Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(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...
(JNS) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday categorically rejected claims of starvation in the Gaza Strip, dismissing such reports as “a bold-faced lie.” Speaking at a Daystar TV conference in Jerusalem hosted by Pastor Paula White, leader of the White House Faith Office, Netanyahu said, “There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza.” Israel, he continued, had “enabled humanitarian aid throughout the duration of the war to enter Gaza. Otherwise, there would be no Gazans.” It is Hamas that ha...
(JNS) - Argentinian President Javier Milei started his official state visit to Israel on Monday with an emotional pledge at Jerusalem's Western Wall that he will "always stand" with the Jewish state, which he called "the cause of the West." The Argentine leader, who is on his second visit to Israel in as many years and has emerged as one of Israel's most vocal supporters around the globe, reinforced that message at the Jerusalem holy site. "I want you to know that my support for Israel comes fro...
(JNS) — The head of Israel’s Civil Aviation Authority, Shmuel Zakay, warned this weekend that it will take weeks before all Israelis stranded abroad will be able to fly home, as Israel’s main international airport remained closed for a third day on Sunday amid the war with Iran. The remarks came as tens of thousands of Israelis remain stranded abroad since Israel closed its airspace after launching a pre-emptive strike on Friday against Iranian nuclear and military sites. “I want to say to Israelis abroad: It will take weeks, not days or hour...
(JNS) KFAR ADUMIM, Israel - It was four decades ago that three childhood friends from New Jersey who had immigrated to Israel heard of a young Jerusalem rabbinical student who was looking for scuba divers who could help him find snails off the Mediterranean coast. The three young men knew nothing about snails or the centuries-old search for the biblical blue known as tekhelet, but it was an adventure that would change their lives. "It became a hobby that became an obsession that tuned into a...
(JNS) — Jordanian textbooks justify the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre and promote antisemitism and violent jihad, marking a troubling decline in the Hashemite Kingdom’s educational standards, an international think tank reported Monday. A study by the London-based watchdog IMPACT-se found that nearly 300 textbooks used in the 2023–2025 curriculum “promote antisemitism, glorify violent jihad, and express strong hostility toward homosexuality.” At the same time, and somewhat contradictorily, the materials also “generally advocate concepts of r...
(JNS) — A group of American Christian leaders are publicly reaffirming the Jewish people’s right to the biblical heartland of Israel, ahead of a key U.S. decision on Israeli sovereignty over the territory. The move comes weeks before U.S. President Donald Trump is slated to announce whether or not he supports the Israeli annexation of Judea and Samaria—a goal backed by many evangelicals including some administration officials—amid international plans to rebuild post-war Gaza. The declaration will be made public on Tuesday at the annual National...
(JNS) — A Spanish-language documentary on the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, told through the eyes of Latino immigrants who were targeted in the country’s south that day, premiered in Los Angeles in February. The four-part series, “7/O: Testigos del Terror” (“10/7: Witnesses of Terror”), tells the story of the largest single-day attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust by focusing on Latin Americans living in kibbutzim and other farming villages on the border with Gaza, the largest immigrant group that came u...
(JNS) - Hundreds of thousands of shattered and fire-damaged wine bottles, some with wine remnants, line the floor of a once-thriving winery in Moshav Avivim, a picturesque community on Israel's border with Lebanon. The tableau of devastation at the former winery in this deserted Israeli village in the Upper Galilee just down the hill from Lebanon has remained frozen in time since four Hezbollah missiles demolished the site last year in multiple attacks and with it some 300,000 bottles of wine....
(JNS) — Prominent Israeli-American columnist and JNS senior contributing editor Caroline B. Glick is returning to the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem to serve as International Affairs Adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Glick, who worked with Netanyahu over a quarter century ago before becoming a widely read columnist, took up her new position on Sunday. “Life takes you in different directions, and I am going back to the office where I worked nearly three decades ago as the prime minister leads Israel through the most...
(JNS) — President-elect Donald Trump and his new administration are “uniquely positioned” to stabilize the Middle East, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel said. “President Trump has strategically surrounded himself with a team of seasoned leaders who possess a deep understanding of the Middle East’s complex dynamics and the grave threats Israel faces from its enemies,” Haskel told JNS. “Supported by this powerhouse team, President Trump is uniquely positioned to stabilize the region and secure a better, more prosperous future—one th...
(JNS) - Thrown into a tank after being riddled with seven bullets in Gaza, the 23-year-old Israeli soldier kept his hand on his mortally wounded Dutch Shepherd through the entire ride to the hospital, even as he drifted into unconsciousness. "I kept hoping that he was OK even as I felt my organs were popping out of my body," Ben Ladany told JNS in an interview in Herzliya on Wednesday of his beloved IDF counter-terrorism dog, Jack. For the next two months, Ladany lay in an induced comatose at...
(JNS) — An Israeli low-cost airline is planning to launch flights between Israel and New York this winter, ending the wartime monopoly on the popular route by Israel’s flagship carrier El Al, the Israeli Ministry of Transportation said on Wednesday. The move, which envisions four weekly flights on Israir from Tel Aviv to Newark Liberty International Airport, comes at a time when flights on U.S. carriers to and from Tel Aviv remain suspended due to the security situation, and as El Al is facing an investigation for price gouging on tickets due...
(JNS) — The son of the late American evangelist, Billy Graham, heads a list of Israel’s top Christian Allies around the world, recognized for their unwavering faith-based support for the Jewish state. The fifth annual list released Wednesday by the Washington, D.C.-based Israel Allies Foundation comes at a time when evangelical Christian support for Israel has served as a bulwark and counterweight against international criticism of Israel for the yearlong war against Hamas in Gaza. The American evangelist and missionary Franklin Graham, 72, of...
