Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA) — The BBC has apologized for an on-air interview in which one of its anchors told former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett that “Israeli forces are happy to kill children.” The journalist, Anjana Gadgil, was interviewing Bennett on Tuesday about the Israel Defense Forces’ incursion this week into the Palestinian city of Jenin. Twelve Palestinians, including a number of children, and one Israeli were killed in the operation, which lasted two days. Israel conducted the operation to root out terror cells in the city and maintai...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — In a case that drew support from a broad array of Jewish groups, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that employers had to show a “substantial” burden to deny workers religious accommodation. In a decision released Thursday, the court sided with Gerald Groff, an evangelical Christian mail carrier who asked not to work on Sundays, his Sabbath. Jewish groups that do not often line up on the same side of church-state issues before the court were of a single voice in this case. Justice Samuel Alito, writing the opinion, sought to...
(JNS) — A spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council, which advises U.S. President Joe Biden, released a statement on Monday in support of the Israel Defense Forces’ ongoing counterterrorism operation in Jenin. “We support Israel’s security and right to defend its people against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups,” it states. The council added that it is monitoring the situation closely. Sources said on Tuesday afternoon that the operation was getting close to winding down. But Israeli officials said it would pro...
K2 Medical, a prominent healthcare organization, recently hosted a special breakfast event for sponsors of the Jewish Pavilion in Maitland. The primary objective of the occasion was to facilitate networking among healthcare professionals who actively support the Jewish Pavilion's endeavors. Members of the Jewish Pavilion's board were also in attendance, lending their support and fostering a sense of community within the healthcare industry. The event was a resounding success, bringing together a...
(JNS) - Residents of the Jenin refugee camp are blaming the Palestinian Authority and Hamas for this week's two-day Israeli military incursion, laying bare divisions within the Palestinian terrorist groups. Significant numbers of Hamas operatives feel betrayed by their leaders in Gaza and have quit in anger. The aftermath also exposes a widening rift in the Strip between Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. On Wednesday morning, after Israeli soldiers left the camp, the enormous extent of the...
(JNS) - It has been nearly ten years since General Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi came to power as president of Egypt following a military coup. July 3, 2013, began as a regular day in Cairo, with demonstrations held against then-President Mohamed Morsi, but ended in his dramatic ouster. The Egyptians had taken to the streets for seven long months. Some due to Morsi's attempt to reinstate an Islamist-led parliament, others due to the energy crisis. Following the coup, there were suspicions that the...
(JTA) - A Palestinian gunman killed an Israeli soldier when security forces stopped the gunman while he was driving near the Kedumim settlement in northern Samaria. The gunman was killed after the attack. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack on Thursday, noting that Kedumim is where Bezalel Smotrich, the minister responsible for Judea and Samaria, lives. "Tell the criminal Zionist Minister Smotrich that al-Qassam almost knocked on your door," the Jerusalem Post quoted Qassam Brigades, a...
Deborah Project files another lawsuit against a California school district (JNS) — It was déjà vu for the public-interest law firm the Deborah Project, which has sued two California public-school districts in as many months. In both instances, the districts refused to turn over record requests, despite state law requiring that they do so. Earlier this month, the firm, which focuses in particular on the civil rights of Jews in education, asked a court in Santa Clara County, Calif., to ensure that the Mountain View-Los Altos Union School Dis...
(JTA) — The request for rainbow-frosted cupcakes came from a repeat customer — a local synagogue that had relied on the West Orange Bake Shop to make kosher desserts for its special events. But this year, bakery co-owner Yitzy Mittel decided to decline the order. He couldn’t bring himself to produce the Pride-themed goods. Mittel, an Orthodox Jew, had made a similar cake for an order the year before. But the experience unnerved him, he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, because his understanding of Jewish law holds that LGBTQ symbols are “anti...
In a proud and longstanding partnership and in the continuing celebration of Israel’s 75th anniversary, JCC Association of North America and Maccabi World Union are bringing athletes from around the globe together in Israel at the world’s largest Jewish youth sporting event, beginning on July 6. More than a thousand Jewish teens from 10 countries will kick off the weeklong JCC Maccabi Games®, an Olympic-style sports event that includes opening and closing ceremonies; community service; and soci...
(JNS) — While the Biden administration is denying it, the fact is that in recent weeks the United States and Iran have been holding indirect talks regarding Tehran’s nuclear program. According to U.S. officials and Western diplomats, in the weeks and months after the unofficial death of attempts to revive the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement, the Biden administration conducted several “what’s next” meetings. What emerged from these meetings was the idea of a new kind...
(FORT LAUDERDALE) — A recently appointed member of the District Advisory Council for the Broward County Florida School Board, Laurie Cardoza Moore, a nationally recognized pro-Israel advocate, was among the first to commend the Fort Lauderdale based Board for their removal of local educator Naima Khan-Ghany from her recently re-appointed positions on both the county’s School Board Diversity Committee and the Human Relations Committees. Earlier this month, Cardoza Moore was in urgent communication with the office of Dr. Jeff Holness of the Bro...
When Molly Resnick was in her 30s, she was quite successful in her field of journalism. As a producer for NBC News, she had interviewed the likes of Henry Kissinger, Menachem Begin, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Sean Connery. Born in Bulgaria and raised in Israel, she grew up in a secular family and came to America with dreams of making it big. "In 1972, I left the land of milk and honey to go to the land of gold and money," she said. Resnick worked her way up from PBS to NBC. She was living her...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Some 65 U.S. senators from both parties have urged the Biden administration to finalize Israel’s entry into the Visa Waiver Program by Sept. 30. Israel has sought to join the program, which enables citizens to travel to the United States without a visa, for decades. Currently, Israelis who do not hold citizenship in any of the 40 countries in the waiver program must apply for permission to travel to the United States, a process that typically results in a visa but can be extensive. The letter, sent to Secretary of State Ant...
(JTA) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he spoke by phone with Elon Musk on Sunday, calling the businessman and Twitter CEO “a person whose intelligence and contribution to humanity I greatly appreciate.” The tech mogul, currently the world’s richest individual despite notching steep losses at Twitter, has drawn controversy for his tweets about the Holocaust survivor and liberal megadonor George Soros and about Israeli data on COVID-19. The U.S. antisemitism envoy, Deborah Lipstadt, decried the Soros tweets as traffic...
(JTA) — The Arkansas House of Representatives approved a resolution encouraging trade with Israel that specifically mentions “Judea and Samaria,” the biblical name for the West Bank favored by Israel’s government. The resolution, approved last month by the Republican-led chamber, declares that “the State of Arkansas, which lies in America’s heartland, has a special kinship with Judea and Samaria, Israel’s biblical heartland” and notes that “cities across Arkansas bear the names of biblical cities throughout Judea and Samaria, such as Bethel, He...
(JTA) – The Sackler family, the Jewish billionaires whose marketing of the painkiller drug OxyContin fueled the United States’ ongoing opioid epidemic, will receive full immunity from all civil legal claims in exchange for spending up to $6 billion on addiction treatment and prevention programs. The decision to grant immunity by a federal appeals court panel Tuesday effectively ends the thousands of civil lawsuits that have been filed against Purdue Pharma, the Sacklers’ company, over opioid deaths. But it clears the way for the company to de...
(JNS) — The Southern Poverty Law Center is a Montgomery, Ala.-based nonprofit that according to its website was founded in 1971 “to ensure that the promise of the civil rights movement became a reality for all.” Before reaching that first paragraph on the group’s site, however, comes the SPLC’s self-identification as “a catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond, working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements and advance the human rights of all people.” SPLC is often quoted...
(JTA) — For years, as the Sackler name fell from art museums, colleges and even a wing of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater amid revelations about the family’s contributions to the opioid crisis, it remained very much attached to the medical school at Tel Aviv University. Now, three weeks after the Jewish family that produced the opioid OxyContin agreed to spend up to $6 billion on addiction treatment and prevention in exchange for immunity from civil claims, the university has announced that the family “has kindly agreed to remove their name” from t...
(JNS) — The Israel Defense Forces is preparing for a scenario in which Israel’s Arabs join its enemies in wartime, according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “There are 10 military battalions training for this thing. Although it is still not enough, they are preparing exactly for this day,” said Netanyahu. The prime minister made the remarks in response to questions from lawmakers during a recent closed-door session of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Kan Bet, Israel’s Public Broadcaster, reported on Monday. L...
Jewish millionaire involved in GameStop saga, buys Charlotte Hornets from Michael Jordan By Jacob Gurvis (JTA) — Basketball legend Michael Jordan has announced that he will sell his majority stake in the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets to a group led by Jewish millionaires Gabe Plotkin and Rick Schnall for an estimated $3 billion. Plotkin, whose net worth is estimated at $400 million, is the founder of investment management firm Melvin Capital, which he named after his grandfather and which had been valued at around $8 billion prior to announcing its...
(JNS) — Social-media networks are being exploited by Palestinian terror factions to boost the recruitment of minors, an Israeli military source has told JNS. The source noted that although the trend of recruiting minors is not new, its current form and scope are both relatively new phenomena. In 2004 during the Second Intifada, 16-year-old Hussam Abdo, who was stopped at a Huwara military checkpoint wearing a suicide-bomb belt, made headlines across the globe. Since then, however, the smartphone revolution and the arrival of social media n...
PITTSBURGH (JTA) - The gunman who committed the worst antisemitic attack in U.S. history is guilty of all charges he faced, according to the verdict delivered by a federal jury on Friday morning. Robert Bowers, who killed 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Oct. 27, 2018, was charged on 63 counts in total. Those include 22 capital charges - two for each of his victims: 11 charges of the federal crime of "obstruction of the free exercise of religious beliefs resulting in death," and 11 ch...
(JNS) - First, she represented Iraq in the "Miss Universe" competition. Then she fled her country after posing for a selfie in 2017 with "Miss Israel." Now, Sarah Idan is running for California's 30th congressional district-the seat that Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is vacating as he vies to replace the retiring Dianne Feinstein in the Senate. "I'm running because this is a critical time in U.S. history when our democracy is fundamentally at stake," the Baghdad native, 33, told JNS. "I've always...
(JNS) — Silvio Berlusconi was “a great friend of Israel,” Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday as the world reacted to the death of the 86-year-old Italian political leader. “I was deeply saddened by the passing of Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister of Italy. My heartfelt condolences go out to his family and to the people of Italy,” Netanyahu said. “Silvio was a great friend of Israel and stood by us at all times. Rest in peace, my friend,” the premier added. The media tycoon served as the European country’s pri...
