Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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A couple of hundred French Jewish doctors interested in moving to Israel gathered in Paris on Sunday in a major immigration fair for medical professionals. The event was held during a time of global turbulence in the Jewish Diaspora, which is especially noticeable in the 450,000-strong community in France that is also home to the largest Muslim population in Europe, and where a recent survey showed that nearly four of five French Jews feel unsafe. "It is becoming more and more difficult to live...
(JNS) - Hundreds of Christian and Jewish leaders are gathering in Washington, D.C. this week to press lawmakers on Capitol Hill to strengthen ties with Israel and confront the rise of global antisemitism. The annual interfaith event comes amid increasing criticism of Israel on both sides of the political aisle amid a burst of antisemitism around the globe triggered by the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel. The gathering for Israel Advocacy Day, which will bring together pastors...
(JNS) — Against the twin backdrops of Israel at war and rising Jew-hatred around the world, some 7,000 people from around the world marked Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, by marching the two miles between the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps in Poland. Known as the International March of the Living, the annual event is designed to create a new generation of witnesses to the murder of 6 million Jews at the hands of the Nazis. The task is taking greater importance as the n...
(JNS) - KRAKOW, Poland-For eight decades, Holocaust survivor Hannah Yakin, 93, wondered what happened to the baby boy who turned up outside a neighbor's home in suburban Amsterdam during World War II with some clothes, blankets, a hot water bottle and buttermilk powder. "I never forgot him because I loved him so much," Yakin told JNS this week during the annual March of the Living Holocaust commemoration in Poland. The little girl of nine who had played with the baby for two years in the garden...
(JNS) - KRAKOW, Poland-Scores of elderly Holocaust survivors from around the world, including a dozen from war-ravaged Israel, are in Poland this week for the annual March of the Living Holocaust memorial event, even as the war against Iran forced the cancellation of the official Israeli delegation. The annual event, expected to draw some 7,000 participants in one of the world's largest Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations, takes place on Tuesday amid a surge in global antisemitism...
(JNS) - An Israeli university announced that archaeologists have uncovered the earliest known clay ornaments in Southwest Asia, dating back 15,000 years in modern-day Israel. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem said that 142 beads and pendants were created by Natufian hunter-gatherers. These ancient people lived by gathering wild food and hunting, rather than through agriculture or farming. The ornaments were found at four Natufian sites: el-Wad, Nahal Oren, Hayonim and Eynan-Mallaha, spanning mo...
(JNS, Dimona, Israel) - Amid the soot-covered ruins of a home in southern Israel demolished by an Iranian ballistic missile, the wedding ring was found. It was just a day earlier when Dorit Azran and her 29-year-old son, Dor, along with their two dogs-all sheltering in their safe room at the time of the missile impact-escaped unscathed from the home. "It was a visible miracle," Dor recounts of the harrowing ordeal when the missile, packed with half a ton of explosives, slammed into the yard...
(JNS) — Scores of parliamentarians from around the world are calling for the toppling of the Iranian regime and rejecting any negotiations with it that would enable its survival. A public letter, initiated by an Israeli lawmaker in the Knesset’s Christian Allies Caucus, as the war approaches its third week, was signed by more than 50 parliamentarians from Europe, Latin America and Africa, including dozens who lead Israel Allies caucuses in their respective parliaments. Entitled “International Call For A Free Iran,” the March 10 letter calls f...
(JNS) - ZIKIM, Israel - For nearly a year and a half, Michal Reichter stared at the Mediterranean Sea from her first-line beach home in her southern Israeli agricultural community, but dared not approach. "The sea is my home, but I would not agree to come near it," said the 46-year-old resident of Kibbutz Zikim, three miles north of Gaza. The trauma of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks, still fresh in her mind even after nine months of being evacuated from her southern Israel home, simply...
(JNS) — A Norwegian parliamentarian has nominated Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Jerusalem memorial center is “one of the world’s most significant institutions in the fight against antisemitism, hate ideologies and historical distortion,” Joel Ystebø of Norway’s Christian Democratic Party wrote in a letter addressed to the Norwegian Nobel Committee on Tuesday. “I believe that the Nobel committee should take a stand on antisemitism by issuing this award to Yad Vashem even though I understand it...
(JNS) — The longtime Chabad House in Nepal, in the capital of Kathmandu, has been forced to relocate amid growing pressure from its landlord, who demanded that the Jewish center remove all Hebrew signs, Rabbi Chezky Lifshitz said on Sunday. The Chabad House, which serves thousands of Israeli and other Jewish travelers each year, has been in place at the site for the last two decades. “We came under a lot of pressure from the landlord, who started by demanding about a month and a half ago that we remove any Hebrew sign or signs connected to Jud...
(JNS) — 18.4 million passengers travelled through Israel’s Ben-Gurion International Airport this year, an increase of 33 percent compared to the previous year, the Israel Airports Authority announced on Tuesday. The figures highlight both the resurgence of the Israeli aviation sector and the postwar re-emergence of Tel Aviv as an international travel hub. Some 60 foreign carriers are now flying to Tel Aviv compared to 80 two years ago, before the war, with the Hungarian budget carrier Wizz Air expected to open a hub in Israel in the spring. The...
(JNS) - U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said Thursday that disarming Hamas is "absolutely going to happen" and that he expects to see other countries in the region join the Abraham Accords next year. He spoke as U.S. President's Donald Trump's Gaza ceasefire plan is expected to move to its second stage next month following the president's anticipated meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Florida after Christmas. "The challenge of getting Hamas disarmed is not a goal...
(JNS) — Members of a delegation of more than 1,000 American pastors and religious leaders who visited Israel last week were targeted by a coordinated wave of online harassment on their return to the United States. The development underscored both the hostility that exists on social media against Israel and the usage of bots to amplify hate on such networks. The weeklong visit, which was organized by American evangelical leader Mike Evans with the Israeli Foreign Ministry, was the single largest gathering of pastors in Israel since the e...
(JNS) — Guinness World Records is no longer accepting submissions from Israel or the Palestinian territories, Jerusalem-based NGO “Matnat Chaim” said on Wednesday. The NGO, whose name means “Gift of Life” in Hebrew, helps people make voluntary kidney donations. It had contacted Guinness World Records regarding an event it is planning next month, which will bring together 2,000 Israeli kidney donors in the hope of having the gathering entered into the next Guinness Book of World Records. However, the British body informed the Israeli group two...
(JNS) — U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee on Wednesday urged more than a thousand visiting American pastors and Christian leaders to “light the pulpits of America” with the truth about Israel, and to quash criticism of the Jewish state from both the left and the right with the facts and the Bible. “We need the pulpits of America to be on fire with the truth,” Huckabee said in a fiery address. “I pray that you don’t just go back home and say, ‘Oh, I had wonderful trip. I took some good pictures. I saw some wonderful sites.’ I hope...
(JNS) — The war against Hamas in Gaza isn’t over, because the Islamic terror group will not willingly give up its weapons, Israeli Minister of Agriculture and Food Security Avi Dichter said on Wednesday. The blunt comments by the senior Israeli minister, a former head of the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) and a member of the Security Cabinet, come amid increasing Israeli concerns regarding the second stage of the U.S.-brokered Gaza ceasefire plan. “The war is not ended; it is a ceasefire to prepare ourselves [for] the next stage,” Dichter sa...
(JNS) SYDNEY, Australia - When Sharon Stoliar saw the images of masked terrorists rampaging through southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, she immediately was taken back to her childhood nearly four decades ago in Sri Lanka. The academic researcher and former midwife, who came to Australia as a girl of five, vividly recalled how her father, a pastor with the Wesleyan Methodist Church, was held at gunpoint by rebels in Sri Lanka. "It brought up all those memories," she recounted in an interview with JN...
(JNS) — The Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, can be traced back to Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005, Amichai Chikli, Israeli Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, stated on Wednesday evening. “There is a direct line between the withdrawal from Gaza to the disaster of Oct. 7,” Chikli said in remarks at The Future of Judea and Samaria conference at the Inbal Hotel in Jerusalem, sponsored by the American Friends of Judea & Samaria and the Jewish News Syndica...
(JNS) MELBOURNE, Australia — Over one hundred Australian doctors were gathering this week in both Melbourne and Sydney as part of a major immigration fair for medical professionals planning on moving to Israel following the war against Hamas in Gaza. The event comes amid a sharp rise in antisemitism around the world following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on southern Israel. In Australia, currently ruled by a strongly anti-Israel government, a synagogue and a Jewish daycare center were firebombed and Jewish-owned properties and cars h...
(JNS) — A prominent American evangelical leader said Thursday that the faith-based Christian community needs to take a more verbal stand against antisemitism, and “shut down” people like the right-wing political commentators Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson who feed hatred of Jews and Israel. The unequivocal remarks come at a time when polls show a drop in support for Israel among young evangelicals due to the fallout from the two-year war in Gaza and follow last month’s assassination of the American conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was...
(JNS) — One was held in a Gaza tunnel, deep underground, shackled in darkness for nearly two years. Another was kept in total isolation, enduring a process of deliberate starvation at the hands of his captors, losing nearly 40 percent of his body weight. They were tortured and tormented and in constant peril. These were some of the gruesome stories emerging from the 20 living Israeli hostages released two years after Gazan terrorists seized them during the Hezbollah-led invasion of the northwestern Negev. Elkana Bohbot, 36, one of the o...
(JNS) — Hundreds of Christians marched through the streets of the Kenyan capital of Nairobi in a faith-based show of support for Israel. The event, which commemorated the second anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught on southern Israel, offered a stark contrast with the throng of anti-Israel protests held the same day throughout Europe as well as in Australia. This follows an intensive Israeli outreach to the African continent. The nearly two-mile peaceful “March for Israel,” which was convened by the King Jesus Celebration Churc...
(JNS) — A memorial mural featuring angel wings in a prominent city square in Israel. A sand sculpture on the Tel Aviv beach. An Israeli tank shell inscribed with a commemorative message. Spontaneous Israeli public tributes that have poured in since last week’s assassination in Utah of American conservative activist Charlie Kirk, 31, who was admired in Israel for his staunch support of the Jewish state and had a large following across the Atlantic. “If the world is divided into good and evil, the...
(JNS) — Israeli and French researchers have discovered in Israel the earliest scientific evidence of interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, Tel Aviv University announced on Wednesday. The skeleton of a five-year-old child who lived 140,000 years ago, that was found in a prehistoric cave on Mount Carmel, features a combination of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens traits, according to the university. Neanderthals vs Homo sapiens While closely related, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were distinct human species with different physical chara...
