Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 1 - 25 of 38
WASHINGTON (JTA)—How do you confront hatred when it has no fixed address? Abraham Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League national director, attempts to pin down an answer to the question in his latest book, “Viral Hate.” Co-authored with privacy lawyer Christopher Wolf, the book chronicles the complications of countering hate on the Internet. The takeaway? It’s up to us. “Let’s take back responsibility for our culture—both online and off” is the book’s main conclusion. “Public involvement, concer...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—For much of the past two years, Israel has taken a singular approach to the Syrian civil war: Stay as far away as possible. But with a recent string of victories by forces loyal to President Bashar Assad and the crumbling of the U.N. peacekeeping force that has kept the peace along the border for four decades, the tack is becoming considerably harder. Assad’s statement that he had decided to engage in military action against Israel, published June 10 in an interview with a Lebanese paper, was followed by a terse warning fro...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Dianne Feinstein and Ron Wyden have much in common. Both are longtime U.S. senators, Democrats, Jewish and fiercely independent West Coasters. They’ve also both been members of the Senate Intelligence Committee since before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and privy to classified materials that describe how the government systematized radical changes in intelligence gathering in their wake. Now the two lawmakers are on opposite sides of the debate over the massive inf...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Former national security adviser, former nuclear negotiator, a decades-old friendship with the supreme leader—Hassan Rohani is as Iranian establishment as it gets. Which is why, some Iran watchers say, he may be an invaluable asset in the quest to reduce tensions between the Islamic Republic and the United States. In his first remarks following his election to the Iranian presidency last week, Rohani sustained the moderate image that helped sweep him into office with more tha...
NEW YORK (Corriere della Sera Online)—His Wikipedia page remembers him, in at least 10 languages, as “the Italian police commissioner who saved thousands of Jews from being deported to Nazi extermination camps during the Second World War and for this was deported to the Dachau Concentration Camp, where he died.” “For his actions,” according to the free encyclopedia, “Giovanni Palatucci was decorated with the ‘Medaglia d’oro’ award for civil merit, and honored as one of the ‘Righteous Among the N...
The remaining members of the Ethiopian Jewish community will make aliyah by the end of this summer, and the Jewish Agency educational compound in the northern part of the country that has prepared them for their new lives in Israel will be turned over this month to the Ethiopian government. The compound in Gondar, which earlier was under the auspices of the North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry, “will not be needed beyond July,” said Misha Galperin, who heads the Jewish Agency’s department of international development. “That’s it. There...
NEW YORK (JTA)—No earth was moved last month at the groundbreaking of one of the nation’s newest Holocaust memorials. Instead, the gatherers stood silently, symbolic shovels in hand, on the immaculate lawn where the privately funded $400,000 monument will soon rise. A succession of speakers delivered somber homilies remembering one of the darkest chapters in human history. “It was an absolutely unbelievable world that I lived in,” survivor Fred Lorber was quoted as saying by local media....
BETHESDA, Md.—Did Pope Pius XII, the leader of the Catholic Church during World War II and the subsequent decade, suppress a landmark Vatican document that his predecessor, Pius XI, had commissioned, a document that would have unambiguously criticized racism and anti-Semitism? And did that document—an encyclical, in Vatican parlance—actually exist? Historians and theologians have been asking these questions for decades. The so-called hidden encyclical has played a role—contrasting the attitudes and personalities of the two popes—since the end o...
Biannually, Chabad at UCF brings students to Israel on the Taglit – Birthright Israel: Mayanot program. Every summer and winter break sees hundreds of students travel to Israel with UCF Chabad Rabbi Chaim Lipskier, and this summer marked their 10th trip to Israel with Birthright. With Lipskier serving as the rabbi and spiritual tour guide, the trip is a high-quality Israel experience that includes 10 days of visiting landmark attractions and participating in cultural activities together with y...
The board of directors of Temple Israel in Winter Springs announces that Rabbi Joshua Neely will serve as Rav Beit HaSefer (Principal) of the religious school for the coming year. Neely will continue in his other rabbinical roles as well. The Temple Israel leadership team sees this as yet another advantage of having a synagogue family that is of a size to allow the rabbi, the students and the students’ family members to get to personally know one another. What else does it mean to have one’s rab...
The Roth Jewish Community Center of Greater Orlando’s Richard S. Adler Early Childhood Learning Center is embarking on a fundraising campaign to renovate its enclosed courtyard playground, just behind its preschool lobby and outside of the infant/toddler patio. The playground renovation will include new surfacing, a gathering area for planning and storytelling, a secret garden pathway with sensory experiences, musical instruments for the stage, wooden decking for building and planters for flowers and herbs. New fencing will be installed a...
The Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Orlando’s next program, at 1 p.m. Sunday, June 23, will be “Smarter Searching on Ancestry.com.” An Ancestry.com expert, Crista Cowan, will be the facilitator. Shaky leaf hints. Global searches. Database specific. Fuzzy. Exact. These are just a few of the ways to locate records on Ancestry.com. You can search by person or location. You can use the Card Catalog to discover what is online before you begin your search. You can change your collection prior...
EIN PRAT (in the Judean desert between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea)—How do you encourage young Israeli Jews, both secular and observant, to deepen their “Israeli-ness,” exploring their Jewish and national identities in a way that is serious, thoughtful and open? Micah Goodman, 38, a popular and respected Religious Zionist thinker, author and lecturer here on Zionism, Judaism, the Bible and contemporary Jewish life, has come up with a creative model that could have a profound impact on Israeli life. And his approach seems almost the oppos...
Everything I ever heard about slavery is despicable. The West is familiar with the history of slavery in the New World. However, few people in the West know about Islam and slavery. Muslims were enslaving black Africans long before any slave ships sailed for the New World. Slavery still exists today in Islamic communities and is condoned in the Quran. There are Islamic religious leaders who approve of Muslims raping infidel females and having sex slaves. The Quran actually devotes more verses, such as 33:50, 23:5, 23:6 to making Muslim men...
When it comes to an even-handed look at Israel, the forthcoming film “The Attack” doesn’t sound very promising. Based on a novel by an Algerian army officer, directed and co-written by a Lebanese Arab and tackling a Tel Aviv cafe bombing from the perspective of a terrorist’s family, you might expect “The Attack” to show up as the Al Jazeera movie of the week. In fact, “The Attack” is a nuanced, intimate look at the complicated identities of Israel’s Arab citizens. And its reception in the Arab world is a case study in the failure of Israel...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Last Friday’s Iranian presidential election was fraught with fraud and fear—candidates vetted for their loyalty to the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guards, the press muzzled by the imprisonment of independent journalists, and the leaders of Iranian civil society in detention. The absence of any free or fair election is a manifestation of the larger repression in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Simply put, the Iranian government imprisons and tortures thousands of activists, executes dissidents without due process, ruthl...
NEW YORK (JTA)—The JTA Op-Ed championing human rights in Iran is very compelling but for two facts: It was co-authored by two of Israel’s greatest advocates, and they published it in JTA, a Jewish media outlet. As a community, we can be willing to bomb Iran into oblivion in order to stop its nuclear program, or we can worry about the rights of its citizens. We cannot, and should not even pretend, to do both. The co-authors, Canadian lawmaker Irwin Cotler and U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), are high on the AIPAC speakers list because they are lea...
In the children’s magazine Highlights, home to those moral opposites Goofus and Gallant, we can imagine that revenge is for the likes of Goofus, while Gallant waits for judge and jury. Vengeance is unseemly, the province of the unhinged, while justice is a Greek goddess holding the scales outside a government courthouse. Even when it comes to Nazis, Simon Wiesenthal titled his book, “Justice, Not Vengeance.” Even after 9/11, President George W. Bush declared, “Ours is a nation that does not seek revenge, but we do seek justice.” Thane Ros...
MORNING AND EVENING MINYANS (Call synagogue to confirm time.) Chabad of South Orlando—Monday and Thursday, 8 a.m. 407-354-3660. Congregation Ahavas Yisrael—Monday - Friday, 7 a.m.; Sunday, 8 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., 407-298-4650. GOBOR Community Minyan at Jewish Academy of Orlando—Monday – Friday, 7:45 a.m. – 8:30 a.m. Temple Israel—Sunday, 9 a.m., 407-647-3055. FRIDAY, JUNE 21 Light Shabbat candles at 8:08...
A month ago, Rita Margulis and her fiancé Amit (as a career army officer he asked not to use his last name) got married at the Safari in Tel Aviv. There was a Reform rabbi and 450 guests. But according to the state of Israel, the wedding never happened. That is because Margulis, who immigrated to Israel from Ukraine at age 4, is not Jewish according to Jewish law, because her mother is not Jewish. Jewish law states that only someone born of a Jewish mother or who had an Orthodox Jewish conversion is Jewish. And since there is no civil...
SAN FRANCISCO—Fifty years ago, a hit single took America by storm, one unlike anything on the top of the charts: ”Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah,” a paean to summer camp angst, sung by a pudgy Jewish guy in horned-rims and a crew cut. That song about Camp Granada, where “all counselors hate the waiters, and the lake has alligators,” cemented Allan Sherman’s reputation as the nation’s great song parodist. More than that, it opened pop culture to a Yiddish-inflected humor later perfected by...
Herbert Miller of Winter Springs died Sunday, June 16, 2013. He was 89 years old. Mr. Miller was born on April 4, 1924, in Brooklyn, N.Y., to the late Harry and Diana Seidler Miller. He was married to the late Janice Miller for 38 years, when she passed away on 2006. Mr. Miller was a salesman in the pool service equipment business. He is survived by his son, Douglas (Elizabeth) of Oviedo; and four grandchildren. He was predeceased by his brother, Daniel, and sister, Mildred. Graveside funeral services were held at Beth Israel Cemetery, Gotha,...
PARIS (JTA)—Using two iPhones, Marc Fischel was overseeing the shipping of tons of vegetables two weeks ago at the hectic Rungis wholesale market, where thousands of Frenchmen ship mountains of fresh perishables across Europe. The director of export at one of the market stalls, 40-year-old Fichel fits in easily with the multitudes of Asians, Arabs and Africans who work at Rungis. It’s easy to forget the French Jew is an up-and-comer on the country’s indie pop scene, with a debut album recently r...
Kardashian buys kibbutz stone NEW YORK—Reality star Kim Kardashian has done her part for a kibbutz in Israel. Take a deep breath—she hasn’t actually performed any manual labor or even visited the place (do they make high-heel Naots?). Her contribution is of the wallet-opening kind. Kardashian settled on Caesarstone brand quartz countertops, made in Kibbutz Sdot Yam, for the renovation of her Beverly Hills mansion, Tablet reports. Trend-setter that she is, it wasn’t long before her neighbors were...
“Chicago, Chicago, a todd’lin town”… This native New Yorker recently returned from Chicago where the temperature was in the 60s and the natives were wearing shorts and t-shirts, flip flops, and some even wore swimsuits! (I had to borrow a jacket to wear over my sweatshirt!) Of course, when my plane landed back in Orlando, I faced the mid 90s and a lot of humidity. (I’m living here almost 49 years but will never get used to the extreme heat… yuck!) The trip to Chicago was purely for pleasure… n...
