Heritage Florida Jewish News - Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice

On Thursday, Oct. 12, 2023, I sent the following e-mail [edited] to the White House: “Dear Mr. President, Your decision to unambiguously support Israel and the Jewish people in their hour of need after the horrendous, barbaric, and totally immoral i...

On our return to Warsaw we took some time to rest from our day’s touring, to prepare for Kabbalat (Evening) Shabbat services at a local synagogue and Shabbat dinner at our hotel. We were advised at the last minute that we would not be attending the l...

Following our visit to the Jewish Historical Society Museum in Warsaw we took a walking tour of the Okopowa Jewish Cemetery (Cm. Zydorfski), the largest Jewish Cemetery in Europe with an estimated 250,000 graves dating back to 1806, when the Jewish...

The days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are devoted not only to examining our relationship with God, but also to self-reflection and our relationship with others. Our tradition, developed over more than three thousand years, has created a rich narra...

The City of Warsaw was ravaged in WWII by the Nazis, who destroyed close to 95 percent of all its buildings including museums, historical landmarks, churches, and of course synagogues. The Warsaw Ghetto in which the Jews courageously fought the...

The next day our positive energy experienced on the March of the Living quickly dissipated as we arrived at the site where an estimated 800 Jewish children are buried in a mass grave in the Zbylitowska Góra Forest. The gravesite is located deep in th...

If weather can ever be a metaphor for emotion and feelings it certainly was so on the two days we visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camps. On the first day, the weather was cold, damp, rainy and overall bleak. It mirrored perfectly the...

The bus ride to Birkenau took only 15 minutes since the two facilities were less than two miles apart. The next day we would be marching that same route from the gates of Auschwitz to the entrance of Birkenau as part of the March of the Living....

As we stepped through the entrance gate of Auschwitz I, marked with its overhead sign, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” “Work shall set you free,” I was trying to figure out how I was going to emotionally handle what I was about to experience. Our group was not...

The Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camp complex is located in the city of Oświęcim about 70 km. (43.5 miles) east of the city of Krakow. It was initially built as a prison camp in 1940 by the Nazis for Polish prisoners. In 1941-1944 it w...

After several hours of rest and regaining my composure from my encounter with the beautiful Vistula River and its ugly past as the depository for Jewish ashes, I met the group I would be traveling with at our organizational meeting. Several of us had...

This year 2023 marks the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the 75th anniversary of the Jewish State of Israel’s independence. It is also the 35th anniversary of the first annual March of the Living. In that first March of the L...

While almost every federal election is generally perceived as “the most important election the American people have ever faced.” this year’s midterm elections should accurately be described as one of the most confusing and potentially dange...

On the eve of The Day of Atonement, “Erev Yom Kippur”, it is traditional for Jewish families to recite the Kapporeth prayer in the morning before Yom Kippur as part of our atonement, asking G-d to forgive our sins of the past year; and to give cha...

Through the course of American history and two centuries of developing constitutional law, two great principles have emerged, both of which have become increasingly ignored by many good and patriotic Americans. The first of these principles was hamme...

This article won second-place in the American Jewish Press Association’s annual Simon Rockower Award program. Rosh Hashanah is the time of year when we as individuals find ourselves at the center of the universe in direct communication with God. For...

Making friends is an important part of human development, human experience and ultimately human happiness. It begins in very early childhood. Some children are born with personalities that are naturally gregarious, and other children suffer shyness...

On March 26, 2022, with much fanfare and staging in the Polish capital of Warsaw and with the whole world watching, the President of the United States and the leader of the Free World, made a speech which can only be described as, employing the...

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision that reversed Roe v. Wade, the five justices of the United States Supreme Court who voted in favor of the reversal embraced Mississippi’s statutory definition of a fetus as...

On Jan. 15, 2022, during Shabbat services, Congregation Beth Israel located in Colleyville, Texas, a suburb of Ft. Worth was attacked by an armed individual who barricaded himself in the synagogue, after taking four congregants hostage, including...

News of prominent NYC business woman and Jewish philanthropist, Helene Fortunoff’s death brought back memories of working in the Fortunoff family business during my college years in the 1960s. Helene was the last of the second generation of m...

As the holiday season concludes with this evening’s New Year’s celebrations and tomorrow’s recovery, the same old problem of 2021 confronting the Jewish people is carried over into 2022, namely global antisemitism. As we move into the new year,...

In October, I wrote about the president’s announced shift from a foreign policy strategy of military intervention to a policy of “relentless diplomacy”; and the challenges he will face in dealing with Iran and with increased Palestinian intra...

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or the free exercise thereof …” It is not just by chance that these profound words were chosen to be the very first words of the 1st Amendment to the Bill of Rights. The first coloni...

Lebanon is the little Arab brother that reluctantly got into its big brothers’ fight with Israel. Lebanon won its formal independence in 1943 with the termination of the French Mandate established by the League of Nations. It became truly independent...