Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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Farewell, my friend… Just a little tribute to a wonderful man I was fortunate to meet when he visited our Orlando Jewish community some years ago. I refer to former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, who died recently. Mayor Koch was a man I always admired, especially my being a native New Yorker (Brooklyn), and realizing all the good he had done. For one, I can remember Times Square in Manhattan being a really seedy place with X-rated movies and show bars where “low-life” criminal types hung out....
NEW YORK (JTA)—Espacio Anna Frank says its goal is to promote tolerance by teaching the life story of the teenage diarist murdered by the Nazis. But is there something sinister lurking behind the Venezuelan organization’s benevolent facade? SEBIN, the Venezuelan intelligence service, seems to believe so. According to a dossier attributed to SEBIN, the Caracas-based group is actually part of an Israeli cloak-and-dagger operation aimed at undermining the leftist government of President Hugo Chavez...
Netanyahu says Syria, Iran and peace process on Obama agenda in Israel JERUSALEM (JTA)—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Obama will focus on Iran, Syria and advancing the peace process when Obama visits Israel. Netanyahu at the beginning of the weekly Cabinet meeting on Sunday said he and Obama had “discussed the visit” and agreed on the subjects on which they will focus during their talks: Iran’s attempt to arm itself with nuclear weapons; the unstable situation in Syria and its consequences for the security of the reg...
NEW YORK (JTA)—Who knew the man behind the Brooklyn homecomings of Jay-Z and Barbra Streisand had a thing for heimische melodies? Bruce Ratner, the developer and majority owner of the Barclays Center arena in Brooklyn, which opened last September with a Jay-Z show and hosted borough native Streisand a month later, holds a special place in his heart for cantorial music. “My parents are both from Eastern European descent, so that type of Jewish music is in my blood,” Ratner told JTA. “I grew up...
BALTIMORE (JTA)—Even as he sits on the Cleveland Cavaliers bench, watching yet another game proceed without him, Omri Casspi is working to improve. He studies his teammates and his opponents, focusing on the player he’d likely be defending if he were on the court. Casspi uses the time to prepare for whenever he is summoned to participate—now or the next game or the one after. For Casspi, the first Israeli to play in the NBA, his fourth season in the elite league for pro hoopsters has been the most trying. The 6-foot, 9-inch forward doesn’t play...
Idlib, Syria—Nine-year-old Salima Hamid jerked her hips to the musical chants as the older male youths clapped their hands. Behind them in the crowd, Amal Nuran and her head-scarf-covered friends exchanged cell phone pictures snapped at the day’s anti-regime rally. “We all have a role to play in this revolution,” the 19-year-old law student tells The Media Line. “Even we girls can help by coming to the protests.” Later, however, outside of earshot of suspicious men, Nuran expressed her real feelings. “There is little for us to do beyond making...
The American businessmen and women appeared transfixed as they listened to the man behind the first Palestinian planned city depict his journey from vision to reality. Bashar Al-Masri was describing the day in 2008 when in Qatar on the first stop on a planned investment tour of the Gulf States to raise money for the project, he had asked for “between one and ten million dollars,” but “came away with a commitment for hundreds of millions of dollars”—enough to cover both the equity and financing. Rawabi—“hills” in Arabic—would soon be more than...
(JTA)—Wide-eyed and smiley, Elay-Gabriel seems utterly unaffected by the French media’s sudden interest in him. A dozen French journalists have visited the 18-month-old in recent months because he is trapped in a sort of legal limbo: He cannot obtain citizenship because the state does not recognize children born to surrogates abroad as French, even if one of their biological parents is a French national. Complicating matters is the fact that Elay-Gabriel is being raised by two gay Parisians—Isra...
AMMAN, Jordan—Street noises mix with a call to prayer coming from the King Hussein Mosque in downtown Amman, the city’s commercial center, while on a nearby street corner, Issam, a Syrian businessman, calmly answers a steady flow of phone calls and customers’ questions. The 44-year-old has successfully transferred his shoe business from Syria’s war-ravaged city of Aleppo to the Jordanian capital, starting his enterprise anew in Amman like hundreds—if not thousands—of other Syrian refugee businessmen that Jordanian officials say have settle...
(JTA)—In his many years of service for France’s spy agency, Claude Moniquet has seen much evidence linking Hezbollah to terrorist-related activities in Europe and beyond. The attacks, says Moniquet, a 20-year veteran of the DGSE intelligence service, go back as far as 1983, to the bombing of military barracks in Beirut that killed nearly 300 people, including 58 French soldiers. But the evidence, he says, was ignored. So Moniquet believes that Bulgaria’s announcement last week that it concl...
For many students, one of the most difficult parts of their bar/bat mitzvah preparation is writing the speech about their Torah portion. While there are many Torah commentaries, it’s rare to find one whose comments relate directly to the lives of contemporary teenagers. Fortunately, the publication of “Text Messages: A Torah Commentary for Teens,” edited by Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin (Jewish Lights Publishing), solves this problem. Its title contains a play on words that refers to the younger generation’s dependence on technology: Salkin notes t...
LOS ANGELES (JTA)—It’s hard to imagine two more divergent perspectives on Israeli-Palestinian relations: that of a Palestinian farmer whose village is resisting the encroachment of a nearby Jewish settlement and of the security service chiefs responsible for maintaining order in the Palestinian territories. Surprisingly, however, these protagonists in two documentaries vying for an Academy Award in the best documentary feature category come to much the same conclusion: that military force alo...
TEL AVIV—Israel’s first large gas field, Tamar, is due to begin producing natural gas next April. It is an economic bonanza for the state, and a security nightmare for the navy, tasked with protecting the huge area, much of which is outside Israel’s territorial waters. “These fields have strategic significance and could be easily a target for our neighbors,” a senior naval official in charge of planning, told The Media Line in an exclusive briefing in his office in Tel Aviv. “Usually to protect an area, we just make a sterile zone around it....
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon dedicated this year’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day to rescuers of Nazi victims who were not famous heroes but little-known people living “ordinary” lives. Yet some of those little-known rescuers—like Berta Davidovitz Rubinsztejn— lived anything but ordinary lives. When Berta celebrated her 90th birthday in New York this summer, one guest—Meir Brand, a white-haired grandfather of eight—made the trip from Israel. Berta calls Meir her son. He is, but not in any ordinary sense. In 1941, when B...
The surprise of Israel’s 2013 election was the rapid ascendance of the new Yesh Atid (There is a Future) party, led by former television celebrity Yair Lapid, at the expense of Israel’s known political entities. The party surpassed all polling estimates to be come the nation’s second-most powerful party in Israel’s 19th Knesset. With 19 out of 120 parliamentary seats, Yesh Atid is in prime position to dictate many of the terms of Israel’s next ruling coalition, to be led by re-elected Prime Min...
AMUKAH, Israel (JTA)—They walked up a tree-lined path through stony hills to a square, white building—men in black hats, beards and frock coats; in T-shirts and jeans; in sweaters, slacks and velvet kippahs. They came by the hundreds—19-year-olds looking for a match, 40-year-olds losing hope that they would ever find one, boys of 15 praying for the unmarried. They had come for a special ceremony: They would blow 1,000 shofars, encircle the building seven times and recite penitential prayers led...
NEW YORK (JTA)—After years of watching synagogue members die or move away, the Sephardic Jewish Center of Canarsie made the difficult decision to downsize. The 50-year-old Brooklyn synagogue had been a thriving center for the area’s Sephardim. But after accepting that it could no longer pull together enough money to cover expenses, let alone muster the 10 men necessary for daily prayer, the synagogue disposed of most of its belongings and began holding Shabbat services in a nearby Ashkenazi cong...
NEW YORK (JTA)—Spiderman heroically dispatched countless foes since he arrived on the scene in 1962. Nearly a half-century later, Brian Michael Bendis managed to kill him. In 2000, Bendis was hired to write Ultimate Spiderman, a modern-day retelling of the classic Spiderman story. More than 10 years, 160 issues and several blockbuster Hollywood adaptations later, Bendis did the unthinkable, killing off the superhero’s famous alter ego, Peter Parker, and replacing him with a half-black, hal...
