Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited troops in the northern Gaza Strip, during which he said that the war against Hamas is not nearly finished. "We are not stopping; we are continuing to battle. We will be intensifying the fighting in the coming days, as this will be a long war. It is not close to over," Netanyahu told soldiers. "We are proud of you and trust you. We see the determination and the desire to continue until the end," he added. Netanyahu was joined by Israel...
DENVER - Orlando community members recently joined 2,500 Zionists in Denver, Colorado, for Jewish National Fund-USA's Global Conference for Israel. Emotions ran high as attendees embraced the dozens of Israelis in attendance who experienced the horror and aftermath of the attacks. These same Israelis have been working around the clock with Jewish National Fund-USA to address the immediate needs of those affected while also planning for the region's future. "After so much tragedy, it was...
(JNS) - Mark Podwal's "Shabbat: A Taste of Heaven," an acrylic and colored pencil drawing on paper, was part of his 2003 exhibition "A Sweet Year" at the Israel Museum Ruth Youth Wing in Jerusalem. (His book "A Sweet Year: A Taste of the Jewish Holidays" came out the same year.) "When the Jewish people were gathered at Mount Sinai to receive the Torah, God told them that olam habah (the world to come) would be their reward for keeping the commandments," the New York artist tells JNS, quoting "Ot...
(JNS) - Two Israeli reserve soldiers recently discovered a small, well-preserved Byzantine-era oil lamp at a military staging area in southern Israel near the Gaza border, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced on Tuesday. The find, by Nathaniel Melchior and Alon Segev, part of the 404th Battalion within the Israel Defense Forces' 282nd Fire Brigade, sparked a chain of events that led to the 1,500-year-old artifact's safe handover to the IAA. "During one of our wanderings in the field, I...
Dillard's Department Store in Altamonte Springs is proud to announce its role as the host venue for the upcoming Jewish Pavilion Annual Fashion Show on Feb. 15, 2024, starting at 9:30 a.m., according to Nancy Nguyen, the store manager. Dillard's encourages the community to extend financial support to The Jewish Pavilion, recognizing its remarkable contributions to the community. This year's fashion show will specifically honor Lisa Eichenblatt, acknowledging her unwavering commitment, board...
The program directors, staff, and volunteers working with The Jewish Pavilion have earned a well-deserved rest after filling and distributing approximately 450+ holiday bags and conducting an average of 26 programs in Independent Living, Assisted Living, Memory Care and Long-Term Health facilities throughout Central Florida. In an effort to make the celebrations special, each year I look around for unique foods that enhance the holidays. Latkes, the favorite treat for Chanukah, are prepared and...
Jan. 9 — Kabbalah One Class This 10-week course will be held in the Senior Lounge from 6 p.m. — 7:30 p.m. The course is free. Information, please email Michael Slone, mslone@slonebrothers.com Jan. 16 — Annual Appreciation Event for Legacy Donors & Community Members Learn about charitable giving, gift and estate planning, market, economic and philanthropic trends. Keynote speakers are Michael Murdoch, vice president of Goldman Sachs, Investment Strategy Group; and Laura Stegossi, vice president of Goldman Sachs, Family Office. Event begin...
(JNS) — South American and African countries have already expressed interest in taking in Palestinian Arab refugees from the Gaza Strip in return for monetary compensation, Likud Knesset member Danny Danon said on Monday. Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, who has floated the idea of the transfer of Gazans as part of his five-point plan for the post-war period, told Israeli broadcaster Kan Reshet Bet that Israel should “make it easier” on those Palestinians who wish to leave the Strip for other countries. Danon noted that Ca...
(JTA) — A global bestseller by a Jewish Holocaust victim; a novel by a beloved and politically conservative Jewish American writer; a memoir of growing up mixed-race and Jewish; and a contemporary novel about a high-achieving Jewish family are among the nearly 700 books a Florida school district removed from classroom libraries this year in fear of violating state laws on sexual content in schools. The purge of books from Orange County Public Schools, in Orlando, over the course of the past semester is the latest consequence of a conservative m...
(JNS) — A group representing some 60,000 evacuees from northern Israel is calling on the Biden administration to back a military campaign to push Hezbollah away from the border. Lobby 1701 is named after the U.N. Security Council Resolution that ended the 2006 Second Lebanon War and mandated that the Iranian terrorist proxy stay north of the Litani River, which is around 18 miles from the Israeli border. The Lebanese Shi’ite group has entrenched itself along the border in violation of the resolution. Lobby 1701 argues in its letter to the Ame...
(JNS) — Following Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon, veteran journalist Marvin Kalb, senior fellow at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, detailed how Hezbollah manipulated the press. A similar report can be written when the war with Hamas is over. In the following excerpts, substitute Hamas for Hezbollah. Israel is automatically at a disadvantage in any conflict because it is an open society. “During the war,” Kalb noted, “no Hezbollah secrets were disclosed, but in Israel, secrets were leaked, rumors spre...
(JNS) — The coming of a New Year is an appropriate time for retrospection. I’ve been thinking about December 2001. Like many Americans, I was traumatized by the horrific images of the Sept. 11 attacks. And like many Americans, I wanted to do something useful in response. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t make the cut for Delta Force. But, with help from former U.N. Amb. Jeane Kirkpatrick and former Rep. Jack Kemp, I began setting up a research institute to study the regimes, organizations and ideologies driving and justifying terrorism, to formu...
Yes, that’s right. I agree with AOC. No, these were not words I ever expected I’d put together in the same sentence much less in that order. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is hateful, reckless, dangerous, factually challenged, and a member of the extremist wing of the Democratic Party. Other than the sun rising in the day and setting at night, and the existence of gravity (I assume she agrees), there’s nothing I can think of that I ever would have agreed on with her. This highlights the saying that even a broken clock is right once...
(JNS) — Yemen’s Houthi terrorist movement recently made international headlines due to its attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. Initially a Zaydi Shi’ite response to perceived marginalization, the Houthis have become a powerful force in Yemen’s brutal civil war thanks to the Iranian regime’s sponsorship, as shown by the Houthis’ successful conquest of the capital Sana’a in 2014. The Zaydi Shi’ites are located in Yemen’s Saada province. Once dominant, Zaydism declined in the 20th century, and the Houthis first emerged in the 1980s as a Zaydi...
(JNS) — The repeatedly proposed remedy for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a “two-state solution,” with Arabs and Jews living side by side, happily ever after. But these magical words, as enticing as they may seem, are little more than fantasy. Its recent proponents, predictably in The New York Times (Dec. 21), are R. David Harden, a senior adviser to former President Barack Obama’s special envoy for Middle East peace, and Larry Garber, a former U.S. Agency for International Government mission director to the West Bank and Gaza Strip....
MORNING MINYANS Chabad of South Orlando — Monday - Friday, 8 a.m. and 10 minutes before sunset; Saturday, 9:30 a.m.; Sunday, 8:15 a.m., 407-354-3660. Congregation Ahavas Yisrael — Monday - Friday, 7:30 a.m.; Saturday, 9:30 a.m.; Sunday, 9 a.m., 407-644-2500. Congregation Chabad Lubavitch of Greater Daytona — Monday, 8 a.m.; Thursday, 8 a.m., 904-672-9300. Congregation Ohev Shalom — Sunday, 9 a.m., 407-298-4650. GOBOR Community Minyan at Jewish Academy of Orlando — Monday — Friday, 7:45 a.m. — 8:30 a.m. Temple Israel — Sunday, 9 a.m., 407-647-30...
(JNS) — An Olympic champion who won Israel’s first-ever world gold in gymnastics is auctioning off the medal to raise money for the Gaza border communities devastated in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas terrorists. Artem Dolgopyat, 26, won the 2023 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships on floor exercise in Belgium on the very day of the massacre, when thousands of Hamas terrorists burst into southern Israel and overran nearly two dozen Israeli communities, murdering 1,200 people, most civilians, abducting 240 others to Gaza and laying waste to the...
(JTA) — Dean Phillips is running for president. And he wants to talk. Talking runs in the Jewish Minnesota congressman’s family — his grandmother is Dear Abby. And he’s friends with Ilhan Omar, despite their polar opposite views on a range of issues, including Israel, because they like to talk things through. Now, Phillips, 54, is hoping that penchant for dialogue will fuel his latest endeavor — a long-shot bid to defeat Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary. “The greatest ch...
(JNS) — Shai DeLuca, a Canadian-Israeli interior designer, won a defamation suit on Dec. 22 against an anti-Israel Toronto restaurant owner who called him a terrorist and killer. “As much as this was my personal suit against Foodbenders, and Kim Hawkins, the win is a collective win and belongs to the Jewish community as a whole,” he told JNS. “What we are witnessing—the trampling through the streets of Western countries—is reminiscent of Europe in the 1930s. Instead of ‘Sieg Heil,’ we’re...
By (JNS) — An investigative report published earlier this month purports to show that senior Israeli and American officials had in hand financial intelligence showing the flow of tens of millions of dollars to Hamas and failed to act on it. That funding, the report alleges, helped Hamas pay for its military infrastructure, laying the foundation for its Oct. 7 massacre. As Israel now looks to take apart Hamas piece by piece militarily, there is a renewed focus on disrupting its funding. Erel Margalit, Israeli hi-tech entrepreneur and former m...
(JNS) — The United States has delivered more than 10,000 tons of military weapons and equipment to Israel since the start of the war on Oct. 7, Channel 12 reported on Monday. These shipments have arrived in 244 cargo planes and 20 ships. The Hamas terror group invaded the northwestern Negev on Oct. 7, murdering 1,200 people, mostly civilians, precipitating the launch of “Operation Swords of Iron” with support from Washington. According to the report, Israel’s Defense Ministry has acquired nearly $2.8 billion in additional purchases from th...
(JTA) - The bright, colorful movie musical "The Color Purple," which opens in theaters on Christmas, tells a story that has by now become a familiar part of the American canon - of a young Black woman's self-empowerment and discovery of her own sexuality amid the horrific, abusive conditions of her life in the early-1900s rural South. It's far from the first time Americans have heard the story of Celie, the protagonist of Alice Walker's novel "The Color Purple." Walker's novel debuted in 1982...
(New York Jewish Week) — The late Brooklyn klezmer musician Pete Sokolow would sometimes take the stage as “Klezmer Fats.” But many players used a different sobriquet to refer to the pianist, who served as a link between generations: “the youngest of the old guys.” Sokolow started playing klezmer in the summer of 1958 with older musicians at resorts in the Catskills. Twenty years later he was part of the klezmer revival. “When it mattered, Pete was there,” klezmer historian Henry Sapoznik told the New York Jewish Week. “Pete was able to bui...
(JTA) – Earlier this month, a lawyer acting on information from a pro-Israel group of North Carolinians told the federal government that their state’s flagship public university should be investigated for allowing anti-Israel rhetoric on campus. Now the government has acted on it. The U.S. Department of Education announced today that it has opened a new Title VI investigation into the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, along with two others into George Mason University and Newark Public Schools, related to complaints of mis...
(JNS) — The members of Doctors Against Genocide, which calls itself “a global health coalition committed to stopping genocide” and has some 3,100 combined followers on Instagram and X, may have taken their Hippocratic Oaths. But the group first did a good deal of harm. First, the group announced a Dec. 28 gathering at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum at 11 a.m., followed by a 3 p.m. gathering outside the White House. “Urgent call to action,” it announced. “Stop the genocide in Gaza.” The announcement urged attendees to get free tickets to the...
