Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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Following six days of devastating fires that ravaged Israel, Jewish National Fund (JNF-USA) is stepping up fundraising efforts to raise the many millions of dollars needed to help the nation recover. Since Tuesday, Nov. 22, approximately 10,000 acres of forests have been destroyed by fires. Some 137 people have suffered fire-related injuries. At least 569 homes burned down throughout Israel and in Haifa alone, more than 700 homes were damaged, 37 were destroyed, 400 are uninhabitable, and...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-Call them Israel's American volunteer fire brigade. Dozens of firefighters from across the United States put their lives on hold-leaving behind jobs and families-to help subdue the wildfires that swept Israel over the past week. While they all share a love of Israel, only a handful of them are Jewish. "We're just firefighters. When guys hear about a situation like this one, where the Israelis are working as hard as they can, they want to come help," said Billy Hirth, a Protestant...
More than 5,600 Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic rabbinic emissaries and communal leaders from 90 countries, hailing from as far away as Bangkok and Kenya gathered for the International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Emissaries, held in the Queens borough of New York on Nov. 25. The event is considered the largest Jewish gathering in North America. This year's conference carries an added significance as the North American Jewish community marks 75 years since the Lubavitcher Rebbe-Rabbi Menachem M. Schn...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-Stephen Bannon recently called Breitbart News "the most pro-Israel site in the United States of America." That will not change with Bannon leaving the far-right news website for the White House, according to Breitbart's Jerusalem bureau chief. Saying he shares a worldview with Bannon, President-elect Donald Trump's chief White House strategist, Aaron Klein plans to expand the Israel operation, which staunchly backs the Jewish state's political right wing. There is talk of moving...
NYPD sees ‘huge spike’ in hate crimes post-election—Jews targeted most NEW YORK (JTA)—The New York Police Department said it has seen a dramatic rise in hate crimes following the election of Donald Trump, with the majority of incidents directed at Jews. There has been a 115 percent increase in bias crimes in New York City following Election Day, with Jews being targeted in 24 of the 43 incidents during that nearly monthlong period. The anti-Semitic incidents represented a threefold increase from November 2015, The New York Observer reporte...
WASHINGTON (JTA)-Outgoing Secretary of State John Kerry signaled in a speech that the Obama administration was still considering action on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in its final days, although it might fall short of a direct intervention on the issue. There's no way to "force-feed" peace between Israel and the Palestinians, Kerry said in a lengthy speech delivered Tuesday at the Women's Foreign Policy Group conference, but there are "other things we can do" to preserve a two-state...
By Sean Savage JNS.org Improving weather conditions, a massive influx of support from the international community and efforts by Israeli first responders have enabled the Jewish state to get raging wildfires under control. This week’s fires are expected to be among the costliest in Israeli history, with unofficial preliminary estimates projecting about $520 million in damage. The damage to Israeli homes is estimated to be more than $182 million, while destruction to public property such as roads, electrical power systems and other i...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-Forty years after his reporting exposed one of the worst war criminals in Dutch history, Hans Knoop is still celebrated in his native Netherlands as a hero. On Nov. 23, more than a million television viewers watched a public broadcaster's historical period drama on how Knoop, a Dutch Jewish journalist, unmasked the art collector Pieter Menten in 1976 as a monster who murdered hundreds of Polish Jews and stole their property with help from German Nazis. It was the highest rating f...
ISRAEL21c-Doctors diagnose as many as 60,000 new cases of Parkinson's disease (PD) every year in the United States. Yet diagnosing PD with certainty can take years-long after early signs and symptoms have appeared. The Israeli startup BioShai has a game-changing product on the horizon: PDx, the world's first simple blood test for the early diagnosis of PD. The test results can be combined with clinical data, providing a more accurate diagnosis to help physicians decide on the best course of...
The Jewish National Fund asks everyone to turn attention to homes and forests that are in immediate danger across Israel. A series of wildfires are raging across Northern and Central Israel. Many homes have already been destroyed, families displaced, and more residents are being evacuated. Israel's firefighting capacity is being stressed to its limits. The threat is so great that the prime minister has put a request out to surrounding countries for assistance. Always underfunded, KKL's and...
JERUSALEM (JTA)-Fires throughout Israel, fanned by dry conditions and high winds, have led to the evacuation of thousands of people from their homes. Several homes have been destroyed by the conflagrations on Tuesday and Wednesday. A brush fire that began Tuesday and spread to Zichron Yaakov, located at the southern tip of the Carmel Forest in northern Israel, continued to burn on Wednesday, destroying at least 10 homes and damaging dozens more. Several adults and children were treated for...
Air Supply gives free concert tickets to wives of Israeli firefighters JERUSALEM (JTA)—After postponing a concert in Haifa last week due to massive fires there, the band Air Supply gave away 200 tickets to the wives of Israeli firefighters. The concert was rescheduled for Sunday after being canceled last Friday. “This is a gesture to wives of firefighters, who went through incredibly difficult days and nights,” concert producer Dudi Berkowitz said, according to Ynet. “We decided to give them an evening away from it all with some good music....
WASHINGTON (JTA)-In recent months, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee have each emphasized what in recent years hardly needed emphasizing: mainstream Jewish support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The reiterations of support signify a concern growing among Jewish organizations about deepening partisan differences on what has been since 2002 a rare area of broad political consensus in Israel and...
Israeli army conscription rate drops 3.5% since 2010 (JTA)—The rate of enlistment into the Israel Defense Forces has dropped by 3.5 percent over the past five years, army sources said. In 2016, the IDF saw the conscription of 72 percent of people who are initially listed as duty bound to serve in the military, Army Radio reported Wednesday. Among the 28 percent who do not enlist are tens of thousands of haredi Orthodox Jews, who once were allowed an automatic exemption from serving until a 2014 law decreed they sign up for the army or other f...
(JTA)-As a Jewish family originally from the Ivory Coast, Amy and George Camara and their four children felt somewhat immune to the rising anti-Semitic thuggery in France. The Camaras, relieved to leave their war-torn African country, settled in the northern French city of Lille in 2012. Because they fit no one's Jewish stereotype, they said they were able to live as Jews without fear-despite, in recent years, the rise in attacks on French Jews from a small segment of Muslim extremists. But the...
The Hadassah Medical Center is continuing to receive positive findings with its Phase II clinical trial using its unique stem cell approach to stop the progression and reversing the disabilities of multiple sclerosis. The Hadassah-developed treatment involves intrathecal injection-injection of the patient's own bone marrow-derived stem cells directly into the spinal fluid-so that the cells circulate all the way around the brain and the spinal cord, where they are needed. Hadassah began its...
New York Observer, owned by Trump’s Jewish son-in-law, ceases print edition (JTA)—The New York Observer, a weekly newspaper owned by President-elect Donald Trump’s Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner, will cease publishing a print edition. The Nov. 9 edition was the last print edition, the Observer’s parent company, Observer Media, announced in a statement. The newspaper will continue to be available online as Observer.com. The decision to end the print edition and change its name “signals an end of an era when The Observer served as a fixture of M...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)—His name was never mentioned during the Netherlands’ main commemoration event for Kristallnacht, but Donald Trump was likely on everyone’s mind at the ceremony at the Dutch capital’s majestic Portuguese Synagogue. It wasn’t for any imagined parallels between Trump’s election as U.S. president and the campaign of violence that the Nazis unleashed 78 years ago against German and Austrian Jews, which many historians see as the opening shot of the Holocaust. Most European Jews, whose families still live in the shadow of that pogrom...
One of the leaders in the fight against breast cancer is Dr. Tamar Peretz Yablonski, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, whose tenacity and determination to find a cure inspires her and countless others. "My parents always taught me to fight, to look on the bright side," Yablonski, director of Hadassah Medical Center's Sharett Institute of Oncology in Israel, told JNS.org. As Hadassah continues its important research work in finding a cure, the organization celebrates 20 years since its...
Anti-Trump ad in Florida substitutes ‘Jews’ for ‘Muslims’ in candidate’s anti-immigrant speech (JTA)—An anti-Trump ad that substitutes the word “Jews” for “Muslims” in an anti-immigrant speech by the presidential candidate is running in the swing state of Florida. A similar ad running in Utah substitutes “Mormons” for Muslims. The ads were launched by TruthPAC, a new super PAC launched Friday by Dick Brass, a former executive at Microsoft and Oracle, the Huffington Post reported. Brass told the Huffington Post he launched the PAC to prevent Tru...
(JNS.org)—The Palestinian Authority and Jordan are warning members of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee against opposing a planned resolution on Jerusalem set for a vote last Wednesday, Oct. 26. The 21-member World Heritage Committee is considering a resolution that solely refers to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem by its Muslim name, Al-Haram Al-Sharif, which ignores any Jewish or Christian ties to the site. Temple Mount was home to the First and Second Jewish Temples. The resolution is similar to one passed by the 56-member UNESCO Executive Com...
(JNS.org)-Lawmakers from 17 countries signed a declaration last Thursday against the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) resolution and called for international recognition of Jerusalem as the undivided and eternal capital of Israel. The UNESCO resolution rejected any Jewish link to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall in Jerusalem. In the declaration, 19 MPs representing the 17 countries, said that "the U.N. resolution is disconnected from reality and is...
PHILADELPHIA—The Middle East Forum’s “Islamist Money in Politics” (IMIP) project has recorded an additional $12,061 in campaign contributions from Islamist sources to Hillary Clinton since releasing its list of the top ten recipients of Islamist money for 2015-2016 on October 20. The new figures come from just-released FEC filings from August and September. Clinton has padded her lead atop the list, accepting $53,226 from prominent Islamists. This includes $16,216 from individuals associated with the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC),...
Jewish Federations of North America and its predecessor organizations have had a longstanding policy of not officially traveling beyond Israel’s 1967 borders. In reality, however, representatives have already done so. Top leaders of JFNA held a secretive meeting Wednesday to approve changing its policy of not traveling into Judea and Samaria to visit Jewish settlements or Palestinian communities. The conference call was led by JFNA Chairman Richard Sandler, who is executive vice president of the Milken Family Foundation in Los Angeles. P...
Danielle Berrin slams Ari Shavit for not apologizing for ‘committing sexual assault’ (JTA)—Jewish-American reporter Danielle Berrin slammed prominent Israeli journalist Ari Shavit for not admitting and apologizing for allegedly sexually assaulting her. “As recounted in my article, he engaged in physically aggressive behavior—grabbing the back of my head, lurching at me for a kiss, pulling and pawing at me, and pressuring me to enter his hotel room,” she wrote in a response published Friday in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles. She added: “Thr...
