Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 226 - 250 of 328
(JTA)-As the Pokemon Go phenomenon grows, some institutions connected to European Jewry's darkest hour have taken precautions against it. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum in Poland has banned the addictive smartphone game, in which players viewing their environments through their device's camera run in search of animated figures that the game's application superimposes on the video feed in real time. Citing the need to respect the memory of the dead, the U.S. Holocaust Museum in...
(JTA)-When the late Austro-Hungarian aristocrat Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi attended church on Good Friday, his father would famously cause a scene, storming out when the liturgy came to the anti-Semitic exhortation "Let us also pray for the faithless Jews." Such protest was unusual in 19th-century Austria-Hungary, where anti-Semitism and other forms of racism were de rigueur. But the old count-a personal friend of Zionist legend Theodor Herzl-abhorred such biases in part because his wife,...
JEDWABNE, Poland (JTA)-As German army troops invaded eastern Poland, Ichak Lewin's family fled their town of Wizna. On July 10, 1941, the Lewins approached the nearby town of Jedwabne, where hundreds of Jews lived and had the means to shelter other Jews. But the Lewins soon realized they had come to the wrong place. "We were on the cart when we smelled a fire and another bad smell," said Lewin, recalling the day 75 years ago that has changed how millions in Poland and beyond think of the...
LONDON (JTA)- For two years, in her travels around the English capital, Natalie Pitimson has toted a library bag emblazoned with a word in Yiddish. "The word 'schlep' written on the side perfectly describes my regular hour-long trek through central London," Pitimson, a senior sociology lecturer at the University of Brighton, wrote on her blog. She had encountered no unpleasant incidents over the bag, whose slogan "reminds me of growing up in a lively Jewish family where such phrases littered...
EDINBURGH, Scotland (JTA)-The last time that Scotland voted on whether to become independent from the United Kingdom, most of its 7,000 Jews thought doing so was a bad idea. Worried that Scottish independence would encourage nationalism and embolden an already aggressive anti-Israel movement with deep roots in the pro-independence camp, Jews here were relieved when, during a 2014 referendum, 62 percent of Scottish voters supported remaining in the United Kingdom. Less than two years after that...
(JTA)-Only a week ago, Jeremy Corbyn seemed to have survived his biggest public relations debacle as the leader of Britain's Labour Party: the proliferation of anti-Semitic rhetoric among its members. Yet this week, the British vote to leave the European Union achieved what Corbyn's opponents failed to do in their attacks against him over anti-Semitism. On Tuesday, 172 Labour lawmakers among the total 229 in the Parliament said they had no confidence in Corbyn, opening the door to a challenge...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-In a country where 75 percent of Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, the Moszkowicz family of lawyers stood out as a unique Jewish success story. Descended from Max Moszkowicz, a steel-willed Auschwitz survivor who became Holland's first modern celebrity attorney, his four lawyer sons took the family business to new heights, turning their name into a household brand here with winning arguments in some of the country's most famous trials. Max Moszkowicz himself in 1987 obtained...
Great Britain and the rest of Europe woke up to a new reality Friday as a slim majority of British voters said their country should leave the European Union. Markets trembled, British currency crashed and British Prime Minister David Cameron announced his pending resignation. It was a major blow to an alliance formed specifically to avoid a repeat of the nationalist rivalries that led to the First and Second World Wars. Although Britain's Jews appeared as split as the rest of the country over...
PARIS (JTA)-On a crowded sidewalk in the French capital, Yomi Peretz exchanges jokes and backslaps with customers who are waiting in a 20-yard queue in the rain to enter his falafel shop. This chummy interaction comes naturally to Peretz, a tall enthusiast of boxing and poker who owns and runs l'As du Fallafel (The Falafel Ace), one of the best-known eateries in Paris. But working the crowd also serves a commercial purpose. "I do it to keep up morale in the queue," Peretz said on a recent Thursd...
PARIS (JTA)-When David Harroch moved from his native Morocco to France 12 years ago, he found a vibrant Jewish scene with a plethora of activities for young adults like himself. The social circle was something of a lifeline for Harroch, 30, an introverted finance executive who left home to study in France. With neither childhood friends nor family here, he relied on community events to find companionship and the occasional date. But he arrived at a time of change for Parisian Jewry, as many...
(JTA)-Science has finally provided evidence of what Jewish "Star Wars" fans long suspected: Yoda is a member of the tribe-or at least he speaks like one. The bad news is the science has been widely dismissed as junk. The Yoda reference appears in a video in which a a 36-year-old Israeli linguist at Sheffield University in England argues that Ashkenazi Jews and the Yiddish language originated in Turkey. The study joins a number of others published in the past 15 years that challenge the...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-As a Dutch Jewish couple hiding separately from the Nazis, Emmanuel Joels and Hetty van Son were literally drawn together by a comic book of Emmanuel's romantic invention. After narrowly avoiding deportation to Auschwitz thanks to a policeman's tip, the young couple spent 2 1/2 years living less than a mile apart, each in the care of rescuers with ties to the resistance in the city of Apeldoorn, 55 miles east of Amsterdam. It was a fortunate situation in a country where 75...
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (JTA)-After Yvonne van Gennep-Bouma discovered that Holocaust victims used to live in what is now her home, she began to think about them constantly. At night, van Gennep-Bouma imagined the former occupants preparing to turn in. And in the morning, she wondered where they had their breakfast. That was in 2012, she recalled, talking to a visitor in the manicured three-story townhouse in the Hague where she has lived with her husband and three children since 2001. It was als...
LONDON (JTA)-Less than two years after he moved his family from Paris to London, David Herz is already feeling at home in the United Kingdom. The co-founder of a communications agency, Herz is among thousands of French Jews who moved across the channel in recent years. He says he immigrated mostly for financial reasons and is enjoying the added benefit of having his teenage children study in English in a good school. Herz, his wife and three kids are part of the vibrant congregation of the...
BRUSSELS (JTA)-I was feeling nervous about coming to Brussels for seder with my family. Making the 130-mile trip there from my home in Amsterdam meant taking my 5-month-old son on a train that last year saw an attempted jihadist attack, and into a city that is still reeling and on alert from the March 22 Islamist bombings that killed 32 people. I wasn't worried about terrorism, though. Having experienced, by the time I turned 19, two intifadas and the Gulf War missile attacks in my native Israel...
SAINT-DENIS, France (JTA)-After three firebombs hit the synagogue of this poor and heavily Muslim suburb of Paris, municipal authorities advised the local Jewish community to lower its profile. Like dozens of attacks on French synagogues since 2000, the January 2009 incident at the Chabad House of Saint-Denis, which did not result in any injuries, was believed to have been Islamist extremists' retaliation for Israel's actions-that year against Hamas in Gaza. "We were told by the mayor from the...
(JTA)-In the wake of last week's terror attack in Brussels, Belgians transformed a central square in the capital into an impromptu memorial for the victims. Thirty-five people died Tuesday in a series of suicide bombings at the city's main airport and a subway station. Starting the next day, people gathered in Place de La Bourse and lit candles amid spontaneous singing and guitar playing of French-language songs about peace, along with some Beatles hits for good measure. Locals and foreigners...
ANTWERP (JTA)—The hundreds of rifle-toting police and soldiers who patrol Isaac Michaeli’s neighborhood have done little to improve his sense of safety. “When the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, the soldiers might as well be cardboard cutouts,” he said. A jeweler in his 40s, Michaeli lives with his family in Antwerp’s Jewish quarter, a small neighborhood of 12,000 that is one of the largest haredi communities in Europe. The troops have been assigned to protect the neighborhood, with its 98 Jewish institutions, since May 2...
(JTA)—Growing up, trips to stay with my Jewish family in Brussels were a taste of freedom. In my native Israel, waves of Palestinian terrorist attacks kept me under constant maternal surveillance. Fear of regular bus bombings limited my excursions to biking distance. On the tranquil streets of the Belgian capital, by contrast, I could wander at will amid the mix of Medieval architecture and glass-and-steel skyscrapers. Even riding the tram with my cousin Eli was exhilarating. The rails seemed to stretch out endlessly, and there was the added t...
ANATEVKA, Ukraine (JTA)-At the age of 53, Sergey and Elena Yarelchenko fled their native city of Lugansk with three suitcases and moved into a wooden room in a muddy refugee camp outside Kiev. Like hundreds of thousands of refugees from Ukraine's war-torn east, life for this Jewish couple in 2014 went from a normal bourgeois existence to a hellish struggle for survival and flight from a city that within days became the arena for vicious urban fighting between government troops and pro-Russian...
NIJKERK, Netherlands (JTA)-As a boy, Pieter van Oordt would often accompany his father, Karel, on the elder van Oordt's weekly shopping excursions specifically seeking out products made in Israel. A Christian Zionist businessman in Amersfoort, some 25 miles east of Amsterdam, Karel van Oordt sought to strengthen the Jewish state economically by purchasing its exports to feed his family of eight. But it wasn't easy. "At the greengrocer, my father asked for Jaffa oranges, but they didn't offer tho...
(JTA)-When Evgeny Afineevsky began filming his Oscar-nominated documentary about Ukraine's revolution, he thought he was in for a fun project full of song and dance, oddly enough. Afineevsky, a 43-year-old Russian-born director who served in the Israeli army, says his first days in Kiev in 2013 were "one big festival," with people singing and playing musical instruments in Maidan, the square that was the birthplace of the upheaval. Yet as the fighting intensified in the winter of 2013-14,...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-Two months before they were deported from the Netherlands to Auschwitz, Louis Barzelay and Flora Snatager invited a few guests to their wedding in Amsterdam. Instead of the yellow star he was legally required to wear, Louis wore a white flower on his lapel as he posed with Flora in a doorway for their wedding photo. Flora is smiling faintly and looking slightly to the side while Louis stares straight at the camera, his lips pursed. It was May 31, 1942. For more than 70 years,...
BERLIN (JTA) - Set amid a 1944 prisoner uprising at Auschwitz, "Son of Saul" stood out as a long shot when its producers first applied for funding from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. The film's director, Laszlo Nemes, had no experience with feature films; its lead actor hadn't been on a film set in 15 years; and its script included long, silent and out-of-focus shots. But the Claims Conference, which negotiates restitution for Nazi victims, ultimately decided to help...
RAANANA, Israel (JTA)-Before she traded her native France for Israel, Catherine Berdah ran a successful drug store in an affluent suburb on the eastern edge of Paris. A 50-year-old pharmacist with a master's degree in business and decades of experience, Berdah earned over $6,000 per month and presided over an expanding business with 14 employees. But Berdah sold out last year and moved with her husband and two teenage daughters to this central Israeli city because she feared for their future in...
