Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 26 - 33 of 33
The "Seeking Kin" column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA) – Judith Mertz still recalls plenty of the Indian words she learned from her friend Miriam El-Chai when they were high school friends in Israel and embarking on teaching careers together. And when Mertz next makes one of her frequent trips to Israel, she expects to see El-Chai for the first time in a half-century. "I always tell my family about my Indian friend," she said. "I remember lots of words s...
JERUSALEM (JTA) - An Arab-Israeli Knesset member said the kidnappers of three Israeli teenagers are not terrorists. "They are people that cannot see any way to change their reality, and they are forced to use these means until Israeli society wises up a bit and sees and feels the suffering of the other," Hanin Zoabi of the Balad party said Tuesday in an interview with Tel Aviv Radio. Zoabi participated in the May 2010 flotilla to break Israel's naval blockade of the Gaza Strip and was punished...
NEW YORK (JTA) - A special panel tasked with examining the governance and strategic vision of the Claims Conference is recommending that the organization shift its long-term focus to Holocaust education and remembrance, JTA has learned. The panel was appointed last year following a scandal involving the Claims Conference's failure to detect a $57 million fraud scheme there that persisted until 2009. It also recommended cutting in half the size of the board's executive committee and the number...
TEL AVIV (JTA) - Since the three teenagers were abducted last week, Israel's goals have been simple: Find them and punish their kidnappers. Realizing those goals, though, is far from a simple task. The international community has condemned the kidnappings, and Israel has spread its forces across Judea and Samaria to search for the teens. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to stop at nothing to find Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach. But the effort is taking place...
When most people think of the shtetl, images reminiscent of “Fiddler in the Roof” pop into their heads: small villages filled with poor Jews, struggling to make a living in an almost exclusively Jewish world. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth in the heyday of the shtetl. At one point, these thriving areas – whose size ranged from 2,000 to 20,000 people – were not only populated by Jews, but by a variety of ethnicities and religions. In “The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe” (Princeton University Press),...
Netanyahu: Israel will air proof that Hamas kidnapped teens JERUSALEM (JTA)—Israel has “unequivocal proof” that Hamas is responsible for the kidnapping of three Israeli teens more than a week ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. Netanyahu, speaking Sunday at the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting, said Israel would share the proof and information with several countries and soon will make it public. Airing the information, the Israeli leader said, will put remarks by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Saudi Arabia “to t...
A Chinese girl forced me to confront what it means to be Jewish. “What are we waiting for?” my Chinese girlfriend asked, somewhat confused, as we sat facing each other in the privacy of my apartment. For weeks we’d been talking about the prospect of getting married. I held back. I was not supposed to marry a Gentile, I thought. It would be a betrayal of my family, my ancestors, my tradition. Yet it would sound racist if I told her that. Then I realized: It would sound racist to me as well. I was raised with a lox-and-bagels Judaism, reple...
By Linda Gradstein The Media Line Almost a week after three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped, presumably by the Islamist Hamas movement, Israel has expanded its crackdown to include “anything green” as one Israeli army officer referred to the traditional Hamas color. Some 300 Palestinians affiliated with Hamas have been arrested in the past week, including several Palestinian parliamentarians and more than 50 prisoners who had been released in a prisoner exchange for a captured Israeli soldier in 2011. Israeli officials say that their main goa...
