Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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Shira Rebecca Weiss, daughter of Kevin and Rona Weiss of Winter Park, Fla., will be called to the Torah as a bat mitzvah on Saturday, April 27, 2013 at Congregation of Reform Judaism in Orlando. Shira is in the seventh grade at Jewish Academy of Orlando, where she is a high honors student. She works on the yearbook and will be performing in the school musical, “Flapper,” in the spring. Her hobbies and interests include reading, photography, listening to music, playing the piano, theater and dan...
Congregation Beth Israel of Ocala will sponsor a Shabbaton the weekend of May 10-11. The event will be a Reconstructionist approach to Judaism and the various ways of experiencing Judaism as seen though the Reconstructionist lens. Rabbinical intern, Hannah Spiro, a student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, will lead the program. Her specialty is incorporating music with Jewish liturgy through the medium of alternative folk rock. She has composed many award-winning songs and combines...
It is traditional for Jews to have two Passover seders during the first and second night of the holiday. The Jewish Pavilion of Central Florida, a nonprofit, held 40 seders over the course of a month....
Among the adult enrichment classes offered at the Roth Jewish Community Center of Greater Orlando is watercolor painting for beginners. For six weeks, adults of all ages have met each Thursday morning for instruction and social time. This was the second time the course was offered by Marilyn Schwartz of Maitland. Schwartz comes with years of experience as a painter of various mediums. She is a member of the Roth JCC and enjoys sharing her knowledge and love for painting with other members and...
Shades of Mel Gibson… The following information comes directly from the Simon Wiesenthal Center with asides by me: “Vicious attacks on the memory of the Holocaust…from denial to distortion…to revisionism…are erupting in countries worldwide. Every day in ways big and small, the deniers and anti-Semites are chipping away at our history, savaging the memory of the six million who perished. Some examples are: The senior Egyptian official in charge of appointing editors of all state-run Egyptian...
On Tuesday, April 9 the city of Winter Park and the Multifaith Education Project got together for the 10th annual Trees for Peace Interfaith Tree Planting Project at Martin Luther King, Jr. Park. Mayor Kenneth Bradley began the ceremony at 11:30 a.m. and the program was led by Louise Franklin Sheehy, director of the Multifaith Education Project. More than 100 Christian, Jewish and Muslim students and faculty, representing The Geneva Christian School, The Jewish Academy and The Leaders...
NEW YORK (JTA)—Moviegoers who head to “42” will see the story of how Jackie Robinson displayed legendary courage, class and talent in the face of immense pressure and racial hatred as he broke down baseball’s color barrier. Less well known is Robinson’s role in a controversy that erupted at Harlem’s most famous theater, and underscored his commitment to fighting all bigotry, including prejudice emanating from his own community. It was 1962, a decade-and-a-half after Robinson first took the fi...
Jonah Hill’s deadly date NEW YORK—Jonah Hill has been on the market since his split from Ali Hoffman (Dustin’s daughter), and following a recent date it looks like the dry spell will continue a little longer. Hill apparently took a brunette to Joe’s Shanghai Restaurant in New York and, according to the New York Post, was trying “really hard to woo her” when something strange happened. “A man a table over leaned in and told Jonah, ‘I buried my dad today, and I just want to say you’re gonna be...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—Here are some stories out of Israel that you may have missed: A better bomb shelter app An app that helps Israelis locate the nearest bomb shelter was updated in response to the civil war in Syria. The Merkhav Mugan app had been launched six months ago for southern Israelis being bombarded by rockets from the Gaza Strip. Now, with the Syrian unrest spilling over the border into northern Israel, the app will include all secure bomb shelters and areas throughout Israel, the T...
Abbas accepts Fayyad’s resignation JERUSALEM (JTA)—Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas accepted the resignation of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad after an internal power struggle. Abbas accepted the resignation Saturday at a meeting of the two Palestinian leaders at P.A. headquarters in Ramallah. Fayyad reportedly had offered his resignation earlier in the week. Abbas asked Fayyad to stay on and lead a caretaker government until a new government is formed, the WAFA-Palestine News Ser...
BALTIMORE (JTA)—Visiting his late father’s ancestral village of Pavoloch in 2011 confirmed some of the images Lew Priven had long held of the place as a real-life Anatevka, the fictional shtetl of “Fiddler on the Roof,” such as the people he saw riding by on horse and wagon. Then he and his wife, Judy, learned of the horror: The 1,500-member Jewish community, massacred on Sept. 5, 1941, was buried in a mass grave. The suburban Washington couple were visiting the Ukraine village’s museum, housed...
In an unprecedented move, the head of Egypt’s 2,000-year-old Coptic Christian Church, Pope Tawadros II, recently slammed Islamist President Mohamed Morsi for what he called a weak response to violence that left several Christians dead and its religious institutions violated. Pope Tawadros’s statements come at a time of increasing political deadlock and the threat of economic collapse in Egypt. Halim Meawad, co-founder of Coptic Solidarity, a U.S.-based international Coptic Christian human rights organization, told JNS.org that Pope Taw...
SANA’A—Women living in areas of rural Yemen are increasingly losing their say regarding whom they marry as they become caught-up in the widespread phenomenon of ‘exchange marriages,’ in which money and family ties outweigh romance. The expression rises from the phenomenon of spouses from two families being traded in what is essentially more of a business arrangement than a traditional marriage, Dr. Abdul-Baqi Shamsan, professor of sociology at Sana’a University, explained. Shamsan told The Media Line that the main victim of this type of marria...
BIRMINGHAM, Ala.—“Are you still a bigot?” Every year for the rest of his life, students studying the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” would call Rabbi Milton Grafman, knowing little of the situation in 1963 Birmingham, and pose that question. His son, Stephen, a Washington attorney, said his father’s reputation “is still stained by what simply is not correct,” and this month’s 50th anniversary of the letter is a chance to explore the full context and history behind the letter. “The substance of the letter is beautif...
RAMALLAH—While use of the Internet and social media is growing in the Palestinian territories, some experts warn it has also brought with it the danger of cyber crime—especially against women—more harmful and at a greater rate than it is worldwide. Arabic society’s conservative and patriarchal nature runs counter to the Internet’s call to share everything with everyone, and makes women more vulnerable to cyber threats. As a result, many are very deliberate about not using pictures on the Internet, not only in personal use, but also in their...
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT) are at odds over the presence of anti-Israel materials in the public school system of Newton, Mass. APT—a Boston-based nonprofit “dedicated to promoting peaceful coexistence in an ethnically diverse America by educating the American public about the need for a moderate political leadership that supports tolerance and core American values in communities across the nation”—is calling for reforms in Newton schools to prevent the reappearance of those materials, most no...
Ofer Prison, West Bank—The long strings of blue and white Israeli flags, set up for Israel’s upcoming Independence Day, flap incongruously against the background of barbed wire and tall gray watchtowers. Inside, some 710 Palestinian prisoners, including 100 minors, wait for their transfer to other prisons or for their release. Mohammed Jamal Al-Natshe, 55, a Hamas legislator from Hebron with a trim white beard, says that he was arrested most recently last month and placed under administrative detention, meaning that no charges have been fil...
SAN FRANCISCO—Mary Farquhar’s earliest memory is of flame. Specifically, the flames of war in the last months of World War II, when Japanese forces battled the Americans in a fight to reclaim Manila, Farquhar’s city of refuge. She was a toddler at the time, the daughter of Austrian Jews given safe harbor in the Philippines, where she was born in 1943. Hers was one of hundreds of European Jewish families—1,200 Jews in all—taken in by the Pacific island nation between 1938 and 1941, saved from the Nazis by an unlikely alliance of Americans and Fi...
LOS ANGELES (JTA)—A semi-automatic weapon sits propped beside the front door of the ranch-style home that Eric Agaki shares with his wife, a couple of goats, some chickens and a horse. Only it’s not the real thing. “That’s an air gun for raccoons,” Agaki says. “For intruders I’ve got other things.” Agaki, 41, is particularly concerned with home security, and with good reason. A private investigator for the past 10 years, Agaki has put murderers in jail and staked out hundreds of spouses suspecte...
Kevin Goodman’s second Boston Marathon will be one he will never forget. That’s because just about 60 minutes after he concluded the race, two explosions rocked the finish line. “It’s a gruesome day,” Goodman, who lives in Cleveland, told the Cleveland Jewish News from the Fairmont Copley Hotel, where he was staying in Boston. “I was in the hotel when the explosions went off. The explosions happened about an hour after I finished. I was in the hotel recovering (from the race). I went outside to see the sights. It was gruesome. A lot of bloo...
(JTA)—“When Gilles Bernheim speaks, France listens.” That’s how Avraham Weill, the chief rabbi of Toulouse, describes what he believes was the main appeal of his charismatic mentor, who on April 11 resigned as chief rabbi of France after admitting to several instances of plagiarism and falsely using an academic title. The media frenzy that led to Bernheim’s resignation after five years on the job was part and parcel of the 61-year-old’s strong media presence—a presence that may have attracte...
Tiny Bahrain consists mainly of a 34-mile island connected to Saudi Arabia by a causeway, but aside from having modest oil and gas reserves, a booming market-based economy and lots of tourism, it also happens to be the home of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet that patrols the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman and the Red Sea. Bahrain’s strategic military location is complemented by its symbolically important place in the Arab world for a relatively liberal and tolerant society despite its own brief ver...
