Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 26 - 35 of 35
Chadwick Sikora, son of Risa and Jeff Sikora of Ocoee, will be called to the Torah as a bar mitzvah on Saturday, Jan. 18, 2014, at Southwest Orlando Jewish Congregation in Orlando. Chad is in the seventh grade at SunRidge Middle School where he is a member of the National Junior Honor Society, is in the gifted program and plays guitar for the school. His hobbies and interests include playing guitar, sports and Xbox. He is also vice president of Kadima at SOJC. Sharing in the family's simcha...
Oy vay, shades of Adolph Hitler... This is information reported by the World Jewry Digest of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) about Greece and its politics: "In the wake of continued harassment of Jews, immigrants and ethnic minorities by the far-right (Greek) Golden Dawn party, WJC urged the Greek government to crack down on the neo-Nazi extremists. WJC president, Ambassador RONALD S. LAUDER said, 'There can be no legitimate place in the Greek Parliament for parties whose public statements and...
(JTA)—French Foreign Minister Manuel Valls instructed French mayors to ban performances by the anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala. Valls sent the non-binding recommendation days before Dieudonne is scheduled to launch a nationwide tour, the French news agency AFP reported. “I have sent an instruction today to all mayors,” Valls said at a news conference near Paris. “It recalls that mayors and municipalities may prohibit a show if it risks creating a disturbance to public order.” The text stipulates that the the mayors may ban shows t...
In 2013, the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI) published a survey of mature trees in Jerusalem that was "the most comprehensive of the recent SPNI surveys, including some 4,000 trees," according to the society's marketing and communications coordinator, Danielle Berkowitz. Many of the trees identified through such surveys have rich histories and stories attached to them. In fact, hundreds of trees throughout the Jewish state illuminate fascinating aspects of Israeli history...
By Rabbi Jack Riemer JNS.org Whenever a new book on the life and thought of Abraham Joshua Heschel appears, I always have two reactions. One is to marvel at the fact that Heschel is the only one of the star-studded Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) faculty to which he belonged who is still studied and written about today. No one would have believed back in the days when I was a student at JTS that Heschel-and Heschel alone-would be the subject of continued study in our time, for back then he...
(Washington Free Beacon)—The Obama administration is pressuring Israeli generals to stop publicly voicing their concerns about the administration’s security proposals in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and instead endorse the administration’s plans, according to Israeli media reports. The administration is seeking a complete or partial IDF withdrawal from the Jordan Valley, where the border between Israel and Jordan lies at the eastern edge of Judea and Samaria, also called the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority has long sought contr...
Why has education been so important to the Jewish people? Author Maristella Botticini says a unique religious norm enacted within Judaism two millennia ago made male literacy universal among Jews many centuries earlier than it was universal for the rest of the world's population. "Wherever and whenever Jews lived among a population of mostly unschooled people, they had a comparative advantage," Botticini told JNS.org. "They could read and write contracts, business letters, and account books...
PARIS (JTA)—The Israeli government is wading into the burgeoning European debate over circumcision and receiving a mixed reception from the continent’s Jews. On Dec. 11, Israel initiated a motion in defense of circumcision at the Council of Europe, an intergovernmental organization devoted to enhancing cooperation among its 47 member states. Intended to offset a nonbinding October resolution approved by the council’s Parliamentary Assembly that condemned non-medical circumcision of boys, the Israeli initiative will be reviewed in January and p...
Bus bomb in Israel called similar to Boston Marathon type JERUSALEM (JTA)—The bomb that exploded last month on an evacuated public bus in central Israel closely resembled the type used in the Boston Marathon attack. The explosive in Bat Yam was enclosed in a pressure cooker and was activated by a cell phone, according to the Shin Bet security service, the Times of Israel reported. Some 14 people have been arrested in the foiled Bat Yam attack, the Shin Bet announced after a gag order on the arrests was lifted on Jan. 2. Among them are four m...
Several weeks after Bedouin and global anti-Israel elements celebrated the apparent cancelation of a plan to resettle tens of thousands of Bedouin in Israel's southern Negev region, the fate of the plan remains unknown. In a dramatic press conference on Dec.12, former Israeli minister Benny Begin, placed in charge of the implementation of the "Prawer Plan," resigned his post and announced that the plan would be withdrawn. Just days later, however, Knesset members continued to meet to discuss...
