Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA) - BERLIN - The success of German extremists in Sunday's European Parliament election has mainstream Jewish leaders and politicians worried. Some say they fear the country is veering into political territory that resembles the era just before the rise of the Nazis here nearly a century ago. The strong showing for far-right parties reflects worries about increasing numbers of Muslim refugees since 2015 in Germany. The Alternative for Germany Party stresses isolationism, takes an anti-EU and...
BERLIN (JTA) – Israeli director Guy Nattiv and British actor Helen Mirren have received a Dove Award from the Cinema for Peace Foundation for their joint work in the 2023 biopic, “Golda,” in which Mirren stars as Golda Meir, the fourth prime minister of Israel. The film focuses on Meir’s role during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Nattiv and Mirren attended the awards ceremony in Berlin this week, where their prize was presented by 102-year-old Margot Friedlander, one of the oldest remaining Holocaust survivors. The ceremony took place contemp...
BERLIN (JTA) — Police in Berlin have arrested a 23-year-old man who allegedly attacked and seriously wounded a Jewish student in a bar on Friday. The Jewish student and his family say the attack was a hate crime. The victim, Lahav Shapira, 30, was hospitalized and underwent surgery for non-life-threatening injuries to his face. He is the grandson of Israeli athletics coach Amitzur Shapira, who was murdered by Palestinian terrorists in the Munich Olympics terror attack in 1972. His older brother, Shahak Shapira, is a prominent comedian and w...
BERLIN (JTA) — Recognizing Israel’s right to exist is now mandatory for those who want to become German citizens in the former East German state of Saxony-Anhalt. Applicants living in the state will have to confirm in writing “that they recognize Israel’s right to exist and condemn any efforts directed against the existence of the State of Israel.” Saxony-Anhalt’s interior minister, Tamara Zieschang, a member of the center-right Christian Democratic Union party, said Tuesday that the rule went into effect at the end of November. The new sta...
(JTA) - Germany has banned a neo-Nazi group after raiding the homes of its leaders across the country, in a move the government said "sends a clear signal against racism and antisemitism." The Hammerskins, a local spinoff of a group founded in the United States in the late 1980s, are accused of promoting criminal activities and of opposing the German constitution. According to a recent report from Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the group was the only the only re...
BERLIN (JTA) - Alongside Munich's river, construction workers made a sensational discovery last week: Stone tablets carved with the Ten Commandments from the city's former main synagogue, which was torn down in the summer of 1938 on Adolf Hitler's orders. The find was announced almost exactly 85 years after the building was destroyed. The object - along with 150 tons of rubble from the synagogue, including parts of columns - had likely lain on the banks of the Isar River since the 1950s, when...
(JTA) — Berlin police are investigating a pro-Palestinian rally where demonstrators allegedly chanted “Death to the Jews” and “Death to Israel,” phrases that if verified could be criminal offenses under Germany’s strict post-World War II hate speech laws. Hundreds of people showed up in the Kreuzberg and Neukölln neighborhoods on Saturday at a rally organized in response to the police clashes with Muslim worshipers at the Temple Mount and Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem last week. In video captured by a watchdog called Democ, many were also sh...
BERLIN (JTA) - A federal German cultural organization has returned a 16th-century sculpture to the heirs of its pre-war Jewish owner who faced Nazi persecution. The Berlin-based Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, or SPK (for Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz), announced today that the "Maria Lactans" statuette depicting Mary nursing an infant Jesus would be given back to the family of German Jewish banker and entrepreneur Jakob Goldschmidt, who fled Nazi Germany soon after Hitler came to...
(JTA) - This week, Jewish communities across the United States are commemorating the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish riots that marked a brutal turning point in the Nazi campaign of persecution. In Germany, cities and towns also will commemorate this day, but under a different name. They refer to the events of November 9-10, 1938, as "the November Pogrom," or variations on that term. That's became to many in Germany, the term "Kristallnacht" - night of shattered glass - sounds...
(JTA) — Germany’s public broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, has revised its code of conduct to require support for Israel’s right to exist, and employees who fail to do so may now be fired. The move announced Sept. 1 preceded a court order last week that DW reinstate a former employee fired who was fired after the company determined she had made comments about Israel that could be construed as antisemitic. In all, seven employees from the broadcaster’s Arabic service were let go last year on similar grounds, and so far two have successfully sued DW...
(JTA) - At a ceremony held on the air base where 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were murdered during the 1972 Munich Olympics, German officials apologized for the "lack of protection" that led to the tragedy and agreed to establish a joint research commission to look more deeply into the events surrounding the terror attack. "We cannot make amends for what has happened," said German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Monday. "I ask you, as the head of state of this country and on behalf of th...
BERLIN (JTA) — Nestled in the Bavarian alps, the city of Oberammergau has one major claim to fame: every 10 years, it hosts the world-famous Passion Play, which tells the New Testament story of Jesus’ death and resurrection. It has been doing so since the 17th century, almost without fail, and it happens to be on now, after a two-year, pandemic-related delay. About half a million spectators are expected to flock to the town by the time this season is over, on Oct. 2. Over the centuries, the play — in which all roles are filled by local resident...
(JTA) - The director of a major international art exhibition has resigned after a work that included caricatures of Jews and Israelis ignited a reckoning over antisemitism. The scandal leaves Documenta - a sweeping, decentralized exhibition staged every five years in Kassel, Germany - on uncertain territory for the future. Documenta announced that the Anne Frank Education Center in Frankfurt, would review all of the work in the exhibition, but the center's director said announced on Friday that...
BERLIN (JTA) — Growing up in London had its ups and downs for Jeremy Issacharoff, Israel’s outgoing ambassador to Germany. On one hand, as a schoolboy he was beaten up by skinheads and called a “dirty Jew.” On the other hand, he had long, civilized discussions with Arab and Palestinian classmates at the London School of Economics. Such experiences prepared him for his life as a diplomat: With some people you talk. With others, never. Issacharoff, 67, recently reflected on his 40 years in the Israeli foreign service, days before leaving Germany...
(JTA) - It is nearly 10 p.m. at the emergency refugee shelter in Tomaszow Lubelski, Poland, near the Ukrainian border. It's bitter cold; snowflakes catch in the headlights of the huge tourist bus from Hanover, Germany, as it pulls up at the guard post. Zohar Spivack's bus company, Kings Travel - "the logo is blue and white, and I don't have to tell you why," he said - has been picking up refugees every day since Russia's attacks began. Leaving Warsaw empty after sundown, stopping at shelters...
BERLIN (JTA) - On a recent Friday afternoon, with the Beijing Olympic Games only three weeks away, Mischa Ushakov and Padma Wangyal chained themselves to the entrance of the Allianz insurance giant's headquarters in Germany's capital. They had two demands: that Allianz "drop their sponsorship of the games in China and comment on the human rights abuses of the Chinese government," Ushakov said. "We gave them a one week deadline," he added. Ushakov, 23, is a cofounder with Bini Guttmann of Never...
BERLIN (JTA) - A new survey of youth in Germany shows growing interest in Nazi-era history, but it also suggests that their attention span is shrinking. According to the study conducted by the Cologne-based Rheingold Institute, Germany's 16-25 year olds are much more interested in the Nazi era than their parents were. They tend to draw analogies from the time period to racism and discrimination today, and are eager to examine the motives of perpetrators. But they also want more "snackable conten...
BERLIN (JTA) - A German Protestant minister has handed over segments of a long lost Torah scroll to the city of Görlitz in southeast Germany, 83 years after his father, a town policeman, came into possession of them. While it is not unheard of for German non-Jews to turn over religious objects that have been lost or hidden since the Nazi period, the Torah scroll fragments took an unusually circuitous journey before coming to light last week. The Torah had not been seen since Kristallnacht, the...
BERLIN (JTA) – The number of politically motivated crimes rose sharply in Germany last year, including a 15 percent rise in antisemitic offenses. The total documented by the country’s federal police force is the highest since contemporary record-keeping began in 2001. German officials said new efforts are underway to help police officers identify antisemitic crime. The annual report by the Federal Criminal Police Office released Tuesday showed an 8.54 percent increase in political crimes over 2019, to 44,692 crimes, German Interior Min...
(JTA) — Drawing a line between its mission of Holocaust remembrance and the ravages inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic, the March of the Living honored Dr. Anthony Fauci with an award for “moral courage in medicine” on the eve of Yom Hashoah, Israel’s Holocaust commemoration day. The award to Fauci, who for decades has been the top U.S. official handling infectious diseases, culminated in an online program on Wednesday called “Medicine and Morality.” In his acceptance remarks, Fauci referred to Maimonides, the medieval Jewish scholar and...
BERLIN (JTA) — The head of Austria’s Jewish community has apologized for COVID-19 vaccine doses that were administered to community members, including himself, who were not meant to receive them. In a letter to the community released Monday, Oskar Deutsch said it was a “mistake” to have included nonpriority individuals in the vaccinations administered on Dec. 30 at the Maimonides Center, the Jewish community’s senior home. It “should not have happened,” Deutsch said. “I myself was invited to receive an inoculation and didn’t refuse. That was...
(JTA) - Plans are under way to find a home for a huge trove of works by a nearly forgotten Jewish artist that was uncovered 78 years after her death in a Nazi concentration camp. The works of Czech artist Gertrud Kauders (1883-1942) were found during the demolition of an old house near Prague in 2018, when 30 paintings tumbled onto the head of a worker. Hundreds more canvases were found in the walls and under floorboards of the home where the artist had stashed them to keep them out of Nazi...
BERLIN (JTA) — Joining a growing chorus of critical voices, Holocaust survivors have launched an international online campaign criticizing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that is aimed at countering Holocaust denial on his social media platform. Starting Wednesday, a campaign sponsored by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany called “There’s No Denying It #NoDenyingIt” will upload video testimony daily from survivors across the globe to social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram (owned by Facebook) and Twitter...
BERLIN (JTA) - They date back to the late Middle Ages and irritate to this day: The Judensau (literally "Jewish sow") is a Christian folk image that depicts Jews sucking on the teats or peering into the anus of a pig. Mostly found in the form of reliefs or gargoyles on the exterior of German churches, some of them major historical landmarks, the images have been the subject of increasing public debate in recent years. And now Germany's highest court will weigh in on the matter when it hears the...
BERLIN (JTA) - In May, a demolition crew tore down a building in the western German city of Gelsenkirchen. As the walls fell, a 110-year-old advertising mural on the adjacent brick wall was exposed. It read: "For suits and overcoats with a perfect fit, shop at Alexander." The large Alexander family was Jewish and had moved to Gelsenkirchen around the 1910s from another German city. The Nazis eventually expropriated their businesses and property. Some family members fled to Brazil. Others made...
