Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 1 - 25 of 26
(JNS) - Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) drew on the recent New York Knicks NBA finals win in his opening statement during his second televised debate with former city comptroller Brad Lander, who is running to unseat him in New York's 10th Congressional District. "We cannot afford to put a rookie in the game," he said. "We have to put our best players on the court." He referred often to Lander's lack of federal government experience as his opponent being a "rookie." Both men are Jewish. Lander has...
(JNS) - Hundreds of New Yorkers filled the normally quiet and bucolic Upper East Side street adjacent to Gracie Mansion, the official home of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, on Tuesday evening, chanting "Hey, hey, no, no, Mayor Mamdani's got to go" and "stop Mamdani." Lilly Icikson was among the demonstrators-a group of mostly Jews with a few Muslims and Christians-and handed out stickers, which she prints at home and affixes to light poles and other surfaces outside Gracie Mansion and in...
(JNS) — The UJA-Federation of New York said that it purchased 20,000 bags of Bamba in response to the Park Slope Food Coop’s recent decision to boycott Israeli products. The UJA, the largest Federation in the world, which distributes $275 million in grants annually, described the co-op boycott as “divisive and hate-driven.” Food co-op members voted 67 percent to 31percent to boycott Israeli products. Some 8,400 members, out of 17,000, reportedly voted at the meeting, which was moved online due to security concerns. The Federation said it will...
(JNS) - The Israel parade on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue this year is slated to have a Muslim group marching alongside Jewish organizations in what is believed to be a first time in the parade's 61-year history. It will also be the first time in memory that New York City's mayor will not participate in the parade, which shows support for the Jewish state. The annual event, scheduled this year for May 31, typically has thousands of participants, with groups marching from Jewish day schools,...
(JNS) — It is no small thing to get a street in Manhattan named after you, but the creator of such timeless superheroes as Captain America, the Fantastic Four, Ant-Man, the Hulk and Iron Man received that honor on Monday, when the Lower East Side block where he was born was named “Jack Kirby Way.” Kirby was born Jacob Kurtzberg in 1917 near the corner of Delancey and Essex Streets, which is now home to a McDonald’s but in his youth was filled with horse-drawn carts selling all manner of produce...
(JNS) — Abe Foxman, who grew from being a hidden child during the Holocaust into the country’s best-known fighter of Jew-hatred, was called a “towering” and “giant” figure in statement after statement from Jewish groups after his death. At his funeral on Tuesday, May 12, the capacity crowd that filled the pews at Park Avenue Synagogue heard a different aspect of Foxman’s life — the man who was a close friend and mentor to many, a father of two and grandfather of four. The crowd heard of the man, who regularly sent texts to those he loved...
(JNS) — Most Jewish New Yorkers, 58 percent, think that Zohran Mamdani, mayor of New York City, is doing a poor job, while 32 percent approve of his job performance and 10 percent weren’t sure, according to a survey from the Jewish Majority. Mercury Group, which conducted the poll and surveyed 664 Jewish adults who voted in November in the New York City mayoral election, found that 84% of respondents support the city passing a law creating barrier zones around the doors of houses of worship to prevent harassment and intimidation of wor...
(JNS) — Lindsey Boylan, whom New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed and who has called the Israeli prime minister a “war criminal and a danger to Israel” and accused the Jewish state of “genocide,” conceded the special election in the New York City Council’s third district on Tuesday night. The New York Times reported that Boylan, a Democratic Socialist, called Carl Wilson, a former chief-of-staff to Erik Bottcher, who resigned the council seat to join the state Senate, to concede the race. With 99 percent of votes counted, Wilson appe...
(JNS) — On Oct. 11, 2023, five days after the Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel, Itay Sagi and his unit in the Israeli military went into Gaza to retrieve bodies of Israelis whom the terror organization killed. The unit was ambushed, three soldiers were killed and Sagi was gravely hurt. “My body and my soul were wounded,” Sagi told about 900 people, who filled the Moorish revival sanctuary at Park East Synagogue, an Orthodox congregation in Manhattan, on Monday for a commemoration of Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day. “The images ar...
(JNS) — To mark his first 100 days in office, Zohran Mamdani, mayor of New York City, talked about how many potholes he has filled. He should be focusing on mending his relationship with New York City’s Jews, according to Jewish leaders. “Unfortunately, in his first 100 days, Mayor Mamdani has done nothing to allay the concerns I expressed before the election regarding his stance on Israel and the safety of Jewish New Yorkers,” Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, who leads Park Avenue Synagogue, a Conservative congregation on Manhattan’s Upper East Side...
(JNS) - The 4,500 Jewish teenagers from all over the world-from Australia to Slovakia to Singapore to Brazil to France to Los Angeles-who had come to Brooklyn, N.Y., for a weekend of inspiration and learning through the Chabad movement, intended to return home on Sunday. A blizzard that paralyzed the city, shutting airports and leading officials to ban cars from the streets, had other ideas. Instead, teens who had never seen snow before had friendly snowball fights outside 770 Eastern Parkway,...
(JNS) — The 4,500 Jewish teenagers from all over the world—from Australia to Slovakia to Singapore to Brazil to France to Los Angeles—who had come to Brooklyn, N.Y., for a weekend of inspiration and learning through the Chabad movement, intended to return home on Sunday. A blizzard that paralyzed the city, shutting airports and leading officials to ban cars from the streets, had other ideas. Instead, teens who had never seen snow before had friendly snowball fights outside 770 Eastern Parkway, the headquarters of the international movem...
(JNS) - Moshe Davis learned that he was out of a job on Feb. 4 from a public social media post that Phylisa Wisdom was succeeding him as director of the New York City Mayor's Office to Combat Antisemitism. Close to an hour later, his supervisor made it official. He wasn't surprised but was disappointed, he told JNS. Mayor Zohran Mamdani "signaled that they would be taking a different approach that didn't align with mine," Davis said. "I was hoping they wanted to make this office something that...
(JNS) - Many American Jews assume that it's easy to be Jewish in Israel given the ubiquity of Hebrew and history in the Jewish state, where one needn't pay tens of thousands of dollars annually for day school or thousands for synagogue membership to raise children who are knowledgeable about Judaism. But senior Israeli educators told JNS that is not the case. Several Israeli education officials, who spent a week visiting New York schools and synagogues, told JNS that Israeli students aren't...
(JNS) — Democratic Colorado gubernatorial hopeful Phil Weiser calls Denver home, but he returned to the city of his youth this week for a quick fundraising visit. In an interview at a wine bar on Manhattan’s Upper East Side before the private fundraiser, Weiser, who had iced tea, spoke with JNS about his Jewish identity and his successful legal efforts, as the state’s current attorney general, to win back hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money that the Trump administration had cut, including funds for healthcare, education and transpo...
It’s Switzerland in 1945 and the war has just ended. A group of deeply traumatized, ragged-looking Jewish teenagers recently liberated from Buchenwald have been sent to live in a former Swiss school building. A young Swiss woman named Klara cares for them, while her new husband, Johann, runs her family’s textile business, whose success is dependent on the work of unrepentant Nazis living in comfort in Swiss exile. Johann’s brother, Egon, home from the war after five years working as a Swiss border guard, is wracked by guilt for having to turn...
(JTA) - Dr. Vivian Fischer spent five hours Saturday walking toward Minneapolis's devastation from her home in a suburb immediately outside the city. The family physician put on gray scrubs, her stethoscope, a mask and gloves, filled a backpack with whatever she had at home - extra masks, medical gloves, asthma inhalers, bandages, tweezers to pick glass out of cuts and water, and went to see where she could help. She found countless people sweeping up the glass on the streets from storefront windows broken in the chaos of Friday night's...
NEW YORK (JTA)-Had she received a better Jewish education, Marianne Williamson says, she might have become a rabbi. Instead, Williamson has become one of the country's best-known New Age self-help gurus, reaching millions of people over more than three decades in the public eye. She counts Oprah and Deepak Chopra among her pals. Now Williamson, the author of a dozen books-four of them New York Times best-sellers-wants to extend her influence to the highest office in the land: She has announced a bid to run for the Democratic nomination for... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA)-As its name suggests, relationships are key to members of the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysts and Psychotherapists. But there is one relationship some members want to sever: the one between the organization and Israel. At its 2018 conference, held June 14-17 at a Midtown Manhattan hotel, a vocal minority of the association's 2,200 members objected to next year's gathering being held in Tel Aviv, with some pledging to boycott it. The 100 people or so who attended a concurrent meeting in the same hotel... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA)—Congregation Kolot Chayeinu in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood is removing its savings from JPMorgan Chase, making it the first U.S. synagogue to publicly divest from a bank or other corporation “to explicitly oppose the funding of fossil fuel and other related projects dangerous to the world in which we live,” according to a statement from the congregation. The move also puts Kolot at the forefront of Jewish organizations in doing “values-driven investing,” putting money where Jewish groups’ mouths are on climate chang... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA)-I have roamed the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Egyptian wing many times, marveling at sarcophagi, statues of Horus and Ra, and portraits of young men on ancient panels who gaze back at visitors, looking shockingly familiar and contemporary. But on a Sunday just before Passover, I viewed the artifacts as I'd never before seen them: through the lens of the Exodus story, which we retell each year through reading the Haggadah. Nachliel Selavan, a Jewish educator and self-taught museum guide whose specialty is looking at Jewish texts... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA)-She was young, Jewish and the founder of a nonprofit organization that aids deprived children in Southeast Asia. He was a potential funder more than twice her age, promising donations and introductions to influential people. "He dangled a lot of carrots," she said in retrospect. But the fundraiser, who spoke on condition she not be named for fear of jeopardizing future professional prospects, received no donations from the man who promised so much. Instead he stroked her thigh, propositioned her, belittled her and at their first... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA)-Organizers of the Women's March renounced the anti-Semitic views of Louis Farrakhan, but they stood behind one of its co-presidents who attended a speech last month by the Nation of Islam leader and seemed unperturbed by his attacks on Jews. Tamika Mallory, co-president of the Women's March, sparked an outcry when she posted a photo of herself and Farrakhan on Instagram following his Saviours' Day speech in Chicago on Feb. 25. In that speech, Farrakhan declared that "powerful Jews are my enemy" and that he had "pulled the cover o... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA)-Nearly 80 years after being persecuted by the Nazi-allied Vichy French government, some 25,000 elderly Algerian Jews are being recognized for the first time as Holocaust survivors by the German government. Algerian Jews had their French citizenship stripped in 1940 by the Vichy government, which then ruled the area. Nuremberg-like laws banned Jews from working as doctors, lawyers, teachers and in government. Children were kicked out of French schools. On Tuesday, 78 years after they endured suffering that left families penniless... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA)-It shouldn't have been complicated. Shimon Abta, an expert Israeli cannabis agronomist, was sent by his employer to consult with American companies in states where medical marijuana is legal. He was living in Las Vegas and met an American Jewish woman on JDate. They married last year and together started becoming more religious. Both in their 30s, they are eager to start a family. But on Jan. 8, U.S. immigration officials told Abta to withdraw his application for permanent residency status and leave for Israel that very day or... Full story
