Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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An Israeli judge sparked an outcry during the hearing of a 19-year-old Israeli woman who was raped by four Palestinians when she was 13. The woman was petitioning the court for the rape to be considered “an act of terror” which would make her eligible for government compensation. “Some girls enjoy being raped,” Judge Nissim Yeshaya of the District Court in Tel Aviv said, according to Army Radio. The rape victim was not in the room for the hearing. Her attorney, Roni Aloni-Adovnik described the scene to Army Radio. “In the midst of the passionat...
PALMACHIM, Israel (JTA)—As construction workers pass through sandy corridors between huge rectangular buildings at this desalination plant on Israel’s southern coastline, the sound of rushing water resonates from behind a concrete wall. Drawn from deep in the Mediterranean Sea, the water has flowed through pipelines reaching almost 4,000 feet off of Israel’s coast and, once in Israeli soil, buried almost 50 feet underground. Now, it rushes down a tube sending it through a series of filte...
The streets in the Aleppo neighborhood of Hannano are piled high with garbage. Flies buzz around putrid bags that extend farther than the eye can see. The refuse has not been collected for months nor are there any plans to do so. Garbage collection is merely another casualty in war that has pulverized everything in this country. Throughout rebel controlled Syria, state services have ceased only to be replaced with hardships. From running water to electricity, services taken for granted have stopped operating. Staples such as medicine and baby f...
The script reads like this: Israel treats wounded Syrian refugees in its own hospitals. Syria produces a report alleging an “acute shortage of primary and tertiary health care services” in the Golan Heights region. A United Nations agency, citing the Syrian report rather than acknowledging Israel’s actions, condemns Israel. On the surface, this storyline contains several plot twists, but it is not surprising for Dr. Daniel Pipes, president and founder of the Middle East Forum. “The U.N. is a par...
How do you spell knaidel? (JTA)—An Indian-American boy won a national spelling contest after correctly spelling a Yiddish-derived word. Arvind Mahankali, 13, of Bayside Hills, N.Y., won the 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee on May 30 by spelling the word “knaidel,” a traditional Jewish dumpling. Mahankali beat out 10 other finalists in the competition, held in Oxon Hill, Md. He won $30,000 in cash, a $2,500 U.S. savings bond from Merriam-Webster and $2,000 worth of reference works from Encyclop...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—Dov Lipman has staked his budding political career on his reputation as a moderate haredi Orthodox leader, someone uniquely positioned to broker compromise between Israel’s increasingly polarized secular and religious communities. The problem is that Israel’s haredi leaders say he’s not actually haredi. Once seen as a possible bridge between Israel’s growing haredi community and the secular majority, Lipman, a freshman member of Knesset from the centrist Yesh Atid party, has weath...
Widespread protests in Turkey are threatening the decade-long rule of Islamist Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, raising questions over his ambitions to transform his country. The protests, which began in Istanbul’s famous Taksim Square over government plans to turn nearby Gezi park into a shopping mall modeled after Ottoman-era army barracks, have turned into a widespread rebuke of Erdogan’s Islamist rule, spreading to several other major Turkish cities such as Ankara and Izmir as...
CAPE TOWN, South Africa (JTA)—Cyril Karabus stepped into the arrivals hall at Cape Town International Airport to a rapturous welcome. A multiracial crowd numbering in the hundreds had turned out to greet him. A minstrel troupe was singing “Hevenu Shalom Aleichem.” And a rabbi stepped forward to recite the priestly blessing. The arrival two weeks ago capped a nine-month saga in which Karabus, 78, was jailed in the United Arab Emirates on charges of manslaughter and fraud. Unbeknownst to the retired pediatric oncologist, he had been convi...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Poland is a stalwart American ally in Europe, a bulwark against an increasingly belligerent Russia and, with the recent opening of a major new Warsaw museum, is enjoying a flush of accolades for its belated embrace of its Jewish roots. But there’s a thorn in the bouquet: Poland is seen as having the world’s worst record on the restitution of Jewish property lost during the Holocaust. Officials of Jewish groups seeking restitution say they will be making a renewed push to put t...
Bordering the attention-grabbing countries of Israel, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, Jordan is sometimes overlooked by the media and by policy experts because of its peace with Israel, its close alliance with the United States, and its relatively liberal socio-economic system. Underneath this façade of stability, however, is a country plagued by a number of economic and social issues that threaten to plunge Jordan into the chaos of the “Arab Spring” upheavals. “If there is to be another countr...
NEW YORK (JTA)—Now that it’s clear that the top leaders of the Claims Conference were involved in investigating an anonymous accusation of restitution fraud in 2001, the question is who bears the responsibility for failing to detect that a broad fraud scheme was under way. The person at the center of the 2001 allegations, Semen Domnitser, turned out to be the ringleader of the $57 million fraud; he was found guilty at trial on May 8. For most of those who played a role in two botched probes in...
As the siren began to wail, the children ran quietly down the steps of the Science and Technology Elementary School in Pisgat Zeev, a northern suburb of Jerusalem built on post-1967 land. They sat on the floor in the four classrooms in the basement, all outfitted as bomb shelters. The air quickly became stuffy in the windowless rooms. The teachers handed out crayons and pages to color, which most kids ignored. A few read books while others played cards. Some of the youngest students, sitting on the floor, looked scared. One little boy was...
Haredi draft debate spurs Lapid threat to bring down government JERUSALEM (JTA)—Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid threatened to bring down the Israeli government if a bill requiring the enlistment of haredi Orthodox men does not include imprisonment for avoiding conscription. Lapid, who serves as finance minister, made the threat on Monday during a party meeting following marathon talks the previous night of the Peri Committee, also known as the Knesset Committee for Promoting Equal Share of the B...
Jacob Ostreicher, a haredi Orthodox father of five who remains under house arrest in Bolivia, does not believe he will ever be free and often unplugs his home phone because he is too depressed to speak with his family, according to his wife, Miriam Ungar. He just can’t see himself ever coming back to his home in Brooklyn, she said. “We all feel that. I really know they will never let him go,” she said, adding that Bolivian officials “make up reasons” to detain Ostreicher indefinitely. “This cou...
On May 21, Iran’s Guardian Council released a list of “approved” candidates for the upcoming June 14 presidential election. As expected, the list of eight candidates included a number of hardliners loyal to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, crushing any hope that Iran’s next president would bring about new policies that would end the nuclear standoff with the West, economic sanctions and domestic political repression. Nevertheless, many in the West are interested in the upcoming election. The last election in 2009 launched major protest...
ELEM vans go where the children are in Israel—venturing into dark and dangerous streets. The vans, and the volunteers on them, go to places where already-troubled children—some involved with vagrancy, drugs, homelessness, sexual exploitation, or other criminal or anti-social behavior—can encounter greater peril. At the forefront of these efforts to get troubled youths off the street is the ex-wife of former Israeli prime minister and defense minister Ehud Barak. “Kids know the van means safety,...
JERUSALEM—The Israeli parliament, or Knesset, is quiet on Sundays. The plenum does not meet, and the carpeted hallways are silent. But at the end of one corridor, in Room 2021, there’s a lot of foot traffic in and out of Rabbi Dov Lipman’s office. Every 10 minutes, an aide escorts the next petitioner into the office. Most have never met Lipman. They have all made appointments through his office, and each is here with a different issue. “The government is planning to start imposing an 18 percent...
NEW YORK (JTA)—Who knew what, and when? Those are the questions critics are asking following the disclosure that the Claims Conference received an anonymous letter in 2001 identifying several fraudulent Holocaust-era restitution claims—nearly a decade before the organization halted a massive fraud scheme. By 2009, when the magnitude of the scheme was discovered, the fraud had been running for 15 years and managed to extract more than $57 million in illegitimate payouts. Last Friday, World Jew...
Chabad center taking in Oklahomans displaced by deadly tornado (JTA)—A Chabad center in Oklahoma City opened its building as a shelter for those displaced by a deadly tornado. The Chabad Community Center of Southern Oklahoma also is collecting supplies for those left homeless by the tornado that tore through an Oklahoma City suburb on Monday afternoon, leaving at least 24 people dead, including several children, and injuring hundreds. “While we feel the pain of others, we’re very thankful that we’re able to respond—to use all our energy an...
LOS ANGELES—The Rev. Kenneth Meshoe, a member of the South African Parliament and founder of the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP), sees irony in how the anti-Israel attitudes of his country’s mainstream politicians are depriving them of benefits the Jewish state could bring them. “African politicians who have contaminated water will boycott Israel, whose technology and whose scientists could help bring clean water to the many thousands of Africans who now don’t have it and need it desp...
An Israeli government review of the death of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura during the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000 has officially debunked a French television report suggesting he was killed by direct Israel Defense Forces fire. The 36-page report, which was presented to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday, further concluded that it was highly likely that the boy survived the incident unscathed and therefore may still be alive. The boy’s father, Jamal, urged an international inquest into t...
(JTA)—Itzik Shanan and Abbas Suan watched last week as 100,000 English soccer fans sang along to a live performance by a multiracial quartet at London’s Wembley Stadium. Shanan, who started a campaign to eliminate racism from Israeli soccer, and Suan, a well-known Arab-Israeli player, were in Britain for five days of anti-hooliganism training in advance of Israel’s hosting next month of a major international soccer tournament. For Shanan, the operatic rendition of “Abide With Me,” a Christian...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—When it comes to the latest Arab peace initiative, two questions are circulating in Washington: Why Qatar? And why now? The three answers: Because Qatar is rich; it is scared; and why not? Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al Thani, the Qatari prime minister and foreign minister, in recent weeks has driven the revivification of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, moderating it slightly to hew closer to the outlines touted by the Obama administration since 2011. The updated v...
By Ben Sales JERUSALEM (JTA)—Haredi Orthodox youths mobbed the Western Wall plaza by the thousands to protest Women of the Wall as they held their monthly prayer service. The youths, many of them students from haredi Orthodox yeshivas, filled the Western Wall Plaza by 6:40 a.m. on Friday, May 10, about 20 minutes before Women of the Wall, a women’s prayer group that holds monthly services at the site, also called the Kotel, began praying. Because haredi Orthodox women had packed the wom...
DAKAR, Senegal (JTA)—Struggling to be heard over a flock of bleating sheep, Israel’s ambassador to Senegal invites a crowd of impoverished Muslims to help themselves to about 100 sacrificial animals that the embassy corralled at a dusty community center here. The October distribution, held as French troops battled Islamists in neighboring Mali and one month after Muslim radicals killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya, is held annually in honor of Tabaski, the local name of the Muslim Eid al-...
