Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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Israeli activists, philanthropists and aid workers have helped rescued 125 Afghans at risk from Taliban retribution in a complex and hush hush operation that happened earlier this month. The Afghans, which include judges, human rights activities, journalists, TV presenters, scientist, artists, diplomats, artists and even cyclists, arrived in Albania on October 2nd, after being evacuated from Afghanistan to a neighboring country. The operation took weeks to arrange and was a collaborative effort...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Yair Lapid got what he wanted out of his Washington visit: the word “every,” instead of “other.” During Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s first meeting with President Biden in August, the American president, despite his desire to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal, said that if Iran does not engage in good faith diplomacy with the nations involved in the deal, the U.S. would consider “other options” in getting Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions. It was a sign that Israel and U.S. Democrats, long far apart in their opinions o...
The six finalists for the 2022 Genesis Prize have just been released. The Foundation is asking the global Jewish community to vote for their favorite. Last year, they engaged over 3 million people via social media and 200K from six continents voted. The Prize Committee then selected Steven Spielberg as our 2021 Laureate. The finalists for the 2022 Genesis Prize are: • Albert Bourla (Greece/US), Chairman and CEO of Pfizer, under whose leadership the company delivered a COVID vaccine in record time • Sacha Baron Cohen (UK), Award-winning act...
(JNS) — Hundreds of Google and Amazon employees have signed a public letter demanding that the tech giants cancel Project Nimbus, a billion-dollar contract to provide public cloud computing services to Israel. In the letter, published by The Guardian on Tuesday, the authors state that they were “morally obliged” to speak out against the project, calling on Amazon and Google to cancel the contract and sever all ties with the Israeli military. “We cannot look the other way, as the products we build are used to deny Palestinians their basic rights...
(Israel21c via JNS) — The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine loses considerable effectiveness six months after the second dose, according to new Israeli research published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study echoes findings published by Pfizer and Kaiser Permanente in Lancet earlier in the week, showing the vaccine’s effectiveness drops from 88 to 47 percent after six months. This study also proved the vaccine 90 percent effective for at least six months at preventing hospitalization of infected people. The Israeli study inv...
More than Facebook crashing, news in Israel this week has been about the vague announcement and gripping story of efforts to locate Ron Arad, an Israeli Air Force officer who has been missing in action since October 1986. Ron Arad was a 28-year-old Lieutenant Colonel whose plane crashed during a mission over Lebanon. It is believed he is dead, though there are conflicting reports as to when and how he died. Arad and his pilot Yishai Aviram ejected from their plane, damaged when a bomb apparently exploded prematurely. Aviram was located and...
(JNS) — In his address to the U.N. General Assembly on Friday, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas demanded that Israel return to its pre-1967 borders or face consequences. “If the Israeli occupation authorities continue to entrench the reality of one apartheid state as is happening today, our Palestinian people and the entire world will not tolerate such a situation,” he said in a pre-recorded video. “Circumstances on the ground will inevitably impose equal and full political rights for all on the land of historical Palestine, within...
(JTA) — Three Israelis have been arrested for an attack on Palestinian residents of the West Bank that sent a three-year-old to the hospital over the Jewish holiday of Shemini Atzeret. The attack came amid a week in which several Palestinian terror suspects have been killed in the West Bank and Jerusalem. A man in Gaza who Israeli troops said was carrying a “suspicious bag” was also shot dead Thursday, according to the Times of Israel. On Tuesday afternoon, dozens of Israeli settlers entered the Palestinian village of Khirbat al-Mufkara, throw...
(JTA) - Israel captured the remaining two Palestinian prisoners of the six who riveted the country with their escape from a maximum facility two weeks ago. Israeli police and army troops surrounded a building in Jenin in the West Bank on Saturday night. The two remaining prisoners emerged and surrendered. They were Iham Kamamji, 35, who was convicted in the 2006 murder of Eliyahu Asheri, an Israeli 18-year-old who had asked Kamamji for a ride near the West Bank settlement of Ofra, and Monadal...
(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has made Time magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people, and his Arab-Israeli coalition partner Mansour Abbas thinks he knows why. “It all comes down to courage,” Abbas, the leader of the first Arab party to join an Israeli governing coalition, writes in the accompanying blurb explaining why his political opposite was recognized on the list published Wednesday. “After four elections in two years, a bold act was needed to unite a country frayed by political stalemate and brought...
(JNS) "Israel is your home away from home," Israeli President Isaac Herzog said in a message on Sept. 2, ahead of the Jewish New Year. His address was aimed at "the people of Israel and the Jewish people at large," which he referred to as his "extended family." Herzog was previously head of the Jewish Agency for Israel, where, as one of his stated objectives, he worked to provide a platform for all Jewish communities around the world. Today, the Jewish Agency's top position has yet to be...
(JNS) The dramatic escape of six Palestinian terrorists from Gilboa Prison in northern Israel last Monday carries the potential of a broader security escalation, a former defense official has cautioned. Col. (res.) David Hacham, a former Arab-affairs adviser to seven Israeli defense ministers and a senior research associate at the Miryam Institute, told JNS that the breakout could lead to a chain of incidents and an escalation dynamic, although this is not a certainty. He recalled a highly relevant precedent from the 1980s. In May 1987, six...
JERUSALEM (JTA) - Amit Zakoon's flower business started with a seed - literally - but it quickly grew into one of Jerusalem's premier purveyors of luxury sukkahs. "We work for all the rich and famous," Zakoon, the owner and CEO of Yarok Yarok Events Design, told JTA. Studio Ya Ya, as Zakoon's clients call the business, is known for executing weddings, bar/bat mitzvahs and parties for Jerusalem's A-list, including visiting U.S. presidents (from Bush to Obama) to big-time philanthropists like the...
The Arava Desert in Israel's south is "abuzz" with activity - and it is all thanks to one important six-legged critter: the humble honeybee. In a world where scientists acknowledge the important role bees play in our ecosystem yet worry about their dwindling numbers, farmers in Israel's Arava Desert are working to grow bee colonies – and they are already achieving some very "sweet" results. You would not expect to find a bee colony in the middle of a desert, yet the bees at Porat Farm in Ein Yah...
When Israel came to a standstill in March 2020 at the onset of the COVID pandemic, shops, restaurants and offices shut down as part of a nationwide lockdown. But for Israel's hungry, there was no break. On the contrary, the closure of corporate dining facilities, restaurants, hotels and military base cafeterias left them more vulnerable because suddenly there were no excess meals from these institutions to donate. For Leket, Israel's leading food rescue organization, this was an immense...
(JTA) — When the world shut down last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Natan Sharansky figured his experience as a Soviet political prisoner meant he had a thing or two to teach the millions of people who were suddenly confined to their homes. So he recorded a video providing his advice that went viral among the many Jews around the world who have long seen him as a sage figure. Nearly a year and a half later, Sharansky, 73, announced on Facebook that he and his wife, Avital, had contracted the disease. The Israeli couple had both been v...
(JNS) — As Israel observes the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, it’s difficult to forget the capitulation of the Iraqi army to ISIS in 2014 or the EUBAM observers who fled as Hamas seized power in the Gaza Strip in 2007, not to mention visions of the United States fleeing Saigon in the spring of 1975 as part of the collapse of the Vietnam War. Noting the coincidental, yet equal number of years separating each of the Middle Eastern incidents in which Islamic fundamentalists defeated their adversaries, Eran Lerman, vice president of the Jer...
(JNS) — Archeologists have uncovered in the City of David National Park in Jerusalem the first evidence of the capital being hit with an earthquake that was mentioned in the Bible, reported i24News. According to the first verse of the book of Amos, the earthquake occurred during the time of the Kingdom of Judah in the eighth century BCE. The Israel Antiquities Authority said last week that while evidence of the earthquake has been discovered across Israel, archaeologists have never unearthed markings of the destruction that prove the natural d...
(JNS) — Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett blamed Iran on Sunday, Aug. 1, for the attack that left two dead on the oil tanker in the Arabian Sea on Thursday night. Speaking during the weekly Security Cabinet meeting, Bennett was quoted by Maariv as saying that while Iran is denying responsibility for the incident, “I state here absolutely: Iran is the one that carried out the attack on the ship.” “The intelligence evidence for this is there and we expect the international system to make it clear to the Iranian regime that they have made a...
(JNS) — Lebanese media outlets as well as Saudi Arabia’s London-based Asharq Al-Awsat have reported that Israel’s freedom of action against Iran in Syria is dwindling as Russia makes changes to its policy vis-à-vis its relationship with Israel. But this so-called reversal of policy by Russia may be manufactured news and does not necessarily reflect reality. Micky Aharonson, former head of the foreign-relations directorate of the National Security Council in the Prime Minister’s Office and an expert on Russia at the Jerusalem Institute for Strat...
(JNS) - It was billed as the first Iranian delegation to Israel since the fall of the Shah 42 years earlier. Six Iranian Muslim dissidents, forced to leave their homeland decades ago and who made their way to the United States, came on a three-day solidarity mission last week to show support for the Jewish state following the May clash between Israel and Palestinian terror groups in the Gaza Strip - namely, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad - that have long been backed by Iran. Accompanying th...
The Shmitah (Sabbatical) year is a little over a month away. Coincidentally, the Israeli Finance in coordination with the Agricultural Ministry, has introduced reforms that would enable more European produce to be imported into Israel creating unwanted competition for Israeli farmers. In response, Farmers across Israel have blocked roads by dumping massive amounts of unsold crops in major highway intersections on Thursday putting traffic throughout the Jewish state at a standstill for an hour-and-a-half. Thousands of farmers and agricultural...
Leah and Yehuda Smolarcik are moving to Israel from Chicago with their four children this summer. The challenges over the past year and a half of COVID convinced them not to put off reaching for their dream any longer. "My husband and I met in Israel while living there temporarily after college, and we always hoped to return as immigrants," Leah said. "The pandemic made us realize that there is no sure or stable thing anywhere, so we felt now was the time to make the move." The Smolarciks are...
(JNS) - Iranian defector Saeid Mollaei, who now represents Mongolia, dedicated his silver medal to the State of Israel after the match on Tuesday at the Tokyo Olympics. "This medal is also dedicated to Israel, and I hope Israelis are happy with this achievement," said Mollaei, according to Israel's Kan news. Earlier this year, Mollaei competed in the Tel Aviv Grand Slam, winning a silver medal for Mongolia. He was warmly received by the Israel Judo Association and its president, Moshe Ponte....
(JNS) — In a video address to the 2021 summit of Christians United for Israel, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid on Monday expressed his appreciation to the largest pro-Israel organization in the United States for their ongoing support — most recently, during and after the 11-day conflict with Hamas in Gaza in May. While its base is American evangelicals, which are largely politically conservative, CUFI as an organization emphasized that it makes its decisions based on the pro-Israel issues it believes in. While evangelicals fervently sup...
