Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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This has been a trying week for America. As Americans, we are all wounded by the targeting of the police force in Dallas and the deaths in St. Paul and Baton Rouge. Now, I know a lot of you might ask, "What can I do?" You can do a lot-right now, this weekend. This weekend, it is on each of us to be a visible force in our communities for non-violence. Join together online, in your neighborhood, in your houses of worship, around your kitchen table. For all of you community leaders, use your...
(JNS.org) A United States Senate report released this week shows that the U.S. State Department sent nearly $350,000 to OneVoice, a group that advocates for peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians but was also part of a campaign to oust Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The group received grants from the State Department during 14-month period ending in November 2014, revealed the report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. After the grants ended, OneVoice merged with another Israeli group, Victory...
(JNS.org)-The American social media giant Facebook has closed the account of Hamas politburo member Ezzat al-Rishq for the seventh time. "I condemn Facebook's administration for closing my personal account for the seventh time in a row, and I consider the [decision] bias in favor [of] the occupation and its dictates and against the struggle of our people for the sake of freedom," Rishq, who is a close confidante of Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, said on Twitter, the Jerusalem Post reported. The...
British-Jewish and pro-Israel groups are congratulating Home Secretary Theresa May for winning the leadership of the Conservative Party and replacing outgoing United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron, who resigned following the U.K.'s decision to leave the European Union (EU) in the Brexit referendum last month. May takes over the role after all other candidates for the Conservative leadership exited the race earlier in the week, and after Cameron expedited his resignation to Wednesday, July...
Netanyahu video message to Abbas lists 5 steps toward peace JERUSALEM (JTA)—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent a video message to Mahmoud Abbas listing five steps the Palestinian Authority president can take to help bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The message was released last Friday in English. “President Abbas, since over the past several years, you refused to meet me and sit down and negotiate peace, I hope you’ll hear this message,” the message began. Netanyahu called on Abbas to fire his adviser Sultan Abu al...
WASHINGTON (JTA)-The conventional wisdom has it that earning the sobriquet "the most right-wing government in Israeli history" does not lead to diplomatic successes. In recent weeks, on the Turkish, Egyptian and African fronts, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is proving the conventional wisdom wrong. How is it that the head of a government beating a hasty retreat from the two-state solution scored a triumphant tour of Africa, hosted a convivial summit with an Egyptian foreign minister for the...
By Cnaan Liphshiz PRESTWICH, England (JTA)-When Yitzchak Horwitz's family opened one of the first Jewish businesses in this leafy suburb of Manchester-a bookstore that also sold Judaica items-it served a small Jewish community that had only recently moved there from the downtown area. "The center was run-down after the war, living conditions deteriorated, we had to get out," said Horwitz, a man in his 80s who runs and owns the Judaica World store that his family opened here in 1960. "A few...
The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has criticized the statement issued by the Middle East Quartet (the U.S., the U.N., the European Union & Russia) which, while rightly criticizing Palestinian incitement to hatred and murder as a factor responsible for the non-attainment of peace, also criticizes Israeli "settlement-building"-that is, Jews living and building residential communities in Judea/Samaria-as an obstacle to peace. The report, written by senior diplomats representing the members...
NEW YORK (JTA)-Three months after Israel's Chief Rabbinate rejected his authority to perform conversions, one of America's most prominent Modern Orthodox rabbis joined with Natan Sharansky to advance a message: The rabbinate needs to become more open. But not too much more. A widely respected rabbi in New York's Orthodox community, Haskel Lookstein saw his credentials called into question when a conversion he performed was deemed invalid by a rabbinical court in the Tel Aviv suburb of Petach...
PHILADELPHIA (JTA)-Growing up in Namibia, Dan Craven would bicycle long distances upon the only two paved roads in his hometown of Omaruru-80 miles heading north to Otjiwarongo and 45 miles south to Karibib. Cycling on what he calls the "tar roads" is how he fell in love with the sport; plus Craven acknowledges he wasn't very good at soccer or rugby. He took to the road after seeing a poster promoting a triathlon, which encompasses bicycling, swimming and running. While competing for the...
LONDON (JTA)- For two years, in her travels around the English capital, Natalie Pitimson has toted a library bag emblazoned with a word in Yiddish. "The word 'schlep' written on the side perfectly describes my regular hour-long trek through central London," Pitimson, a senior sociology lecturer at the University of Brighton, wrote on her blog. She had encountered no unpleasant incidents over the bag, whose slogan "reminds me of growing up in a lively Jewish family where such phrases littered...
Five hundred Jews gathered Tuesday morning by the entrance to the Temple Mount, to ascend in memory of Hallel Yaffa Ariel, a teenage girl who was stabbed to death by a Palestinian on June 30. In a YouTube video released last week, Amihai Ariel, Hallel's father called on the Jewish nation to join himself and his family on the Temple Mount on Tuesday for a memorial ceremony. Rina Ariel, Hallel's mother, wrote a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his diplomatic trip to...
(JTA)—The families of five American citizens killed in terror attacks in Israel are suing Facebook for $1 billion, accusing the social network of providing material support to Hamas for its incitement and violence. Shurat HaDin-Israel Law Center, an advocacy organization based in Israel, filed the lawsuit Sunday night in Manhattan federal court. The suit alleges that Facebook is violating the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act by assisting terror groups such as Hamas in “recruiting, radicalizing, and instructing terrorists, raising funds, creating fea...
Netanyahu investigation has been launched, Israel’s attorney general confirms JERUSALEM (JTA)—Israel’s attorney general has confirmed that he has ordered an investigation into accusations against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in what the Israeli media is reporting as a money-laundering probe. Avichai Mandelblit stressed to the media that the investigation opened late Sunday is initial and not a criminal investigation, according to reports. The attorney general reportedly discussed the accusations with the police intelligence unit, the s...
EDINBURGH, Scotland (JTA)-The last time that Scotland voted on whether to become independent from the United Kingdom, most of its 7,000 Jews thought doing so was a bad idea. Worried that Scottish independence would encourage nationalism and embolden an already aggressive anti-Israel movement with deep roots in the pro-independence camp, Jews here were relieved when, during a 2014 referendum, 62 percent of Scottish voters supported remaining in the United Kingdom. Less than two years after that...
WASHINGTON (JTA)-"I am proud to be a Vlach," says Yiannis Boutaris, the mayor of Thessaloniki, Greece's second largest city. Ostensibly, we're here at the Washington Hilton to discuss Boutaris' bid to put the Jewish back in Thessaloniki, a city-perhaps best known as Salonika-once home to the largest numbers of Jews in Greece. But I'm the one who brought up the Vlachs, a dwindling minority of speakers of an ancient Latin dialect, scattered throughout the Balkans. When he ambles over, I greet him...
It was Oct. 27, 2015, shortly after 10 a.m. Two terrorists from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabel Mukaber boarded an Egged bus in the East Talpiot area. One was armed with a gun, the other with a knife. They started shooting and stabbing passengers, including 76-year-old Richard Lakin, who died two weeks later from his wounds. “We spent almost two weeks at Hadassah Hospital trying to save his life,” recalls Richard’s son Micah Lakin Avni, CEO of Peninsula Group Ltd., a publicly traded Israeli commercial finance institution. “During those t...
(JTA)-Only a week ago, Jeremy Corbyn seemed to have survived his biggest public relations debacle as the leader of Britain's Labour Party: the proliferation of anti-Semitic rhetoric among its members. Yet this week, the British vote to leave the European Union achieved what Corbyn's opponents failed to do in their attacks against him over anti-Semitism. On Tuesday, 172 Labour lawmakers among the total 229 in the Parliament said they had no confidence in Corbyn, opening the door to a challenge...
(JNS.org) Israel and Turkey have agreed to normalize ties after a six-year rift in their diplomatic relationship. “Israel and Turkey are two major regional powers,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. “The disconnect between us prevented necessary cooperation.” Turkish-Israeli relations broke down after the 2010 Gaza flotilla incident, in which nine Turkish militants were killed in clashes after they attacked Israeli commandos who boarded a ship that was trying to breach the blockade on Hamas-ruled Gaza. According to reports citing...
PARIS-Arab immigration to France and deep-seated anti-Semitism in that country mean French Jews have no future there, the head of the Jewish Agency for Israel said. Natan Sharansky made this declaration on Monday in the French capital, where he was attending a Jewish Agency Board of Governors meeting, held in the city for the first time as a sign of solidarity with French Jews. "We came here because there are historical processes here," Sharansky said of France, which for the past two years has...
VENICE, Italy (JTA)-It's been more than 50 years since the Nuremberg trials, yet proving the Holocaust actually happened remains an ongoing project. Why? For one, the Nazis covered their tracks, deliberately leaving gaps in the historical record. (In the death-camp blueprints that survive, for example, gas chambers were often labeled as morgues or "undressing rooms.") As the years pass, survivors and eyewitnesses are dying or suffering dementia. Add in social media-including the rise of the...
A German court recently sentenced 94-year-old Reinhold Hanning, a former Nazi, to five years in prison for being an accessory to the murder of 170,000 Jews between January 1942 and June 1944, when he served as an SS guard at the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Hanning served in a unit that handled newly transported prisoners, and assisted in selecting those who would temporarily live as slave laborers and those who would be murdered on the day of their arrival. He was not accused of personally killing a single prisoner, but...
Netanyahu launches Africa tour with Entebbe commemoration (JTA)—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a tour of East Africa by marking the 40th anniversary of the raid at Entebbe that killed his brother. “We were powerless no more,” Netanyahu said Monday of the July 4, 1976 Israeli commando raid on the Ugandan airport where German and Palestinian terrorists were holding more than 100 Israelis hostage after having hijacked a plane. His older brother, Yoni, who commanded the rescue unit, was killed in the raid. Netanyahu laid a wre...
Great Britain and the rest of Europe woke up to a new reality Friday as a slim majority of British voters said their country should leave the European Union. Markets trembled, British currency crashed and British Prime Minister David Cameron announced his pending resignation. It was a major blow to an alliance formed specifically to avoid a repeat of the nationalist rivalries that led to the First and Second World Wars. Although Britain's Jews appeared as split as the rest of the country over...
(JTA)-The parents of Steven Sotloff, the Jewish freelance journalist beheaded by the Islamic State nearly two years ago, have joined the families of three other killed U.S. hostages in urging President Barack Obama to bring home a missing American hostage. Shirley and Arthur Sotloff, in an essay published Wednesday in the McClatchy newspapers, called on Obama not to leave behind any Americans when he leaves office in January, referring to freelance journalist Austin Tice, who disappeared in...
