Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA) - Henry Kissinger, the first Jewish secretary of state and the controversial mastermind of American foreign policy in the 1970s - orchestrating the U.S. opening to China, negotiating the end of the conflict in Vietnam and helping ease tensions with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War - has died. Kissinger died at his home in Connecticut on Wednesday at 100, according to a statement posted to his website. He had celebrated his 100th birthday in June with a party at the New York P...
(JTA) - Rabbi Harold Kushner, one of the most influential congregational rabbis of the 20th century whose works of popular theology reached millions of people outside the synagogue, died on April 28, 2023. Kushner, who turned 88 on April 3, died in Canton, Massachusetts, just miles from the synagogue where he had been rabbi laureate for more than three decades. Kushner's fairly conventional trajectory as a Conservative rabbi was altered shortly after arriving at Temple Israel of Natick when, on...
(JTA) - Every year brings the deaths of Jewish icons who leave behind outsized legacies, from the realms of art and culture, government, business, philanthropy and beyond. Here are 18 whom we lost in 2021 presented in alphabetical order. Sheldon Adelson Few people have exerted as significant an influence on American and Israeli politics as Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate who gave lavishly to Republican candidates and Israeli causes. The founder and CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corp...
This article will be updated as more names are identified by authorities in Florida. (JTA) - The Champlain Towers South building collapse is a national tragedy, one that has claimed nearly 20 lives so far and left over 140 still missing in the rubble as of Thursday. Among other groups, it struck a unique nexus of the American Jewish community in South Florida, home to a mix of Latin American immigrants, Israelis and retirees from the Northeast. The town of Surfside, the site of the collapse, is...
(JTA) - Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom whose extensive writings and frequent media appearances commanded a global following among Jews and non-Jews alike, has died. Sacks died Saturday morning at age 72, his Twitter account announced. He was in the midst of a third bout of cancer, which he had announced in October. Sacks was among the world's leading exponents of Orthodox Judaism for a global audience. In his 22 years as chief rabbi, he emerged as the most...
(JTA) - As night falls on the second night of Rosh Hashanah this year, Rabbi Adam Zagoria-Moffet and two shofar blowers will ascend the 144-foot tower of St. Albans Cathedral, the 11th-century church that dominates the skyline of this city of the same name 20 miles northwest of London. As members of Zagoria-Moffet's 200-family synagogue assemble - at a safe distance - in the large grassy area below, the blowers will sound the ram's horn meant to rouse people to repentance at the Jewish New...
(JTA) — The Palestinian Authority has submitted a proposal for an independent demilitarized Palestinian state in Gaza, the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem. Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh said Tuesday that the P.A. had submitted a proposal to the so-called Quartet of international mediators — comprising the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia — in response to the Trump administration’s release of its own Middle East peace plan in January. Shtayyeh said the proposal calls for a “sovereign Palestinian state, in...
(JTA)-After Marilee Shapiro Asher was admitted to the hospital in mid-April sick with COVID-19, her daughter got a call from the doctor telling her she ought to get down there right away. Her mother likely had only 12 hours to live. "Well, he doesn't know my mother, does he?" Joan Shapiro said. What the doctor didn't know was that Asher, a 107-year-old working artist, had already survived one global pandemic. And she was about to survive another. In 1918, then about 6 years old, Asher contracted... Full story
(JTA)—Among the mysteries of the coronavirus is that some patients suffer and ultimately die from the disease while others experience the symptoms as akin to a mild cold. Rabbi Daniel Nevins is in the latter category. The dean of the rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Nevins was laid up for a few days earlier this month with a fever and some aches, and then recovered. Nevins was tested for the coronavirus on March 12 and a week later got back a positive result. A week after that, he was tested again. Friday morning, he got t... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA)-For the past three years, Esther Possick has avoided the hassle of hosting Passover at her Long Island home by traveling to kosher hotels in foreign locales. In 2017, she spent the holiday at a resort in Stresa, a resort town on Lake Maggiore in northern Italy not far from the Swiss border. The following year she tried out Rimini, a coastal city on the Adriatic. Last year she opted for a program in Spain. This year, she was planning to spend the holiday at a seafront hotel in... Full story
(JTA)—The leaders of the Conservative movement’s Jewish law committee issued a crisis declaration allowing the recitation of the Mourner’s Kaddish with a virtual online prayer quorum. In a statement issued this week, Rabbis Elliot Dorff and Pamela Barmash, the co-chairs of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, said that given the current public health crisis it’s permitted to constitute a prayer quorum, or minyan, with individuals connected by videoconference. “This permission of constituting a minyan solely online, whether for all praye... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA)—Purim celebrations at Oakland Hebrew Day School on Tuesday included a surprise, un-festive addition: farewells to two young Israeli women whose work in the Northern California school was being cut short by the global coronavirus pandemic. The women were assigned to work at the school as part of their national service, an alternative to Israeli army service chosen by many Orthodox girls. They were ordered to return to Israel immediately, along with 2,000 other participants in the program run by Israel’s National Civic Service Aut... Full story
Ask any parent of Jewish day school students about the biggest challenge they face in providing a solid Jewish education for their kids: Chances are they’ll talk about tuition. At some schools in the New York-New Jersey area, where most U.S. Jewish day school students are located, annual tuition fees of $30,000 in high school and $20,000 in elementary school are not unusual. Mindful of the challenge, schools and communities across the country are experimenting with various strategies to keep Jewish education affordable—even for families that do... Full story
Every Friday, the staff and campers at Camp Ramah Nyack gather for a ceremony called Shishi Al Hamigrash-Hebrew for "Friday on the field." The entire camp community, some 1,100 people in all, assembles on an enormous field in the center of the camp about 30 miles north of New York City for a spirited session of Israeli dancing. When it's over, the Israeli emissaries who serve as staffers each summer line up at the flagpole holding Israeli flags and singing "Hatikvah," the Israeli national... Full story
(JTA)-For North American Jews, the Jewish year 5778 began with tensions between Israel and the Diaspora over egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall and ended with more tension over a controversial nationality law. In between, North American Jews grappled with the impact of the #MeToo movement, the Trump administration relocated the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv and actress Natalie Portman made headlines for turning down a chance to collect a top prize in Israel. September 2017 Edie... Full story
The first time Rabbi Raphael Karlin gave his sixth-grade students a Talmud game, it didn't turn out quite the way he expected. The challenge was to take a passage of Talmud cut up into six parts and reassemble the components in the correct order. The process required his students at the Jewish Education Center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to replicate a line of Talmudic argumentation followed by rabbis who lived 2,000 years ago. On the first round, no one got it right. So Karlin had them look at... Full story
Teaching students Hebrew is a top priority for the Chicago-area day school Hillel Torah. So to ensure it has a ready supply of native Hebrew speakers on its faculty, the school goes straight to the source. It recruits two couples from Israel for multiyear teaching gigs, flies them to Chicago and puts them up in rented homes. A parent committee makes sure the houses are appropriately furnished and the refrigerators fully stocked. Volunteers take the couples to open bank accounts and offer tours o... Full story
MONTREAL (JTA)-Just inside the gate of the Shaar Hashomayim synagogue off Boulevard du Mont Royal, a gravestone bears an unusual Star of David, the sharp angles of its two opposing triangles-one reaching heavenward, the other aimed at the earth-softened into the shape of hearts. A dozen red roses scattered on the ground are signs of recent visitors, and an overflowing mound of stones on top, in keeping with the Jewish custom, is evidence of many more. The footstone is engraved in Hebrew with... Full story
NEW YORK-Yechiel Malik was born and raised an hour's drive from New York City, but until age 10 he spoke only Yiddish. He grew up in an all-Hasidic village in New York's Hudson Valley, and for most of his school years his primary focus was Judaics, with only minimal secular studies. "No one around me spoke English," Malik recalled. "Maybe I picked up a word here and there-but my entire world was Yiddish speaking." Today, Malik not only is fluent in English, but he is pursuing a college degree... Full story
When Jory Hanselman was a high school student, she found herself struggling on multiple fronts. A family member was wrestling with addiction and mental illness. And two friends died suddenly, one from suicide and another from an overdose. "I was in a place where I was really struggling to deal with that loss along with taking into consideration the secondary trauma of living in a home where mental illness and addiction were playing out in a very real way," Hanselman said. To help her cope, her... Full story
(JTA)-A stabbing and car-ramming epidemic in Israel that some called a third intifada was among the most dominant Jewish stories of the past year. But 5776 was also notable for the release of spy Jonathan Pollard after 30 years in prison, the communal fallout from the Iran nuclear deal, a historic (and unfinished) agreement on egalitarian worship at the Western Wall and continuing clashes between pro-Israel students and the BDS movement on college campuses. Below is a timeline of the Jewish... Full story
(JTA)-Itzhak Perlman, the Israeli-born violin virtuoso, was named the third winner of the Genesis Prize. Perlman was named the winner on Monday of the annual $1 million prize that has been dubbed the "Jewish Nobel." He joins former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the actor-director Michael Douglas as recipients. "I was totally dumbfounded," Perlman told JTA about learning he had been selected as this year's winner. "I'm a musician. I play the fiddle. So I was so totally taken aback... Full story
By (JTA)-Israel and the Obama administration have stepped up their war of words over the framework agreement that aims to limit Iran's nuclear activities in exchange for a gradual rollback of sanctions. President Barack Obama made his most detailed effort yet to persuade skeptics of the accord reached last week in Switzerland in a weekend interview with The New York Times, asserting that the deal is the "best bet" to prevent Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapon and promising to "stand by"... Full story
(JTA) - Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi was one of the world's most innovative and influential Jewish spiritual leaders. To his followers, he was their Hasidic rebbe. But what other rebbe had dropped acid with Timothy Leary and dialogued with the Dalai Lama? Schachter-Shalomi, who died in his sleep on July 3 at his home in Boulder, Colorado, after a short bout with pneumonia, wasn't the only rabbi who tinkered radically with Jewish tradition. No one else, however, did so with the sense of... Full story
By Ben Harris NEW YORK (JTA)—When the Museum of the History of the Polish Jews opened its doors to the public recently after years of delays and tens of millions of dollars in spending, it was in no small part thanks to the work of Tad Taube. A successful San Francisco businessman and philanthropist, Taube (pronounced Toby) has been directing the considerable resources of the Taube Philanthropies and the Koret Foundation, both of which he helms, to support efforts to revive Jewish life in P... Full story
