Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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Part 1 of a series In recognition of 20 years since the Gaza pullout, JNS is featuring a five-part series of articles reflecting Israel's disengagement, speaking with an array of former Gush Katif residents to find out how they perceive the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the Trump plan for the Gaza Strip and the prospect of returning. About two months into the Israel Defense Forces' invasion into the Gaza Strip as part of "Operation Swords of Iron" in retaliation of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern...
Roslyn (Roz) Weber Halpern, 82, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, passed away peacefully on July 7, 2025, at Elizabeth Residence Bayside. Born on Oct. 8, 1942, she was raised in Philadelphia, Pa., and graduated from Temple University with a degree in education. After graduation, she was married to Rabbi Larry J. Halpern, with whom she had two children, Susan and Ari. They moved to Orlando, Florida in 1970 where Roz was an active member of the community starting the JCC’s summer camp program, serving as chair of the Jewish Federation of Greater O...
(JNS) — The United States will examine “alternative options” to bring home the 50 captives held by Hamas as the terrorist group “does not appear to be coordinated or acting in good faith,” U.S. Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff said on Thursday. “We have decided to bring our team home from Doha for consultations after the latest response from Hamas, which clearly shows a lack of desire to reach a ceasefire in Gaza,” U.S. President Donald Trump’s point man in the talks wrote in an X post on Thursday afternoon. While mediators Qatar and Egypt “have...
Tom Lehrer never identified closely with his ancestral Judaism. But the famed satirist and mathematician, who died Saturday, July 26, at 97, wrote one of the first popular songs about a Jewish holiday. "(I'm Spending) Hanukkah in Santa Monica" debuted in 1990, well after Lehrer's peak as a performer, on a come-from-retirement performance on Garrison Keillor's radio show. Keillor commissioned the new song from Lehrer because, he observed, Jews had written many popular Christmas songs but none for...
Rabbi Neil Danzig, a longtime professor of rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and an authority on the post-Talmudic Babylonian scholars known as the Geonim, died July 4. He was 74. A longtime resident of Teaneck, New Jersey, he was buried in Israel. As a scholar of medieval rabbinic literature, Danzig explored the halachic, or Jewish legal, writings of the Geonim, the Jewish leaders and scholars during the late sixth to mid-11th centuries in what is now Iraq. The Geonim secured the Babylonian Talmud as the central canonica...
(JNS) — The U.S. State Department announced on Wednesday that it is investigating Harvard University’s participation in the exchange visitor visa program. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested that Harvard’s continued use of the program might undermine U.S. national security. “To maintain their privilege to sponsor exchange visitors, sponsors must comply with all regulations, including conducting their programs in a manner that does not undermine the foreign policy objectives or compromise the national security interests of the United...
Anti-Israel vandals deface AOC’s office Anti-Israel vandals defaced the Bronx, N.Y., office of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Sunday after the far-left member of “The Squad” in the U.S. House of Representatives voted against cutting aid to the Jewish state, the New York Post reported. The vandals wrote in red paint that the congresswoman “funds genocide in Gaza.” The Boogie Down Liberation Front, which claimed responsibility, stated that “the Bronx is sick and tired of people like AOC and Ritchie Torres using us as a stepping-st...
Israel says its army is pausing military operations in some parts of Gaza for 10 hours a day to facilitate the distribution of aid to civilians. The announcement Sunday comes amid a global outcry about the hunger crisis in the Palestinian enclave where the IDF has been battling Hamas for more than 21 months. Israel also dropped supplies by air for the first time in the war on Sunday, while Egypt allowed aid to enter through its border with Gaza in a first for a period when hostilities are ongoing. In the first “humanitarian pause,” Israel said...
(JNS) — House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) voiced support for extending Israeli sovereignty to Judea and Samaria during a meeting with Samaria Regional Council leader Yossi Dagan in Washington. “Sovereignty is so important to the world. It’s so important to all of us,” Scalise said. The congressman spoke alongside Dagan after taking part in a summit on the issue organized by the council on Capitol Hill. “We always pray for Israel and especially the people of Samaria,” Scalise said. “We know how difficult the times are but keep mora...
(JNS) — An Israeli musician says he and two colleagues were kicked out of a restaurant in Vienna for speaking Hebrew, while elsewhere in Austria, a couple from Israel reported being denied service at a trailer park because of their nationality. The musicians — Hagai Shaham, Julia Gurvitch and Amit Peled — were waiting for the server at an eatery called “Pizzeria Ristorante Ramazzotti” on Meiselstrasse, a quiet street in Vienna’s 2nd district, or Leopoldstadt, which is the city’s most heavily Jewish quarter. The server heard them speaking Hebr...
I’m reading a new novel by an Israeli author that has nothing to do with the war in Gaza, or any current crisis for that matter. I can’t tell if I feel relieved or guilty. With a world in turmoil, how much permission can I give myself to tune out — if tuning out is even possible? Iddo Gefen’s “Mrs. Lilienblum’s Cloud Factory” is set in a village on the lip of a crater deep in the Negev Desert — far from the bright lights of Tel Aviv and even Beersheba. When the family matriarch invents a machi...
