Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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BERLIN (JTA)-It's a drizzly Saturday morning in May. Some 160 young Jews, mostly European and ranging from Orthodox to secular, have come to the Hotel Berlin to talk about everything under the sun. Well, almost. The upbeat, weekend-long event did not focus on anti-Semitism, the Holocaust or Israel, and thus the gathering reflected a shifting approach to Jewish continuity in Europe, 72 years after the end of World War II. Under the theme "Our World in Transition," participants in Junction...
Netanyahu’s office defends vote to freeze Western Wall agreement JERUSALEM (JTA)—The Prime Minister’s Office in Israel said it was working to ensure that Jews of all streams can feel comfortable praying at the Western Wall after the Cabinet voted to freeze an agreement that would have made a permanent space there for women and men to pray as they wish. Non-Orthodox and feminist groups in Israel and the Diaspora reacted with outrage Sunday at the news that the government had suspended the 17-month-old agreement under pressure from haredi Ortho...
NEW YORK (JTA)—Eighty percent of Jews live in two countries—Israel and the United States—but Jewish organizations are spending more and more of their money elsewhere. Jewish aid to the developing world—the impoverished set of countries your zayde called the “third world”—has grown quickly in the past couple of decades. What used to be a handful of groups has grown to become a constellation of organizations working on anything from solar power in Rwanda to agricultural sustainability in Nepal. Together, the groups aid millions of people. Jewish...
(JTA)-Before he threw Sarah Halimi to her death from a window of her third-story apartment in Paris, 27-year-old Kobili Traore called his Jewish neighbor "Satan" and cried out for Allah. These and other facts about the April 4 incident that shocked French Jewry are known from testimonies and a recording made by a neighbor, according to the National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism watchdog. Years before the attack, Traore called a daughter of his 65-year-old victim, whom he beat...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—Israel’s security cabinet agreed to reduce the amount of electricity Israel supplies to the Gaza Strip at the request of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas said he would reduce by 40 percent how much money the P.A. pays Israel to supply the electricity, with a concurrent reduction in the amount of electricity delivered, Haaretz reported. He reportedly made the decision in order to put pressure on Hamas in Gaza. At the security cabinet meeting on Sunday, Israeli military officials described a worsening eco...
RAMAT HASHARON, Israel (JTA)-An Israeli soldier clapped football great and Vietnam War veteran Roger Staubach on the shoulder at a soccer field here, telling the 1963 Heisman Trophy winner and U.S. Naval Academy grad that he and his brother serve in the paratroopers. The introduction Thursday evening prompted Staubach to hark back to early June 1967, when he was serving in Vietnam and heard a report on his walkie-talkie that Israel was about to be attacked. Staubach recalled being concerned for...
JERUSALEM (JTA)-Israel's minister of education says he wants to protect students from political coercion in the classroom. But critics of a new code of academic conduct he is proposing say it's a power play meant to stifle left-wing opinions in higher education. The code of ethics for institutes of higher education, which would bar the expression of political views in classrooms, was drafted at the request of Education Minister Naftali Bennett, head of the pro-settler Jewish Home party. It has...
Jared Kushner, Jason Greenblatt returning to Jerusalem this week (JTA)—Two top advisers to President Donald Trump, including his Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner, will return to Jerusalem this week to push for restarted peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. The visits to Jerusalem and Ramallah by Kushner, a senior adviser to Trump, and national security aide Jason Greenblatt were widely reported on Sunday night, all citing unnamed White House officials. The visits were first reported in The Wall Street Journal. It will be the first m...
Following Saturday night's terror attack that killed seven people and injured as many as 50 in London, British Prime Minister Theresa May said "enough is enough" and vowed to crack down on the "evil ideology of Islamist extremism." In response to the U.K.'s third major Islamist terror attack in recent months-prompting May to describe the attacks as a "new trend"-the prime minister asserted, "We cannot, and must not pretend that things can continue to carry on as they are." May also reiterated th...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is willing to suspend his demand that Israel freeze Judea and Samaria settlement construction as a condition for restarting peace talks, a top adviser said. Abbas is also willing to mute his campaign to single Israel out for condemnation at the United Nations and prosecute Israeli officials for war crimes, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. “We have not made the settlements an up-front issue this time,” Mohammad Mustafa, a senior economic adviser to Abbas and a former PA deputy prime...
"Wonder Woman" may be a hit at the box office, grossing $228 million worldwide in its first weekend, but not in much of the Arab world. The reason? It's Israeli star, Gal Gadot. After being banned in Lebanon, Wonder Womanis now facing bans in Tunisia, Jordan and Algeria. The Hollywood media site Deadline.com reported Thursday that the movie's scheduled release in Tunisia was suspended because of Gadot's defense of Israel's 2014 incursion into Gaza. Deadline said the secular Arab nationalist...
WASHINGTON (JTA)-Five Arab nations cut ties with Qatar on Monday, June 5, escalating a long-simmering competition for preeminence in the region into actions that could set the stage for war. Saudi Arabia, which is leading the charge, has cut off Qatar's only land crossing-and what one Saudi-friendly estimate says is as much as 40 percent of the tiny emirate's food supply. The other four nations cutting all ties with Qatar are Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Yemen. Meanwhile, Iran...
(JNS.org) The U.S. Senate urged President Donald Trump to fulfill his campaign promise of relocating the American embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, unanimously passing legislation in support of the move Monday. The Senate voted 90-0 in favor of a resolution introduced in May by Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), commemorating the 50th anniversary of Jerusalem’s reunification and acknowledging Israel’s sovereignty over its capital. The resolution urges the “president and all United States officials to abide by” the 1995 Jerusalem Emba...
1. In Hebrew, Gal Gadot's first name means "wave" and her surname means "riverbanks." 2. Gal Gadot was born in Rosh Ha'ayin, and her maternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors. 3. At the age of 18, Gadot won the Miss Israel beauty pageant. She then went on to compete in Miss Universe in 2004, but was so reluctant to win that she turned up late for events, wore the wrong kind of evening wear, and even pretended that she couldn't speak English. 4. Gadot carried out two years of service as a...
‘Oslo,’ Bette Midler and Ben Platt take Tony Awards (JTA)—“Oslo,” a play about the 1993 Oslo Accords, won the Tony Award for best new play and its Jewish lead actor, Michael Aronov, was recognized as best featured actor in a play. Bette Midler, the veteran Jewish actress and singer, won for best actress in a musical for “Hello Dolly” as Broadway handed out its highest honors on Sunday night in New York. The play also won for best musical revival. “Oslo,” a J.T. Rogers play in which Israeli and Palestinian negotiators struggle to hammer out a p...
WASHINGTON (JTA)-The year was 1981 and the director of AIPAC was calling for a "showdown" with the Reagan administration, saying "This country is being held hostage to the whims of the Saudis." At issue was the sale to Saudi Arabia of AWACS, aircraft with radar-enabled surveillance capabilities that at the time were state of the art. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, then helmed by Tom Dine, famously lost the battle but won the war: President Ronald Reagan got the necessary...
(JTA)-One of Israel's strongest condemnations of Donald Trump wasn't about the peace process. It didn't concern Trump's broken promise to relocate the U.S. embassy, or his reported leak of Israeli intelligence. It was about climate change. After President Trump announced the United States' withdrawal from the Paris accords, the landmark 2015 agreement to fight global warming, Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz joined the chorus of international leaders criticizing his decision. "Even if...
(JTA)-On a recent Sunday, eight far-right activists filmed themselves on what they called a "raid" on the Aurora Jewish community center in Budapest. Sporting crewcuts and black clothes, the men affixed posters with a crossed-out picture of the Hungary-born Jewish American billionaire George Soros to the entrance of the building, which along with having a Masorti, or Conservative, synagogue, also serves as the headquarters for a gay rights group, a Roma advocacy lobby, a hotline for immigrants...
(JNS.org)—The Israeli start-up BiomX, which last week completed a $24 million round of financing, is aiming to replace the need for conventional antibiotics by developing treatments that selectively eliminate bacteria. BiomX’s treatments are developed using phages—special viruses intended to fight certain bacteria, as opposed to traditional antibiotics that kill all bacteria, including beneficial bacteria. “BiomX has developed a platform with two elements. One is the ability to detect with precision what bacteria are missing, and which existin...
Argentine website’s analysis of Nisman recordings wins Google journalism prize (JTA)—An Argentine news outlet’s analysis of secret recordings concerning the bombing of the AMIA Jewish Center in Buenos Aires won a national prize from Google Argentina and the National Forum of Professional Journalists. The Digital Journalism Innovation Award was announced on Saturday during the 6th National Congress of Digital Journalism, organized by the journalism forum, known as FOPEA, and Google. La Nacion Data Argentina analyzed 40,000 audio recor...
JERUSALEM-Just prior to US President Donald Trump's whirlwind tour of Israel and the breathtaking and emotional 50th anniversary Jerusalem Day celebrations across the country, the staff of United with Israel, the world's largest grassroots pro-Israel movement, met with Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat to present him with the 'Jerusalem Declaration,' a historic book containing the names of over 500,000 individuals from around the world who recognize Jerusalem as both the eternal capital of the Jewish...
(JTA)-Britain's bloodiest terrorist attack in over a decade occurred Monday just two miles from Rabbi Yisroel Cohen's synagogue. Yet one day after the deadly bombing in Manchester, Cohen told JTA he has no intention of changing security arrangements at his congregation. In fact Cohen, a Chabad emissary who works in a Jewish enclave in the northern part of the city surrounded by a heavily Muslim area, said there is little room for improving security across his tight-knit community. After all, the...
JERUSALEM (JTA)-President Donald Trump spent just 30 minutes at Yad Vashem on the second and last day of his visit to Israel, but the leadership of the Holocaust memorial center in Jerusalem planned to use the brief time to deliver a powerful message. Rather than bombarding Trump with facts or analysis, they told him the story of one German Jewish girl, Ester Goldstein, who was murdered by the Nazis. "The story of a child touches everyone, not only the president," Yona Kobo, researcher of...
The President of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump, participated in a memorial ceremony at Yad Vashem on 23 May 2017. Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev accompanied President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump while at Yad Vashem. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara Netanyahu, Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner, and Chairman of the Yad Vashem Council Rabbi Israel Meir Lau also joined the president during his visit. During the ceremony, conducted by Yad Vashem’s Michael Fisher, the presi...
(JNS.org) During the second day of President Donald Trump’s visit to Israel, a rocket was fired at the Jewish state Tuesday from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The IDF confirmed the rocket landed in Israeli territory, but in an open area, causing no casualties or damage. During 2016 and the beginning of 2017, several rockets were launched at Israel from the Egyptian Sinai by Salafi jihadists affiliated with the Islamic State terror group. In April, a Grad rocket struck a greenhouse in Israel’s southern community of Yuval, adjacent to the Egypt...
