Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Biden administration has suspended assistance to Sudan, including assistance related to its normalization deal with Israel, and wants Israel to call out the bloody coup that removed the country’s civilian government last year. “The United States is not moving forward at this time with assistance originally committed to Sudan’s civilian-led transitional government in connection with its efforts to improve Sudan’s bilateral relationship with Israel,” a State Department spokesman said in an email Friday in response to...
(JNS) — Israel has boosted the deployment of its air-defense systems due to concerns that Iran could retaliate for the May 22 assassination of a senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officer in Tehran, Kan News reported on Monday. The move comes after the National Security Council took the unusual step on Monday of updating a travel advisory to Turkey, citing a tangible threat of Iranian attack on Israeli nationals there. On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett told a weekly government meeting that “the era of immunity for Ira...
Lillian Sweet Berkowitz passed away peacefully, surrounded by family, on June 4, 2022, at the age of 94. Her husband Dr. Milo M. Berkowitz predeceased her in 2009. She was born to Harry and Bella Sweet of Brooklyn, New York, in February 1928, and has ever since told her family she was happy for her good life. She grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn and graduated from City College of New York. After college she traveled for two years throughout post-war Europe and to Israel with her sister. She... Full story
JERUSALEM (JTA) — I was on a short visit to Israel last week, and spent time with a friend with whom I have been engaged in a 30-year argument. Elli Wohlgelernter and I met when he was the managing editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and I was a staff reporter. We would argue about the future of Jewish life in the Diaspora, which even then he considered in unstoppable decline. We continued the argument after he moved to Israel not soon after. Over the years we’ve both dug in our heels: I am convinced, even after living for a time in Isr...
(JNS) — The Jewish presence in the Galilee is shrinking — in part, critics say, because of government policies that effectively discriminate against Jews in favor of Arabs, who constitute the vast majority of the area’s inhabitants. The stakes are high, say those warning of the danger, noting that a large ethnic minority controlling a significant bloc of territory can lead to irredentist movements. “The issue also exists in the Negev with the Bedouin, but the problem in the Galilee is much more serious,” Bentzi Lieberman, chairman of the Shilo...
In a first, Israeli government to pay Orthodox women to advise on Jewish law By Ron Kampeas (JTA) — In a first, Israel will pay 21 women to be advisers on Jewish law in the Orthodox community, a concept that has spread in the United States but that Israel’s Orthodox establishment has resisted. Matan Kahana, the deputy religious services minister, said in a release Thursday he will hire the women for “communities across Israel” this year. Women advisers on halacha, or Jewish law, have flourished in recent years in the United States, where t...
(JNS) — U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government has resolved to pass legislation that will stop public bodies from adopting anti-Israel boycott resolutions. The proposed legislation was outlined in the Queen’s Speech, an annual ceremonial address on May 10 that opens parliament and which sets out the government’s legislative priorities. The bill’s purpose, according to a government summary, is to stop public bodies in the United Kingdom from engaging in BDS measures and to prevent them “adopting their own approach to...
(JTA) — French President Emmanuel Macron has appointed as prime minister Élisabeth Borne, a former cabinet minister whose father, Joseph Bornstein, was a Polish Holocaust survivor who died by suicide when she was 11. Borne, a 61-year-old former Socialist Party politician who previously had served as labor minister, is the second woman to hold the post and one of several people with Jewish roots, including Laurent Fabius and Leon Blum. Joseph Bornstein and his three brothers, Isaac, Albert and Leon, were born to Polish-Jewish immigrants in Be...
(JTA) – General Mills announced Tuesday it would be fully divesting from a business venture in Israel that had operated in an East Jerusalem settlement, in a move pro-Palestinian activists celebrated as the result of their campaign against the food conglomerate. The Minnesota-based company has operated a Pillsbury frozen-food factory in the Atarot Industrial Zone since 2002, in a joint venture with Israeli investment group Bodan Holdings. In a statement, the company said it would sell its majority stake in the venture back to Bodan as part o...
(JTA) — More than half of bankruptcies in the United States are connected to medical debt. For some families in the Chicago area, however, that debt is being erased in accordance with the Jewish law of shmita, the sabbatical year. The Torah’s shmita laws prescribe that, every seven years, all agricultural activity in the Land of Israel is forbidden, and the land must be left fallow. There are many specific rules, including prohibition against plowing, pruning and planting. But a lesser-known custom in observance of the shmita year is the rel...
(JTA) - "The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem" has made headlines as one of the Israeli TV industry's most elaborate and expensive productions ever. The series, which follows a family of Spanish Sephardic Jews living in Jerusalem through different decades of the early 20th century, also features Ladino - the centuries-old language sometimes referred to as Judeo-Spanish that combines medieval Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish, Greek, Arabic and other influences. Ladino, spoken by Jewish communities...
