Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 512 - 536 of 1886
(JTA) – In early December, Judaism’s Conservative movement sent a disquieting message to dozens of synagogues looking for a new rabbi: Many of you won’t make a hire this year. At least 80 Conservative synagogues anticipated rabbi vacancies —approximately one of every seven affiliated with the movement, the email said. At most, 50 to 60 rabbis would be looking for new jobs. “We are not presenting this information to alarm, but rather to help you prepare for and navigate the challenges of this search season,” said the email, which was signed by t...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Sen. Chuck Schumer, the most senior Jewish elected official in U.S. history, recited the Shema prayer at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday. The New York Democrat added a reading from Leviticus that emphasized unity, echoing the message President Joe Biden emphasized in his remarks at the same event. Biden in his remarks referred to the recent synagogue hostage crisis in Texas as an example of courage in the face of divisiveness. Schumer, the majority leader in the Senate, appeared with Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., t...
WASHINGTON (JTA) - Stephen Breyer, the oldest justice on the Supreme Court and one of its minority of three liberal justices, is set to retire, multiple reports said Wednesday. The move would leave Elena Kagan as the only Jewish justice left on the court. Breyer, 83, has come under pressure to retire ever since President Joe Biden assumed office a year ago. Liberals and Democrats do not want to deny Biden the chance to replace a liberal justice with another liberal. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.,...
(JNS) — Jewish groups in California took out a full-page ad in a local newspaper on Wednesday to voice their displeasure and concern with a school-board decision to engage an ethnic-studies curriculum for high school and middle-school students that they say will lead to hostility towards Israel and Jewish students. Appearing in the Castro Valley Forum, the ad reads, in part: “The Castro Valley Unified School District claims it is committed to ensuring the inclusion and belonging of all students and families with its tagline ‘All Means All....
(JNS) — The multinational firm Unilever, which owns Ben & Jerry’s, announced on Tuesday that in the wake of severe losses, it will fire 1,500 workers around the world and split off its ice-cream division from its food division. The move follows Ben & Jerry’s decision to break its contract with its Israeli licensee, who refused to stop selling the company’s ice-cream in Judea and Samaria. The U.S. states of New York, New Jersey, Florida, Texas, Illinois, Colorado and Arizona have decided to remove investments from their pension funds in Unileve...
(JTA) — Whoopi Goldberg apologized for upsetting people by starting a debate on Monday over whether the Holocaust was “about race,” writing that she is “sorry for the hurt I have caused.” But in an appearance that aired that same night on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” she elaborated on some of her views on the Holocaust. On “The View,” a show that Goldberg co-hosts, she said “the Holocaust isn’t about race,” but rather about “man’s inhumanity to man.” As she explained in an apology that she tweeted that evening, and on Colbert’s sho...
(JTA) - A Tennessee school board voted unanimously to remove "Maus," Art Spiegelman's graphic memoir about his father's Holocaust experience, from its curriculum after board members raised objections about curse words, nude drawings and "not wise or healthy" content within it. Spiegelman, who won a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for the book, told CNBC that the decision was "Orwellian" and said he doubted that the McMinn County school board's decision to stop teaching his book had only to do with his choic...
(JTA) - The New York City rabbi who spoke twice to the man who held Jews hostage in their Texas synagogue last week detailed the experience in a sermon Friday night. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of Central Synagogue also outlined her anxiety as an American Jew and exhorted her congregants to heed a prayer that the Reform movement has made part of its liturgy on Tisha B'Av, the Jewish day mourning the destruction of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem and other traumatic events in Jewish history: "Blessed...
(JTA) — In Orlando, neo-Nazis yelled antisemitic slurs from a highway overpass. In Chicago, a Jewish school and a synagogue were vandalized. In Washington, D.C., a man was arrested and charged with spray painting swastikas on a train station. The turbulent weekend — which also included a rally in Ottawa against COVID-19 vaccine mandates that featured swastikas — comes just a few weeks after the hostage situation at a Texas synagogue left American Jews feeling vulnerable in their synagogues. A video of the Orlando rally that spread on socia...
(JNS) — Pro-Israel groups working on campus agree that the situation for Jewish students is growing steadily worse. Just this fall, antisemitic incidents erupted at campuses across the country — from vandals desecrating a Torah scroll at George Washington University to a student at the University of New Mexico hospitalized after being attacked by a group shouting antisemitic slurs. “Recently at USC, we saw a member of student government threaten to ‘kill Zionists’ without repercussion while a Jewish member of student government was harassed int...
(JTA) — A rural Tennessee school board’s decision earlier this month to remove “Maus,” the celebrated graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its curriculum has attracted fierce backlash from other pockets of the state and beyond. A nearby comic-book store is pledging to give away the book for free to every student in the county, an area church plans to hold a discussion on its themes and a college professor intends to offer free classes on the book to students in the county. Nirvana Comics, a comic-book store in Knoxville, announced Thursda...
StandWithUs is proud to announce that it recently opened a Holocaust Education Center. The purpose of the center is to create a toolbox of user-friendly Holocaust education presentations and materials for public or private schools that have experienced Holocaust denial, lack of information, or simply want to proactively teach their teen and/or young adult students about the organized persecution and murder of six million European Jews in the Holocaust. The center’s presentations can be given by Matt Lebovic, who is the founding director of the...
(JTA) — Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, the man at the center of the Colleyville, Texas, synagogue hostage crisis last weekend, says that he is looking for another job, but wants the world’s focus to remain on his congregation’s trauma and healing process rather than his career. “My congregation, Congregation Beth Israel, and Colleyville have just undergone a traumatic experience. I’ve just undergone a traumatic experience,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And that’s where the focus needs to be.” Cytron-Walker was responding to an...
\(New York Jewish Week via JTA) — Almost exactly 18 months ago, as the U.S. settled into its first pandemic summer, the Upper West Side’s flagship Jewish community center delivered some bad news to its staff: more than a third of them would be laid off or furloughed. The Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan joined JCCs nationwide in cutting staff when in-person programming abruptly shut down that spring and summer. Facing the devastating wave of COVID that hit the city at the time, the JCC Manhattan found itself unable to offer the range of services...
(JNS) - "I'm grateful to be alive," wrote Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker on Facebook shortly after he emerged unscathed from his synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, where he was held hostage for nearly 11 hours, along with three congregants. "I am grateful that we made it out." The world watched in shock on Saturday as yet another antisemitic incident threatened to take the lives of innocent people - their only crime praying in their synagogue. On Sunday, the FBI named Malik...
(JTA) — Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker has publicly described for the first time the moment he and two other hostages escaped a gunman in his synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, on Saturday “The last hour or so of the standoff, he wasn’t getting what he wanted,” Cytron-Walker told CBS in an interview posted on Monday morning. “It didn’t look good. It didn’t sound good. We were very, we were terrified. “And when I saw an opportunity where he wasn’t in a good position, I made sure that the two gentlemen who were still with me that they were ready t...
(JNS) — A dozen major Jewish organizations spanning the religious and political spectrum are urging the U.S. Senate to quickly approve funding for the replenishment of Israel’s Iron Dome air-defense system. The House of Representatives overwhelming approved (420-9) legislation last September to provide $1 billion in funds, but the legislation has since stalled in the Senate. The letter, which was spearheaded by the American Jewish Congress and Jewish Council for Public Affairs, calls on Senate leaders Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Mitch McC...
(JNS) — After the University of Southern California was included in the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Global Anti-Semitism 2021 Top Ten list, the school responded on Wednesday by condemning both anti-Semitism in all its forms and the threatening tweets by a student leader that led to the distinction. USC board of trustees Chairman Rick Caruso said that “the board of trustees together with [University] President [Carol] Folt unequivocally rejects antisemitism. We explicitly condemn and denounce tweets calling for the killing of Jews. This kind of ha...
(JTA) — At a time when many local Jewish news outlets are scaling back or shuttering operations altogether, the Cleveland Jewish News is expanding its footprint for the second time in three years. CJN’s publisher, the Cleveland Jewish Publication Company, announced Dec. 21 its plans to begin serving the Jewish population of Akron, Ohio, after reaching an agreement with the Jewish Community Board of Akron to revamp the current Akron Jewish News as a monthly print newspaper and standalone website, beginning in February 2022. The current Dec...
NEW YORK — Anuradha Mittal, the head of Ben & Jerry’s Board of Directors and vice president of Ben & Jerry’s Foundation Inc. has been crowned 2021 Antisemite of the Year by watchdog group StopAntisemitism. After several weeks of voting, thousands selected Mittal for the distinct dishonor, beating the other two finalists Dua Lipa and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Earlier this year, Mittal spearheaded the effort by Ben & Jerry’s to stop the sale of its ice cream to 800,000 Jews living throughout various parts of Israel. This decision was clearly...
(JNS) — In the estimation of U.S. Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, the future of the Iran nuclear deal “is going to be resolved by Israel” rather than by the world powers who are actually negotiating with Tehran. “The Israelis have sat across the table from me for years, looked me in the eye, and said, ‘Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.’ And I believe them,” he says. In the following interview with JNS, the former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and currently its ranking member also shares his candid views on Israel’s righ...
(JNS) — Winning the lottery usually conjures images of elated people feeling set for life after receiving a check for hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet for five North Shore Hebrew Academy students in the Long Island region of New York, winning the lottery meant being selected to represent their day school on an eye-opening, life-changing relief mission to tornado-devastated Kentucky. On Dec. 10, a tornado with winds of over 166 miles per hour decimated the Kentucky of towns Cayce, Mayfield, Benton, Princeton, Dawson Springs and Bremen, k...
(JTA) — Shimon Peres will soon receive a major honor for a non-New Yorker: the late Israeli prime minister will have a New York City street corner named in his honor. The intersection of West 95th Street and Riverside Drive will be renamed “Shimon Peres Place” after the New York City Council approved nearly 200 new street names last week to honor various people. The news was reported by Patch. Peres, who died in 2016, served three times as Israel’s prime minister in addition to serving as president of the country from 2007 to 2014. In 1949, h...
(JTA) — Students at a Washington, D.C., elementary school were instructed by a staff member to reenact scenes from the Holocaust Friday, according to The Washington Post. When the third-grade students asked why the Germans killed Jews, the staff member said it was “because the Jews ruined Christmas.” The student at Watkins Elementary School were supposed to be working on projects in the library Friday when the staff member told the students to reenact scenes from the Holocaust. The woman reportedly told one student, who is Jewish, to play...
ST. PETERSBURG, FL — A recent story involving a third-grade teacher who made their students simulate episodes of the Holocaust has rightfully sparked comment from around the nation. The incident, which involved a staff member having their students mimic digging mass graves and shooting their peers, highlights the need for proper educational materials surrounding the Holocaust. Students, especially those at a young age, need to understand the atrocities of the Holocaust in a responsible way that teaches them how to recognize and understand t...
