Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA) — Israel is investigating Hamas’ claim that its youngest hostages, brothers Kfir and Ariel Bibas, are dead, along with their mother Shiri. The Bibas family became an early face of the hostage crisis after Hamas released a video showing Shiri holding her sons while being taken captive. Kfir, who is 10 months old, has become a symbol of the campaign for the hostages’ release. His brother Ariel is 4. Although most of the child hostages have been freed under the agreement with Israel, the Bibas family was not among those who have been retur...
(Oct. 9, 2023, JTA) — A massive military operation is underway to place Gaza under a “complete siege,” Israel’s defense minister said on Monday, 48 hours after a surprise attack by Hamas left 800 Israelis dead, thousands wounded and more than 100 captive in Gaza. “We are going to change the Middle East,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday, according to Israeli media. Meanwhile, a second front in the war has threatened to open up. On Monday, a number of gunmen entered Israel’s north from Lebanon, where the Hezbollah ter...
This story will be updated. (Oct. 9, 2023, JTA) — A massive military operation is underway to place Gaza under a “complete siege,” Israel’s defense minister said on Monday, 48 hours after a surprise attack by Hamas left 800 Israelis dead, thousands wounded and more than 100 captive in Gaza. “We are going to change the Middle East,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday, according to Israeli media. Meanwhile, a second front in the war has threatened to open up. On Monday, a number of gunmen entered Israel’s north from Le...
(JTA) - Barbie the doll has a deep Jewish history. Now, the creator of "Barbie" the movie hopes watching the film will also evoke a deep Jewish experience. Greta Gerwig, who conceived and directed the buzzy live-action film released this month, told The New York Times that she hopes watching the movie will be a quasi-spiritual activity for its viewers. The feeling she wants to achieve, she said, is the same one she felt as a child when she was a guest at the Shabbat dinners of close family...
JERUSALEM (JTA) - Helen Mirren will soon become linked with Golda Meir in the minds of many viewers when she plays the late Israeli prime minister in a new film. But the award-winning actress has another, real-life connection to Meir: the two are related, Israeli genealogical researchers revealed on Thursday. Mirren was in Jerusalem for the Israeli premiere of "Golda," the dramatic film she's headlining about Meir's handling of the Yom Kippur War - when Egypt, Syria and a coalition of their alli...
(JTA) - Viewers of the popular game show "Jeopardy!" got a glance of one of the United States' most distinctive synagogue buildings on Tuesday, after a clue showcased Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, Michigan. The Conservative synagogue had leaked the fact that it would appear as a trivia item on "Jeopardy!" for days before the game, and as luck would have it, one of the contestants on Tuesday lives just a 45-minute drive from Southfield, in Dexter. Ben Goldstein told the Jewish...
(JTA) — For years, as the Sackler name fell from art museums, colleges and even a wing of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater amid revelations about the family’s contributions to the opioid crisis, it remained very much attached to the medical school at Tel Aviv University. Now, three weeks after the Jewish family that produced the opioid OxyContin agreed to spend up to $6 billion on addiction treatment and prevention in exchange for immunity from civil claims, the university has announced that the family “has kindly agreed to remove their name” from t...
(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) - Rabbi Harold Kushner, one of the most influential congregational rabbis of the 20th century whose works of popular theology reached millions of people outside the synagogue, died on April 28, 2023. Kushner, who turned 88 on April 3, died in Canton, Massachusetts, just miles from the synagogue where he had been rabbi laureate for more than three decades. Kushner's fairly conventional trajectory as a Conservative rabbi was altered shortly after arriving at Temple Israel of Natick when, on...
(JTA) — Among the many honors accruing to King Charles III coronation was a new version of a traditional prayer performed by a British-Jewish children’s choir. United Synagogue, the union of British Orthodox synagogues, commissioned a new recording of “Adon Olam,” a prayer perhaps most recognizable as the conclusion of Shabbat services, and dedicated it to the new king. The rendition was composed by a British-Jewish musician who teaches at a Jewish school and was arranged by the brothers in the indie rock due Portnoy, according to the Jewish...
(JTA) — In a surprise move, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has backed out of his appearance at a major conference of U.S. Jewish leaders in Tel Aviv, just hours before a speech that was expected to draw mass protests. But in a sign that the conference organizers did not expect Netanyahu’s cancelation to head off the protests, Jewish Federations of North America told attendees that it was not changing the schedule of the buses bringing them from their hotels to the conference center. The group had told attendees to plan extra tim...
(JTA) - Perhaps the greatest influence on Al Jaffee, known to readers of Mad Magazine as the creator of the "Fold-In," was the time he spent living in a Lithuanian shtetl as a child. Jaffee had been born in Savannah, Georgia, but returned to his mother's native country with her after she became disillusioned by the irreligious character of life in America. Living in her small town, Zarasai, from ages 6 to 12, he became steeped in both the Yiddish and the "anti-adultism" that would infuse his...
(JTA) - The most notable message Melissa Klapper got during her four-night run on "Jeopardy!" didn't come because the Jewish studies scholar was unable to answer a question about Yom Kippur. It also wasn't an unkind note from a game-show stickler who believed she'd gotten credit for a wrong response. Instead, it was an email from a past student who recognized herself in the story Klapper told as part of her self-introductory stage banter - a staple of the game show. Klapper, who teaches history...
(JTA) — Like hundreds of thousands of her fellow Israelis, Kelly Breakstone Roth’s instinct on Sunday was to take to the streets. The only wrinkle: She and her family have been in Brooklyn for the last two years, part of the diaspora of hundreds of thousands of Israelis living abroad. They couldn’t just walk out the door of their apartment and join the sweeping nationwide protest that ignited after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired his defense minister, who had called for a pause on proposed changes to Israel’s judiciary. So they bought...
(JTA) - Chaim Topol won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of an immigrant to Israel, stepped off the stage in London to fight for his country and had his sketches of Israeli presidents turned into postage stamps. But the actor was, by far, best known for his embodiment of Tevye the Dairyman in "Fiddler on the Roof," first in the Israeli and London stagings and then in the 1971 movie that brought the musical about poor shtetl Jews to the masses. Topol died March 9 in Tel Aviv at 87, a day after...
(JTA) — A “National Day of Hate” against Jews planned by white supremacists that triggered sweeping warnings from law enforcement and Jewish security officials came and went without significant incident on Saturday. Synagogues and Jewish institutions across the United States had spent the preceding days shoring up their security procedures, reassuring their congregants and requesting extra patrols from local police. Reports from synagogues suggested that the pews were crowded on Shabbat with Jews who said they would not be deterred by hate. In...
(JTA) — Richard Belzer wasn’t just a hard-boiled Jew who rose from a troubled childhood to the top of his field — he played one on TV. Belzer, who died Sunday at 78, was a familiar face because of his longstanding roles on “Homicide: Life on the Streets,” “Law and Order: SVU” and other TV shows. In each of those series, he played a presumptively Jewish detective named John Munch whose biography overlapped significantly with Belzer’s own. Belzer was born in 1944 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and had what he described as a difficult child...
(JTA) — The Israeli minister responsible for relations with Jews in the Diaspora has a message for the government of the country where most of them live: “Mind your own business.” Amichai Chikli made the comment Sunday in a radio interview in Israel, where he was asked to address recent comments by U.S. ambassador Tom Nides, who said he was urging Israeli leaders to “pump the brakes” on their controversial effort to change the country’s judiciary. Nides was echoing sentiments expressed by U.S. President Joe Biden about the judicial reform prop...
(JTA) — One of the Israeli teams dispatched to Turkey to assist after the devastating earthquakes there has headed home after being informed about a “concrete and immediate threat” against them. United Hatzalah told its team of roughly two dozen personnel in Turkey to end their rescue mission and leave the country, the emergency services organization announced early Sunday. Because of a shortage of available planes to evacuate them, the philanthropist Miriam Adelson donated her private jet to facilitate the evacuation, the group said. “We k...
(JTA) — A New Jersey synagogue is crediting recent safety improvements after a Molotov cocktail thrown at its door overnight caused little damage. Still, Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield canceled activities on Sunday as the police investigated, marking the second time in recent months that the suburban congregation suspended activities because of an antisemitic incident. Last November, the Reform synagogue of about 500 families near New York City briefly closed its doors while the FBI investigated a “credible threat” against New Jersey synag...
(JTA) — Second gentleman Doug Emhoff extended his focus on Holocaust remembrance by inviting a Washington, D.C.-area survivor to be his guest at President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech Tuesday evening. Ruth Cohen, who survived multiple concentration camps including Auschwitz, joined Emhoff at the annual policy address in Washington. Emhoff first met Cohen last year before International Holocaust Remembrance Day with his wife, Vice President Kamala Harris, according to a press release from the White House. This year, Emhoff spent Int...
(JTA) — A prize established to honor a single inspiring Jew with a lifetime of achievements has been awarded this year to a nameless group whose work is ongoing: Jewish activists in war-ravaged Ukraine. The Genesis Prize Foundation said the war in Ukraine required a change in the approach it has taken since creating the prize, known by some as the “Jewish Nobel,” a decade ago. “Recognizing the extraordinary nature of events dominating the past 11 months, The Genesis Prize Selection Committee has decided to depart from the usual custom of awar...
(JTA) — In 1923 in New York, a Yiddish play that featured the first lesbian scene on a Broadway stage was censored for being indecent. In 2023 in Florida, a play about the first play has been canceled for the same reason. For many involved in the new play, including its Pulitzer Prize-winning Jewish playwright and the Florida high schooler cast in a lead role, the déjà vu is alarming. “The 100-year anniversary of Sholem Asch’s ‘God of Vengeance’ being shut down on Broadway is the same week that our production of ‘Indecent’ would have open...
(JTA) — George Santos’ first Chanukah party with the Republican Jewish Coalition was his last. The group said it will not host Santos at any future events after the congressman-elect lied to RJC officials and to the public about being Jewish and the descendant of people who escaped the Holocaust. Santos participated in an event with the group on the first night of Chanukah, Dec. 18, where he was feted as one of two incoming Jewish Republicans in Congress; he had been elected in New York’s 3rd Congressional District. The next day, the New York...
(JTA) — Yes, Lionel Messi will forever be the face of Argentina’s long-awaited World Cup championship on Sunday. But the voice of the victory belongs to the Argentinean Jewish sportscaster who cried as he announced the win. Andres Cantor, a prominent soccer announcer, responded to Argentina’s game-winning penalty shot with his signature elongated “Gooooooool!” In a video clip that has gone viral, Cantor can be seen grabbing onto his broadcast partner as he yells “Argentina, campeon de mundo!...
