Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA)-World Zionist Congress elections began earlier this month and run through April 30. Here's a primer on what the congress is, how (logistically) to vote, who's on the ballot, and why you just might want to sign up for PayPal before casting your vote. What is it? The World Zionist Congress is a 500-person representative body of the Jewish people that wields substantial control over three key institutions with significant assets at their disposal: Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael, or the Jewish...
KRAKOW, Poland (JTA)-What kept you alive? Did your non-Jewish friends reject you? Could you ever forgive? Those were some of the questions posed by Jewish young adults to Holocaust survivor Marcel Tuchman at the Galicia Jewish Museum here. "What kept me alive was having my father with me," said Tuchman, 93, a physician from New York who was born in Poland and survived several concentration camps, including Auschwitz. "And another thing was the hope I had that one day I will be able to tell the...
Killer filmed Paris kosher supermarket attack (JTA)—The Islamic terrorist who killed four Jewish men at a kosher supermarket in Paris filmed the attack. Amedy Coulibaly recorded seven minutes of the attack on a video camera, including the shooting deaths of three of the victims, CNN reported Friday, citing a U.S. intelligence official. Citing a French source close to the investigation, the French magazine L’Express made an identical report. Coulibaly wore the GoPro camera, often used in extreme-action video photography, on his torso during the...
HAVANA (JTA)-On a recent Friday night inside this city's Beth Shalom synagogue, Aliet Ashkenazi, 25, stood draped in a blue-and-white prayer shawl leading prayers in a mix of Spanish and near-perfect Hebrew. It was the first time she had ever led services-a feat considering she converted to Judaism seven years ago after discovering her father was Jewish. The 300-seat sanctuary in the Cuban capital was near capacity, but the crowd filling the wooden pews was largely American, comprised of tour...
Thanks to the efforts of a bus driver who fought off a Palestinian terrorist, the stabbing attack that injured 12 people aboard Dan Bus No. 40 in Tel Aviv last week did not end in a single death. Israeli police officials praised the actions of Herzl Biton, the 55-year-old bus driver who was the first person to get stabbed by terrorist Hamza Muhammed Hassan Matrouk. Despite being seriously wounded, Biton managed to use pepper spray on the assailant and fight him off while simultaneously opening...
(JTA) – The mysterious death of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman seems ripped straight out of a crime thriller. Nisman-the indefatigable prosecutor collecting evidence of culpability in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people-was found dead in his apartment just hours before he was to present evidence to Argentina's congress that he said implicated his country's president and foreign minister in a nefarious cover-up scheme. The charge? That the t...
(JTA)—Hate crimes against Jews in London more than doubled last year, according to the Scotland Yard. Last week, the police headquarters for metropolitan London reported 299 hate crimes against Jewish people between the start of April and the end of December. This represented a rise of 128 percent over the corresponding period in 2013, when there were 131 hate crimes, The Jewish Chronicle of London reported Jan. 21. Britain’s 300,000 Jews account for 0.4 percent of the total population. Anti-Semitic attacks recorded in Britain during the 201...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-Former Israeli President Shimon Peres said he is confident in France's ability to fight anti-Semitism on its own soil. Immigration to Israel, he said, should be encouraged for positive reasons, not only as a response to persecution abroad. "We call on Jews to immigrate to Israel when there's no crime and no other reason," said Peres, speaking exclusively to JTA from his Peres Center for Peace office overlooking the Mediterranean. Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister...
Journalist who first reported Nisman’s death flees Argentina BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (JTA)—The Argentine-Israeli journalist who first reported the death of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman has fled to Israel following threats to his safety. Damian Pachter, who works for BuenosAiresHerald.com and tweeted the news of Nisman’s Jan. 18 death, left Argentina on Saturday after the threats and being followed by people he did not know, according to Fopea, the Argentine Journalism Forum. Pachter citizenship was en route to Israel, where he holds...
The death of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah last Thursday shouldn't change how the Gulf nation treats its relations with Iran and Israel, experts say. Saudi Arabia remains determined in its opposition to the Iranian nuclear program, and while that gives them at least one shared interest with Israel, a Saudi ambassador's anti-Israel remarks at the United Nations on the same day as Abdullah's death served as a reminder that the Saudi-Israeli relationship isn't exactly friendly. Abdullah, who died...
Walking in the front row, arm-in-arm, of the march against terrorism were (l-r) Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta of Mali, French President François Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, President of the European council Donald Tusk, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and, not in the picture frame but there, the King Abdullah II of Jordan. Noticeably not in attendance was U.S. President Barack Obama or Vice President Joe Biden or Secretary of S...
(JNS.org) The White House admitted that it made a mistake by not sending a higher-ranking official to Paris for Sunday's unity rally against terrorism. More than 40 heads of state attended the rally and marched together through the streets of Paris in solidarity with France after three Islamist terrorist attacks, which killed a combined 17 people. America was represented by U.S. Ambassador to France Jane Hartley, rather than President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, or Secretary of...
The four bodies were wrapped in Jewish prayer shawls and laid out on stretchers. All of them should have lived for many years before they were buried. The victims of the synagogue attack were all killed in the kosher supermarket in France, and their bodies brought to Jerusalem for burial. Relatives of each of the dead lit a torch and said a few words. One of the victims, Francois-Michel Saada, a businessman, had already bought an apartment in Israel and was preparing to move here....
In the wake of Islamist terror attacks that killed a combined 16 people at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine and a kosher supermarket in Paris, the leader of a prominent Christian-Jewish aid group told JNS.org that he is exploring ways to help French Jews immigrate to Israel. Brothers Cherif Kouachi and Said Kouachi, the two Muslim terrorists suspected to have carried out the Charlie Hebdo shooting, were killed Friday in a police raid on a printing shop in the Paris suburb of...
Preliminary report: No others involved in gunshot death of AMIA special prosecutor (JTA)—There was no sign of intervention by others in the shooting death of Alberto Nisman, the special prosecutor in the AMIA Jewish center bombing, according to preliminary autopsy reports. “There was no intervention from third parties in the death,” Buenos Aires Prosecutor Viviana Fein said Monday afternoon in a statement, citing the report given to her by the head of the judicial morgue, the Argentine media reported. Fein also said in the statement that she w...
(JTA)-An attack on the Paris headquarters of a French satirical magazine has left at least 12 people dead, including the Jewish caricaturist Georges Wolinski. Two of the reported fatalities in Wednesday's attack were police officers, according to the French daily newspaper Le Monde. Later reports said that one of the officers was Muslim. Ten others were wounded, five of them seriously. Details of the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices are still sketchy, but witnesses said the three assailants...
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi calls for Islam to 'grow up' and join the 21st century in its "Islamic thinking" at the prestigious Al-Azhar University. Al-Azhar is the same location where President Obama gave his famous 2009 Cairo Speech insisting the two front row seats be assigned to Muslim Brotherhood members. General al-Sisi is saying the current Islamic thinking, based on the texts and Islamic Law, are "antagonizing the entire world." General al-Sisi understands that the current tr...
(JNS.org)—The American Historical Association (AHA) rejected two anti-Israel resolutions proposed by Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement activists in a 144-55 vote at the association’s annual meeting on Sunday in New York. The resolutions, proposed by Historians Against the War (HAW), criticized Israeli policies but did not go as far as calling for a boycott of Israel. To become a member of HAW, which a separate entity from AHA, one must sign an online statement declaring opposition “to wars of aggression, military occup...
(JNS.org)—The Palestinian Authority’s unilateral quest for statehood and other forms of recognition in the international arena is among 10 points illustrating why the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians are no longer valid, wrote Alan Baker, Israel’s former ambassador to Canada, in a new article for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) think tank. In a September 1993 letter to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had stated that “all outstanding issues relating to permanent status...
LOD, Israel (JTA)-He says he's a leader of a "Zionist settlement" movement, but Raz Sofer's home is no West Bank outpost. Sofer, 25, is the manager of a 100-member student village in this mixed Jewish-Arab city in central Israel. The village, comprised of several apartment complexes, offers students cheap rent in exchange for volunteer work with Lod's poor residents, many of them Arab-Israelis. Sofer is fluent in Arabic and is proud of the students who volunteer in Arab kindergartens or run...
Victims of supermarket attack remembered at Paris synagogue PARIS (JTA)—Hundreds gathered with the leaders of France and Israel to remember the victims of an attack at a kosher supermarket near Paris. French President Francois Hollande and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined several hundred members of the Jewish community at the memorial Sunday night at the Grand Synagogue of Paris, also known as the Synagogue de la Victoire. Hollande did not deliver remarks at the synagogue. The sister of attack victim Yoav Hattab, one of four J...
NEW YORK (JTA)—A Palestinian-backed U.N. resolution setting a one-year deadline for a peace deal with Israel failed to garner sufficient votes for passage in the U.N. Security Council. The resolution, which was voted on Dec. 30, was aimed at achieving a full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank by late 2017. Eight nations on the 15-member council votes yes, two voted no and five abstained. Nine votes were required for passage. Had nine votes been obtained, the United States, which voted against the resolution, was expected to exercise its Secu...
HarperCollins, one of the world's largest publishing houses that sells English-language atlases to schools in the Middle East, made a large, intentional mistake-it omitted labeling Israel. In fact, the Middle East Atlases showed Jordan and Syria extending to the Mediterranean and clearly marked the position of the West Bank. The decision to omit Israel elicited a tremendous amount of anger online, and now HarperCollins is pulling its Middle East Atlas from sale in all territories, and has...
(JNS.org) The Knesset Finance Committee on Dec. 21, 2014 voted to allocate $3.1 million to build a tourism center in the Jewish community of Barkan in Samaria. Committee members from the Likud, Habayit Hayehudi, and Yisrael Beiteinu parties voted in favor of funding the center. “The visitors’ center in question is a crucial asset for Israel,” Likud MK Gila Gamliel said, according to Israel Hayom. “It’s intended to present scientific exhibits to thousands of young people and school pupils.” Responding to criticism of the vote’s result by Lab...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—A Palestinian man was crushed to death as he tried to get through a West Bank checkpoint. Ahmad Samih Bdeir, 39, a construction worker from the village of Farun in the northern West Bank, died Dec. 31 at the Efraim checkpoint, the Palestinian Maan news agency reported. Bdeir reportedly was choked to death in the crush of people trying to get through the checkpoint. More than 15,000 Palestinian workers pass through al-Tayba checkpoint every day, Maan reported, citing the Palestinian Federation of Trade Unions. A year ago, a...
