Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 1 - 5 of 5
BERLIN (JTA) — Last year, as Rabbi Rebecca Blady approached the first anniversary of the Yom Kippur attack on a synagogue in Halle, Germany, she knew she wanted to commemorate it on her own terms. Blady runs Base Hillel Deutschland, an organization for young Jews in Berlin, and was praying in the Halle synagogue on Yom Kippur in 2019 when a gunman attempted to break down the door. The gunman then went on to kill two people nearby, and is now serving a life sentence in prison. Rather than suffice with the state-organized memorial on the a...
One morning, my wife suggested I look into making a different kind of bread. Not necessarily to replace my weekly challah habit, but just to try something new. I asked what she had in mind and she mentioned monkey bread. I'd never heard of it. So I Googled and turns out that monkey bread is actually a yeasted cake. Its origins are rooted in the immigrant Hungarian Jewish community that came to the United States. I immediately thought of my father's grandparents, Jews who immigrated from the form...
BERLIN (JTA) — I wasn’t raised Jewish, but this year I’m proud to be connecting with a neglected part of my heritage. There are a lot of Jews who would say that I am not Jewish — my Jewish heritage stems from my paternal grandmother, and I wasn’t raised in the culture or religion beyond enjoying some foods my grandmother made. I accepted for most of my life that, at best, I was Jew-ish, with an emphasis on the “ish.” This year’s Rosh Hashanah was the first explicitly Jewish holiday I had ever celebrated. I skipped Yom Kippur, not feeling pre...
BERLIN (JTA) - The previous director of the Jewish Museum Berlin left in the wake of a tweet. In May, after the German parliament declared the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel anti-Semitic, the museum tweeted a critique of the decision, arguing that it was undemocratic, and shared an article featuring several Jewish scholars who agreed. Public pressure mounted against the director, Peter Schafer, and a debate about the role of Jewish museums and the legality of the BDS...
BERLIN (JTA) - There were approximately 30,000 Jews in the city of Frankfurt before World War II, making it the largest community in Germany. By the time the U.S. military occupied the city in 1945, there were only about 100 left. "Jewish life was destroyed," said Tobias Freimuller, author of the recently published "Frankfurt and the Jews," a history of the community from 1945-1990. Flash forward to 2020 and the Jewish community of Frankfurt is once again a powerful force in the city, one of...
