Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) — Operation Israel, a U.S.-based nonprofit, has provided more than $7 million worth of supplies, medical equipment and protective gear to IDF soldiers since Hamas launched the current war with its massacre of 1,200 people on Oct. 7, the NGO said on Thursday. Since then, the organization has received requests from nearly a thousand IDF units and provided some 10,000 soldiers with a total of more than 50,000 items, including ceramic vests, ballistic goggles and tactical gear together weighing over 66,000 pounds (30,000 kilograms). The group...
(JNS) - Kindertransport survivor Walter Bingham, recognized by the Guinness World Records as the oldest living working journalist, celebrated his 100th birthday in Jerusalem on Jan. 4, 2024. Born Wolfgang Billig in 1924 in Karlsruhe, Germany, Bingham escaped Germany after Kristallnacht in 1939 by way of the Kindertransport, which sent nearly 10,000 unaccompanied children, most of them Jews, from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Free City of Danzig to Great Britain. Bingham...
In mid-December, Central Florida was experiencing a cold snap, and I decided to make chili. I had the canned tomatoes and chopped green chilis and the soy meat crumbles for the recipe, and I had all the ingredients for cornbread, a must whenever I made it. Once I checked my pantry, however, I realized I was out for canned beans. No problem! I had been meaning to use up the dried red kidney beans tucked away for a while. What I quickly realized that the “while” was at least 9 years. Yes, as evi...
(New York Jewish Week) - Jewish outfielder Harrison Bader is headed back to New York, this time as a member of the New York Mets. The 29-year-old Bronxville native agreed to a one-year, $10.5 million contract with the Mets Thursday, becoming the team's first Jewish player since Kevin Pillar and Robert Stock donned the blue and orange in 2021, according to data compiled by the Jewish Baseball News site. Bader's father, who is Jewish, told the Forward last year that his son is considering...
When a parent needs long-term care or nears the end of life, siblings may argue about a range of caregiving issues. Sometimes these disputes are bitter, and they can break up a family. In these situations, it can be helpful to have an objective professional in the room — someone to diffuse the anger, ask appropriate questions and find common ground. These people are called eldercare mediators, family mediators or adult family mediators. While most seniors face major adjustments when transitioning to an eldercare community, Jewish seniors f...
(JTA) — One of the movies up for best picture at the 2024 Golden Globes awards is about the Holocaust. One of the most notable displays during the ceremony alludes to a current attack on Jews. In the lead-up to the awards ceremony Sunday night, advocates for Israeli hostages in Gaza worked to supply attendees with yellow ribbon pins to affix to their red-carpet garb. Terrorists in Gaza are still holding approximately 136 hostages, who were kidnapped when Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7, sparking the ongoing war. Yellow ribbons are a l...
(JTA) - When I spoke with novelist Elizabeth Graver in August about her novel "Kantika" - inspired by her own Turkish Jewish family - I asked her how she managed to breathe life into a tired genre like the Jewish family saga. "I want the characters to be flawed and complex, and for the turns that they take to come out of their intersections with both history and their own very particular circumstances," she told me. The flawed and the complex; the historic and the particular. These are the...
(Jewish Journal of Greater Boston via JTA) — Sarah Freudenberger has spent a lot of time being told “no.” A year and a half out of college, the “no” came from cantorial schools when she applied for ordination. Months later, when she got engaged, it came from the three rabbis she had worked with at a Reform synagogue in Florida, when she asked if they would officiate her wedding. Both refusals were because – like 42 percent of married American Jews, according to a 2020 Pew study – Freudenberger’s spouse is not a Jew. Peter, her husband and the...
(JTA) — In a 1988 episode of the British television show “That’s Life,” British stockbroker Nicholas Winton was invited to sit in the audience as host Esther Rantzen dramatically revealed to him that the entire crowd was composed of the Jewish children — now adults — he had saved during the Holocaust. That tear-jerking clip periodically goes viral on social media, but now, Winton’s story is coming to bigger screens — in a dramatic film, “One Life,” where he is portrayed by two-time Academy Award-winning actor Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins wa...
(JNS) - Harold Rhode has a PhD in Ottoman history and lived for years in the Muslim world. He served as an adviser on the Islamic world to the U.S. Department of Defense for 28 years. I recently had the opportunity to speak with him. Q: Do all of the signatories to the Abraham Accords, Arabs and Israelis, see the Abraham Accords the same way? A: We Jews want people to love us. And the peace we're looking for is that you'll stop fighting, and we'll stop fighting, and everyone will live together...
(JNS) - Mark Podwal's "Shabbat: A Taste of Heaven," an acrylic and colored pencil drawing on paper, was part of his 2003 exhibition "A Sweet Year" at the Israel Museum Ruth Youth Wing in Jerusalem. (His book "A Sweet Year: A Taste of the Jewish Holidays" came out the same year.) "When the Jewish people were gathered at Mount Sinai to receive the Torah, God told them that olam habah (the world to come) would be their reward for keeping the commandments," the New York artist tells JNS, quoting "Ot...
(JTA) - The bright, colorful movie musical "The Color Purple," which opens in theaters on Christmas, tells a story that has by now become a familiar part of the American canon - of a young Black woman's self-empowerment and discovery of her own sexuality amid the horrific, abusive conditions of her life in the early-1900s rural South. It's far from the first time Americans have heard the story of Celie, the protagonist of Alice Walker's novel "The Color Purple." Walker's novel debuted in 1982...
(New York Jewish Week) — The late Brooklyn klezmer musician Pete Sokolow would sometimes take the stage as “Klezmer Fats.” But many players used a different sobriquet to refer to the pianist, who served as a link between generations: “the youngest of the old guys.” Sokolow started playing klezmer in the summer of 1958 with older musicians at resorts in the Catskills. Twenty years later he was part of the klezmer revival. “When it mattered, Pete was there,” klezmer historian Henry Sapoznik told the New York Jewish Week. “Pete was able to bui...
(JNS) — ’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the news, not a keyboard was clanking, except in New York to target the Jews. The “gem” of Gaza City “was destroyed by Israeli bombardment,” its mayor Yahya Sarraj wrote in a Dec. 24 New York Times op-ed. “The Israeli invasion has caused the deaths of more than 20,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, and destroyed or damaged about half the buildings in the territory,” Sarraj adds. “The Israelis have also pulverized something else: Gaza City’s cultural riches and municipa...
By Ben Sales (JTA) — On Oct. 6, JTA led its morning newsletter with an article that had long been in the works — and that we expected to drive conversation in the days ahead: It was a profile of a Jewish dad in Florida who had pushed to ban hundreds of books — including Anne Frank’s diary — from school libraries. The ongoing saga of book bans in school libraries, and how they ensnared works about the Holocaust and other Jewish topics, is a story our reporter Andrew Lapin, and JTA more broadly, had focused on all year. For much of 2023, book ban...
Senior Program Director Susan Bernstein and Jewish Pavilion volunteers were busy celebrating Chanukah with senior residents of 10 assisted living facilities....
(JNS) — On Dec. 16, our rabbi announced that Avi Lulu of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, who spent Chanukah with us in Palm Beach, Florida and returned to Israel on Dec. 11, had telephoned him the previous day to tell him that his son Alon Shamriz had been one of three hostages mistakenly killed by IDF soldiers. The congregation roiled with anguish. We had gotten to know Avi. He spoke at menorah lightings, Shabbat services, parlor meetings and before the Jewish Federation. Kfar Aza is located near the Gaza border. On Oct. 7, 80 of its more than 700 r...
Sometimes, your loved one is going to be discharged from the hospital, and you feel that person is not ready to come home. You can refuse discharge. Every state has a quality innovation network quality Improvement Organization. These government agencies help people with Medicare and Medicaid. See www.tiny.cc/QINmap. KEPRO handles Florida, Georgia, etc. Kepro, 844-45-9708. It is a beneficiary and family centered family quality improvement organization that can help you. Quite simply, this is how it works and I tried it with my mother a few...
(JTA) - A decades-long era of Jewish comedy on television will come to an end next year, as "Curb Your Enthusiasm," Larry David's HBO comedy, is set to end after its 12th season. The imminent conclusion of "Curb" has been rumored for several seasons now, but a poster and press statement from David this week confirmed that its 12th go-around, premiering Feb. 4, will indeed be the show's last. "As 'Curb' comes to an end, I will now have the opportunity to finally shed this 'Larry David' persona...
(JNS) - To the women, children and men who survived the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7 in Israel: You are not alone. We see you. We hear you. We are crying with you. And I am sorry. I am so very sorry. Those words are not adequate enough to convey the depth of my sorrow for what you were made to endure, but they will have to do because I don't believe adequate words exist. I am sorry for the horrors you suffered on that Black Shabbat. And I am sorry for every day of continued suffering you...
(JNS) — Eran the potato farmer. Rachel the food hostess. Michaela the midwife. All three are residents of the northwestern Negev who were caught in Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre; all three are heroes who were able to think quickly on their feet and save myriad lives on that dreadful day. Their stories of heroism, and many more, are being gathered and documented online for children, to give them strength and create a sense of unity amid the horrors being shared about Oct. 7. The name of the project is...
Our first Susya soldier fell. It was the first night of Chanukah. We were eating dinner and my daughter, 16, saw a message in her medical whatsapp group. The head Medic was wishing a friend of mine sorry on her son. I saw it, and said "he probably got injured" and we continued eating. The mother, a good friend of mine, is one of our original medics here. She is a strong person, one of my group of friends, and is one of those women who seems to do it all. She can even do a lay-up on the basketbal...
Men account for almost 40 percent of the caregiver population. In order for male caregivers to properly care for their loved ones, they must remember to care for themselves. Here are seven emotional and physical tips for male caregivers: • Participate in a support group. • Vary the caregiving responsibilities among family members or friends. • Exercise an average of three times per week and maintain a healthy diet. • Establish time for meditation. • Practice time management. • Prepare all necessary documents, i.e.: insurance policies, d...
As the end of the year approaches, you’ve probably noticed your inbox filling up with requests from charities asking for year-end donations. Giving is important, especially now. Like so many people, you may find yourself stressed as you scramble to locate receipts and track contributions to document your tax deductions for 2023. You may also discover that organizing your giving differently could have resulted in greater tax benefits. Here are a few tips to help you maximize your tax deductions, be more intentional about your giving, and r...
(JTA) - Throughout Hollywood history, many stars of Jewish ancestry have soft-pedaled their heritage, changing their names or speaking rarely, if at all, about their Jewishness. No one can accuse Barbra Streisand of either. The singer and actress of the stage and screen - one of the most beloved Jewish American icons of the past half-century - published her long-awaited memoir, "My Name is Barbra," earlier this month. Throughout, Streisand references her Jewish background constantly, often...
