Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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Amid increasing discrimination-and even violence-against Christian minorities across the Middle East, a small program in Israel is dramatically increasing the number of Christian-Arab Israelis who join the Israeli military, with the aim of integrating this minority population into mainstream Israeli society. With support from the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (The Fellowship), the Israeli Christians Recruitment Forum, led by Father Gabriel Naddaf of Nazareth, is multiplying...
(JTA)—Out of baseball after four years playing in the minor leagues, Brent Powers, a Christian from Texas, took a tour of Israel last year with his wife. He was smitten with the country and considered how to return. The Masa Israel Journey will provide his path. Powers and about a dozen American college players will be part of the group’s five-month, baseball-themed program launching in January. Israel’s baseball czar figures their expertise will do wonders for a sport that is growing in popularity, but remains a niche sport in a country where...
US Orthodox rabbis slam wedding video calling for revenge against Palestinians (JTA)—The main modern Orthodox rabbinical group in the United States expressed its “outrage” over a video that shows Jewish revelers at a wedding celebrating the murder of three Palestinians in a West Bank firebombing. “The vigilante and lawless calls for revenge and dancing with machine guns and knives are anathema to Jewish morality and religious standards,” Rabbi Shalom Baum, president of the Rabbinical Council of America, said in a statement issued Dec. 24....
Honk. Honk. Hoooonk. It’s the sound of the Israeli street. Israelis have a reputation for aggressive driving, no doubt. But according to the 2014 Road Safety Annual Report, 263 people lost their lives on Israel’s roads in 2012, a 40-percent decrease from the number of accidents causing death in 2000. “There has been a real increase in the awareness of the need for road safety,” says Dr. Victoria Gitelman, a researcher at the Transportation Research Institute of Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. So what has changed? First: publ...
The following is a statement from Stephen Greenberg, chairman, and Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman/CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations: We are deeply dismayed at the vote by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) 35-nation Board of Governors to close the file on the possible military dimensions (PMD) of Iran’s nuclear program despite Iran’s continuing lack of transparency and hindrance of the inspection work. Moreover, Iran was found by the IAEA to have lied about its nuclear program and...
Part 3 of a 3-part series The Republican Party’s candidates for the 2016 presidential race have, since the Paris terror attacks on Nov. 13, 2015, and the San Bernardino terror attack on Dec. 2, 2015, placed an increasing emphasis on their proposed measures aimed at increasing America’s national security. These proposals range from the intense to the laughable and, to some, the intensely laughable. Regarding the Islamic State (ISIS) group, an increasing threat to the West, multiple candidates support a ground operation in the Middle East aga...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking at an annual U.S.-Israel confab, said Israel’s government must consider the consequences of evolving toward a single state incorporating the Palestinian areas. “How does Israel possibly maintain its character as a Jewish democratic state?” Kerry said Saturday at the Saban Forum in Washington, D.C. Would Palestinians “be relegated to a permanent underclass? Would they be segregated?” he asked. Kerry’s forceful questioning of Israeli policy as well Israeli Defense Minister Mosh...
(JNS.org) The Vatican issued an unprecedented declaration that the Jewish people are part of God’s salvation without explicitly confessing Christ as their savior, in a document that includes other changes in Catholic Church teachings related to Christian-Jewish relations. On Thursday, the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews presented the “A Reflection on Theological Questions Pertaining to Catholic-Jewish Relations” document during a press conference at the Vatican to mark the 50th anniversary of the “Nostra Aetate...
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) The Middle East has gone through monumental changes over thousands of years, but one thing has never changed: an affinity for hummus. This conclusion was reached after fava seeds were discovered during an excavation by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) in the Galilee, showing that prehistoric man living in the southern Near East some 10,000 years ago preferred a diet consisting of legumes. The joint IAA-Weizmann Institute research project, which examined fava seeds unearthed in recent years at...
While Christians in Iraq and Syria face the threat of extinction at the hands of the Islamic State terror group, the U.S. State Department remains silent on the prospect of publicly designating the atrocities against Christians and other Mideast religious minorities as “genocide.” According to a recent investigative piece by journalist Michael Isikoff for Yahoo! News, the State Department is in the midst of internal discussions to officially recognize the Yazidi people as genocide victims. But a lingering question remains: Will other rel...
(JTA)-Itzhak Perlman, the Israeli-born violin virtuoso, was named the third winner of the Genesis Prize. Perlman was named the winner on Monday of the annual $1 million prize that has been dubbed the "Jewish Nobel." He joins former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the actor-director Michael Douglas as recipients. "I was totally dumbfounded," Perlman told JTA about learning he had been selected as this year's winner. "I'm a musician. I play the fiddle. So I was so totally taken aback...
(JNS.org) Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias informed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Greece will not follow recently implemented European Union guidelines to label Israeli products from Judea and Samaria, the Golan Heights, and eastern Jerusalem. Israel and Greece agreed on extensive bilateral cooperation in economic matters, technology, science, education, trade, energy, and agriculture following last month’s meeting between Kotzias and Netanyahu. Greece joins Hungary in its defiance of the EU’s directive to remove “Ma...
Obama calls on Israelis and Palestinians to ‘exercise restraint’ NEW YORK (JTA)—President Barack Obama, making a surprise address, told a Haaretz-sponsored conference in New York that Israelis and Palestinians must “exercise restraint.” “Inexcusable violence has taken too many lives—Israelis, Palestinians, Americans and others,” Obama said via teleconference on Sunday morning at HaaretzQ, the liberal Israeli newspaper’s event with the New Israel Fund. “I’ve been clear that Palestinian leaders have to condemn the ongoing attacks and stop the...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—During last week’s climate summit outside Paris, the 195 delegate countries—including Israel—committed to implementing plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improving their goals every five years. The aim: Keep Earth from warming more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the 21st century. “This demands international discipline, which is not easy, but for the good of humanity, I hope that it will be found,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who attended the climate talks, told his Cabinet on Sunday. “It...
In recent years, the so-called “Arab Spring” uprisings, the Syrian civil war, and the growth of jihadist terror groups like Islamic State have countered the perception that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root cause of instability in the Middle East. Adding to the mix, mutual concern over the Iran nuclear deal and declining American leadership in the region has made ties between Israel and some Arab states warmer than ever before. In line with this narrative, Israel recently announced that it is opening its first-ever diplomatic off...
The Syrian civil war continues to fester and has now drawn in nearly every major world power, including the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Syria's neighbor of Turkey, who all have different and sometimes opposing interests. The geopolitical situation recently escalated to new heights on Nov. 24, when a Turkish F-16 fighter jet shot down a Russian Su-24 fighter jet near the Turkish-Syrian border. Turkey, which is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO),...
The artificiality of a Palestinian identity is reflected in the attitudes and actions of neighboring Arab nations who never established a Palestinian state. The rhetoric by Arab leaders on behalf of the Palestinians rings hollow, for the Arabs in neighboring lands, who control 99.9 percent of the Middle East land, have never recognized a Palestinian entity. They have always considered Palestine and its inhabitants part of the great “Arab nation,” historically and politically as an integral part of Greater Syria - Suriyya al-Kubra - a des...
BERLIN (JTA)—A new Torah scroll in a German city was completed with interfaith help, including from a Muslim leader. Bilal El-Zayat, president of the Islamic Community of Marburg placed his hand atop that of Torah scribe Rabbi Josef Chranovski as he penned one of the last 15 letters of the Torah to spell out the statement “Witnessed by all Israel.” Also joining in the ritual to mark the Marburg congregation’s 10th anniversary last week were local Protestant and Catholic clergy, as well as the central German city’s mayor and his predecess...
Netanyahu: Palestinian refusal to recognize Jewish state ‘core’ of conflict WASHINGTON (JTA)—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and rejected U.S. warnings that Israel was devolving toward a single state. The “root cause of the problem,” Netanyahu said in a video address Sunday to the annual Saban Forum, is that “the Palestinians have not yet been willing to cross that conceptual bridge, the emotional bridge of giving up t...
Report: Paris attacks mastermind planned attack on Jews as well (JTA)—The mastermind of last month’s Paris attacks also planned to strike Jewish targets, Reuters reported, citing sources close to the investigation. The plans by Belgian national Abdelhamid Abaaoud, disclosed in a confidential police witness statement, were leaked last week to the French magazine Valeurs Actuelles, Reuters reported over the weekend. According to the witness statement, Abaaoud asked his cousin Hasna Ait Boulahcen to hide him while he prepared more attacks fol...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-It was 2 a.m. when Illana Attali's friend's screams woke her. Her friend had just heard about the series of coordinated terror attacks on Paris-a wave of violence that would kill at least 129 people on Friday. A Paris native who moved to Tel Aviv five years ago, Attali, 31, had been on a desert hike with two friends and had turned off her phone. When she first heard about the attacks, she thought it was just a bad dream. All three friends began sobbing and decided to head back to...
JNS.org—Ezra Schwartz, an 18-year-old American yeshiva student from Massachusetts, was among the three people killed in a Palestinian terror attack in Gush Etzion on Thursday, Nov. 19. Schwartz was riding in a van with five of his friends from Yeshivat Ashreinu in Beit Shemesh when a Palestinian terrorist driving in the opposite direction opened fire on the van and other cars stuck in traffic. The students were heading back to the yeshiva after handing out food to IDF soldiers. “Ezra wanted nothing more than to help feed another person, to stu...
WASHINGTON (JTA)-The series of terrorist attacks that killed at least 129 in Paris pose a couple of major challenges for the United States, Jewish officials and security experts said. The challenges: security threats from the the 200 or so Islamic State fighters who have returned to the United States, and moral questions surrounding America's absorption of Syrian war refugees. The key takeaway from Friday's attacks, for which ISIS has claimed responsibility, is that the plotters managed to...
British born Muslim Kasim Hafeez made the remarkable journey from an adherent of Islamic extremist ideology to a proud Zionist, and finally, to Room 116 of the University of Central Florida's College of Business Administration on the night of Nov. 18. While there, Ben Suster and the UCF Knights for Israel student group hosted Hafeez for a talk before a standing-room-only audience titled "The Day I Stopped Hating Israel," discussing his journey from British Muslim to Muslim extremist to Israeli...
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) Israel is the sixth-healthiest country in the world and is the only Middle Eastern country in the top 10, according to recent world health rankings compiled by media outlet Bloomberg and reported in the British newspaper The Independent. The rankings, compiled data from the United Nations, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization, placed Singapore in first place among 145 countries, with a “health grade” of 89.45 percent. Italy came in second, followed by Australia, Switzerland, and Japan. After Isr...
