Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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When members of the pro-Israel community think of populations in need of relief, Syrian refugees are probably not one of the first groups coming to mind. After all, the proverbial elephant in the room is that the Syrian civil war is a conflict between two enemies of Israel: Iran-supported President Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah on one side, and jihadists linked with the al-Qaeda and Islamic State terror groups among the Assad regime's opponents. But as the fourth anniversary of the Syrian civil...
WASHINGTON (JTA)-When Benjamin Netanyahu faces the Congress next month, two things are unlikely to come up in his speech: a consideration of diplomatic protocol and an analysis of the efficacy of sanctions. Media attention ahead of the speech has focused on the diplomatic crisis set off by the invitation to the Israeli prime minister from U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who kept President Barack Obama in the dark, and the ensuing political tussle between backers and...
The latest episode in a history of tension between the Obama administration and Israel has escalated to a new level, with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden opting out of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's March 3 speech before a joint session of Congress on the Iranian nuclear issue and radical Islam. Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner (R-Ohio) invited Netanyahu to address Congress, and the prime minister accepted. The Obama administration claimed Boehner breached...
Senior Orthodox rabbis resign in wake of Australia’s sex abuse probe SYDNEY, Australia (JTA) – Three senior Orthodox rabbis have resigned in the wake of Australia’s Royal Commission into the child sex abuse scandal at two Chabad institutions. On Monday, Rabbi Meir Shlomo Kluwgant, president of the Organization of Rabbis of Australasia, stepped down from several posts after a text message was revealed during the commission’s hearings last week in which he accused one of the whistleblowers of being a “lunatic” who is “killing us.” Rabbi Av...
The four-year term of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz officially ended Monday, with Gantz handing command of the military over to his deputy, Maj. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, during a ceremony at Rabin Base in Tel Aviv. While serving as Gantz’s deputy, Eizenkot was part of major decisions on military reforms. He assumes command of the IDF during a time marked by tension in all sectors: the potential for further escalations in Gaza, concern over the growing unrest among Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, the volatile s...
"Usually after the first event, it's like a firestorm," said Pastor Scott Thomas, the Florida state director for Christians United for Israel (CUFI). "The excitement hits, the understanding settles in." That, in short, illustrates the process through which CUFI has become America's largest pro-Israel organization in less than a decade of existence. In January, CUFI announced that its membership surpassed the 2-million mark. (The organization defines members as email-list subscribers whose...
Suspect in knifing of soldiers guarding French JCC charged with attempted murder (JTA)—The alleged knife-wielding attacker of three soldiers guarding a Jewish community center in France was charged with attempted murder during a terror operation. Moussa Coulibaly, 30, was indicted Saturday, according to the French news agency AFP, citing an unnamed judicial source. He was ordered held until trial. On Feb. 4, during questioning a day after the attack on the JCC in Nice, in southern France, Coulibaly spoke of his hatred of France, Jews, the p...
Despite the criticism he has received, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner does not regret the decision he made to invite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress in early March. In an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" last Sunday, Boehner said he notified the White House of his decision only on the morning that he extended the invitation to Netanyahu. "There's nobody in the world who can talk about the threat of radical terrorism, nobody...
(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...
