Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 4434 - 4458 of 4518
WARSAW, Poland (JTA)—Krzysztof Sliwinski, a longtime Catholic activist in Jewish-Polish relations, gazed wide-eyed at the swooping interior of this city’s Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Nearly two decades in the making, the more than $100 million institution officially opened to the public last week amid a month of high-profile, state-sponsored events marking the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. “It’s incredible, incredible, incredible how things have changed,” Sliwinski... Full story
Two hundred fifty people, one huge tent, and the smell of brisket coming from the oven, can only mean one thing: Passover at Chabad of UCF is here! Every year, Chabad of the University of Central Floria holds seders on the first two nights of Passover, open to all Jewish students in the Orlando area. With many students from out of state or even down south, and unable to celebrate Pesach with their families, Chabad remains their home away from home. There where even a few families that came to vi... Full story
A correction… In last week’s column I suggested sending garbage pails filled with doggie poop bags over to North Korea as a missile. I now realize that was such a bad idea because human poop is used to fertilize the soil in North Korea. If they are accustomed to inhaling that, well… what more need I say? Texas, Boston, Ricin poisoned letters… What a week. I shudder to think what’s in store. It’s starting to feel like we are living in Pakistan! So much hate, so many sick and twisted people. We do... Full story
BALTIMORE (JTA)—Josh Perelman is seeking kin—but not his own. Rather, Perelman is on a quest for families and individuals who will share memories, artifacts and pictures that help tell the story of the American Jewish relationship with baseball. As chief curator for the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, Perelman is mounting an exhibition that will open next March. Instead of focusing solely on American Jewish baseball icons such as Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax, the e... Full story
BUDAPEST, Hungary (JTA)—On a corner in the heart of the former Jewish ghetto here, David Popovits sits down for some matzah ball soup and super-sized dumplings at his newly opened kosher-style restaurant. A burly, 40-year-old Hungarian Jewish businessman, Popovits used to eat in the restaurant as a boy, when its former owners ran a “dirty little place that smelled like oil but had good Wiener schnitzel,” as Popovits puts it. It wasn’t the memories but the location that convinced Popovit... Full story
It started around the time of his bar mitzvah at age 13, when Tomer Hen decided it was time to open his first business. “I wanted to be independent and not take money from my parents,” Hen told The Media Line. “I was too young to get a job so I started an online business. First, I started selling stuff from my room on Ebay; then I started buying Dead Sea products and Israeli army T-shirts. Soon it became larger than I expected and I was making $200 a month at 14-years old.” Today, at 19, Hen is a millionaire and owns three homes—one in Dallas,... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA)—Meredith Ross will never forget when she first laid eyes on Lior, her partner for the past seven years. Lior, an infantryman in the Israel Defense Forces, was escorting Ross’ Birthright Israel group on a free tour of the Jewish state when his friend, a fellow soldier, was killed. Lior was leaving to attend his funeral and had come to say goodbye. The two 18-year-olds spoke for just five minutes, but it was enough. “I remember borrowing someone’s phone to call my mother in the U.S... Full story
“You are who they were.” This is just one of many quotes Laurence Morrell uses with his middle school students at the Jewish Academy of Orlando. Morrell, a longtime and enthusiastic genealogy hobbyist, also the past president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Orlando, is volunteering his time and knowledge to teach 11 JAO middle school students the basics of genealogy research. When asked why, Morrell answers with a gleam in his eye and a broad smile. “Because it’s importa... Full story
It is traditional for Jews to have two Passover seders during the first and second night of the holiday. The Jewish Pavilion of Central Florida, a nonprofit, held 40 seders over the course of a month.... Full story
Shades of Mel Gibson… The following information comes directly from the Simon Wiesenthal Center with asides by me: “Vicious attacks on the memory of the Holocaust…from denial to distortion…to revisionism…are erupting in countries worldwide. Every day in ways big and small, the deniers and anti-Semites are chipping away at our history, savaging the memory of the six million who perished. Some examples are: The senior Egyptian official in charge of appointing editors of all state-run Egyptian... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA)—Moviegoers who head to “42” will see the story of how Jackie Robinson displayed legendary courage, class and talent in the face of immense pressure and racial hatred as he broke down baseball’s color barrier. Less well known is Robinson’s role in a controversy that erupted at Harlem’s most famous theater, and underscored his commitment to fighting all bigotry, including prejudice emanating from his own community. It was 1962, a decade-and-a-half after Robinson first took the fi... Full story
Jonah Hill’s deadly date NEW YORK—Jonah Hill has been on the market since his split from Ali Hoffman (Dustin’s daughter), and following a recent date it looks like the dry spell will continue a little longer. Hill apparently took a brunette to Joe’s Shanghai Restaurant in New York and, according to the New York Post, was trying “really hard to woo her” when something strange happened. “A man a table over leaned in and told Jonah, ‘I buried my dad today, and I just want to say you’re gonna be... Full story
BALTIMORE (JTA)—Visiting his late father’s ancestral village of Pavoloch in 2011 confirmed some of the images Lew Priven had long held of the place as a real-life Anatevka, the fictional shtetl of “Fiddler on the Roof,” such as the people he saw riding by on horse and wagon. Then he and his wife, Judy, learned of the horror: The 1,500-member Jewish community, massacred on Sept. 5, 1941, was buried in a mass grave. The suburban Washington couple were visiting the Ukraine village’s museum, housed... Full story
BIRMINGHAM, Ala.—“Are you still a bigot?” Every year for the rest of his life, students studying the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” would call Rabbi Milton Grafman, knowing little of the situation in 1963 Birmingham, and pose that question. His son, Stephen, a Washington attorney, said his father’s reputation “is still stained by what simply is not correct,” and this month’s 50th anniversary of the letter is a chance to explore the full context and history behind the letter. “The substance of the letter is beautif... Full story
SAN FRANCISCO—Mary Farquhar’s earliest memory is of flame. Specifically, the flames of war in the last months of World War II, when Japanese forces battled the Americans in a fight to reclaim Manila, Farquhar’s city of refuge. She was a toddler at the time, the daughter of Austrian Jews given safe harbor in the Philippines, where she was born in 1943. Hers was one of hundreds of European Jewish families—1,200 Jews in all—taken in by the Pacific island nation between 1938 and 1941, saved from the Nazis by an unlikely alliance of Americans and Fi... Full story
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
