Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA) — If there’s one thing Rabbi Sholom Lipskar wants to remember from the aftermath of the Surfside condo collapse in June, it’s the small cards that he distributed to the first responders and search-and-rescue teams working at the site. Inscribed with Psalm 23, a psalm often recited in times of trouble that begins with the words “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” the cards were meant to protect and inspire those charged with extracting survivors and, later, recovering bodies. Lipskar estimated that he gave out as many as 800 of...
ROCHESTER, N.Y. (JTA) - Rob Nipe and Nora Rubel hadn't anticipated selling out of pastrami on their opening day. But when you have a vegan butcher shop certified kosher and open up just a few blocks from an Orthodox synagogue, perhaps selling out of pastrami is par for the course. Butcher, of course, is a bit of a misnomer: Everything in Grass Fed - from the sliced "bacon" to the "butter chicken" to the "corned beef" - is made with plant-based ingredients and therefore fairly easy to certify as...
This article will be updated as more names are identified by authorities in Florida. (JTA) - The Champlain Towers South building collapse is a national tragedy, one that has claimed nearly 20 lives so far and left over 140 still missing in the rubble as of Thursday. Among other groups, it struck a unique nexus of the American Jewish community in South Florida, home to a mix of Latin American immigrants, Israelis and retirees from the Northeast. The town of Surfside, the site of the collapse, is...
(JTA) - For Rabbi Michael Perice, the hardest thing about counseling congregants who have family members dealing with addiction had been holding back his own experience with substance abuse. "I really wanted to let people know in these conversations that I understand. And I couldn't do that," Perice said. Perice, the spiritual leader at Temple Sinai of Cinnaminson, New Jersey, decided to change that by telling his congregation the story of his four-year struggle with opioid addiction. He...
(JTA) - Among Rabbi Mayer Berger's first thoughts on seeing the 12 stories of the Champlain Tower South pancaked upon themselves: This is like Sept. 11. Then as now, destruction of unimaginable proportions claimed many lives without warning in a manner that rendered traditional practices for burying the Jewish dead impossible to perform. Those practices call for bodies to be buried as soon as possible following death after undergoing a purification ritual called tahara. But with both Jewish and...
(JTA) — When Ricki moved into her new ground floor apartment in New York City less than a year ago, she felt perfectly comfortable placing a mezuzah on the front door for all who passed through the lobby to see. Today she feels less sanguine about that choice. Ricki hasn’t removed the mezuzah, but she has asked the building’s management to put bars on her windows. And she’s still considering taking down the Jewish symbol. “When I put it up I was really proud of it,” Ricki said, declining to use her last name due to privacy concerns. ...
(JTA) — Faye Schulman, a Holocaust survivor who lost most of her family to the Nazis but joined a group of partisan fighters and documented their work in photographs, died April 24, The Washington Post reported Saturday. She was 101 years old. Schulman’s photographs often depicted the smiling faces of young partisan fighters, with Schulman at times at the center in a stylish leopard print coat. Michael Berkowitz, a professor of Jewish history at University College London, told the Post that her...
(JTA) - For some Americans watching the escalating violence in Israel and Gaza in recent days, the most striking image from the conflict came in a video of Israeli men at the Western Wall, singing and dancing as they watched a fire burn outside the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Others can't look away from videos of Iron Dome, Israel's missile defense system, which shoots rockets out of the air mid-flight, lighting up Israel's skies like a fireworks display. Both images have gone viral as Israel and Gaza...
(JTA) — Among the findings of the Pew Research Center’s new survey of American Jews is one that has become increasingly self-evident in recent years: Orthodox Jews in the U.S. overwhelmingly affiliate with the Republican Party. According to the newest study, 75 percent of Orthodox Jews surveyed said they were Republicans or leaned Republican. In 2013, the last year in which Pew conducted a survey of American Jews, 57 percent of Orthodox Jews said they were Republicans or leaned Republican. The Pew survey was conducted between Nov. 19, 2019 and...
(JTA) - Growing up, Passover was always a special time of year for David Teyf. It wasn't just about the holiday. It was also the stories his family would tell about the matzah factory they used to operate behind his grandfather's house in Minsk before they left Soviet Belarus in 1979. Teyf, who was born in that house, was 5 when they left that capital city. Now a successful chef, Teyf has few memories of the matzah factory. Yet he has found himself thinking about it more often lately as he...
(JTA) - It was only about a week into lockdown last spring when Elana Brody took out her keyboard piano for a jam session. It was late at night, so it made sense that the new melody that came to her then was "B'shem Hashem" a part of the Shema. "It was kind of natural to want to sing this prayer because it's a bedtime prayer," Brody said, calling it an "incantation" of sorts. The words call on four angels to surround her - Michael to the right, Gabriel to the left, Uriel in front and Raphael beh...
(JTA) — Last year at this time, the message out of Jewish summer camps was one of doom and gloom. In April 2020, the Union for Reform Judaism announced that COVID would force a closure of its camps for the summer, affecting some 10,000 kids. In May, the Conservative movement’s Ramah camps across the country followed suit. This year, the outlook could not be more different. Camps in the United States are opening again with a combination of testing and vaccinations, along with a better understanding of how COVID-19 spreads. “It’s absolutely exhau...
(JTA) - Holocaust remembrance day programs in Jewish communities have stuck to a familiar form for decades, featuring Holocaust survivors sharing their stories followed by the lighting of yahrzeit candles and the recitation of commemorative prayers. But that model of memorial faces a problem that is growing more pressing each year: the dwindling number of survivors still living and able to share accounts of their painful past. That reality drove Michal Govrin, an Israeli writer and professor,...
(JTA) — One year after COVID-19 first walloped Jewish communities in the United States, a scientific study has confirmed something that many in the communities have long believed: gatherings during the week of Purim served as super-spreader events. A paper published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open, a peer-review journal that is open to the public, concludes that the coronavirus was spreading widely in Orthodox communities across the country last spring around that Jewish holiday — before public hea...
(JTA) - The Darvick family did Jewish holidays by videoconference long before a pandemic forced them. "We call it Skypanukkah," Elliot Darvick told The New York Times in December 2011, when the family was featured in an article about celebrating Chanukah over Skype. So when Zoom seders suddenly became standard last year, the Darvicks were prepared. But this Passover, the Darvicks will be together again. By the time the holiday begins later this month, both Debra Darvick, 64, and her husband,...
(JTA) — Even without hearing the words, the pictures that animate the “Appreciation Song for President Trump” sung by a group of Hasidic boys clearly spell out the reasons for their appreciation for Donald Trump. “With devotion so strong, you lead us like you know how,” they sing as a photo of Sholom Rubashkin, the former meat processing plant owner whose 27-year prison sentence Trump commuted in December 2017 appears on the screen. “The economy is growing like never before,” they sing against the backdrop of a stock ticker. “The peace th...
(JTA) - Heshy Tischler, the pro-Trump provocateur of Orthodox Brooklyn, wasn't at the U.S. capitol when a mob stormed it Wednesday - but not because he didn't want to be. Tischler was one of a throng of Orthodox Jews who traveled down to D.C. to join mass protests of the election results Wednesday. He had left the city before the protest turned into an insurrection that drove members of Congress and the vice president into hiding, and in which a woman was killed. But that afternoon, unaware...
(JTA) — A federal court of appeals ruled that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s capacity limits on houses of worship in areas with rising COVID-19 cases constituted a violation of religious liberty. The ruling on Monday comes after a Supreme Court injunction last month blocking Cuomo from enforcing the rules until the lower court could reevaluate an earlier ruling that upheld state guidelines limiting synagogue attendance to 10 or 25 people. The case, brought by the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and Agudath Israel of America, an advocacy org...
(JTA) - After an Orthodox-owned health clinic appeared to be administering COVID-19 vaccines to members of the public contrary to state guidelines, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the investigation would be referred to the state attorney general's office and that vaccine-related fraud would come with consequences. "We will not tolerate any fraud in the vaccination process," Cuomo said at a news conference Monday. "Anyone who engages in fraud is going to be held accountable." His comments come...
(JTA) — The Supreme Court blocked government restrictions on houses of worship imposed by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, in a late-night ruling Wednesday. Deciding two cases at once — one brought by Agudath Israel, an umbrella organization representing haredi Orthodox Jews, and one brought by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn — the court ruled that restrictions placed on New York’s “red zones” with high COVID test positivity rates unfairly discriminated against houses of worship. The decision, which split 5-4, was the first in which Justi...
(JTA) - In the more than 30 years that Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel has worked at Agudath Israel, an umbrella organization and advocacy group representing haredi Orthodox Jews, he can't remember a single year where as much of the group's work took place in court. There was the lawsuit challenging New York State for applying different standards on attendance at houses of worship than at businesses. Agudath Israel filed an amicus brief supporting the plaintiffs. There was the case in which Orthodox...
(JTA) — After several challenges to pandemic-induced restrictions on houses of worship citing religious liberty, an Orthodox Jewish advocacy group is taking its case to the U.S. Supreme Court in the hopes that the new conservative majority will rule in its favor. Agudath Israel, an umbrella organization representing haredi Orthodox Jews, is challenging New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s limitations on houses of worship in “red zones,” areas with especially high COVID test positivity rates. Agudath Israel claims that they were implemented in a way t...
(JTA) — Jewish schools and other private schools in New York City will remain open even as the city shutters its public school buildings starting Thursday amid a rise in new COVID-19 cases in the city. City officials decided this summer to shift all schools to virtual learning if the city’s seven-day test positivity rate reached 3 percent. That happened Thursday, according to the city’s data. But the rules do not affect the city’s private schools. That’s because every public school district and private school in New York state was required...
(JTA) — At the end of the annual conference of Chabad emissaries from around the world, they typically take a giant group photograph in front of the movement’s headquarters in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights. But this year, no camera at the Kinus Hashluchim could capture the nearly 6,000 participants at once: They were on Zoom from their separate computers and time zones. The video version was a concession to the coronavirus pandemic that has disrupted the globe for nearly a year. What’s more, the conference didn’t really end. Without planes to catch...
(JTA) - The doctor burst into public view in the pandemic's early days, vaulting from behind the scenes to the front lines of a crisis bringing his community to its knees. Community members hung on his every word and changed their behavior because of him. Seven months later, he still has his adherents, but he also knows that weighing in about ways to curb the spread of COVID-19 comes with a cost - from being dismissed at best to facing violent threats from people who are tired of restrictions...
