Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 26 - 44 of 44
(JNS) - "It's a miracle," Liat Ariel told JNS on Monday. Ariel's cousin Shlomi Ziv, along with Noa Argamani, Almog Meir and Andrey Kozlov, was rescued by Israeli forces in a daring daylight raid on Saturday after spending 246 days in Hamas captivity in Gaza. "We are still digesting the news. We don't really quite understand what happened to us. Suddenly, Shlomi is back," Ariel said. "We are so happy and a bit nervous. We want to make sure that he is fine. He looks alright physically but...
By (JNS) — Evacuees from Israel’s north set up a tent encampment on Tuesday outside the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem to protest their ongoing displacement due to daily attacks by the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon. “We’ve been unable to return to our homes for more than seven months. We won’t go back until we know we’re safe,” Raphael Salve, co-founder of Lobby 1701, a group representing displaced people from northern towns and villages, told JNS. Lobby 1701 is named after the U.N. Security Council Resolution that...
(JNS) - The Hostages and Missing Families Forum on Wednesday evening released a video of Hamas terrorists abducting female Israel Defense Forces spotters on Oct. 7. Footage taken by body cameras of the terrorists reveals the violence and trauma experienced by five of the seven spotters captured alive from the Nahal Oz base. Another 15 field observers serving there were murdered during the attack. The video running time is 3 minutes and 10 seconds. It was edited and censored to exclude the most...
(JNS) - Israelis evacuated from their homes in communities opposite the Gaza Strip and the Upper Galilee, who live in temporary housing arrangements, have been provided specially designed areas called "Quiet Rooms" for them to retrieve some peace and privacy. The "Quiet Rooms," modeled after Beit Issie Shapiro's Snoezelen rooms, are controlled spaces designed to reduce anxiety and mental stress while calming sensory overload. Since 1993, when their first Snoezelen room opened, Ra'anana-based...
(JNS) - "Somehow I know that Shani attended the Supernova festival on October 7 for a reason. Had she not, a lot more people would have died," Aviel Gabbay told JNS on Sunday. Aviel's sister Shani Gabbay was murdered by Hamas terrorists and later mistakenly buried along with another victim. "My father [Yaakov] would not have driven three hours from Yokneam [in the Lower Galilee] to Kibbutz Re'im [near Gaza] to look for her and would not have saved many others in the process," Aviel said. Shani...
(JNS) - "Our unity gives us as much protection as our army. We need it just as much to secure our existence," Sapir Cohen, who spent 55 days in Hamas captivity, told JNS on Monday. On Oct. 6, on the eve of Simchat Torah, Cohen and her boyfriend, Alex Trufanov, drove to Kibbutz Nir Oz to spend the holiday with his parents. The next morning, they woke up to loud explosions. "We hid under the bed. There was nowhere else to hide. Then, I heard screams of 'Allahu Akbar.' Terrorists were yelling and t...
(JNS) - Families of deceased hostages whose bodies are still being held by Hamas in Gaza carried an empty coffin through Jerusalem on Thursday to raise awareness of their plight and call for the return of their loved ones. "I am attending this rally because we, the families of deceased hostages, are a unique group," Ruby Chen, the father of American-Israeli dual citizen Sgt. Itay Chen, 19, told JNS on Thursday. Itay, from Netanya, was stationed at the Nahal Oz army base as part of a tank unit...
(JNS) - Israel Bonds has surpassed $3 billion in global sales in the seven months since Hamas's Oct. 7 massacre, a sum almost three times greater than the company's recent annual average. "On Oct. 7, we initiated what is the most powerful and successful campaign in support of the state of Israel in the history of Israel Bonds since 1951," Israel Bonds president and CEO Dani Naveh told JNS. "My managerial task, in collaboration with my amazing team, was to elevate Israel Bonds sales to a much hig...
(JNS) - "It all started after I joined the fight on Oct. 7 against Hamas terrorists invading the Israeli communities bordering the Gaza Strip," says Nimrod Palmach, CEO of Israel-is, which partners with producer Stephen D. Smith in the virtual reality "Be the Witness" initiative. Israel-is is an NGO dedicated to improving Israel's image. Part of the "Survived to Tell" project, "Be the Witness" features the stories of five survivors of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre. Participants in the project wear...
(JNS) — The only moral and rational conclusion that can be drawn from the horrors of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre is that Israel must regain control of the Gaza Strip, Knesset member Amit Halevi (Likud) told JNS. “Israel had disengaged from Gaza, it was essentially a Palestinian state. The outcome was Oct. 7,” Halevi said on the sidelines of the Conservative Political Action Conference Hungary on Thursday. “From the river to the sea, Israel will be free: this should be the slogan chanted at Columbia University, Harvard, Yale and Berkeley,...
(JNS) - The father of an Israeli Defense Forces soldier killed in action in the Gaza Strip has denounced renewed anti-government protests, accusing demonstrators of using the plight of bereaved families and the relatives of hostages to further their political aims. "Nobody should burn the country down," Hagay Lober, whose son Staff Sgt. (res.) Elisha Yehonatan Lober, 24, was killed in the southern Gaza Strip in December, wrote in a viral Facebook post on Sunday. "You cannot dismantle the...
(JNS) - Tel Aviv's bustling Dizengoff Street was lined with people garbed in Purim costumes on Sunday, even as the celebrations were noticeably muted compared to years past due to the ongoing war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. "This year feels different with everything that has been happening. There are people who aren't celebrating with us because they can't and there are those who will never celebrate again," Zach Blank, 28, who immigrated to Tel Aviv from the United States 10 years ago,...
(JNS) - "I can't allow myself to get caught in the emotional rollercoaster around hostage negotiations," said Jonathan Dekel-Chen, whose son Sagui, 35, was kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7. "It is hard if not impossible to survive that when your loved one is being held captive by a terror organization," he told JNS. On Oct. 7, some 200 terrorists stormed Kibbutz Nir-Oz, murdering 40 residents and abducting 80 more. "I have been worried for Sagui's life since then. Every day is another day that the...
(JNS) - Friends, family and supporters gathered on Feb. 7 at the Nahum Gutman Museum of Art in Tel Aviv to mark what would have been Shani Louk's 23rd birthday with an exhibition of work that runs through Feb. 21. On Oct. 7, Louk became a symbol of Hamas's unfolding atrocities as terrorists paraded her lifeless body on a pickup truck through the streets of Gaza, with crowds cheering and spitting on her lifeless body. "We wanted to keep Shani's memory alive through her passion for dancing and...
(JNS) - Founded in 1916, Kfar Giladi is one of Israel's oldest kibbutzim. Located less than a mile from the Lebanese village of Odaisseh, it is currently evacuated. Nisan Zeevi is a member of the kibbutz's local security squad. "If Israel does not address the threat Hezbollah poses, residents of northern Israel are at risk of another murderous invasion similar to Hamas's Oct. 7 attack," Zeevi told JNS. "On Oct. 7, we woke up to the horrors of Hamas's massacre and were certain that Hezbollah...
(JNS) — Operation Israel, a U.S.-based nonprofit, has provided more than $7 million worth of supplies, medical equipment and protective gear to IDF soldiers since Hamas launched the current war with its massacre of 1,200 people on Oct. 7, the NGO said on Thursday. Since then, the organization has received requests from nearly a thousand IDF units and provided some 10,000 soldiers with a total of more than 50,000 items, including ceramic vests, ballistic goggles and tactical gear together weighing over 66,000 pounds (30,000 kilograms). The group...
(JNS) — “I was six years old when I was captured by terrorists during the Entebbe hostage crisis, and Emilia Aloni, who was just released, is the same age. I can’t get her out of my head,” Shay Gross told JNS. Aloni, 5, was freed from Hamas captivity on Friday, along with her mother Danielle, as part of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas. The Palestinian terror group took captive some 240 people during its Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, which left 1,200 Israelis dead and thousands more wounded. Gross was among 246 civilia...
(JNS) — Rami Davidian, a farmer from Moshav Patish, an Israeli farming community located about 10 miles from the Gaza Strip, saved scores of young partygoers during Hamas’s murderous assault on the northwestern Negev. Davidian, 58, will participate in a series of gatherings and speaking opportunities in Miami and New York to describe the role he played as a civilian hero during the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, which killed 1,200 and wounded thousands. He also met Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Gilad Erda...
(JNS) — As rockets from Gaza continue to rain down across Israel following the carnage of the Hamas attack on the western Negev that began on Oct. 7, and foreign nations including the United States consider further evacuations of their citizens, many new immigrants to the Jewish state are for the first time facing the harsh reality of living at war. Dov Lipman, former member of the Knesset and CEO of the Yad L’Olim NGO, shed light on how traumatic the last few weeks have been for olim in Israel. He made aliyah from the U.S. in 2004. “Ke...
