Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 76 - 91 of 91
NEW YORK (JTA)—It’s being billed as the “Conversation of the Century.” When the main synagogue organization of Conservative Jewry gathers this weekend in Baltimore to celebrate its centennial, there will be a lot to talk about. The number of synagogues affiliated with the group, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, is in decline. The proportion of American Jews who identify as Conservative has shrunk to 18 percent, according to the recent Pew Research Center study of U.S. Jewry,...
NEW YORK (JTA)—What would happen if some of the biggest players in American Jewish life sat down and debated the implications of the new Pew Research Center’s survey of U.S. Jewry? After last week’s landmark study, I talked to nine Jewish philanthropists and organizational leaders about the lessons Pew holds for them and how they spend and invest their hundreds of millions of dollars per year dedicated to American Jewish life. (The result was this story: Engagement trends are negative, but Jewish funders see validation in Pew study.) I thoug...
NEW YORK (JTA)—If you’re pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into Jewish identity building, what do you do when a survey comes along showing that the number of U.S. Jews engaging with Jewish life and religion is plummeting? That’s the question facing major funders of American Jewish life following the release of the Pew Research Center’s survey on U.S. Jews. The study—the first comprehensive portrait of American Jewry in more than a decade—showed that nearly one-third of American Je...
NEW YORK (JTA)—There are a lot more Jews in America than you may have thought—an estimated 6.8 million, according to a new study. But a growing proportion of them are unlikely to raise their children Jewish or connect with Jewish institutions. The proportion of Jews who say they have no religion and are Jewish only on the basis of ancestry, ethnicity or culture is growing rapidly, and two-thirds of them are not raising their children Jewish at all. Overall, the intermarriage rate is at 58 per...
NEW YORK (JTA)—When Georgette Bennett decided a few months ago to help refugees from Syria’s civil war, she wanted to do it in a Jewish way. Citing a passage from Leviticus she said her late husband often quoted, “Thou shalt not stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor,” Bennett met with the CEO of a major Jewish aid group and quickly got him to agree to head a Jewish effort for the refugees. Bennett, a former professor, journalist and philanthropist, supplied the first $100,000. The CEO, Al...
AKRON, Ohio (JTA)—During a High Holidays discussion about repentance in Sarah Greenblatt’s Jewish values class, not all the students are listening. One girl stares out the window at the azure sky. Another sits in the back doodling. But a boy in the front row wearing a creased black skullcap sits transfixed, notebook open, pencil poised. Why is reflection and repentance so important around Rosh Hashanah? Greenblatt asks. The boy’s hand shoots up. “The Torah, and also the Bible, tells us how to...
NEW YORK (JTA)—In 5773, the religious wars just would not go away. In Israel, elections that extended Benjamin Netanyahu’s tenure as prime minister delivered big wins to two anti-Orthodox-establishment upstarts, Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett. For the first time in nearly two decades, Israel’s coalition government included no haredi Orthodox parties. The Israel Defense Forces took concrete steps toward ending the draft exemption for haredi men. Israel’s Ministry of Religious Services agreed...
NEW YORK (JTA)—When the nation’s largest Jewish federation convened its first-ever conference recently on engaging interfaith families, perhaps the most notable thing about it was the utter lack of controversy that greeted the event. There was a time when the stereotypical Jewish approach to intermarriage was to shun the offender and sit shiva. A generation ago, the publication of the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey showing intermarriage at the alarmingly high rate of 52 percent tur...
NEW YORK (JTA)—If you want to lead a major Reform Jewish organization, here’s a piece of advice: Go to the Westchester Reform Temple. With this week’s announcement that Rabbi Aaron Panken will be the new president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the temple in suburban New York now has produced two major Reform leaders in two years. (The other is Rabbi Rick Jacobs, who two years ago ceded the pulpit of the Scarsdale synagogue to become president of the Union for Refor...
RAANANA, Israel (JTA)—When U.S. Rep. Peter Deutsch lost his campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2004, forcing him out of Congress for the first time in 12 years, he didn’t quite know what to do with himself. So he did something not entirely uncommon among American Jews who haven’t quite figured out their next step: He went to Israel. More than eight years later, Deutsch is still here, living with his family in Raanana, a Tel Aviv suburb. His 22-year-old son recently completed a stint as a combat sol...
NEW YORK (JTA)—After two months of Jewish communal squabbling following the disclosure of a flubbed opportunity to detect a massive fraud scheme at the Claims Conference years before it was stopped, the Claims Conference appears to be moving on. At its annual meeting this week, the organization’s board of directors debated for more than six hours the circumstances surrounding an anonymous letter sent to the conference in 2001 alleging that multiple false claims had been approved for restitution payments. Despite two investigations that yea...
NEW YORK (JTA)—In his letter announcing he was stepping down as Yeshiva University’s chancellor and rosh yeshiva, Rabbi Norman Lamm acknowledged his failure to respond adequately to allegations of sexual abuse against Y.U. rabbis in the 1980s. Lamm, now 85, became the school’s third president and head of its rabbinic school, the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, in 1976. He stepped down as president in 2003, becoming chancellor, but stayed on as the head of RIETS. His resignation July...
NEW YORK (JTA)—Now that it’s clear that the top leaders of the Claims Conference were involved in investigating an anonymous accusation of restitution fraud in 2001, the question is who bears the responsibility for failing to detect that a broad fraud scheme was under way. The person at the center of the 2001 allegations, Semen Domnitser, turned out to be the ringleader of the $57 million fraud; he was found guilty at trial on May 8. For most of those who played a role in two botched probes in...
NEW YORK (JTA)—Who knew what, and when? Those are the questions critics are asking following the disclosure that the Claims Conference received an anonymous letter in 2001 identifying several fraudulent Holocaust-era restitution claims—nearly a decade before the organization halted a massive fraud scheme. By 2009, when the magnitude of the scheme was discovered, the fraud had been running for 15 years and managed to extract more than $57 million in illegitimate payouts. Last Friday, World Jew...
(JTA) – Real estate developer Hank Katzen has a conviction: If you build it, they will come. Except this is no baseball field in an Iowa cornfield. It’s a $60 million, 600,000-square-foot luxury dormitory at the nation’s second-largest college campus, the University of Central Florida. When it opens in August, the new dorm will push the bounds of cushiness. Every room has en-suite bathrooms and flat-screen TVs. Suites have island kitchens with stone countertops, washer-dryers and walk-in closets...
(JTA)—For more than a decade, Venezuelan Jews have been holding their breath, subject to the whims of a mercurial president who used his bully pulpit to intimidate, rail against Israel and embrace Iran. There was the police raid of a Caracas school in 2004, allegedly to search for evidence in the high-profile murder case of a prosecutor. There were the demands by President Hugo Chavez when war broke out between Israel and Hamas in December 2008 that his country’s Jews rebuke Israel for its con...
