Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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The fourth attempt in two years to unseat embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have failed once again, with Netanyahu securing his largest-ever electoral victory over his rivals. Exit polls show Netanyahu's Likud receiving a strong 30 to 31 mandates. The tally is at least 12 seats higher than the next largest party: the left-wing Yesh Atid led by Yair Lapid. While official vote totals will only be completed in the coming days-with the potential to alter Knesset...
It is hard to believe that Passover starts tomorrow evening. How can we even begin to think about preparing for Passover when we are living in the midst of a pandemic? As we each live in the uncertainty of quarantine/lockdown/shelter in place/limited movement - select whichever one matches where you live - many of us have been stockpiling food in our cabinets. And, if they look anything like mine, they are full of chametz (bread products). With everyone stuck at home, the line between work and...
Stars of the binge-worthy Israeli Netflix hit series Fauda will be joining Jewish National Fund-USA, the Orlando community and thousands of supporters across the country for the organization's annual Breakfast for Israel on April 18 at 10:30 a.m. While participants may have to BTOB (bring their own bagel) to this year's virtual "breakfast," JNF-USA promises to deliver the same high-quality, star-studded complimentary event that community members have become accustomed to since the first annual...
Introducing the "Passover Playbook," brought to the Jewish community by Orlando Jewish Parent. OJP, for short, is a comprehensive program, embraced by the Jewish Federation of Greater Orlando and The Roth Family JCC that will be coming to you in the months and years ahead. It started already with a program called "Passover Madness." The tagline, "Which Passover Food Will Win It All?" (See the ongoing contest at orlandojewishfed.org.) Its newest project is The Passover Playbook. "Welcome to our...
JFS Orlando welcomes their newest board member, Kimberly K. Harris. Originally from Richmond, Va., Harris grew up in a large blended family. “I really grew up accustomed to the idea of ‘family’ being what you make it,” she explained. When her father and stepmother moved to the Tampa area, she decided to stay in Richmond for college, attending the VCU-MCV School of Allied Health and later working for Virginia’s state public health laboratory in the Immunology & Virology department. But both her p...
Yom HaShoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day, is observed on April 8 as a day of commemoration for the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust as a result of the actions carried out by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. The date to commemorate Yom HaShoah was chosen because it marks the anniversary of the uprising at the Warsaw Ghetto. This was the largest, symbolically most important Jewish uprising, and the first urban rebellion, in German-occupied Europe. This resistance in Warsaw inspired other revolts in ghettos including Bia...
(Israel Hayom) - Workers at the Western Wall (Kotel) in Jerusalem on Tuesday conducted the site's customary biannual clearout of all the notes stuck between the stones over the course of the previous six months. The notes are traditionally collected before Passover, which this year begins after Shabbat on the evening of March 27, and on Rosh Hashanah. Mindful of public-health regulations, workers wore gloves, masks and used disposable wooden sticks to remove the notes. These will be buried on...
(JTA) - Jewish groups are rallying in support of Asian Americans following a string of murders Tuesday at massage parlors in Atlanta that left eight people dead, including six Asians. Police in Georgia say the 21-year-old suspect may have been motivated by hatred of women and not anti-Asian bigotry. But in the wake of reports of rising levels of anti-Asian harassment and violence amid the coronavirus pandemic, the attack is likely to exacerbate the community's fear regardless of the alleged...
International March of the Living will hold a Virtual March on Holocaust Remembrance Day led by Israel's President Reuven Rivlin, Holocaust survivors, Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion, Jewish Agency Chair Isaac Herzog, KKL Chair Avraham Duvdevani and Rabbi Israel Meir Lau. Among the Holocaust survivors participating are those who survived due to the selfless acts of medical professionals. Participants in the Virtual March from across the globe were filmed using innovative 3D technology so they appear...
The Biden administration has just made two more very concerning appointments: Colin Kahl for undersecretary of defense for policy at the Pentagon, and Uzra Zeya for undersecretary of civilian security, democracy, and human rights. Both have histories of hostility to Jews and Israel. According to Alana Goodman of The Washington Free Beacon, Zeya has worked for the anti-Israel Washington Report and its publisher the American Educational Trust. While there, she was a research assistant on a book which decried how the “Israel lobby” mal...
(JNS) — It has been suggested that the next prime minister of Israel will be forbidden to annex parts of Judea and Samaria for the next three years due to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s personal commitment to former President Donald Trump on the issue. This ostensible commitment, however, was never ratified by Israel’s legislature. Does a personal commitment by an Israeli prime minister to a U.S. president tie the hands of succeeding prime ministers? Not according to the tradition of democratic societies, which aims to avoid execu...
Back in the day, Jews wanted to take care of their family first — mostly because if we didn’t nobody else would. Then we wanted to care for the Jewish people mostly because if we didn’t nobody else would. Governments in Europe from whence most of us came were not friends of the Jews. In the late 1800s came the longest period of immigration from Europe to the U.S. because Europe was in turmoil. The U.S.A. wanted immigration because of a need for low paid labor. However, once they were here, the government had little or no interest in takin...
As the sun sets tomorrow evening and the Sabbath wanes, Jewish people around the world will be welcoming in the holiday of Passover, with the holiday’s most notable event, the Passover Seder. The Passover Seder is a family and community gathering characterized by a festive and elaborate meal, complete with symbolic foods, inserted into the middle of the re-telling of the story of our Exodus from Egypt. The stage is set with the lighting of holiday candles accompanied by the prayer that reminds us of the Torah commandment that mandates our t...
(JNS) — Anti-Zionism, the rejection of self-determination for Jews in their ancestral homeland, has gained considerable ground in recent years, sparking debate about whether it is just another manifestation of anti-Semitism. Anti-Zionists contend that anti-Zionism is a political position rooted in progressive values and principled advocacy for Palestinians whom they consider the rightful heirs to the Holy Land. Charges of anti-Semitism, they say, are just cynical smears meant to muzzle legitimate criticism of Israel, while real anti-Semitism i...
(JNS) — The latest scandal surrounding the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is noteworthy. This isn’t because of the ire that it’s been arousing, however; righteous indignation is literally and figuratively all the rage during these days of “woke.” No, the element that sets this brouhaha apart from its predecessors is the absence of mass murder. Yes, when the ink dries on the current pages of the Paris-based periodical and the Twittersphere moves on to the next hashtag, there won’t be any corpses to count. The current storm involves a...
(JNS) — As of this writing, South Africa’s Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng was on day seven of a 10-day deadline to publicly apologize for a speech he made last year in which he offered a full-throated defense of Israel, and still, he stood fast — no apology was forthcoming. Mogoeng’s uncompromising stance has enraged South Africa’s powerful pro-Palestinian lobby and reignited the charge that the modern-day State of Israel is a reincarnation of South Africa’s old apartheid regime when a white minority that constituted 10 percent of the population...
A ceremonial Yom HaShoah service will be held by Congregation Sinai on Holocaust Remembrance Day to remember and honor all of those who perished. This memorial service will be open to the entire community. Never Again! While the traditional international Holocaust Day of Remembrance is April 7 this year, everyone here is being asked to join together on Friday night, April 9 from 7:30 to 9 p.m. for a combined virtual Kabbalat Shabbat and Yom HaShoah Service. Congregation Sinai Spiritual Leader Joe Goldovitz notes, “We must all remain v...
Rollins College will be holding a Yom HaShoah memorial, titled Never Again: A Commemoration of the Holocaust (Yom HaShoah). It will be on April 8 from 12:30 p.m.-1:30 p.m. The event will include student speakers, a reading by a published poet, the lighting of yahrzeit candles, a recitation of the Kaddish and another Jewish prayer, the reading of children’s names who were in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and a moment of silence. The event is being sponsored by Rollins Hillel, the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life, the Education Department, and the J...
NEW YORK (JTA) - Every Passover, we strive to experience Egypt in our own lives. Locating the suffering of our Egypt wasn't hard this year: It seems like most days my husband and I share the names of new people we personally know who have passed away from COVID-19 and families devastated by the challenging conditions in which their loved ones passed away. We have been mourning the absence of community, the simplest and deepest of joys. The Alter Rebbe of Gur, known as the Sfat Emet (1847-1905),...
BOSTON (JTA) - On the eve of Passover during the Depression, a juggler in ragged clothes is invited into the home of a poor family that has a bare Seder table. It's a poignant scene in "The Passover Guest," the captivating debut picture book by author Susan Kusel, a longtime Judaica librarian who was inspired by a classic Yiddish tale, "The Magician," by I.L. Peretz. By lovely coincidence, readers have that rare opportunity to enjoy another retelling of the beloved story in a new publication of...
Passover begins at sundown tomorrow, Saturday, March 27. (Matzo Brei here I come!) Any prouder? (my blouse will split!)... How about Emma Lazarus? She was Jewish. Her poem, "The New Colossus" is engraved on the Statue of Liberty! Being a battered child because of my Jewish heritage, the first poem I learned (and never forgot) goes like this: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free ..." (Although very poor, living on welfare in a Brooklyn project, I knew how...
I have to tell you about my Aunt Ann and Uncle Harry, both first-generation Americans fresh off the boat from Istanbul, Turkey, and Russia. They owned a fish store in Philadelphia. Their fish shop was the end store on a block of row homes in the Jewish neighborhood. I remember as a little boy, I would avoid the fish store because I didn’t like the smell, but I would go upstairs to Aunt Ann’s and Uncle Harry’s house and would always see the paper bag filled with their day’s receipts sitting somewhere in their home above the store. I also re...
The pandemic forces charities to rethink and refashion their events. Normally, the Jewish Pavilion has two annual breakfasts for their sponsors so they can come together and network. In the past, they have been held in senior communities. Currently, senior communities are not open for public events, so the Jewish Pavilion leadership redesigned their semi-annual breakfast into something that was safe and socially distanced. "Stop by for a smile or stay a while" was the theme. Sponsors could...
NEW YORK — The Orthodox Union, the umbrella group for Orthodox Jewry and leading certifier of kosher products, has released its OU Guide to Passover, the annual publication that provides comprehensive guidance about kosher-for-Passover products. This year’s edition, which is available in both PDF and online database formats, features close to 30,000 kosher-for-Passover products and charts on ingredient substitutions, halachic times for Passover, required portion sizes at the seder and Sefirat HaOmer. Passover this year will be celebrated fro...
Last week, my 11-year-old daughter went back to her school campus for the first time in 50 weeks. As we prepared for her return, we cleaned out her backpack, which was frozen in time: It still held the remnants of a class field trip taken the first week of March 2020; her sunscreen, hat, playing cards, and souvenir pen all stark reminders of the moment just before we hibernated into our own silos. We replaced these relics with the folders and books she needed to bring back to school. She readjusted the straps, already worn-in to the contours...
