Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA) — Some Orthodox neighborhoods classified as “red zones” by the state of New York due to their high COVID-19 test positivity rates in recent weeks will soon be allowed to reopen schools and nonessential businesses. But the areas of Brooklyn where Orthodox Jews have staged protests against the restrictions imposed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo still have so many new cases that that will remain red, Cuomo announced Wednesday. Cuomo instituted the color-coded zones earlier this month after he criticized New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to...
(JTA) — Protests by Orthodox Jews against New York’s crackdown on gatherings in their neighborhoods turned tense and at times violent Tuesday night as throngs of young men demonstrated in the streets of Borough Park. The late-night protest in a heavily Orthodox area of Brooklyn took aim at new restrictions that would close schools, limit attendance at synagogues services and close nonessential businesses in areas with upticks in COVID-19. The protesters set fire to a pile of masks, at one point surrounded a city bus that was moving through the...
(JTA) – It won’t just be schools that close in areas of New York City with many COVID-19 cases. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has announced new restrictions on houses of worship, with services in some parts of the state capped at just 10 people. The new restrictions will go into effect by Friday, as Jewish communities begin celebrations of Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, the last of the fall holidays, which are generally celebrated with large gatherings and dancing. The decision marks the first time in-person religious services, central to Ort...
(JTA) — The county health commissioner in upstate New York’s Orange County issued an order Monday closing schools serving students from Kiryas Joel, a community made up of mostly Satmar Hasidic Jews. The village has the highest COVID positivity rate of any town or village in the county, according to the commissioner’s order, with 27.6 percent of COVID tests confirming a positive result in a three-day average. Schools for whom a majority of students come from Kiryas Joel and Palm Tree, a town that overlaps with Kiryas Joel and which is also...
(JTA) – One New York City private Jewish high school shut down Monday after two students in 11th grade and two students in 12th grade tested positive. Several students in the younger grades exhibited symptoms. In a boys’ yeshiva high school in New Jersey’s Bergen County, a suspected COVID case in an 11th grader sent the entire grade home for quarantine. In Long Island, approximately 15 to 20 families were asked by one school to quarantine after they were found to have attended a wedding of about 200 people. “We spent a lot of time, energy...
NEW YORK (JTA) — After an initial first wave that devastated New York City’s Orthodox Jewish communities, the coronavirus is on the rise again. Meanwhile, Israelis are back under lockdown after new infections there reached crisis levels. As we did this spring, we’re tracking the news flowing in from across Jewish communities here. And as always, we want to hear from you. Have questions, tips or insights about how your community is responding to the pandemic more than six months in? Get in touch. Tuesday, Sept. 29 10:34 a.m. Israel’s per cap...
(JTA) — Parents of students attending Jewish schools in New York City are being encouraged not to have their children tested for COVID-19 to prevent the schools from being shut down. On Thursday, this message made the rounds on WhatsApp, a popular messaging platform in Orthodox communities: a “DO NOT test your child for covid,” the message began. “The city has released new guidelines that mandate CLOSURE of an ENTIRE SCHOOL if there are two positive tests in the school.” It went on to encourage parents to obscure suspected COVID-19 infection...
(JTA) - For many Jews, a high point of services on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is the Unetaneh Tokef prayer, which wonders who will live and who will die in the year ahead. This year, that question will take on added resonance, as the High Holidays fall six months into a global pandemic that has reshaped lives, battered institutions and killed hundreds of thousands of people, including many in Jewish communities. At the same time, the prayer will be experienced in dramatically new ways: on the...
(JTA) - Less than two miles away from the Center for Disease Control's campus in Atlanta, where doctors and researchers prepare guidance for the nation's coronavirus response, an Orthodox rabbi is preparing a different set of plans. Rabbi Adam Starr's task: how to accommodate hundreds of people for in-person services on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur during a pandemic. To keep congregants safe, he's dramatically shortening the services, which can run for most of the day under normal...
(JTA) — There was already some buzz around “An American Pickle,” the biggest Jewish movie of the year, before the movie’s star Seth Rogen made comments about Israel that seemed to set the Jewish internet on fire. In the new movie, Seth Rogen plays Herschel Greenbaum, a Jewish immigrant who is preserved in pickle brine for 100 years and emerges to meet his app developer great-grandson Ben, also played by Rogen, in modern hipster Brooklyn. The movie seems to exist in a world where Israel doesn’t exist — Herschel Greenbaum fell into the pickle...
(JTA) - Before the coronavirus pandemic hit New York City, Rabbi Avi Greenstein knew he needed to make a big push to have people in his neighborhood fill out the census. In Borough Park, where Greenstein serves as executive director of the Boro Park Jewish Community Council, only 49.2 percent of residents filled out the census in 2010, the last year it was conducted, compared to 61.9 percent across New York City. Thus the neighborhood, where many Orthodox Jews live, lost out on federal funding...
(JTA) - Mort Klein didn't know much about Ice Cube when he got on the phone with him on Monday afternoon, but by the end of their two-hour conversation, Klein said he was convinced the rapper was not anti-Semitic. In fact, the president of the right-wing Zionist Organization of America said, the rapper had invited Klein and his wife to dinner - once the pandemic is over. "He called me Mort," Klein told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. "He told me to call him Cube." "Strange bedfellows" would be...
(JTA) — Since retiring from his post as national director of the Anti-Defamation League in 2015, Abraham Foxman has had plenty of opportunities to take on other projects in the Jewish world. Until now, he’s almost always said no. But now the 80-year-old is coming out of retirement with an ambitious goal: to raise $28 million to feed Holocaust survivors during the pandemic. Foxman will lead the national initiative for the Met Council, a social service agency and the largest distributor of kosher food to New Yorkers living in poverty. Since ear...
(JTA) — Just days after the expiration of a federal program meant to preserve jobs during the pandemic, one of the largest JCCs in the country has laid off or furloughed 35 percent of its employees. The Marlene Meyerson Jewish Community Center of Manhattan laid off 32 people and furloughed 40 last week as it faces decreased revenue as a result of the pandemic. The JCC, which operated on a budget of $34 million before the coronavirus hit, expects to cut that in half moving forward. Among the positions eliminated were most of the marketing d...
(JTA) – The front page of the June 26 issue of Der Yid, one of the most widely circulated Yiddish newspapers among New York's Hasidic Orthodox communities, made the point loud and clear. "And so it was after the plague." Those words, lifted from a verse in the Torah and printed alongside photos of large gatherings of unmasked Hasidic men, had a clear implication: After months of funerals and fear, the modern-day pandemic had passed and the time had come to gather again. That sentiment appears t...
(JTA) — For Orthodox Jewish advocacy groups, the last day of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2020 session brought a big win. On Tuesday, the high court handed school voucher proponents a victory in ruling that a state-run scholarship program funded by tax-deductible gifts could not exclude religious schools. The court split 5-4 in the Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue case, with Chief Justice John Roberts providing the swing vote by joining the conservative justices. “A State need not subsidize private education,” Roberts wrote. “But on...
(JTA) - A top Justice Department official sent a letter to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio last week that claims the mayor has enforced uneven social distancing rules that "favor certain secular gatherings and disfavor religious gatherings." The letter, which was shared Tuesday by Agudath Israel, an organization representing haredi Orthodox Jews, specifically cited the mayor's focus on dispersing Jewish community gatherings. "During the period in which all gatherings were banned, you...
(JTA) — They protested the mayor’s decision to keep the parks closed on Sunday. By Monday, they vowed to cut the chains of the park gates themselves if Mayor Bill de Blasio didn’t accede to their requests. In a tweet Monday evening, New York State Sen. Simcha Felder said he and two other Orthodox lawmakers, City Councilman Kalman Yeger and state Assemblyman Simcha Eichenstein, would open the parks themselves if the mayor refused to do so. “We’ve asked nicely and waited patiently. We’ve made every logical argument. The people have spoken and the...
(JTA) - Shevi Samet started her Instagram livestream by letting out a long, deep breath. "How are you?" she asked her co-presenter and fellow Instagrammer Shoshana Greenwald. "So, so nervous," Greenwald replied. "So nervous, so nervous," Samet echoed. "I just want to address that briefly: Shoshana and I are literally doing this with our hearts in our throats." The two women were about to begin an hour-long discussion of racism and their journeys in learning more about anti-racism education...
(JTA) — His rise was meteoric and his fall just as sudden. Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, an Orthodox Jewish doctor who rose to fame in March while promoting a cocktail of drugs he claimed had successfully treated coronavirus — including one that President Donald Trump said Monday he is taking himself, despite the drug’s potentially dangerous side effects — has announced that he is leaving the Jewish community where he has practiced medicine for decades. In a video shared by the Orthodox news site Yeshiva World News, Zelenko announced he would leave Kir...
(JTA)—The nonprofit organization leading an emergency coalition to coordinate the Jewish response to the pandemic-induced financial crisis has itself slashed its staff. Jewish Federations of North America, an umbrella group of communal fundraising and programming organizations across the country, announced layoffs and executive salary cuts in a message to board members and federation executives Wednesday. “We need to redirect resources,” CEO Eric Fingerhut and chair Mark Wilf said in the message. “Accordingly, we have today implemented a plan...
(JTA)-Andrew Parver's phone hasn't stopped ringing since Sunday. That's when Parver, the director of operations at the Hebrew Free Burial Association in New York City, put out a call for donations of prayer shawls for traditional Jewish burials. Less than 48 hours later, he had collected 150 himself and pledges of hundreds more to come from as far away as South Florida and Pittsburgh. "My phone yesterday was nonstop-phone calls, emails, WhatsApps," Parver told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Tu...
(JTA)—With many of its normal activities interrupted because of the coronavirus pandemic, Hillel International, the umbrella organization for centers for Jewish student life on college campuses around the world, has laid off or furloughed 30 positions at its Washington, D.C., headquarters—over 20 percent of its workforce. The cuts were made last week, according to an email announcement sent Friday to Hillel staffers across the country. There are approximately 1,000 employees at Hillels around the world, most of which operate as independent org...
(JTA)-Sometime in March, the Chesed Shel Emes Jewish burial society in Brooklyn added a new responsibility to the sacred tasks its 700 volunteers had committed to uphold: paperwork. Bodies were piling up because of the coronavirus pandemic, and helping funeral homes with their clerical work had grown just as essential to ensuring respectful Jewish funeral rites as washing and guarding bodies before they were buried. Between Purim on March 10 and Passover, which ended last week, the burial...
(JTA)—Simmy Cohen has hardly read from the Torah since his bar mitzvah. When he’s not working at his marketing job from his home in Queens, New York, Cohen spends far more time these days reading children’s books to his 13-month old daughter. But with a spark of comedic genius and perhaps a little quarantine-induced imagination, he put the two together in a video of himself reading—no, chanting—the classic board book “Goodnight Moon” set to the Torah trope. “For those missing the sound of leyning,” he wrote in his post of the video to Twitter,...
