Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) — The Saudi Arabian educational curriculum is now entirely free of antisemitic content, and promotes peace and coexistence, while openly presenting Islamic extremism as a threat, a study released on Monday found. The continued educational reform and unequivocal signs of moderation in the kingdom come amid a push to reach a peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel during the remaining years of the Trump administration and reflect the shifting alliances in the Middle East. They stand in sharp contrast with the ongoing antisemitic i...
(JNS) — A Chabad house in Colombia was damaged in the earthquake that struck the South American country this week. There were no injuries, but the roof and walls of the building in the town of Salento, located nearly 200 miles west of Bogota, were badly damaged by the tremor. “Thank God, we emerged unscathed from the earthquake, and that is the miracle for us,” Chabad Rabbi Shmuel Friedman told JNS Wednesday. “Now we are dealing with the damage and the repairs so that we continue to be an open house to Jewish visitors from around the world....
(JNS) - For Oklahoma native Hayden Jones, antisemitism and visceral hate struck him head-on when, while walking from the House of Representatives to the Senate at the U.S. Capitol, he was spat on for wearing a yellow ribbon in solidarity with the Israeli hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza. The 22-year-old had grown up in a strongly pro-Israel home and later studied at a private Christian university in Tulsa and so had been largely sheltered from the surge of often violent demonstrations that...
By (JNS) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with evangelical leaders in the U.S. on Wednesday and thanked them for their “steadfast and unwavering support” for the State of Israel. “We are the descendants of the original Hebrews from the Holy Land, and we are the first part of that Judeo-Christian heritage that is dear to our hearts and has given the world—human civilization—freedom and faith,” Netanyahu said during the Washington, D.C., meeting. “And again, we have to stand up and defend it. It is under attack from the rising wave of...
(JNS) - When South African peace activist Klaas Mokgomole first arrived at Israel's main international airport outside Tel Aviv, he asked where the "Blacks-only" bathroom was. The former anti-Israel activist, who had been taught that Israel was an "apartheid state," thought the Ben-Gurion International Airport official, who looked at him quizzically, simply didn't understand his English. "What do you mean, Blacks-only bathroom?" the dumbfounded Israeli airport official replied. Mokgomole, who wa...
(JNS) — GIVATAYIM, Israel—Nearing 102 years old, curiosity has not left Dan Hadani. The centenarian’s life story, which begins in prewar Poland and continues in the nascent State of Israel, weaves an extraordinary narrative of renewal and resilience that, in many ways, mirrors the history of modern Israel. He survived a selection at Auschwitz conducted by the sadistic torturer Dr. Josef Mengele, also known as “the Angel of Death.” With no family left after the Holocaust, he immigrated alone to Israel in 1948 to begin a new life. Hadani wa...
(JNS) - KRAKOW, POLAND-Thousands of people converged on the historic Jewish quarter of the southern Polish city of Krakow last week to attend the annual Krakow Jewish Festival, in the largest such event on the continent. The festival, which was initially launched three-and-a-half decades ago for a non-Jewish audience in a country where Jews were decimated during the Holocaust, was held amid a wave of global antisemitism across the globe, spurred by the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on southern Israe...
(JNS) - U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said on Thursday that it is now clear to President Donald Trump that Iran is not serious about making peace. The remarks by the American envoy came a day after Trump said the ceasefire with Iran was effectively over following repeated attacks by the Islamic regime in the Gulf. "The one thing that he became very clear about in the last 48 hours is that the Iranians are not serious people when it comes to making peace," Huckabee told reporters after...
KRAKOW, Poland—The minibus carrying a group of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men from New York pulled up to the site of the demolished Jewish cemetery turned Nazi labor and concentration camp in the southern Polish city of Krakow in June, seeking out a blonde Polish tour guide. Janina Naskalska-Babok, 42, who was dressed for summer and had not expected such a religious group, quickly put on a jacket from her bag out of respect. “In other circumstances, we would likely have never spoken to each other,” Naskalska-Babok told JNS, noting the unusual encou...
(JNS) - OFAKIM, Israel-Hidden among the bushes in a southern Israel grove, a young Bedouin busboy and a resident from Kibbutz Be'eri lay quietly for seven hours, afraid to speak as they hid for their lives. They had fled the Hamas-led massacre at the hard-hit kibbutz, less than three miles from Gaza, on Oct. 7, 2023, and were sheltering from terrorists in the thicket as rockets, bullets and explosions whizzed above their heads. Two years later, Hisham Alkarnawi - the Muslim worker from the...
(JNS) - HAIFA, Israel-"You're from the Jewish school?" the French Ministry of Education official quizzed the teenage girl who had come for her post-high school baccalaureate exam. The examiner began firing off the most difficult questions on the physics test, seemingly seeking to trip up the high school senior, but Noa Uziel, 18, who was at the top of her class at Paris's Yabne school, stood her ground. "Are you going to cry?" the Education Ministry official pressed her. "I am the one who...
(JNS) — The Islamic Republic of Iran is likely to “double-cross” U.S. President Donald Trump in any agreement it reaches with Washington, and he will eventually retaliate, American evangelical leader Mike Evans said on Monday. The remarks by Evans, founder of Jerusalem’s Friends of Zion Museum, come amid high-stakes negotiations aimed at ending the war and addressing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “If Iran double-crosses Trump and makes a fool out of him—and I believe they will—he will get his revenge and he will finish the job,” Evans told JNS in...
(JNS) — Israel officially handed over to Argentina the rotating chairmanship of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance on May 13, amid the worst burst of global antisemitism since the Holocaust. The symbolic ceremony held at the United Nations in Geneva took place two months after Argentina, on March 18, became the first South American country to assume leadership of the organization, which seeks to promote Holocaust education and awareness worldwide. IHRA Chair Marcelo Mindlin, president of the Holocaust Museum of Argentina since 2...
(JNS) - An Israeli man completed the study of a Talmudic tractate atop Mount Everest but fell short of setting a world record. Moshe Frei, 56, from Petach Tikvah, was trekking Mount Everest with three friends when he completed the Menachot tractate on Monday. "The timing was right, and it was a great place," Frei told JNS from Nepal on Wednesday. His friends filmed a nearly four-minute video of him reading from the Jewish law book and posted it on social media. The attorney said he has been...
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...
