Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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In the millennia of Jewish history, several momentous events have stood out as turning points that subsequently influenced the lives of the Jewish people. The exodus from Egypt. The giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. The destruction of the Holy Temples in Jerusalem, and the Jewish exiles that followed. The writing of the Talmud. But many of these events are literally ancient history. And obvious. Some more-recent events in Jewish history have also played significant but often subtle roles in...
RYE, New York — This is the time of year when rabbis begin working on their High Holydays sermons, and Howard Goldsmith of Temple Emanu-El of Westchester had an idea for one the other day. Rabbi Goldsmith, who has served 15 years as spiritual leader of the congregation in suburban Westchester County, 25 miles north of New York City, was reading Yascha Mounk’s “The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time” (Penguin Press, 2023), about minority groups’ growing assertion of their individual identity within wider society. The book...
A question by the father in my “adopted” family in Israel caught me off guard several years ago. Over a motzei Shabbat meal in the restaurant of a swanky Jerusalem hotel, at a window-side table, my friend, a U.S.-born baal teshuvah who has served as the rosh kollel of a small haredi yeshiva for several decades, asked me out of the blue, “Do you think you have become more religious?” I also am baal teshuva, for the majority of my 75 years, but I didn’t know how to answer his question. First of all, I’m not comfortable with the description...
SUGAR LAND, Texas – The distance from Constellation Field, home of the Triple-A minor league Space Cowboys, to Daikin Park, where the major league Houston Astros play, is 20 miles. It’s a 27-minute drive. It took Colton Gordon two years to make the trip. Gordon, a 26-year-old left-handed Jewish pitcher, was named to the American Athletic Conference’s all-academic team while attending the University of Central Florida. He was drafted from UCF in the 8th round, in 2021, and started playing with the Space Cowboys in 2023. He helped his team win t...
(JTA) - In the months after Russian tanks rolled into her country last February, the music largely stopped for Elizaveta Sherstuk. The founder of a Jewish choral ensemble called Aviv in her hometown of Sumy, in the northeastern flank of Ukraine, Sherstuk had to put singing aside in favor of her day job and personal mission: delivering aid to Jews in Sumy. "There was no time to sleep," Sherstuk recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently. "All my team members worked the same, 24/7." A...
NEW YORK (The Jewish Week via JTA)—Just three weeks after terrorists killed four worshippers in a Jerusalem synagogue, a man entered a Brooklyn shul and stabbed a 22-year-old Israeli student. New York police officers fatally shot the 49-year-old assailant, who reportedly shouted “Kill the Jews.” At a press conference Tuesday, New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton said there is “no indication” the assailant, identified as Calvin Peters, was connected to a terrorist group. The Tuesday morning attack is being investigated as a hate cr... Full story
Phil Baum, who joined the American Jewish Congress after college and helped steer the advocacy organization’s growth in membership and influence until he retired as executive director in 2002, died in his sleep on March 27 at his Riverdale home. He was 94. Mr. Baum, who became the organization’s top professional leader in 1994, served the AJCongress during the decades when it ranked among the most effective voices for Jewish interests in the United States. It played a prominent role is such issues as pro-Israel advocacy and Soviet Jewry; it... Full story
The remaining members of the Ethiopian Jewish community will make aliyah by the end of this summer, and the Jewish Agency educational compound in the northern part of the country that has prepared them for their new lives in Israel will be turned over this month to the Ethiopian government. The compound in Gondar, which earlier was under the auspices of the North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry, “will not be needed beyond July,” said Misha Galperin, who heads the Jewish Agency’s department of international development. “That’s it. There... Full story
BETHESDA, Md.—Did Pope Pius XII, the leader of the Catholic Church during World War II and the subsequent decade, suppress a landmark Vatican document that his predecessor, Pius XI, had commissioned, a document that would have unambiguously criticized racism and anti-Semitism? And did that document—an encyclical, in Vatican parlance—actually exist? Historians and theologians have been asking these questions for decades. The so-called hidden encyclical has played a role—contrasting the attitudes and personalities of the two popes—since the end o... Full story
By Steve Lipman New York Jewish Week WARSAW, Poland—At a corner table in the Pod Samsonem restaurant, under framed etchings of the Bible’s Samson and of old Warsaw streetscapes, a middle-aged woman cuts up her “Jewish style” trout one recent evening. At other tables, next to walls lined with framed photographs of rabbis, and menorahs on a small shelf, other customers eat their entrees of “Karp po żydowsku” (Jewish-style carp) and “Kavior żydowski” (Jewish caviar). Pod Samsonem (the name means “under Samson”) is a prominent example in... Full story
