Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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In a proud and longstanding partnership and in the continuing celebration of Israel’s 75th anniversary, JCC Association of North America and Maccabi World Union are bringing athletes from around the globe together in Israel at the world’s largest Jewish youth sporting event, beginning on July 6. More than a thousand Jewish teens from 10 countries will kick off the weeklong JCC Maccabi Games®, an Olympic-style sports event that includes opening and closing ceremonies; community service; and soci...
(JNS) — While the Biden administration is denying it, the fact is that in recent weeks the United States and Iran have been holding indirect talks regarding Tehran’s nuclear program. According to U.S. officials and Western diplomats, in the weeks and months after the unofficial death of attempts to revive the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement, the Biden administration conducted several “what’s next” meetings. What emerged from these meetings was the idea of a new kind...
(JTA) - The moment when Sheldon Harnick realized that his new musical might be something special came when he sang the lyrics he had just composed for a new song: "Sunrise, Sunset." He was sitting in the basement studio of his friend and collaborator, the composer Jerry Bock, in New Rochelle, New York. It was 1961, and they were in the throes of writing "Fiddler on the Roof." Bock had originally meant for the melody to be used for one of the flirtations between Tevye's three older daughters and...
(FORT LAUDERDALE) — A recently appointed member of the District Advisory Council for the Broward County Florida School Board, Laurie Cardoza Moore, a nationally recognized pro-Israel advocate, was among the first to commend the Fort Lauderdale based Board for their removal of local educator Naima Khan-Ghany from her recently re-appointed positions on both the county’s School Board Diversity Committee and the Human Relations Committees. Earlier this month, Cardoza Moore was in urgent communication with the office of Dr. Jeff Holness of the Bro...
When Molly Resnick was in her 30s, she was quite successful in her field of journalism. As a producer for NBC News, she had interviewed the likes of Henry Kissinger, Menachem Begin, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Sean Connery. Born in Bulgaria and raised in Israel, she grew up in a secular family and came to America with dreams of making it big. "In 1972, I left the land of milk and honey to go to the land of gold and money," she said. Resnick worked her way up from PBS to NBC. She was living her...
Theda and Bob Levinn of Oakmonte Village were married two years ago. Marriage is always special, but what is so special about this wedding? Bob was 96 years young and Theda did not tell her age, as is a lady’s prerogative, when they exchanged their vows. They both were married before and the two couples were close friends. After their spouses passed away they started dating. Bob, now 98 years, and Theda are very happy....
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Some 65 U.S. senators from both parties have urged the Biden administration to finalize Israel’s entry into the Visa Waiver Program by Sept. 30. Israel has sought to join the program, which enables citizens to travel to the United States without a visa, for decades. Currently, Israelis who do not hold citizenship in any of the 40 countries in the waiver program must apply for permission to travel to the United States, a process that typically results in a visa but can be extensive. The letter, sent to Secretary of State Ant...
(JTA) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he spoke by phone with Elon Musk on Sunday, calling the businessman and Twitter CEO “a person whose intelligence and contribution to humanity I greatly appreciate.” The tech mogul, currently the world’s richest individual despite notching steep losses at Twitter, has drawn controversy for his tweets about the Holocaust survivor and liberal megadonor George Soros and about Israeli data on COVID-19. The U.S. antisemitism envoy, Deborah Lipstadt, decried the Soros tweets as traffic...
(JTA) — The Arkansas House of Representatives approved a resolution encouraging trade with Israel that specifically mentions “Judea and Samaria,” the biblical name for the West Bank favored by Israel’s government. The resolution, approved last month by the Republican-led chamber, declares that “the State of Arkansas, which lies in America’s heartland, has a special kinship with Judea and Samaria, Israel’s biblical heartland” and notes that “cities across Arkansas bear the names of biblical cities throughout Judea and Samaria, such as Bethel, He...
(JNS) — The wife of Stockton Rush, the OceanGate CEO whose submersible, Titan, vanished on June 18 during a dive to the wreckage of the Titanic, is a direct descendant of two famous Jewish passengers who perished when the ocean liner sank in 1912. Wendy Rush is a great-great-granddaughter of Isidor and Ida Straus. Isidor was co-owner of Macy’s department store. She is descended from one of their daughters, Minnie, who married Dr. Richard Weil in 1905. Their grandson, Dr. Richard Weil III, is Rush’s father, said Joan Adler, executive direc...
(JNS) — In response to former President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from his predecessor Barack Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden announced that, if elected, he would reenter the deal and “work with our allies to make it longer and stronger.” This, Biden claimed, would curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions and moderate its malign behavior. He was and is wrong. The mere fact that Biden claimed to be seeking a “longer and stronger” deal puts the lie to Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry’s repeated claims t...
As we stepped through the entrance gate of Auschwitz I, marked with its overhead sign, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” “Work shall set you free,” I was trying to figure out how I was going to emotionally handle what I was about to experience. Our group was not alone, dozens of other visitors were already there when we were introduced to our personal docent, an English speaking, albeit difficult to understand, middle-aged Polish gentleman at least one generation or more removed from World War II and the Holocaust. Not surprisingly, his explana...
The “Tonys,” the awards for the Best of Broadway, were really interesting this year. Their diversity, their power and their depth showed a rather new attitude on Broadway towards the acceptance of reality. Most interesting to me was the winner of best Musical. The Tony was awarded to the revival of a show from 1998. It tells, with strong musical accompaniment, the story of Leo Frank, a young Jewish factory manager in Atlanta who was accused of raping and killing a 13-year-old factory worker, Mary Phagan, at the pencil factory he managed. Let...
(JNS) — “Al-Sharif [the Arabic/Muslim name for Jerusalem’s Temple Mount] belongs exclusively to the Muslims,” proclaimed Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas at the United Nations General Assembly on May 15. Notwithstanding a preponderance of biblical, historical and archeological evidence, Abbas, UNESCO and other Israel-haters steadfastly deny any Jewish connection whatsoever to the Temple Mount. Although Israel recognizes centuries of Arab-Muslim presence in the Holy Land, research provides overwhelming proof of a millennia-old Jewish...
(JNS) — Results from a Wall Street Journal-NORC poll released this year confirmed that Americans are deviating from religious faith. The study found 39 percent percent of those surveyed said that religion was “very important” to them, a sharp decline from the 62 percent who felt the same 25 years ago. A schism within the Jewish community appears to be emerging as a result of this trend. According to the Pew Research Center’s latest analysis of Jewish Americans, young adults are much more likely than those 65 and older to identify as either Orth...
(JNS) — In a decidedly unsurprising verdict, the man who murdered 11 Jews in the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh has been found guilty. Now, Robert Bowers faces a second judgment: The court must determine whether he will receive the death penalty. Three congregations were using the Tree of Life facility at the time of the massacre—New Light, Dor Hadash and Tree of Life itself. According to The New York Times, “There has not been agreement among the three congregations or within them about whether Mr. Bowers should be sentence...
MORNING MINYANS Chabad of North Orlando and Chabad of Altamonte Springs are holding in-person minyans. Chabad of South Orlando — Monday - Friday, 8 a.m. and 10 minutes before sunset; Saturday, 9:30 a.m.; Sunday, 8:15 a.m., 407-354-3660. Congregation Ahavas Yisrael — Monday - Friday, 7:30 a.m.; Saturday, 9:30 a.m.; Sunday, 9 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...
(JTA) – The Sackler family, the Jewish billionaires whose marketing of the painkiller drug OxyContin fueled the United States’ ongoing opioid epidemic, will receive full immunity from all civil legal claims in exchange for spending up to $6 billion on addiction treatment and prevention programs. The decision to grant immunity by a federal appeals court panel Tuesday effectively ends the thousands of civil lawsuits that have been filed against Purdue Pharma, the Sacklers’ company, over opioid deaths. But it clears the way for the company to de...
Hebrew is one of the oldest spoken languages in the world and the sacred language of the Jewish people. It is the only language ever to be revived as a spoken language - nearly 2,000 years after it ceased being one. A Brief History of Hebrew Hebrew was the language spoken in biblical times by the ancient Israelites. One of the original names for this language, and the one it is called today, is ivrit, because it is the language spoken by a people called the ivrim, or the Hebrew people. But it...
(JTA) - Pop star Harry Styles gave a shout-out to a pair of Orthodox Jewish friends who walked close to six miles to attend a concert of his at London's Wembley Stadium on Saturday. Jewish Chronicle reporter Tash Mosheim, who was at the show, heard Styles tell the crowd of 90,000 that he was grateful for Ben and Meredith Winston's efforts to show up at the gig, which opened its doors well before sundown on Shabbat. The couple walked from their home in Hampstead, an outlying area of London, to...
(JNS) — The Southern Poverty Law Center is a Montgomery, Ala.-based nonprofit that according to its website was founded in 1971 “to ensure that the promise of the civil rights movement became a reality for all.” Before reaching that first paragraph on the group’s site, however, comes the SPLC’s self-identification as “a catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond, working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements and advance the human rights of all people.” SPLC is often quoted...
(JTA) - Viewers of the popular game show "Jeopardy!" got a glance of one of the United States' most distinctive synagogue buildings on Tuesday, after a clue showcased Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, Michigan. The Conservative synagogue had leaked the fact that it would appear as a trivia item on "Jeopardy!" for days before the game, and as luck would have it, one of the contestants on Tuesday lives just a 45-minute drive from Southfield, in Dexter. Ben Goldstein told the Jewish...
LOS ANGELES (JTA) - The White House recently released a detailed strategy for combating antisemitism, complete with more than 100 action items. One thing not on the list? Comedy. That's where Jewish celebrities such as Howie Mandel, Rachel Bloom and Michael Rapaport came in on Wednesday night at the Saban Theater in Beverly Hills, at a so-called "Roast of Anti-Semitism." As event organizer Dani Zoldan put it, the comedy show was focused on "making fun of people that hate Jews." Emceed by...
Traveling when you’re caring for someone in a wheelchair requires a more planning ahead. Hotel Tips When booking a hotel, ask if they have accessible rooms available. This may require booking over the phone because sometimes you can’t select for disability online. Confirm with the hotel that their accessible room has the features you need. Road Trip Tips If you’re driving very far, rest stops are inevitable. Not all of them are handicap accessible, so preplan your rest stops. If you have a commode chair that is smaller than the wheel...
(JTA) — One spring morning in 1934, two little girls followed their mothers to a corner grocery store in Amsterdam. The mothers, hearing each other speak German to their daughters, discovered they were both Jewish refugees who had recently fled Nazi Germany. The two girls peeked shyly at each other from behind their mothers’ skirts, one of them slight with dark, glossy hair, the other taller and fairer. Those two girls were Anne Frank and Hannah Pick-Goslar. One was to become the most fam...
