Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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Cantor Jacqueline Rawiszer was recently awarded the American Conference of Cantors President's Award for Volunteerism at the recent ACC-GTM Convention in Atlanta on June 23, 2019. Rawiszer-shown here with (left) Cantor Steven Weiss, president of the American Conference of Cantors, and Dr. Michael Freidman-received the award for exceptional leadership and in recognition of her commitment and dedication to Jewish music and the cantorate....
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Days ahead of a workshop where Jared Kushner sought tens of billions of dollars for his Middle East peace plan, the White House unveiled an outline of its economic portion, including proposals, like a Gaza-West Bank travel corridor, that are sure to rattle Israel’s government. The Peace to Prosperity plan authored by a team led by Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and key adviser, was posted Saturday on the White House website. It does not outline the political portion of the peace plan, which the architects say w...
(JTA)-Judith Krantz, one of the best-selling female novelists of all time, has died. Krantz died on Saturday at her home in Bel Air, California at the age 91, Deadline reported. According to the Jewish Women's Archives, Krantz is the third-largest-selling female novelist in history. "Although her goal is for her books to provide escape and entertainment, she does try to make some serious points and has woven such issues as anti-Semitism and the German occupation into her novels. All of her...
(JNS)-Israeli defense electronics company Elbit Systems announced on Wednesday that its U.S. subsidiary has been awarded a $26 million contract by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection to install a multi-sensor system to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border. According to a report in the Israeli financial daily Globes, Elbit will install an Integrated Fixed Towers system in Arizona. Elbit has been involved in a number of projects with U.S. Customs regarding border security. The IFT system is a...
Just 72 hours after the St. Augustine Jewish Historical Society marked the 55th anniversary of the largest mass arrest of rabbis in U.S. history, Rabbi Richard Levy, one of the 16 rabbis arrested, passed away. Levy, along with a denominational administrator, came to St. Augustine in support of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the efforts of the Southern Christian Leadership Council to desegregate St. Augustine. Attached to this effort was the desire to keep the Civil Rights movement on...
The Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida would like to make the following statement regarding the humanitarian crisis currently facing immigrants in the United States today: As echoed through our mission, the Holocaust Center believes in using the history and lessons of the Holocaust to build a just and caring community free of anti-Semitism and all forms of prejudice and bigotry. One such lesson is of those seeking to escape persecution, poverty, and oppression by seeking asylum within the United States. The mistreatment...
Are you interested in learning more about the Jewish history of Spain? Then register for “The Jewish Golden Age of Spain: From Glory to Exile” taught by Jewish educator Charlene Neely at Temple Israel this fall. The free course will be taught over three Sundays on Oct. 27, Nov. 3, and Nov. 17, from 10 a.m. to noon each session. The course, which Neely created, shares the story of a 1,000-year-old community that created a lasting legacy in the arts and philosophy. Topics include Spanish life under Islam, including poetry, music, and arc...
Beth Shalom Memorial Chapel was recognized by the Independent Funeral Directors of Florida for its 25 years of membership at their annual meeting in Clearwater, June 7. Beth Shalom was founded by Manny Adams and Sammy Goldstein in 1984 and is the only Independent Jewish funeral home in Central Florida. Originally located on Gore Street in Downtown Orlando, the company relocated to its current facility on Lee Road in 1999. Beth Shalom is privileged to continue to have the honor of serving families in Central Florida, throughout the state and...
(JNS)—U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) rejected an invitation on Sunday to tour Auschwitz with a Holocaust survivor. The organization From the Depths, whose president, 93-year-old Edward Mosberg, is a Holocaust survivor, invited her to see the camp, where an estimated 1.1 million people, almost all of them Jews, were killed. “The opportunity you will have of visiting the German Nazi Concentration Camps along with Mr. Mosberg, a 93-year-old survivor of history’s most brutal genocidal regime, will enable you to become a witness of a wi...
(JNS)—Despite bringing together a historic number of Arab states and prominent world leaders, the Bahrain economic conference, which seeks to be the first step in the Trump administration’s efforts to bring peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, has been buffeted and vilified, especially by the Palestinians, who called the Trump plan “dead on arrival” and have boycotted the summit. Senior adviser to and son-in-law of U.S. President Donald Trump Jared Kushner, who spearheaded the initiative, opened the two-day summit on Tuesday by calling...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak announced Wednesday that he is forming a new political party. At an evening news conference, Barak said he rushed to make the announcement to thwart Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to cancel the Sept. 17 election. “Netanyahu has reached the end” of his political career,” Barak said. “The Netanyahu regime must be felled.” “Bibi, this is your last chance to go home of your own volition,” he said, using Netanyahu’s nickname. Barak, who did not say what the name of his new party wo...
(JTA)-Gary Rosenblatt, the editor and publisher of The New York Jewish Week for 26 years, is stepping down. Under his stewardship, the newspaper started Write On For Israel, an educational/advocacy program to prepare high school students for the Mideast debate on campus, in 2002; and The Conversation, an off-the-record retreat with a diverse Jewish participation, to discuss major issues facing American Jewry, in 2005. It also launched the publication Fresh Ink for Teens, The Jewish Week Investig...
(JNS)—The Somali-born congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who has made a number of anti-Semitic remarks, is currently embroiled in controversy over her marriage history. When claims against her of bigamy and immigration fraud first emerged in 2016, Omar accused the journalists involved of “Islamophobia.” Omar has also made a claim being heard more and more: that Muslims are called anti-Semites only because they are Muslim. In other words, anyone who calls out Muslim anti-Semitism is Islamophobic. This twisted claim is a way of making Musli...
(Jewish Journal via JNS)—It’s a sign of how politicized our national discourse has become that nothing is out of bounds—not even the Holocaust. When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) used the charged term “concentration camp” last week to describe migrant detention centers, maybe she didn’t realize that the term, semantics aside, uniquely reverberates with the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust. If she still has any doubt, she ought to walk over to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and check out “The Evidence Room...
(JNS)—When the Trump administration released the economic portion of its Middle East peace plan last week, the avalanche of criticism was immediate and harsh. Even though the president’s foreign-policy team couched the plan as a “vision” of peace rather than an intricate blueprint, its critics weren’t wrong in pointing out that there was little in it that was new, and that its chances of success were nil. Yet in analyzing the effort, it’s important to note that there’s a difference saying that the plan won’t succeed and saying that putting it...
(JNS)—When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared, during the lead-up to the country’s March 31 municipal elections, that “whoever wins Istanbul, wins Turkey,” he couldn’t have imagined that the catchy campaign slogan was going to energize his rivals and bode ill for his own continued reign of terror. Even the initial mayoral victory of Ekrem Imamoğlu—the opposition Republican People’s Party candidate challenging Binali Yıldırım, a former prime minister from Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party—three months ago in Turkey’s...
(JTA)—The other day, my Catholic mother-in-law again implored me, her sole Jewish daughter-in-law, to watch “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” The third season of the award-winning show is expected to air in a few months, so I dutifully resigned myself to the task. But as I watched, I could not help but agree with Paul Brownfield of the Los Angeles Times’ assessment that the show is an “endurance test of ethnic self-parody” which left him, and me, feeling queasy. The show is stocked with supposedly “Jewish” characters, such as the whiny, self-cen...
(JTA)—On June 20, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a four-story-high cross on government land abutting a major road—brightly lit at night and maintained by taxpayer funds—can continue to loom over drivers because the monument has stood for almost a century. In doing so, the court needlessly applied a new legal standard with the potential to make American life more uncomfortable for Jews and other religious minorities. Since the 1925 case Gitlow v. New York, 268 US 652, the Supreme Court has extended the First Amendment’s mandated separation be...
MORNING AND EVENING MINYANS (Call synagogue to confirm time.) 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 of Orlando—Monday—Friday, 7:45 a.m.—8:30 a.m. Temple I...
RAMAT GAN, Israel-Prof. Yitshak Kreiss, director general of Israel's Sheba Medical Center Tel HaShomer, attended the summit in Bahrain, held June 25-26, to discuss economic prospects for the Palestinian people as part of a first step in a potential Israeli-Palestinian peace plan. "I am both privileged and honored to have been personally invited by US. Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin to the Peace and Prosperity Workshop in Bahrain," said Prof. Kreiss. Born together with Israel in 1948,...
(JNS)-"Far-right anti-Semitism is on the rise in the United States and Europe, but the response from both Jewish communities and law enforcement agencies has been defensive and case by case, rather than proactive and comprehensive," Yigal Carmon, the president of the Middle East Media Research Institute, told JNS in a recent interview. The threat to freedom in the United States is twofold, said Carmon. On the one hand is the jihadi threat, which manifests in terrorist attacks but is rooted in...
Before the wildfires were extinguished in Israel last month, organizations and communities throughout Israel stepped up to help the more than 3500 people who had been evacuated and displaced from their homes, including residents of Mevo Modiin, a community that was all but completely burned down. Calls to provide clothes and other supplies were responded to so much so that by the next morning, almost as quickly as the fire started and calls were issued to help, people were turned away because...
The Statue of Liberty... "Give us your tired, your poor, your humbled masses yearning to breath free." (What has become of us? I'm just saying.) Finally, some justice... "A Belgian criminal court has convicted Frenchman MEHDI NEMMOUCHE for the terror attack at a Brussels Jewish museum in 2014, which resulted in the deaths of four people. Nemmouche's accomplice, NACER BENDRER, was also found guilty of aiding the attacker. Over the course of the trial, Nemmouche's defense lawyers argued that he...
Friday, July 12th: A meaningful Shabbat service at 7 p.m. led by Rabbi Karen Allen. Join the family-like celebration, followed by refreshments at the Oneg Shabbat allowing everyone to mingle with old and new friends. The synagogue is located at 315 North 13th St. in Leesburg, with the entrance on Center Street. More information is available on the synagogue website: http://bethsholomflorida.org/ or by calling the synagogue at 352-326-3692. Thursday, July 18th: Join Rabbi Karen Allen for the 1 p.m. monthly roundtable discussion. It is held at...
(JTA)—In Jewish communities around the world, there is a little known group of men and women dedicated to performing the mitzvah of preparing a body for burial, a ritual called tahara. The group is called the chevra kadisha, the holy society. The chevra kadisha isn’t a secret group, but it operates quietly. Tahara is considered an especially holy mitzvah because it is performed without the possibility that the person you perform it for will return the favor. Because we perform tahara without expectation of reward, I’m also writing this article...
