Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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Ma’arat Numan, Syria—When the jihadist organization Jabhat al-Nusra announced it was joining Al-Qa’ida last week, Syrians in rebel-held territories cringed. “Now everyone will think our revolution is nothing but a jihadist power grab,” complained 28-year-old Muhammad Ansari to The Media Line. “Who will support us now?” With the Syrian revolution faltering and secular rebel groups disintegrating amidst infighting and civilian abuses, it is the jihadists who have benefitted most. But the attention they have received from foreigners has angered S...
Id Khamis Jahalin sits in his sparsely furnished, illegally-built shack, and worries about his future. A father of seven, he was born in this community of tents and shacks about 10 miles east of Jerusalem. Sitting on a thin mattress that substitutes for a couch during the day and a bed at night, Id Khamis told The Media Line that a new Israeli plan to relocate the Jahalin Bedouin community, “is the worst one yet. It is not appropriate for us at all. The place they want to move us to is surrounded on all four sides and it is very crowded. I a...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—Natan Sharansky said the implementation of his plan to expand the non-Orthodox prayer site at the Western Wall could begin in as little as one month. In an interview April 11 with JTA, Sharansky sounded cautiously optimistic about his proposal to create an egalitarian space equal in size to the current men’s and women’s sections combined. The Jewish Agency for Israel chairman was charged last year with finding a solution to mounting tensions over women’s prayer at the Western...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—Here are some stories out of Israel that you may have missed: A better bomb shelter app An app that helps Israelis locate the nearest bomb shelter was updated in response to the civil war in Syria. The Merkhav Mugan app had been launched six months ago for southern Israelis being bombarded by rockets from the Gaza Strip. Now, with the Syrian unrest spilling over the border into northern Israel, the app will include all secure bomb shelters and areas throughout Israel, the T...
Abbas accepts Fayyad’s resignation JERUSALEM (JTA)—Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas accepted the resignation of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad after an internal power struggle. Abbas accepted the resignation Saturday at a meeting of the two Palestinian leaders at P.A. headquarters in Ramallah. Fayyad reportedly had offered his resignation earlier in the week. Abbas asked Fayyad to stay on and lead a caretaker government until a new government is formed, the WAFA-Palestine News Ser...
In an unprecedented move, the head of Egypt’s 2,000-year-old Coptic Christian Church, Pope Tawadros II, recently slammed Islamist President Mohamed Morsi for what he called a weak response to violence that left several Christians dead and its religious institutions violated. Pope Tawadros’s statements come at a time of increasing political deadlock and the threat of economic collapse in Egypt. Halim Meawad, co-founder of Coptic Solidarity, a U.S.-based international Coptic Christian human rights organization, told JNS.org that Pope Taw...
SANA’A—Women living in areas of rural Yemen are increasingly losing their say regarding whom they marry as they become caught-up in the widespread phenomenon of ‘exchange marriages,’ in which money and family ties outweigh romance. The expression rises from the phenomenon of spouses from two families being traded in what is essentially more of a business arrangement than a traditional marriage, Dr. Abdul-Baqi Shamsan, professor of sociology at Sana’a University, explained. Shamsan told The Media Line that the main victim of this type of marria...
RAMALLAH—While use of the Internet and social media is growing in the Palestinian territories, some experts warn it has also brought with it the danger of cyber crime—especially against women—more harmful and at a greater rate than it is worldwide. Arabic society’s conservative and patriarchal nature runs counter to the Internet’s call to share everything with everyone, and makes women more vulnerable to cyber threats. As a result, many are very deliberate about not using pictures on the Internet, not only in personal use, but also in their...
Ofer Prison, West Bank—The long strings of blue and white Israeli flags, set up for Israel’s upcoming Independence Day, flap incongruously against the background of barbed wire and tall gray watchtowers. Inside, some 710 Palestinian prisoners, including 100 minors, wait for their transfer to other prisons or for their release. Mohammed Jamal Al-Natshe, 55, a Hamas legislator from Hebron with a trim white beard, says that he was arrested most recently last month and placed under administrative detention, meaning that no charges have been fil...
(JTA)—“When Gilles Bernheim speaks, France listens.” That’s how Avraham Weill, the chief rabbi of Toulouse, describes what he believes was the main appeal of his charismatic mentor, who on April 11 resigned as chief rabbi of France after admitting to several instances of plagiarism and falsely using an academic title. The media frenzy that led to Bernheim’s resignation after five years on the job was part and parcel of the 61-year-old’s strong media presence—a presence that may have attracte...
Tiny Bahrain consists mainly of a 34-mile island connected to Saudi Arabia by a causeway, but aside from having modest oil and gas reserves, a booming market-based economy and lots of tourism, it also happens to be the home of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet that patrols the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman and the Red Sea. Bahrain’s strategic military location is complemented by its symbolically important place in the Arab world for a relatively liberal and tolerant society despite its own brief ver...
Hundreds of Israeli flags are in place; the Air Force has been rehearsing its formation fly-by routine for days; platforms and sound systems stand ready in the main squares in town; groups of tourists mill about and there’s a discernible festive air. But before Yom Ha’atzmaut celebrations of the nation’s 65th birthday take place on April 16, Israel has to pay tribute to those who fell in battles and terror attacks that continue to claim lives even until today. Officially known as Fallen Soldi...
Sharansky: Women saying Kaddish at Western Wall won’t be arrested JERUSALEM (JTA)—Women who recite the Mourner’s Kaddish at the Western Wall will not be arrested, Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky said he has been assured, despite a police vow to enforce a ban. Jerusalem police Commissioner Yossi Pariente in a letter sent April 4 to Women of the Wall Chairwoman Anat Hoffman said he would enforce the Justice Ministry’s strict interpretation of a Supreme Court ruling prohibiting women f...
At midnight, most people who worked all day at an office job would be in bed. But then Gal Sharon, a superintendent with the Israel Police, has never been a cookie-cutter sort of person. At this witching hour, it wouldn’t be uncommon to find Sharon on a run along Tel Aviv’s beachfront. The 50-year-old mother of three boys is a sports nut. And she has used her love of physical fitness to create bonds of friendship across nations. While acknowledged among peers and family for many successful for...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—History will remember former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for relentlessly facing down communism and helping to turn back more than three decades of socialist advance in her country. But it was Thatcher’s embrace of British Jews and insistent promotion of Jews in her Conservative Party that inspired an outpouring of tributes from Jewish and Israeli leaders following her death April 8 at 87. Thatcher, who suffered from dementia in her later years, died peacefully aft...
SALMA, Latakia, Syria—The village of Bayt Swalkha in the coastal province of Latakia bears the physical scars of the Syrian civil war. Piles of stones are all that remain of rows of houses. Municipal buildings have been reduced to blackened skeletons. But while the destroyed infrastructure will eventually be rebuilt, it is the emotional wounds that are irreparable. For in villages like these throughout Latakia, the sectarian harmony that prevailed for decades has been shattered by a civil war that has increasingly taken on a religious bent. Of...
BUDAPEST, Hungary (JTA)—The potholed streets leading to Tiszavasvari’s rusty train station offer no clue that this sleepy town of 12,000 in eastern Hungary is considered the “capital of Jobbik,” the country’s ultranationalist, anti-Jewish party whose name means “better.” The first sign appears near the office of the mayor, Erik Fulop, the first of five Jobbik politicians elected to run a Hungarian municipality. Shortly after taking office in 2010, Fulop set up a twinning arrangement b...
TEL AVIV (JTA) — When Yityish Aynaw immigrated from Ethiopia to Israel at age 12, she was thrust into an Israeli classroom. An orphan lacking Hebrew skills, Aynaw says she relied on other kids and her own sheer ambition to get through. Ten years later Aynaw, 22, is the first Ethiopian-Israeli to be crowned Miss Israel—a title she hopes to use to showcase Israel’s diversity. “Israel really accepts everybody,” she told JTA. “That I was chosen proves it.” Ethiopian and other African-Israe...
A national anthem written more than 50 years before the birth of the state for which it was composed, “Hatikvah” has served as a source of hope and inspiration for Jews who have found themselves in the most dire of circumstances. During the darkest hours of the Holocaust, Jews defied their tormentors by singing the song’s powerful lyrics. Filip Muller was a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz—a Jewish slave laborer who was kept alive because he helped take corpses from the gas chambers to the crematoria...
BERLIN (JTA)—I was 23 when I first met my cousin Gilbert Michlin. He was sitting at a brasserie near his office in Paris wearing a dark suit with a folded handkerchief poking out of the breast pocket. His short, dark hair was perfectly combed. He said, in charmingly accented English, “There is one thing I must tell you: I was in Auschwitz.” Of course, I already knew. But I had never met a survivor before, let alone our French cousin, who had been a slave laborer for Siemens at the death camp....
Journalist Steven Pressman first learned of the 50 children rescued by Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus in 2002 from his wife Liz Perle, the Krauses’ granddaughter, who had possession of a formerly hidden and unpublished manuscript written by Eleanor decades earlier. That manuscript spelled out in detail the Krauses’ mission to rescue Jewish children shortly before the outbreak of World War II, launching Pressman on an extensive quest for more information that took him to Europe and to archives in Jer...
LOS ANGELES (JTA)—In a dark glass building here, Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter shows that his memory is crystal clear and his voice is strong. His responses seem a bit delayed—not that different from other survivors I have known who are reluctant to speak openly about their experiences—but he’s doing just fine for a 3-D image. In the offices of USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies, Gutter, who as a teenager had survived Majdanek, the German Nazi concentration camp on the outskirts...
VANCOUVER, Canada (JTA)—When Austrian and German Jews escaped Nazism by fleeing to Britain during the 1930s, the last thing they expected was to find themselves prisoners in Canada, interred in camps with some of the same Nazis they had tried to escape back home. But that’s what happened to some 7,000 European Jews and “Category A” prisoners—the most dangerous prisoners of war—who arrived on Canadian shores in 1940. Fearing a German invasion, Britain had asked its colonies to take some German...
Tamar field in northern Israel yields natural gas JERUSALEM (JTA)—Natural gas started to flow from a Tamar field that is expected to meet Israel’s domestic needs for at least the next 20 years. The gas, which began flowing from an offshore rig in the Mediterranean Sea, was expected to reach an intake center in Ashdod in southern Israel last Sunday afternoon. Some 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas is believed to be contained in the field off the coast of northern Israel near Haifa. “This is an important day for the Israeli economy,” Israeli...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—The conviction in Cyprus of a Hezbollah operative plotting to attack Israelis could undercut efforts by the terrorist group to carry out additional attacks outside the Middle East. The conviction two week’s ago was the second confirmation in recent months that Hezbollah is active on European soil. The first was when Bulgarian authorities identified the Lebanon-based terrorist group as being behind the July 2012 bombing in Burgas that left six people dead, five of them Isr...
