Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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When Lake Brantley High School incoming juniors Jennifer Simon and Alexandra George were looking for a place to volunteer this summer to fulfill the Bright Futures scholarship requirement of 100 hours of community service, their Internet search of local organizations brought them to The Jewish Pavilion. They knew it would be a perfect fit, Simon said. Both of them have grandparents that they enjoy spending time with, and they were impressed with the mission of the organization and wanted to...
Cade Resnick is a dreamer and visionary in the classroom and the community. "I see what I think would be amazing. If I can get other people on board with me, then we can do that!" He has spent 16 years as a well-grounded economics and psychology high school teacher and served as a Winter Springs city commissioner. This combination of visionary, community service and teacher has a lot of impact on his students, and he hopes to make this impact on all the students and community in Seminole County...
WASHINGTON (JTA)-The Trump administration has withdrawn the United States from the U.N. Human Rights Council because of its bias against Israel. Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, jointly announced the pullout on June 19. "The Human Rights Council is an exercise in shameless hypocrisy," Pompeo told the media at the State Department. "For too long, the human rights council has been a protector of human rights abusers and a cesspool of...
WASHINGTON (JTA)-It's like finding out that the White House has a mikvah in its basement and no one knows about it. Up an elegant stairway next to the concert hall at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is the "Concert Lounge dedicated by the State of Israel." It's a delicate, quiet refuge from Washington that bursts with, well, Israeliness: Paintings and wooden reliefs feature biblical scenes by Israeli artists who were well known in their time. Forty-seven years after it was...
Just a few weeks ago Lynn and I, together with a group of 39 people from Congregation Sinai and Temple Israel, had the pleasure of being in Israel for the 70th anniversary of the proclamation of the independence of the Jewish state. Yom Ha Zikaron (Remembrance Day) began for our group the evening of April 17 with a gathering of many thousands of Israelis at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv. El Maale Rachamim and Kaddish were said along with music selections appropriate for the occasion being performed and televised throughout the country. Sirens...
Race & Law On Sunday, July 10, the Holocaust Center presents a program titled Race & Law, from 6 p.m.-8 p.m. at the Holocaust Center. Hitler believed that as a group, Jews were racially inferior to the Aryan people. It was this belief that led to the development and implementation of the Nuremberg laws. What constitutes race? Are we as different as we believe? How are race and law connected today? Join us for this discussion as we explore the intersection of race and law in Nazi Germany and the...
A video about our freedoms followed by a talk by Lauri Cardoza-Moore, founder of Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, will be presented by People Promoting Peace and held at Fellowship Church in Winter Springs on July 9 from 6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m. Cardoza-Moore is a tireless advocate through her role as a special envoy to the United Nations for human rights and anti-Semitism on behalf of 44 million Christians to her leadership in statehouses through PJTN's anti-Semitism Awareness Resolution. She is...
(JTA)-On June 10, 2002, Charles Krauthammer delivered the Distinguished Rennert Lecture upon receiving the Guardian of Zion Award from Bar-Ilan University's Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies. Below is an excerpt from the lecture titled "He Tarries: Jewish Messianism and the Oslo Peace." Krauthammer died on June 21, 2018. In the 1990s, America slept and Israel dreamed. The United States awoke on Sept. 11, 2001. Israel awoke in September 2000. Like the left and like the reverie that...
(JNS)-At New York's John F. Kennedy Airport on Monday night, Birthright Fellow and student leader Ariel Tidhar reported that the American Jewish activist group IfNotNow waylaid their group, as well as four other Taglit Birthright groups trying to check into their flights to Israel. IfNotNow attempts "to end American Jewish support for the occupation," referring to lands administered by Israel after wars, including eastern Jerusalem. Tidhar told JNS, "They set up a table with a sign and snacks, a...
(JNS)—Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet, announced on Sunday that it had broken up a major Hamas terrorist cell that was forming in the West Bank Palestinian city of Nablus. The Shin Bet described the cell as unusual in its scope and activities. It was plotting major terrorist atrocities, including suicide bombings, planting bombs and gun attacks targeting Israeli cities and smaller communities. The cell comprised of more than 20 suspected operatives, most of them Hamas members. During counter-terrorist raids to break it up, l...
(JNS)—Once again, Hezbollah flags flew in London last weekend at the Iran-supporting “Al Quds” march in Britain’s capital city. Hezbollah, the proxy army of the Iranian regime, is responsible for numerous murderous attacks around the world against Jews, Americans and other Western interests. No matter. The march—an annual London fixture, no less—featured calls for Israel to be wiped from the map, and was led by a man who previously made the deranged claim that “Zionists” were behind an appalling London apartment block fire last year in which m...
In my last column I tried to reduce some 5,000 years of our history to less than a thousand words. I apologize for the gaps. So, now let us turn to the “Palestinians.” If you search history you will find that the land that is today Israel did not have a formal “Nation State” prior to the Israelites coming in from a long desert trek. There were no “Arabs” living there. The “Arabs” of the time were basically wandering Bedouin nomads. Before Israel, the land was visited by the Phoenicians and Greeks as they built routes for trade (and war). By t...
(JNS)—It was just another day at the office for U.N. officials. As it has done innumerable times in the last 50 years, on June 12, the General Assembly devoted an entire day of debate, procedural wrangling and voting to an effort to condemn Israel. As was the case with almost every previous effort of this kind, it succeeded. The resolution in this case was one that condemned Israel for the violence in recent weeks along the border with Gaza. It placed the sole blame on Israel, which, it said, used, “excessive, disproportionate and ind...
Is our civilization worth keeping alive? This sounds like a ridiculous question. Of course it is worth saving we would say. In fact, most of us don’t even see the need to protect our civilization. We are nestled in the belief that it will last forever. America is strong, powerful. It is the land of the “free.” In reality, no civilization lasts forever. Where is the Greek or Roman civilization? Actually, the only people who have survived, though they were dispersed from their land for about 2,000 years, are the Jewish people. Once again they...
(JTA)—Let me start by stating what should be obvious: Holocaust comparisons are lazy and more often than not hysterical. They diminish Nazism and genocide by making them synonyms for “very bad things.” You may regard the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance stance at the border, and its policy of separating parents and children, as inhumane and un-American. But if you think that’s Nazism, you don’t know Nazism. But wow, was Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ reply weird when Laura Ingraham asked him about the Nazi comparisons. Here’s the Ju...
Dear Editor: In the 15 June 2018 letter to the Heritage, Richard H. Gleick comments on the absence of Democrats at the opening of the embassy in Jerusalem and as a result not understanding why any Jew would support the Democratic Party. I would like to point out to Mr. Gleick that many, if not most, Jews and non-Jews, who are strong supporters of Israel, and who consider Jerusalem the capital of Israel, question from a strategic point of view whether this was the proper time to move the embassy to Jerusalem. To question Chuck Schumer, and...
MORNING AND EVENING MINYANS (Call synagogue to confirm time.) Chabad of South Orlando—Monday - Friday, 8 a.m. and 10 minutes before sunset; Saturday, 9:30 a.m.; Sunday, 8:15 a.m., 407-354-3660. Congregation Ahavas Yisrael—Monday - Friday, 7:30 a.m.; Saturday, 9:30 a.m.; Sunday, 9 a.m., 407-644-2500. Congregation Chabad Lubavitch of Greater Daytona—Monday, 8 a.m.; Thursday, 8 a.m., 904-672-9300. Congregation Ohev Shalom—Sunday, 9 a.m., 407-298-4650. GOBOR Community Minyan at Jewish Academy of Orlando—Monday—Friday, 7:45 a.m.—8:30 a.m. Temple I...
President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser said in an interview published Sunday that the administration will soon present its Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, with or without input from Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. In an interview published in the Arabic language Al-Qudsnewspaper, Jared Kushner appealed directly to Palestinians and criticized Abbas, who has shunned Washington over its alleged pro-Israel bias, particularly on the fate of Jerusalem, Israel’s capital. The interview came out after a weeklong trip around the reg...
JERUSALEM (JTA)-Vanessa, a Venezuelan-American olah, or immigrant, had experienced a hard landing in Israel. Faced with persistent financial problems, she had trouble holding on to an apartment. Turning to the Internet, she found Keep Olim in Israel, an online group dedicated to crowdsourcing solutions for newcomers to the Jewish state. There she found people who were able to help her solve her personal housing crisis. Later, after she underwent surgery, the same group, which boasts 40,000...
The first time Rabbi Raphael Karlin gave his sixth-grade students a Talmud game, it didn't turn out quite the way he expected. The challenge was to take a passage of Talmud cut up into six parts and reassemble the components in the correct order. The process required his students at the Jewish Education Center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to replicate a line of Talmudic argumentation followed by rabbis who lived 2,000 years ago. On the first round, no one got it right. So Karlin had them look at...
Joshua Glasser was called to the Torah as a bar mitzvah on June 2, 2018, at Chabad of Altamonte Springs. Celebrating this joyous occasion with him were his parents, Mitchell and Tamara Glasser, his sister, Sarah Glasser, residents of Altamonte Springs, and uncles, aunts, and cousins from Florida, New York and New Jersey. "We join together wishing Mazal Tov to the Glasser family," said Rabbi Mendy Bronstein. "May Joshua continue to bring them much nachas!"...
(Israel Hayom via JNS)—A Hamas plan to carry out terrorist attacks in Israeli cities has been thwarted, the Shin Bet security agency revealed on Sunday. According to available details, Shin Bet agents, in collaboration with the military and police, uncovered terrorist infrastructure they described as “extraordinary in its size and level of activity” operating in the Nablus area in the West Bank. According to the Shin Bet, the leader of the 20-member cell was paid $100,000 by a Syrian operative to target major Israeli cities. The inves...
This report really upset me... I read this in the World Jewish Congress digest and pass it along to you: "The World Jewish Congress decried the United Nations Human Rights Council's recent adoption of five resolutions under Agenda Item 7 accusing Israel of human rights abuses and violations of international law in the Golan Heights and Palestinian territories. (I visited the Golan Heights some years ago during the Yom Kippur war.) 'The U.N. Human Rights Council has once again let its biased and...
(JTA)-"Ethics of the Fathers" includes this bold advice from Rabbi Yishmael: "When we learn in order to act, we become learners, teachers, preservers and doers." So many Jewish institutions are asking how they might engage younger people, raise a new generation of leaders and appeal across age groups. How might they advance the Jewish journeys of their volunteers, followers and "users," and take them further toward greater interest in and commitment to Jewish life? Limmud, a global network of...
(Israel Hayom via JNS)—The collaboration between the European Union and left-wing groups seeking to undermine Israel and the Israel Defense Forces now includes the funding of legal proceedings against IDF soldiers, a watchdog group revealed last week. NGO Monitor, which promotes greater transparency among foreign-funded Israeli nongovernmental organization, claims that the program, to which the European Union has allocated €250,000 ($290,000), was set up at the request of three left-wing groups and is slated to be in place at least until 202...
