Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA) - It was an unusual Academy Awards in several ways. Forced to adapt to social distancing protocols, the ceremony was split into different venues but mostly took place in Los Angeles' Union Station. For only the second time in history, a woman won best director - and the first woman of color at that, as the award went to Chloe Zhao for "Nomadland," which also won best picture. And then there was Glenn Close's meme-able dance to the self-explanatory 1988 song "Da Butt." Also notable: a very...
(JNS) - When Rosalyn Gold-Onwude was a college student at Stanford University, she participated on Birthright Israel. Several years later, she went on her second trip-this time, as a staff member on her younger sister's Birthright experience. While participating in the program is not so unusual - more than 600,000 Jewish young people have gone on the free, 10-day trips since the program's founding in 1999 - Gold-Onwude's story is a bit different. She is the only Birthright participant to play...
Part 2 of 2 Laurence Morrell's father passed away right after he graduated from Emory University in Atlanta. "I came back home immediately and had to take over the running of my father's business. My brother was working for Martin-Marietta, so he and my mother would show me where the groves were. Together, we took over the management of 550 acres of citrus. It was mid-summer, the weeds were crotch high, and the heat/humidity was intense that summer," Morrell recalled. Morrell learned about the g...
"It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world"... Yes! That's the name of a movie I watched on television recently. It starred many, many, many, many (I got carried away) Jewish comedians. To name but a few, Leonard Hacker was one. (You may have known him as Buddy Hackett. Brooklyn born (like me), he died in 2003. Also, Milton Berle, Sid Caeser, Carl Reiner and Phil Silvers (to name a few more) ... all from either Manhattan, Brooklyn or the Bronx. (of course!) (What talent! What great comedy minds! Will...
“The Lost Key,” the first and only film ever to explore bedroom intimacy endorsed by leading rabbis worldwide, invites everyone seeking closeness amid our currently disconnected society to screen the film for free beginning on May 22, and then join its ‘Intimacy After the Pandemic’ live virtual panel discussion on May 23, 7 p.m. The panel will discuss marriage, sex, and achieving the highest form of intimacy based on ancient wisdom that was hidden for centuries. RSVP is required and registered guests will be allowed to ask questions anonymo...
(JTA) — In the middle of a racy viral Instagram video that preceded his firing from a broadcasting gig at ESPN, NBA legend Paul Pierce spent over a minute lauding the Jewish ritual of a sit-down Shabbat dinner. Pierce is not Jewish, but during the live-streamed video from his house over the weekend — the Hall of Fame finalist gets massaged by scantily clad women and appears to smoke marijuana while flaunting COVID-19 social distancing protocols — he said the family style of meal on the Jewish Sabbath contrasts with his upbringing. At first...
(JTA) - Growing up, Passover was always a special time of year for David Teyf. It wasn't just about the holiday. It was also the stories his family would tell about the matzah factory they used to operate behind his grandfather's house in Minsk before they left Soviet Belarus in 1979. Teyf, who was born in that house, was 5 when they left that capital city. Now a successful chef, Teyf has few memories of the matzah factory. Yet he has found himself thinking about it more often lately as he...
(JTA) — In the late 1800s, the Ottoman Empire was looking to conscript men into its army, including the several thousand young Jewish ones who were living in the city of Baghdad. The Jewish community didn’t like the idea of the imperial forces taking away its young men, so it arranged to pay authorities for exemptions. Rabbi Shlomo Bekhor Husin of Baghdad documented the exemptions, carefully jotting each down name in medieval Rashi script. In the following decades, many of those names vanished or morphed as the Jews living there dispersed acr...
(JTA) - It was only about a week into lockdown last spring when Elana Brody took out her keyboard piano for a jam session. It was late at night, so it made sense that the new melody that came to her then was "B'shem Hashem" a part of the Shema. "It was kind of natural to want to sing this prayer because it's a bedtime prayer," Brody said, calling it an "incantation" of sorts. The words call on four angels to surround her - Michael to the right, Gabriel to the left, Uriel in front and Raphael beh...
(Israel21C via JNS) - Jerusalem is a city of history. Much of that history can be found in the ancient structures of the Old City. However, there's an aspect of Jerusalem's history that is much more subtly integrated into its geography: its street names. Many roads throughout the capital city are named after important figures in local and Jewish history. While there are obvious ones, such as Herzl Street and Balfour Street, many names on street signs pay tribute to lesser-known personalities....
(JTA) — Last year at this time, the message out of Jewish summer camps was one of doom and gloom. In April 2020, the Union for Reform Judaism announced that COVID would force a closure of its camps for the summer, affecting some 10,000 kids. In May, the Conservative movement’s Ramah camps across the country followed suit. This year, the outlook could not be more different. Camps in the United States are opening again with a combination of testing and vaccinations, along with a better understanding of how COVID-19 spreads. “It’s absolutely exhau...
The Torah tells us that Sarah, the matriarch of the Jewish people, laughed when told she’d give birth in her old age. Since that moment, it seems, Jews have continued laughing — at themselves and their predicaments, at each other, even at God. And beneath that laughter, and the humor that sparked it, lies the story of the Jewish people throughout the age. History Jewish humor as a genre got its start in 19th-century Eastern Europe, where Yiddish folk tales found the humor in the often-difficult everyday life of the shtetl (village). The gre...
Part 1 of 2 Laurence Morrell is very proud that he considers himself, "the last of the Jewish rednecks." He's proud because he's worked hard outside in the elements, in the fields of orange groves that once dotted the landscape of central Florida. In the scheme of things, it wasn't that long ago. At 78, he has been a part of the early migrations of Jews in the Orlando area. His grandfather, Abraham M. Bornstein, was in the textile industry in Lodz, Poland, before coming to Paterson, N.J.,...
More famous Jewish talents... If you're as old as me, you will remember actress Marion Levy. NO! YOU DON'T REMEMBER HER? How about if I use her entertainment name? Surely, you've heard of Paulette Goddard. Paulette was a famous star in her day. Her dad was a Russian/Jew (weren't all of our ancestors? Only kidding, of course.) She was once married to Charlie Chaplin for about 6 years. Very famous, very famous! How about GLORIA STEINEM? She is super famous! (Best of all, she's older than me!) Glor...
(JTA) - A mere 43 years after her death, Golda Meir is ready for her close-up. Just a month after it was announced that the Israeli star Shira Haas would portray Meir in a TV series, The Hollywood Reporter revealed this week that Oscar winner Helen Mirren would portray Israel's only female prime minister in an upcoming biopic. While Haas, who is best known for her star turn in the miniseries "Unorthodox," is Jewish, Mirren is not. But she did win international acclaim (and the Academy Award) for...
(New York Jewish Week via JTA) - Growing up, Aaron Bendich would spend lots of time with his grandfather Max in the North Bronx, in a house "filled to the brim" with records, videotapes and CDs. Among Max's collection were recordings of Yiddish songs and other Jewish music. Fast forward a few years and Aaron is the manager of the radio station at Vassar College and taking Yiddish classes. Inevitably he started a show featuring Yiddish music and spent his free time scouring thrift shops and used...
Husband to the Queen for 74 years, Prince Philip was deeply proud of his mother, Princess Alice of Greece, who was recognized as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. "I suspect that it never occurred to her that her action was in any way special," Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, once said about his mother who rescued a family of Jews during the Shoah. "She was a person with deep religious faith and she would have considered it to be a totally human action to fellow human beings in...
(JTA) - Holocaust remembrance day programs in Jewish communities have stuck to a familiar form for decades, featuring Holocaust survivors sharing their stories followed by the lighting of yahrzeit candles and the recitation of commemorative prayers. But that model of memorial faces a problem that is growing more pressing each year: the dwindling number of survivors still living and able to share accounts of their painful past. That reality drove Michal Govrin, an Israeli writer and professor,...
(JTA) — Drawing a line between its mission of Holocaust remembrance and the ravages inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic, the March of the Living honored Dr. Anthony Fauci with an award for “moral courage in medicine” on the eve of Yom Hashoah, Israel’s Holocaust commemoration day. The award to Fauci, who for decades has been the top U.S. official handling infectious diseases, culminated in an online program on Wednesday called “Medicine and Morality.” In his acceptance remarks, Fauci referred to Maimonides, the medieval Jewish scholar and...
When Aaron Feinblatt moved to Israel in late February 2020, just as the first signs of the worldwide coronavirus outbreak were emerging, only one person wore a mask on his aliyah flight. Feinblatt had no idea that masks would soon become the norm for him and everyone else, nor how COVID-19 would affect the first year in his new home. "I got here two weeks before the country completely shut down," he said. "With all the lockdowns and restrictions in the last year, I feel like I have been...
Once again, I repeat, "getting old is not for sissies ...(me) I am astounded by all the famous folks that I didn't know were Jewish. For instance, WILLIAM SHATNER. I just learned that he was from Montreal, Canada (where my mom was born! His ancestry is identical to mine ... Canada, Russia, Ukraine, maybe Austria, maybe Poland.) He is about 90 years old ... NOT ME!! And, because I'm thinking about me (what else is new?), I want to mention two of my favorite songwriters who are also Jewish ......
"A Place at the Table" tells the story of two middle-school girls, Elizabeth and Sara - one Jewish and one Muslim - whose friendship begins in a South Asian cooking class taught by Sara's mother. Elizabeth is a budding chef and Sara is the new kid in school. Both girls have mothers who are studying to become American citizens, and as the girls gravitate toward each other, they must learn to ask awkward questions, be open to honest answers and comfortable standing up for each other even at the ex...
(JTA) - When Rayhan Asat attended a Passover seder last month, its contours seemed familiar and different at once - especially the tradition of leaving a seat empty at the table. It reminded Asat, a lawyer, of leaving a seat empty for her brother, Ekpar, at her graduation from Harvard Law School in 2016. Ekpar, a member of China's Uighur minority, had been "disappeared" by the Chinese government. Jewish World Watch, an anti-genocide group that hosted the online seder for Uighurs on March 30,...
(Crescent City Jewish News via JNS) - Rabbi Peter Hyman was announced as the recipient of the Bronze Wolf Award, the highest Scouting award in the world and the only one given by the World Scout Committee, on March 30. It acknowledges the significant work of an individual to the World Scout Movement. Hyman became the 377th individual to have received this award since it was first established in 1935. The founder of the Scouting movement, Lord Robert Smyth Baden-Powell, was the initial...
Long-time philanthropist, community leader and dedicated Zionist, Bruce Gould has a new role - producer of a documentary portraying the complex and consequential life of the late Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, whose 1977 meeting in Jerusalem with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was an act of unprecedented courage and a turning point for the Jewish state. The film is debuting in Florida at the Miami Jewish Film Festival, running virtually from April 14-29. Titled "Upheaval: The Journey of...
