Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA) - The Israeli military has rescued two hostages in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, the second such rescue since Hamas took hundreds of Israelis captive on Oct. 7. The overnight rescue operation, which was announced in the early hours of Monday morning, Israel time, comes as the Israel Defense Forces are shifting their focus to Rafah, a city on the border with Egypt where there are currently more than a million Palestinians. The rescue operation also comes as negotiations toward a ceasefire and hostage release have hit obstacles. The two...
(JNS) — An Israeli army reservist stumbled upon an ancient Assyrian scarab amulet while hiking in northern Israel’s Nahal Tabor Nature Reserve during a day off, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced on Wednesday. “I received a two-day leave from the reserves and decided to take advantage of the two sunny days for a trip,” said Erez Abrahamov, 45, a resident of Paduel. “During the trip, I saw something shimmering in the ground. At first, I thought it was a bead or an orange stone. After I picked it up, I noticed that it had engraving...
Director-general of the Ethiopia National Project, Roni Akale, will enlighten the Central Florida community about the Ethiopian-Israeli community and its progress in assimilating into Israeli culture. ENP works to ensure the full integration of Ethiopian-Israelis into Israeli society, in a unique and special partnership with global supporters, the Goverment of Israel and the Ethiopian-Israeli community itself. At informative meeting, Akale will discuss ENP’s endeavors in Ethiopian-Israelis education, empowerment and impact, and wartime r...
Actor and Oct. 7 hero, Yadin Gellman, will be at several Chabads in Central Florida to share his story, "The 12 Longest Hours of My Life." Gellman grew up in Jerusalem during the second Intifada. The difficult experiences he endured, led him to become a combat soldier in the IDF's elite Sayeret Matkal unit. Gellman fought bravely in many battles and special operations until 2019 when he left the army and pursued a career in acting. On Oct. 7, 2023, during the Hamas massacre on Simchas Torah, Gellman was called as a reserves combat commander to...
February is the month for love and the Rosen JCC has all the activities adults will love this month! Community Mah Jongg The next date to meet to play Mah Jongg will be Feb. 22 at 11:30 a.m. To register and learn more dates, visit www.rosenjcc.org/mahjongg. Paint & Sip Party The Rosen JCC is offering a Paint & Sip Party. Sign up for Feb. 24, 7 p.m. – 11 p.m. and register www.rosenjcc.org/art. Adult Clay Class The Rosen JCC is now offering an Adult Clay Class on Wednesday’s weekly Feb. 28-April 10, 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. Learn more and register www...
RAISE employees take a cookie break The RAISE employees aren’t always working and learning. Recently they had a wonderful time at a cookie decorating get together. Over eight families enjoyed working learning proper techniques to create wonderfully decorated cookies. Purple Tulip Artisan Cookies’ co-owner Holly Kluger demonstrated step by step how to make the cookies look professionally decorated. The cookie decorating class gave the RAISE employees and their families an opportunity to practice social skills in a fun setting. Shown here are...
(JNS) — For the United Nations’ point man on the Middle East, all options are on the table when it comes to the future of Israel and the Palestinians. “I am very sure of one thing: The divide and the distrust that has come out of this conflict has made it necessary to look at the options that we thought were dead,” Tor Wennesland, the U.N. special coordinator on the Middle East peace process, told reporters in a rare press briefing on Wednesday. The Norwegian longtime diplomat said that the “one-state reality” that many critics of Israel deem...
(JNS) — Death may be the ultimate fate of us all, but it comes in many forms. In Chicago in recent years, all too often it has come from a bullet amid gangland turf wars and skyrocketing violent crime. In southern Israel on Oct. 7, it came for 1,200 men, women and children on a single day after hours of raping, torture and bodily mutilation at the hands of Hamas and Palestinian terrorists; for the 240 captives dragged back to the Gaza Strip by the invaders, the horror has continued. Brandon Johnson, not even a year into his first term as mayor...
(JTA) — French President Emmanuel Macron presided over a somber ceremony in Paris on Feb. 7 to honor the 42 French nationals murdered during the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel. France flew relatives of the victims on a special flight to the ceremony, held in pouring rain in the courtyard of Les Invalides, the national memorial where Napoleon is buried. Each victim was represented by a photograph, and three empty chairs were placed to represent the three French nationals who remain hostages in Gaza. The names of each victim appeared on a l...
(JNS) — Israeli leaders are considering the idea of exiling Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar in exchange for the release of all hostages held by the terrorist group and an end to its governance of the territory. Six Israeli officials and senior advisers confirmed to NBC News on Feb. 8 that Jerusalem would be willing to allow the exit from Gaza of the mastermind of the Oct. 7 massacre. Sinwar is believed to be hiding in the vast tunnel systems underneath Khan Yunis and Rafah, surrounded by hostages used as human shields. In addition to S...
(JNS) — Israel Defense Forces soldiers operating in the heart of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza discovered a large tunnel, one where Hamas had held a around a dozen hostages, the military revealed on Wednesday. Troops from the IDF’s 98th Division, working alongside combat engineers from the elite Yahalom unit, located the approximately 1,000-yard-long tunnel while exploring an underground labyrinth composed of numerous branches. On Jan. 21, the IDF announced that the 98th Division unearthed and destroyed a nearby tunnel branch of similar size. The...
(JNS) - During a fundraising trip to New York City on Wednesday, U.S. President Joe Biden encountered protesters brandishing "Genocide Joe" placards who disrupted traffic and at one point stalled his motorcade. Biden attended a meeting of nearly 20 business leaders at the home of Larry Linden, who previously worked as a partner at Goldman Sachs, where he warned that former President Donald Trump would "undo everything we've done" and "we can't let that happen." The president reportedly also made two other campaign stops. Anti-Israel protesters...
(JNS) - Mosab Hassan Yousef, also known as "The Green Prince," the son of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, has joined Israel's public diplomacy campaign amid Israel's war against the terror group. Yousef, who rejected terrorism and went to work helping fight against it, arrived in Israel and toured the areas of the Oct. 7 massacre in the Western Negev. Referring to Hamas's Charter calling for the genocide of Jews, he said, "The people that wrote the Hamas Covenant are a bunch of lunatics," adding, "The Arab world needs to pay attention...
Palestinian terrorists in northern Samaria opened fire on Tuesday on the northern community of Kibbutz Meirav, located inside pre-1967 Israel. There were no injuries in the attack, but one home was damaged when a bullet penetrated a window. Israeli forces in the area returned fire, and troops launched a manhunt for the terrorists. “They fired a burst. One bullet hit our house,” kibbutz resident Oren Henig told JNS. Henig, who is director of the Liba Center, a group seeking to strengthen the Jewish identity of the state, has been serving for...
Jared Genser, a Washington, D.C.-based international human rights lawyer, has extracted hostages and political prisoners from some of the world's worst dictatorships - usually in one-off deals following years of negotiation and on a rare occasion involving large sums of money. But he's concerned that piecemeal dealmaking with rogue actors encourages more kidnappings. So, Genser is proposing a new multilateral approach to fighting hostage-taking by nations like Iran, Russia, China, Venezuela, and Syria: a pact, like Article 5 of the NATO...
(JNS) - Friends, family and supporters gathered on Feb. 7 at the Nahum Gutman Museum of Art in Tel Aviv to mark what would have been Shani Louk's 23rd birthday with an exhibition of work that runs through Feb. 21. On Oct. 7, Louk became a symbol of Hamas's unfolding atrocities as terrorists paraded her lifeless body on a pickup truck through the streets of Gaza, with crowds cheering and spitting on her lifeless body. "We wanted to keep Shani's memory alive through her passion for dancing and tattoo art," Nissim Louk, Shani's father, told JNS....
(JNS) — Despite the presence of a Hamas terror tunnel system in the Gaza Strip now thought to be larger in scale than the London Underground, the United Nations insists it had no idea the tunnels were being built. Asked on Wednesday whether, given the United Nations’ sizable presence in Gaza via a variety of agencies, there had been any indication to the global body that tunnels were being constructed underground, a spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said, “No is clearly the answer for that.” Spokesman Stephane Dujarric...
(JNS) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met on Wednesday at his office in Jerusalem with Argentine President Javier Milei, who has promised to move his country’s embassy to the capital and designate Hamas a terrorist group. “I’m delighted to welcome you, President Milei, and your delegation, to Israel. You’re a great friend of the Jewish state. We are delighted with your decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move your diplomatic post there, and also, of course, an embassy,” began Netanyahu. “We share the desire for...
By Judy Lash Balint (JNS) — Palestinian children in U.N. Relief and Works Agency camps, mere yards from the border with Israel, talk in a video about killing Jews and returning to their land. “The actions of Hamas match the ideology of UNRWA,” the narrator says. “In the camps, we learned to defend our land and our country,” one boy says. “We learned how to fight, to attack.” Another says of Jews, “with God’s help, very soon, we’ll smash their heads, and we’ll return to our lands.” The three-minute video “The Terror of Return” was filmed at the...
(JNS) — An Israel-Hamas ceasefire in Gaza will take place in three stages over several weeks, sources in the Palestinian Authority and Fatah claim. Parallel to this, Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas is said to be preparing certain reforms under U.S. pressure that he hopes would allow him to return to power in Gaza. The emerging ceasefire agreement will occur in three phases, according to the high-ranking sources and reports in the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya news channel. The basic formula is the release of one Israeli hostage for 30 i...
New Title VI probes of Harvard, UMich, New School, USF, Indiana (JNS) — The U.S. Department of Education announced five new investigations under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Law. Harvard University, the University of Michigan, The New School (New York City), Indiana University-Bloomington, the Butler School District 53 (Illinois) and the University of South Florida are all being probed for violations “for discrimination involving shared ancestry.” Campus Reform said it filed the complaint against Indiana, a public university. The Educa...
(JNS) — The heads of the Knesset’s Christian Allies Caucus on Feb. 7 pressed Dutch legislators to cut funding to UNRWA altogether, as Israel seeks alternatives for the U.N. body over its ties to Palestinian terrorism. The discussion, at the Dutch House of Representatives, comes amid Israeli calls for UNRWA to be replaced by responsible aid agencies; U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that the work and functions of UNRWA need to be preserved. “With the recent horrific reports verifying UNRWA employees’ complicity in the Oct. 7...
BERLIN (JTA) — Police in Berlin have arrested a 23-year-old man who allegedly attacked and seriously wounded a Jewish student in a bar on Friday. The Jewish student and his family say the attack was a hate crime. The victim, Lahav Shapira, 30, was hospitalized and underwent surgery for non-life-threatening injuries to his face. He is the grandson of Israeli athletics coach Amitzur Shapira, who was murdered by Palestinian terrorists in the Munich Olympics terror attack in 1972. His older brother, Shahak Shapira, is a prominent comedian and w...
(JNS) - The OneFamily organization on Sunday hosted a unique day retreat for 25 of the most senior officers of the "IDF Casualty Center," providing a short respite and critical support for soldiers with one of the most difficult jobs in the army. The IDF Casualties Center is a unique division of 1,800 people tasked with notifying the families of fallen soldiers. The unit was founded in 1948 but only became active two years after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which claimed the lives of thousands of Israelis. They are tasked with notifying families,...
(JNS) — Israel will not agree to the “delusional demands” Hamas is making to release the 136 remaining hostages being held in the Gaza Strip, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an address on Feb. 7. Bowing to the terrorist organization’s demands will lead to another massacre and a “major disaster” that no Israeli citizen will accept, he emphasized, speaking from his office in Jerusalem. “We are on our way to total victory,” he declared. “Total victory over Hamas will not take years. It will take months. Victory is within reach....
