Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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PARIS (JTA)-Last year may have been traumatic for France and its Jews, but it was a pretty good one for Rudy Abecassis. In a year that began with the Charlie Hebdo shooting and the subsequent killing of four at a kosher supermarket in Paris, Abecassis, 32, a Marseille-born computer specialist who moved to the Paris region in 2009 to find work, had a good job at a time of rising unemployment. The income was sufficient that his wife, Emilie, was able to quit her secretarial job after the birth of...
MOSCOW (JTA)-Like many tourists in Red Square, I have often wondered what lies beyond the tall walls that separate this Moscow attraction from the Kremlin, the official residence of Russia's president and the nerve center of the state. As a journalist long obsessed with Russia, I've wanted to take a peek inside the Kremlin for just about forever. In my fantasy, I'd have a one-on-one interview with Vladimir Putin in which I gain the strongman's respect by beating him in a staring contest....
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-They warn you that parenting means doing a bunch of stuff you never imagined yourself doing. I had always assumed this applied to saying to children things like, "You watch your tone of voice, young lady" or, "Let's not eat things we find in our underwear." But in my case, the moment came before my son was even born, when I found myself begging a Belgian kosher slaughterer, or shochet, to come to the Netherlands and circumcise him. In my native Israel or the United States,...
(JTA)-As a defiant Russia again flexes military muscles in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, Cold War analogies are, perhaps, unavoidable. The deployment last month of Russian warplanes in Syria laid bare Moscow's readiness to use force to punish leaders who would challenge its authority-as in Ukraine, from which it annexed Crimea in March 2014-and to defend its strategic allies, like Syria's embattled president, Bashar Assad. During the Cold War, Kremlin intervention generally meant bad news...
MOSCOW (JTA)-At Russia's largest kosher food factory, owner Pinhas Slobodnik welcomes his Muslim workers with a greeting in Arabic that he pronounces in a thick Russian accent. Some 120 workers, most from the predominantly Muslim republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, are employed at the factory-a sprawling complex built in 2009 in the basement of the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Russia. When it comes to kosher food for Russia's 250,000 Jews, he hasn't only cornered the market, he...
(JTA)-Even at his remote sheep pasture in the Austrian countryside, Hans Breuer was too disturbed by the plight of the Syrian refugees streaming into his country to go about his daily routine. Especially troubling to Breuer, a 61-year-old Jewish shepherd and singer of Yiddish songs, were the overcrowded conditions at Traiskirchen-a government-run refugee camp near Vienna that was featured on the local news last month because its 4,500 residents were double the intended capacity. "I was sick of...
(JTA)-When he looks into the tired eyes of the Syrian refugees now flooding Europe's borders, Guy Sorman is reminded of his father, Nathan, who fled Germany for France just months before Adolf Hitler came to power. "He wanted to go to the United States. Visa declined. He tried Spain, same result. He ended up in France, neither welcome nor deported," Sorman wrote last week in an Op-Ed in Le Monde in which he argued that Europe should learn from its abandonment of the Jews during the Holocaust...
(JTA)—In their central Jerusalem apartment, Natan and Avital Sharansky can hear their new upstairs neighbors chatting in French on their patio. The young family moved into the penthouse earlier this month, shortly after immigrating to Israel with help of the Jewish Agency for Israel—the semi-official organization for Jewish immigration to Israel, or aliyah, which Natan Sharansky has headed since 2009. The family is part of a major increase in aliyah from France, amid rising levels of anti-Semitism and economic stagnation in that country. In...
(JTA)-Among his rationales for opposing the nuclear deal with Iran, U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer said that he did not trust the three European Union partners to punish Iran should it violate the terms of the accord that offers the Islamic Republic sanctions relief in exchange for scaling back its nuclear activities. The New York Democrat's assertion served as a reminder that while Washington has been the driving force behind the deal, which was reached July 14 between Iran and six world powers,...
DEAUVILLE, France (JTA)-This seaside community situated 125 miles west of Paris boasts windswept beaches, turquoise-water marinas, a grand casino, a race track and an Olympic-size swimming pool. Deauville, spanning 2.2 square miles, also has five kosher restaurants, three main synagogues and more than 20 smaller Jewish congregations. The picturesque Lower Normandy township emerged decades ago as a favorite holiday destination among affluent Paris Jews for its littoral beauty, plentiful...
(JTA)—The Jewish refugee village of Anatevka, Ukraine, is so new it doesn’t even officially exist yet. Due to open in September, the Anatevka Jewish Refugee Community hadn’t received much attention in the Jewish media until last week, when its developers began raising funds for the $6 million project, designed for Ukrainian Jews displaced by the war ravaging the country’s east. Still, you may be thinking, Anatevka sounds familiar. You’re right: It’s the fictional hometown of Tevye the Dairyman from Joseph Stein’s hugely famous “Fiddler on t...
PARIS (JTA) – Elsewhere in the world, unveiling plans for a new Jewish cultural center might merit little more than a cocktail reception. But in this city, where Jews have been the target of rising anti-Semitic violence, the event was significantly more elaborate, with French Jewish leaders touting the blueprints as proof of the community's viability and the government's support for its survival. The $11 million center, which is slated to open in 2017, will house a large synagogue, two e...
(JTA)-Good deeds can be contagious. Just ask Laura Marks, a British Jew who is widely credited with creating one of her community's most widely celebrated new traditions: an annual Mitzvah Day, now in its 11th consecutive year, in which thousands of British Jews perform charity work in retirement homes, homeless shelters, hospitals and even neglected cemeteries. Inspired by the custom of some American Jewish communities, including in Los Angeles and Detroit, Marks thought the activity not only p...
ISTANBUL (JTA)-Every time she prepares her newspaper for print, Karen Sarhon has her pick from dozens of submissions she receives daily from writers around the world. A desirable situation for any editor-in-chief, Sarhon says it is nothing short of unbelievable for her monthly, El Amaneser, which is the world's only newspaper in Ladino-a Jewish-Spanish language teetering on the brink of extinction. "In the 1970s, Ladino was truly a dying language, but El Amaneser is among the relatively new...
ISTANBUL (JTA)-In the backyard of the Etz Ahayim synagogue in Turkey's largest city, congregant Yusuf Arslan hollers pleasantries as he mingles with other members of the small congregation. He needs to shout to be heard over the deafening sound of a sudden downpour hitting the blast-proof glass ceiling that stretches over the synagogue's spacious yard. Installed after Istanbul's deadly 2003 synagogue bombings, the shield is meant to prevent grenades from exploding in the complex should anyone hu...
(JTA)—After Russia invaded Ukraine in March 2014, Israel resisted pressure to join the United States and its European allies in condemning the move—citing in particular its concern not to antagonize Russia for fear it could provide Syria with a powerful anti-aircraft missile called the S-300. Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman was eager to mollify the Obama administration’s anger over Israel’s refusal to endorse sanctions on Russia or support a U.N. General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s annexation of Crimea, according to an Op-Ed pub...
(JTA)-When mainstream French media report about Jewish schools, it's usually not good news. Sometimes, the reports are about controversies surrounding public funding of such institutions in a country with a strong separation between religion and state. More often, the news is in the context of security around Jewish schools, which are under heavy protection by police and the army from Islamist fanatics like Amedy Coulibaly, who killed four Jews at a kosher supermarket on Jan. 9; apparently a...
(JTA)-An attack on the Paris headquarters of a French satirical magazine has left at least 12 people dead, including the Jewish caricaturist Georges Wolinski. Two of the reported fatalities in Wednesday's attack were police officers, according to the French daily newspaper Le Monde. Later reports said that one of the officers was Muslim. Ten others were wounded, five of them seriously. Details of the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices are still sketchy, but witnesses said the three assailants...
(JTA)-Citing failures by the organization traditionally responsible for bringing Jews to Israel, the founder of a Jerusalem-based interfaith charity said his organization would begin bringing more Jews to Israel from Europe-starting with Ukraine. Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, the founder of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, accused the Jewish Agency for Israel of not responding quickly enough to demand for aliyah sparked by violence in Ukraine, prompting the fellowship to launch...
LUGANSK, Ukraine (JTA)-In an unheated synagogue with no running water, a dozen Jews are trying to keep warm as temperatures here veer toward the single digits. Not moving too much helps keep the warmth under their thick coats, they say, a technique developed as the group gathered at least once a week to maintain a sense of community in a city torn by ongoing conflict between pro-Russian rebels and the Ukrainian army. "We usually stay for about two hours," says Igor Leonidovich, the synagogue's...
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (JTA)-Through the backseat window of a black KGB car, Yosef Mendelevitch could see university students his age hurrying to take their finals. It was June 15, 1970, and the 23-year-old Mendelevitch had just been arrested along with 11 accomplices for trying to hijack a plane to escape the Soviet Union. On the tarmac of an airport outside St. Petersburg-then Leningrad-officers from the Soviets' secret police detained the conspirators before they could board the...
VIENNA (JTA)-An Austrian official's letter is threatening to undermine the central pillar of a controversial court decision that found a Jewish journalist guilty of defrauding the government. On Sept. 9, senior state attorney Martin Windisch wrote that the government "makes no claims" against Stephan Templ, who was sentenced in April to three years in jail for cheating Austria out of half the value of a sanatorium confiscated by the Nazis from one of Templ's relatives. In May, the Austrian...
(JTA)-Each time he dispatches a car into Lugansk, Rabbi Shalom Gopin readies himself for hours of anxious anticipation. The scene of brutal urban warfare between Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian separatists, this eastern Ukrainian city now has no regular power supply, running water or cell phone reception. Mortar rounds can fall without warning. Much of the population, once 450,000, has fled. But despite the risks, Gopin, the city's exiled chief rabbi, has dispatched over a dozen cars to...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-A few hours before he departed Amsterdam for Australia on July 17, Ithamar Avnon was praying for peace with his parents at their home in the Netherlands. That evening, pro-Russian separatists shot down Avnon's flight, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 passengers and crew. Avnon, 26, was the sole Israeli national on board. The son of a Dutchwoman and an Israeli who became a Christian evangelist, Avnon loved peace because of how well he and his...
PARIS (JTA) - On their 40th wedding anniversary, Avital and Natan Sharansky went sightseeing in the City of Lights. But the Sharanskys didn't follow the trail of countless couples who come here to kiss at the Eiffel Tower or slip so-called love locks on bridges over the River Seine. Theirs was an itinerary that demonstrated a different kind of commitment. "Avital is taking me to see all the places where she organized protest rallies for my release," Natan Sharansky, the chairman of the Jewish...
