restaurant in downtown San Francisco a “civic social gathering space.” His goal for the Mission District eatery was “to create a central, accessible and affordable place to go to become a better informed and more involved citizen,” he told the San Francisco Examiner. Manny’s has earned praise for hosting talks with speakers on issues ranging from Black Lives Matter to urban sustainability. But Yekutiel, who is Jewish, is being protested wee...
JERUSALEM (JTA)-Moshe Arens, a veteran Israeli politician and defense minister under three prime ministers, has died. Arens, who first hired Benjamin Netanyahu and is credited with helping him get his start in politics, died Monday in his sleep at his home near Tel Aviv. He was 93. Arens was a member of the Knesset for the Likud party from 1973 to 1992 and again from 1999 to 2003. As ambassador to the United States beginning in 1982, Arens brought on Netanyahu as part of the diplomatic corps...
(JTA)-The Pittsburgh Steelers' Stronger Than Hate campaign inspired the city and the world to rally around the Jewish community in the wake of the shooting attack on a local synagogue building that left 11 dead. On Sunday, Dec. 30, the Steelers donated $70,000 to help the Jewish community and the families directly affected by the Oct. 27 attack on Tree of Life Or L'Simcha Congregation building while worshippers were gathered for Shabbat morning services. Prior to the Steeler's home game against...
(JTA)—Georges Loinger, a member of the French Resistance during World War II who saved hundreds of Jewish children from the Nazis, has died. Loinger died on Friday in Paris at the age of 108, France’s Holocaust Memorial Foundation confirmed on its website. Loinger, who was Jewish but looked Aryan with his blonde hair and blue eyes, smuggled at least 350 Jewish children whose parents had been killed or sent to Nazi concentration camps in small groups across the Franco-Swiss border, the French news service AFP reported. The children he saved were...
(JTA)—Earlier this week, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by what it says is the most distant object ever explored by a spacecraft. But calling the trans-Neptunian object by its official designation of 2014 MU69 was cumbersome and boring for NASA scientists, who considered some 34,000 names as part of a public competition in 2017. Ultima Thule, a name that was nominated by 40 people, won the public poll. It comes from classical and medieval literature and means any distant place located beyond the “borders of the known world.” NASA apparen...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—Israel will step up its fight against Iran in Syria after the United States withdraws its troops from her neighbor to the north. “We will continue to take very strong action against Iran’s attempts to entrench itself in Syria. In neither of these sectors do we intend to lessen our efforts; we will intensify them, and I know that we do so with the full support and backing of the U.S.,” Netanyahu said Thursday in a statement to the media. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump launched a full and accelerated pullout of the 2,000 U...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—SodaStream is setting up a manufacturing plant in Gaza. SodaStream CEO Daniel Birnbaum made the announcement Thursday at a conference in Jerusalem sponsored by the Israeli business publication Globes. He appeared on stage at the conference with Ramon Laguarta, CEO of Pepsico, which acquired the Israeli home-carbonated drinks company this year for $3.2 billion. Laguarta told the conference that he toured the SodaStream plant located near the Bedouin town of Rahat in the Negev Desert in southern Israel and said he was proud of ...
(JTA)—Former Major League Baseball center fielder Lenny Dykstra ran car washes, wrote a book, went to drug rehab and spent time in prison. Now he is studying Torah. Dykstra, 55, a three-time All-Star who played for the New York Mets and the Philadelphia Phillies and retired from the game in 1996, attends Torah study every Wednesday afternoon in the basement of the Ambassador Wines shop on New York’s East Side, with Rabbi Shmuel Metzger, who runs the Chabad at Beekman-Sutton, the New York Pos...
(JTA)—Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced at a Chanukah candle-lighting ceremony that she is descended from Sephardic Jews who fled to Puerto Rico during the Spanish Inquisition. Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive Democrat, broke the news to a crowd gathered Sunday night at the Jackson Heights Jewish Center in Queens. It was a party organized by the group Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. “One of the things that we discovered about ourselves is that a very, very long time ago, generations and generations ago, my family consisted of Sep...
(JTA)—A Toledo, Ohio-area man was arrested for planning an attack on a local synagogue. Damon Joseph, of Holland, Ohio, was charged in federal court in Toledo on Monday with attempting to provide material support to ISIS. He told an undercover FBI agent that he was inspired by the shooting attack on a synagogue building in Pittsburgh that left 11 worshippers dead. “I admire what the guy did with the shooting actually,” Joseph said of the Pittsburgh shooting to an undercover agent, according to the Department of Justice. “I can see myself...
JERUSALEM (JTA)-I was watching late night network television on Saturday night-that's not terribly exciting here-when I was slammed with a string of ads that made me feel like I was back in America. The ads were in practically shouted Hebrew, but I could discern the same two English words in each: Black Friday (You have to say it with a Hebrew accent though, kind of like Blek Fchidey.) Clothing, electronics, home decor-all the ads were pushing Black Friday sales. Nor did the Black Friday assault...
JERUSALEM (JTA)-The deadly shooting at a Conservative synagogue in Pittsburgh has underlined tensions in Israel over the haredi Orthodox rabbinic establishment's disenfranchisement of the Diaspora's non-Orthodox Jewish streams. Following Saturday's rampage by a gunman that left 11 worshippers dead, an Israeli government minister and the country's opposition leader both called on Israel to recognize the liberal streams of Judaism. Others criticized the haredi Orthodox media in Israel for not call...
(JTA)-The shooting in a Pittsburgh synagogue that has left 11 people dead has been described as "horrific," "heinous" and "devastating" by Jewish leaders, politicians and Israeli leaders. "Our hearts are broken," the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh posted on Facebook, saying it was making an exception and using social media on Shabbat. The federation's president, Jeff Finkelstein, in an interview on CNN praised the quick reaction of the police and local government and said of the...
(JTA) - The shooting in a Pittsburgh synagogue that has left 11 people dead has been described as "horrific," "heinous" and "devastating" by Jewish leaders, politicians and Israeli leaders. "Our hearts are broken," the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh posted on Facebook, saying it was making an exception and using social media on Shabbat. The federation's president, Jeff Finkelstein, in an interview on CNN praised the quick reaction of the police and local government and said of the...
(JTA)-It's been a dizzying few weeks for South African model and actress Shashi Naidoo, who transformed herself from a harsh critic of the Palestinians to what some are calling a "cover girl" for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. It all began in an Instagram post last month, when Naidoo called Gaza a "s***hole" and accused Palestinian leaders of diverting aid in order to feed its "ambition to annihilate Israel." She explained that she was defending a South African record producer w...
