Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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Purim, or the Feast of Lots, is a joyous holiday that recounts the saving of the Jews from a threatened massacre during the Persian period (539-330 BCE). It is celebrated this year beginning at sunset on Thursday, Feb. 25. The story of Purim is recounted in the Book of Esther, whose eponymous heroine plays the leading role in saving her people. The holiday is traditionally celebrated with wild abandon and with the giving of gifts to friends and the poor. History of Purim While the origins of...
"Go with the flow" has always been King William Halikman's philosophy on life and it has paid off for him. A telemetry engineer for RCA at the beginning of his career, he met an 18-year-old Brazilian beauty at a dance in Recife, Brazil. He was 25 and hadn't planned to be there. She was born in Brazil but hadn't planned to be there either (in that country, that is). Her grandparents came to South America in hopes of reaching their dream to come to America from Europe, not realizing there is a...
Doloros Indek and Rabbi Yanky Majesky, as well as many others, enjoyed the kosher sandwiches at the new kosher food truck from Gili's Kitchen in Jacksonville. They didn't have to drive to Jacksonville as the truck is now going to be coming to Reiter Park in Longwood on the second Thursday of every month. How did this come about? Beginning in January, Gili's Food Truck began serving customers in southwest Orlando in the parking lot at the Rosen JCC every Tuesday and Thursday. Rabbi Yanky Majesky...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — President Joe Biden called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nearly a month into his first term — a time frame that drew criticism from Republicans for its length. Biden appeared to make up for lost time, at least according to Netanyahu’s account on Twitter, and the two spoke for an hour. The conversation was “friendly and warm” Netanyahu said in Hebrew, addressing an Israeli electorate that places a high value on healthy relations with the United States. His tweet, accompanied by a photo of a grinning Netanyahu...
Fundraising can be challenging in the best of times, and if you throw in a pandemic, it creates even bigger challenges. What do nonprofits do to ensure that they are able to receive the funds they need to fulfill their mission? At the Jewish Pavilion an army of dedicated volunteers and employees worked together, came up with a plan, and carried it out beautifully. To quote Charles Dickens “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times” and this group made the Pavilion’s fund-raiser event shine bright to make sure our seniors see the b...
Emotionally together," Chabad will be hosting Holocaust historian Dr. Efraim Zuroff on Sunday, March 14 at 10 a.m. Zuroff is the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the director of the Center's Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs. For four decades, he has played a major role in facilitating the prosecution of many Nazi war criminals all over the world. He is the author of four books (translated into 15 languages) and numerous articles on Holocaust-related issues and their...
Purim was celebrated al fresco at many of the Jewish Pavilion facilities. All of the Jewish elderly received goody bags for the Purim Holiday. Special thanks to Sharon Littman and her mahjong ladies - Marci Gaeser, Pam Ruben, Emily Newman and Patti Bughan. They filled 350 bags with Purim goodies such as masks, groggers, colorful coins, colored pencils, coloring pages from Joanne Fink at Zenspirations, hamantashen, the Purim story and snacks. Allysa Littman made 350 personalized Purim cards to...
(JTA) — President Joe Biden, saying domestic terrorism was the “greatest threat” in America and white supremacists are the “most dangerous people,” pledged to focus his Justice Department on the rise of white supremacy. Biden, in Milwaukee on Tuesday at his first town hall as president, fielded a question from Joel Berkowitz, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, about what Berkowitz termed the “ongoing threat” from white supremacists in the wake of the Jan. 6 raid on the U.S. Capitol. A number of far-right groups and figures w...
(Jerusalem Israel) — Gilda Radner is doing flips in her grave. If she were alive, the former star of Saturday Night Live (SNL) who died in 1989, would be crying, but not from laughter. Radner is one of many young comedians who got their start on SNL. She created and became famous for characters including Emily Litella, Roseanne Roseannadanna, Lisa Loopner, and Baba Wawa. Radner was also among a number of Jewish comics whose careers took off on and following SNL. Others include Billy Crystal, Jon Lovitz, Ben Stiller, and comedian-turned-Senator,...
(JTA) — On the third anniversary of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, parents of the shooting’s Jewish victims shared their memories and hopes for the future. Several of the 17 students and faculty who were killed in the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were Jewish. In the years since the attack, some of the victims’ Jewish parents have become prominent activists for gun control and school safety. Fred Guttenberg shared a letter on Sunday that he wrote to his daughter, Jaime, on Twitter. Jaime was 14 when she was k...
(JNS) — Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial center said on Thursday that it was “deeply disturbed” by the implications of a Polish court’s recent ruling in a libel case involving the alleged wartime actions of Edward Malinowski, the former mayor of Malinowo, Poland. On Tuesday, the court ordered professors Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, the editors of “Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland,” to issue a retraction of their work and apologize to Malinowski’s niece, who initiated the libel suit. The...
(JNS) — The little blue box is no longer ubiquitous in Jewish households the way it once was. The symbolic pushke into which coins were collected in the homes of both the rich and the poor to help the Jewish National Fund redeem the land of Israel has been replaced by websites where you can pay to have trees planted in Israel and other conventional fundraisers. But the work of the JNF, which was founded in 1901 by Zionist visionary Theodor Herzl and his associates in order to start making their dream of a state for the Jews a reality, is o...
Today marks the one-year anniversary since my wife and I attended our last Jewish social or religious gathering. That event was attending services to hear the reading of Megillat,The Book of Esther, and to enjoy the festivities, food and beverages as we celebrated Purim 5780 at the Orlando Torah Center. Since that time our Jewish life has been observed and celebrated in marital “solitary confinement.” In fact, our initial isolation felt a little like imprisonment. I actually texted my children in the early days of the pandemic, somewhat ton...
When Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, the Jewish reaction was pretty well muted. We did not know a whole lot about the guy. Seemed pretty decent, had always been friendly to the Jewish Community. We should have looked under the rock. Two years before, Trump founded the “Birther Movement” questioning the legitimacy of Barak Obama as president. Trump said Obama was born in Kenya. There’s the first hint. A Black president could not be legitimate. While he never took more than 25 percent of the vote in the primaries, Trump w...
(JNS) — A month has passed, 30 days, since our beloved Sheldon — a husband, a father, a grandfather, brother and close friend — was laid to rest. A month ago we were crying by his side atop the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem and today the family is forced to grieve and honor his memory from afar. A month ago we were in the midst of winter, and today we see the budding spring. A month ago, my children had a present father, and today they stand, reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish, shouldering the unshakable burden of having been orphaned. That is life....
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — When the top editor of the world’s newspaper of record flips and flops and flips again on a subject as sensitive as the use of the N-word, you know things are getting messy at The New York Times. And when a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist claims that the paper “spiked” his column on the subject, well, it just gets messier. This sad story started when longtime New York Times science reporter Donald McNeil was accused in 2019 of using a racial slur while on an overseas trip chaperoning high-school students. At the time...
(JNS) — Coronavirus promised a lackluster sophomore year of college until it presented an exciting opportunity. At a time when millions were stuck at home, including me, the pandemic unexpectedly enabled me to travel to Israel for a long-term experience with Masa Israel Journey, an organization founded by the Jewish Agency and government of Israel. I played lacrosse all through high school and now I play at Dartmouth College. This fall, I had been planning to rent a house in New Hampshire with eight of my friends and teammates, where I would do...
Dear Editor: I was interested in seeing how the Heritage would cover the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump. Would the stories on the week of the Senate hearings address all the incriminating evidence being presented? Would articles highlight the memorable job Rep. Jaimie Raskin, a Jew who had just lost his son to suicide, did in overseeing the trial? Would articles cover how the events on January 6, 2021, were repugnant without justifying them as the paper had in the previous issue? Would the Heritage opine that what happened on that...
Dear Editor: To feature a story regarding the nomination of Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize represents to me the epitome of journalistic political reporting. Especially, a few short weeks after that individual attempted, and is apparently still attempting, to start a civil war in his own country. Such pure hypocrisy to claim that this man has not started a war during his tenure as president of the USA. He may not have started an international war, but he surely is aiming to start a conflict in his own country. Even though he was...
MORNING MINYANS (Please note, because of the coronavirus, some minyans have been canceled or held virtually.) Chabad of North Orlando is holding in-person 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.,...
(JTA) — The Democratic Majority for Israel political action committee has made an endorsement in a special congressional election in Ohio, a sign of how Israel tensions within the Democratic Party have not abated since the party’s sweeping wins in November. The PAC affiliated with the pro-Israel group announced Tuesday that it is endorsing Shontel Brown, a Cuyahoga County councilwoman who has the backing of the party’s establishment and who has cultivated the mainstream pro-Israel community. The field ahead of the May primary for the speci...
TEL AVIV - On Feb. 11, 1986, Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky - freed after enduring nine years in Russian prison on false charges of treason and espionage - stepped off a jet that had carried him straight from Germany and out into the Israeli sunshine. "It was a very dramatic day, starting in a Soviet prison, then meeting my wife in Berlin after 12 years, then finishing at Ben Gurion Airport, and finally visiting the Kotel" in Jerusalem, said Sharansky, recalling the events of 35 years ago as...
When Israeli-American violinist Itzhak Perlman debuted at Carnegie Hall in 1963, he performed while seated - a consequence of the polio that left him unable to walk without leg braces or crutches since age 4. "I got a standing ovation, but The New York Times reviewer wasn't sure if that was because of the way I played or because of the fact I was sitting down while playing," recalled Perlman, now 75. "That thing followed me for two or three years. Then people got used to me and they stopped...
Wow! ... Remember recently I mentioned in my column that I would include more Jewish comedians and singers? Two of my favorites were Sid Caeser (now deceased) and WOODY ALLEN. Both were (and are) brilliant! Actually, Woody, who was born in the Bronx, was raised in Brooklyn and at one time we were neighbors. Woody went to Midwood High School and I attended Tilden High School. (And he was older than me!) Remember singer Tony Martin? Not only was he handsome, he had a great singing voice. He appear...
WASHINGTON (JTA) - Nikki Haley has finally and decisively broken with Donald Trump in a move that puts her at the front of the potential Republican presidential pack for moderate conservatives, including pro-Israel Jews who mainly stuck with the party over the past four years because of Trump's foreign policy. After serving as his U.N. ambassador and not taking a stand for months on what his lies about election fraud would mean for his legacy, Haley made the final cut on Friday in a Politico...
