Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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Shavuot is a two-day holiday, beginning at sundown following the 5th of Sivan and lasting until nightfall of the 7th of Sivan (May 25-27, 2023). In Israel it is a one-day holiday, ending at nightfall of the 6th of Sivan. Shavuot combines two major religious observances. First is the grain harvest of the early summer. Second is the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai seven weeks after the exodus from Egypt. The first determines the ritual for the holiday, which was one of the three pilgrimage...
(JNS) - Thousands of participants from around the world joined the "March of Nations" event in Jerusalem to celebrate Israel's 75th year of independence. The event was organized by March of Life, an initiative founded by Jobst and Charlotte Bittner and the evangelical TOS Ministries from Tübingen, Germany. The southwestern German university town served as the training ground for the Einsatzgruppen, the SS death squads that murdered 700,000 Jews, primarily by shooting, during the Holocaust. Joine...
The Torah scroll is one of the Jewish people's most sacred objects. It has 304,805 handwritten letters. With a feather and special mix for ink, the scribe writes the five books of Moses on roughly 54 pieces of parchment. The average process takes over a year to produce the beautiful workmanship of a Torah Scroll. The writing of the scroll follows a strict set of laws that Jewish tradition has maintained for over 3300 years going back to the time of Moses. When a scroll is completed, it calls...
(JNS) — Celebrations were underway across Israel on Thursday for Jerusalem Day, the national holiday commemorating the city’s reunification in the Six-Day War. The main feature of the celebrations is the annual flag march in which tens of thousands of people waving Israeli flags walk through the streets of Jerusalem to symbolize the city’s unity. This year the parade followed the traditional route, departing from downtown and proceeding along King George and Agron streets before reaching the walls of the Old City. After this, the march split...
As a new member with the North Orlando Chabad in Florida with Rabbi Yanky Majesky and his wife Chanshy, I was elated to be invited to attend Shabbat in the Heights that takes place in Crown Heights, New York City, New York for the Hakhel: Year of Gathering. I had no idea what to expect. I have never been to New York City or in a fully Jewish environment. With the months of Shabbos, Women's Studies and JLI courses at Rabbi Majesky's Chabad you would think that it would prepare you for this experi...
Heritage Florida Jewish News is accepting nominations for the 2023 Heritage Human Service Award, which will be presented at the annual meeting of the Jewish Federation of Greater Orlando this summer. “For more than 30 years, individuals who have made major, voluntary contributions of their talent, time, energy and effort to the Central Florida community have been honored with the selection and presentation of this award,” said Jeff Gaeser, editor and publisher of the Heritage. Last year’s recipient was Dr. Edward Zissman. Former recip...
(JTA) — Citing “a major crisis in Jewish education,” Israel’s Diaspora ministry plans to pour about $40 million into training educators at Jewish schools in the United States and Canada. Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister of Diaspora affairs, announced the initiative, called “Aleph Bet” after the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, on Monday. He hopes enrollment will increase at Jewish day schools, fearing that “we are losing large parts of the Jewish people,” and said the initiative would “focus on training teachers for Jewish educatio...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Biden administration said a visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount by Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister, was “provocative” and cautioned against changes at the contested holy site. Ben-Gvir visited the Temple Mount, which Muslims revere as the Noble Sanctuary, on Sunday morning, and declared that Israel was “in charge” of the sensitive site. The visit came days after Thursday’s annual “Flag March” through Jerusalem’s Old City, a right-wing parade that celebrates Jerusalem Day and perennially featu...
(JNS) — In a seemingly never-ending war of narratives, the Palestinians got center stage on Monday at the United Nations, though Israel was victorious in dwindling the audience down. May 15 marked the first official U.N. “Nakba Day,” per a resolution that the U.N. General Assembly passed in December. In Arabic, the word means “disaster” or “catastrophe,” in relation to the establishment of modern-day Israel on May 14, 1948. The ceremonies took place Monday morning at the United Nations, despite the history of the alleged “catastrophe...
(JNS) — Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan on Sunday sent a personal letter to all member state representatives urging them not to attend a “Nakba Day” event scheduled for the next day. Erdan characterized as “abominable” the planned event at the U.N. General Assembly in New York that commemorates what the Palestinians call the “catastrophe” of Israel’s establishment in 1948, saying that it destroys the prospects of peace between Israelis and Palestinians. It is marked annually on May 15, the day after the nascent Jewish st...
(JNS) — On May 14, 2018—exactly the same date and even the same hour that David Ben-Gurion announced Israel’s independence 70 years earlier—I presided over the opening of the United States Embassy in Jerusalem, the eternal and undivided capital of the State of Israel. Apart from family milestones, it was the greatest day of my life, and an experience I will never forget. Moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem was, of course, deeply meaningful to Israel’s citizens and all of world Jewry. It was a firm rejection of the false claim that Jerusalem co...
University of Miami’s J Street U chapter recently shared an Instagram post about Masafer Yatta, a region in Area C of the West Bank. The group’s post promotes the narrative that the Israeli government is “carrying out a mass eviction of Palestinian communities” in Masafer Yatta, a campaign that J Street National began promoting heavily this January. However, this campaign is founded upon baseless claims that paint Israel in a malicious manner and overlook the history that proves J Street’s statements inaccurate. Although J Street labels it...
After several hours of rest and regaining my composure from my encounter with the beautiful Vistula River and its ugly past as the depository for Jewish ashes, I met the group I would be traveling with at our organizational meeting. Several of us had already communicated via e-mail, introducing ourselves to each other and sharing personal thoughts, anxiety and anticipation of what we were about to experience. The group was a cross-section of American Jews from coast to coast, non-Jewish partners and a Jewish couple from Winnipeg, Canada. An Isr...
Israel’s former Prime Minister, Golda Meir, once said that there would only be peace when the Arabs loved their children more than they hated ours. Unfortunately, that is still true. However, there is an early 21st century addendum made no less true by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ recent diatribe at the United Nations: There will only be peace when the Arabs change their narrative so theirs is not mutually exclusive to, a rejection of, and in existential conflict with ours. Conflicting narratives are one thing, but when one...
(JNS) — U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns and the Biden administration seem to harbor the delusional belief that China cares more about improving relations with the U.S. than China’s long-term plan to replace the American-led world order. Burns recently told Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang that America seeks to improve its “lines of communications” with the Chinese Communist Party. Gang told Burns that China would discuss better relations with the U.S. if we stop supporting Taiwan and end our efforts to “contain” China. In other words...
(JNS) — For many years, I have spent Friday mornings reading through a stack of newspapers reflecting a wide spectrum of editorial positions in Israel. It used to be amusing to count the differences in news coverage between them, as if each newspaper came from a slightly alternate reality. Recently, however, these differences have grown into chasms of ill will, cynicism and dehumanization of “the other,” making it difficult to understand how all streams of Israeli society might continue living together. This problem is not unique to Israe...
