Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 4401 - 4425 of 4470
LOS ANGELES (JTA)—Some 65 years after a band of foreign volunteers took to the skies to ensure Israel’s birth and survival, filmmakers are racing to bring their exploits to the screen before the last of the breed passes away. Among the competing producers and their financial backers are such famous names as Spielberg and Lansky. And though their budgets fall well short of Hollywood blockbuster standards, their competitive spirits are just as intense. Nancy Spielberg, the youngest of Steven Spielberg’s three sisters, is the producer of “Abov... Full story
Ben, an Israel Defense Forces reservist, recalls when his unit took up a position to sleep inside a beat-up old Volkswagen van outside a Palestinian village. Hearing a knock on their van’s door, and preparing for the worst, the soldiers jumped up with their guns ready—only to discover it was a “little old Palestinian grandma.” Telling personal stories such as that one, which Ben recently recounted at Boston University (BU), helps put a human face on Israeli soldiers who are often condemn... Full story
According to the dictionary, the word illuminate means “to enlighten someone intellectually or spiritually.” This can be done in a variety of ways. For example, Debra Band uses illustrations (which she calls illuminations) to offer commentary and insights into the biblical text. In her third book, “Arise! Arise! Deborah, Ruth and Hannah” (Honeybee in the Garden), Band focuses on three biblical stories featuring women as main characters. Although additional literary commentary is offered by Arnold J. Band, her father-in-law, a professor of Hebre... Full story
Wow! Talk about your good ideas… Have any of you seen the latest Febreze commercials? (You know… the ones where people are blind-folded and asked to sit in a room or in a car.) They don’t know that there is either garbage, dirty underwear, or some other fowl-smelling items placed near them. And the reason they don’t know, you ask? The air-effects-product Febreze is placed near them to disguise the odors. Comments the blind-folded people make sound something like this: “It smells like a garden.... Full story
THESSALONIKI, Greece (JTA)—It was spring in northern Greece, 1943. Efthymios Kontopoulos, 13, had come to Thessaloniki for the day when he saw Nazis rounding up the city’s Jews. “My father brought me into town,” Kontopoulos, who is not Jewish, said. “We saw them being taken away. They were with their [yellow] badges.” On March 15, 1943, the Nazis began deporting the Jews of Thessaloniki. Some 4,000 people were loaded onto cattle cars and shipped off to Auschwitz. Eighteen more convoys fol... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA)—While a great deal of international and media focus has been placed on Israel’s military conflicts, the country quietly has become an energetic, ambitious incubator of entrepreneurialism and invention. What follows is a timeline chronicling some of the most important and interesting innovations produced by Israelis during their country’s 65-year existence. RUMMIKUB (1940s): Ephraim Hertzano invents the smash hit board game Rummikub, which goes on to become the best-selling game... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA)—As a child of Holocaust survivors, I have always managed to avoid visiting Germany. Part of my parents’ legacy was never to visit the country, with its dark past—not even to own any products in our home that were made in Germany. Despite my reluctance to visit Germany, an opportunity arose that I could not forgo. A professional group to which I have belonged for 10 years was holding a meeting in Wiesbaden—the day after Yom Kippur, no less. As the international group of about 40 includes many friends and people with whom I regul... Full story
(JTA)—Every month or so, a highly emotional email lands in the inbox of Martin Kornfeld, CEO of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Slovakia. The authors invariably are Western tourists appalled by the neglect they witnessed during visits to one of the hundreds of Jewish cemeteries scattered across the country. Often their emails concern the final resting place of their relatives amid overgrown grasses and overturned tombstones. “They want us to fix it,” Kornfeld told JTA. “But ours is a sma... Full story
BEERSHEVA, Israel—Dramatic secularization changes have occurred in significant aspects of Israelis’ public and private lives, according to a new book, “Between State and Synagogue” (Cambridge University), by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) professor Guy Ben-Porat. “Rather than adopt a coherent religious or secular identity, the majority of Jewish Israelis continue to maintain at least some beliefs, identities and practices that can be described as religious,” says Ben-Porat, author and lecturer in BGU’s Department of Public Policy... Full story
The love affair between Naama Shafir and the city of Toledo, Ohio, began five years ago. That’s when the 18-year-old girl from Hoshaya, Israel, packed her bags and went to the Glass City. She knew no one there and knew little English. Little did she know that she would emerge as the greatest player in Toledo women’s basketball history. So, how did Shafir arrive from that tiny community of about 350 families halfway between Haifa and Tiberius to the city of Toledo, with its more than 250,000 res... Full story
The Seeking Kin column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA) – Some people search the world for those they knew before time and circumstance intruded. David Scherr was sitting at his desk at a Baltimore auto repair shop when the lost walked through the door. The amiable Scherr was working in the front office of K&S Associates when a tan Volvo station wagon was towed in this winter with electrical problems. Over the course of several days, Scherr regularly u... Full story
TEL AVIV—Americans work longer hours, take fewer vacation days and retire later than employees in other industrialized countries around the globe. With such demanding careers, it’s no surprise that many experience job burnout—physical, cognitive and emotional exhaustion that results from stress at work. Researchers have found that burnout is also associated with obesity, insomnia and anxiety. Now Dr. Sharon Toker of Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Management and her fellow researchers—professors Samuel Melamed, Shlomo Berliner, David Zeltser a... Full story
Thirty years ago, Israeli hiker Amos Ziv observed a group of visually impaired teens out on a nature trail. They were having a rough time of it, and Ziv decided the only solution was for him to find a way for people with disabilities to experience the great outdoors safely and enjoyably. That’s the story behind LOTEM, a nonprofit organization that now serves about 30,000 Israelis every year through a range of nature clubs and outdoor programs geared to children and adults with physical, c... Full story
AMSTERDAM (JTA)—The dreamy expression of a child at a chocolate factory slowly spreads across Geza Weisz’s handsome face as he watches the quivering breasts and buttocks of young black women dancing around him at an Amsterdam nightclub. The scene appears in “Only Decent People,” a dark and provocative Dutch-language film that examines the fraught relations between the country’s Jews and other minorities and stars Weisz, a Jewish Amsterdammer and a major movie star in Holland. Based on a 2009 be... Full story
Can Broadway musicals teach us about changing American attitudes to the Holocaust? In “Echoes of the Holocaust on the American Musical Stage” (McFarland and Co., Inc, Publishers), Jessica Hillman, an assistant professor of theater and dance at the State University of New York at Fredonia, uses eight Broadway shows to examine how this “unique American art form” has served as a “venue for playing out our cultural obsession with Nazism and the Holocaust.” Her focus is on the public perceptions of the Holocaust and how, as popular opinion changed,... Full story
See something? Say something… This saying really doesn’t apply here… but if the following email (or photo) I recently received, rings a bell in any way… do say something to someone, please. Especially, contact HANAN SHOMRONY via the email address below: “My name is Hanan Shomrony and I’m searching for my brother. He was born in 1946 , his parents’ first born, in Europe after the Second World War. In 1949, when he was 2 ½ years old, he and his parents made aliya to Zfat in Israel. He was hospita... Full story
A generation ago, kids Matt Nadel’s age would be content collecting baseball cards. But in 2013 Matt is making baseball news. Making and reporting it. At 14, Matt is the youngest “pro blogger” on MLB.com, writing not about his favorite contemporary players, or even those his dad, Steve, followed as a kid, but back to the days of Ruth, Cobb and Mathewson. “It gives me a much more thrilling feeling to study the background and history of the game,” said Matt, an eighth-grader at Golda Och Academy in West Orange, N.J. who lives in Springfie... Full story
Sometimes the right book appears at just the right time. That was the case with Anne Lamott’s “Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers.” The past few months have been difficult for a variety of reasons and I’ve been seeking ways to handle the stress. When writing about asking God for help, the Christian Lamott offers suggestions for dealing with difficult times. Her advice made me look closer at my Jewish thoughts and practices. Lamott believes in order to survive our hardest moments, we must release our problems and hand them over to... Full story
In his video, performance art and photography, Shimon Attie reminds viewers of the way history imposes on the present—and demands that they confront the past. Whether depicting the devastating effect of the Holocaust on Berlin’s Jewish community or the human side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Los Angeles-born artist turns to his craft to transmit images of loss and shared dreams. “The common theme is displacement,” said Attie during “Art and Memory: Moving Images,” a recent prog... Full story
The camera opens on a frazzled Philip Roth. He is futzing with the horseshoe of hair he has left, rubbing his face and furrowing his unruly brow as a look of supreme unease settles over his face. For a man who recently announced his retirement, he seems a bit stressed. And for a writer who has spent the better part of his life projecting outward, Roth, at first, squirms under the scrutiny of the camera’s gaze. “In the coming years I have two great calamities to face,” he announces at the beginning of the documentary “Philip Roth: Unmaske... 
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Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology report that cells from the amniotic membrane part of the placenta normally discarded after a woman gives birth could one day be a source for human eggs. The discovery was published online recently in Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology. Amniotic membrane cells—originated about eight days after conception—preserve the plasticity of an embryo’s cells before they differentiate. The Technion researchers found these cells also have the ability to differentiate into ones that expre... Full story
It was the first day of spring, and Jeffrey Tambor was sitting in his car in the snow near his New York home, conducting an interview while his 6-year-old daughter—one of his four children, ages 3 to 8, including twin toddlers—was taking her piano lesson. “Daddy is tired, but I’m a lucky guy,” he said in his signature baritone. Life is good for the 68-year-old actor, not only in terms of his family but also in the realm of his career: In May, Tambor will reprise his role as George Bluth Sr.... Website
NEW YORK (JTA)—Advertising, it’s fair to say, is in Ben Feldman’s blood. Yes, he technically plays a fictional advertiser, the Jewish copywriter in AMC’s award-winning drama “Mad Men.” But Feldman says it was his excellent marketing skills that landed him the role. “The casting loved that I was a Jew in real life,” Feldman told JTA. “They were looking for the typical character, a Jew with a heavy accent, and I played it up for all it was worth.” A 32-year-old traditional Jew from Washington, Fe... Full story
“Tele-Vangelizing” in Israel?... What else could you call it? The name “tele-vangelizing” seems perfect! This comes from The World Jewish Congress Foundation Digest with my asides: “There’s something stirring in the air over Jerusalem and Israelis are feeling the static. It’s one thing for evangelical Christians to show their fervid support for Israel. It is quite another thing for them to tell Jews to convert in time for the Second Coming.” (Really? Sure, I pretended to convert when I was 5 ye... Full story
Refaeli choice stirs a ruckus NEW YORK—Among Israelis, supermodel Bar Refaeli has been among the more controversial figures. It’s not because people are jealous of her looks. Or friends. Or wealth. Or success. Well, maybe partly. But more Israelis think of her negatively because she dodged the compulsory draft in the country. Refaeli married a family friend in order to be exempted from service. Now she is at the center of a dispute between the Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli Ministry of... Full story
