Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA) — In a blistering letter, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo told Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that he no longer deserves a medal she gave him eight years ago — her city’s top honor — because of what she called his willful Holocaust denial. Hidalgo’s letter to Abbas, delivered on Thursday, comes after U.S., German and Israeli diplomats as well as U.S. Jewish groups across the political spectrum condemned a speech Abbas delivered in which he peddled falsehoods about the Holocaust and distortions about Judaism and the Jews. Abb...
Earlier this week, a recent speech by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas came to light in which he characterized the Holocaust as Hitler “fighting” the Jews because of “their social role, and not their religion.” He also denied Jews’ well-documented geographical origins and accused Israel›s founding prime minister of perpetrating false flag attacks on Jewish communities in the Middle East to encourage immigration to Israel. The following is a statement from Mike Igel, chairman of The Florida Holocaust Museum: Mahmoud Abbas’s rem...
By (JTA) - Israel won its first-ever gold medals at the Rhythmic Gymnastics World Championships in Valencia, Spain, over the weekend, improving on last year's silver medal and solidifying its place as a global powerhouse in the sport. On Friday, Israel's team topped China and Spain to take gold in the all-around group category. On Sunday, Israel won gold in the combined exercise, beating out China and Ukraine. The team also finished fifth in the hoop final. Linoy Ashram, who became the first...
(JNS) — The Samaria Regional Council, which administers communities in the northern part of Samaria, has unveiled a plan that seeks to increase the number of Jewish residents living in the area from barely 50,000 to over one million, claiming the initiative would “strengthen Zionism” and solve Israel’s housing crisis. The “Samaria to a Million” proposal, which was first shared on Wednesday in a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had been in the making for over a year with t...
(JNS) — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken says it is in the country’s national security interest “to waive the imposition of sanctions” on Iran and transfer $6 billion to the Iranian Republic in exchange for five detained Americans. Candidates vying to be the next U.S. president, as well as other politicians and activists, disagree vehemently and say they didn’t appreciate the Biden administration’s announcement of the decision on Sept. 11 of all days. “While Americans mourn 9/11, [President Joe] Biden lines the pockets of the Iranian a...
List names 3,000-plus Jews protected by Catholics in Rome during World War II (JNS) — From September 1943 through June 1944 during the Second World War, more than 150 women’s and men’s religious orders, as well as other Catholic groups, protected 4,300 people. Information has now revealed the names of those offered shelter, with the majority of them identified as Jews. Compiled by Italian Jesuit Gozzolino Birolo, the list uncovered in the archives of the Pontifical Biblical Institute of Rome names 3,600 people. Through comparing the names...
(JTA) — Before the Holocaust, the population of the town of Chmielnik, Poland, was around 80 percent Jewish. Sephardic Jews, having been expelled from Spain during the Inquisition, settled in Chmielnik and eventually built a synagogue in 1638. After the war, only four Jews remained. Today, the building houses a museum of the town’s Jewish life and history. Now another Jewish heritage site has been discovered, in an unlikely place. A few years ago, Marian Zwolski, a businessman from Chmielnik, purchased a former nightclub that has been clo...
By Rolene Marks (JNS) - September 16th marks the one-year anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody in Iran. The Iranian "morality police" arrested Amini, a 22-year-old woman from Kurdistan, for allegedly not wearing her hijab correctly. Iranian police said that Amini died after falling ill in custody and slipping into a coma. Her death resulted in mass protests across Iran, with many women refusing to wear the hijab. These protests were supported by many around the world; and th...
(JTA) — The first kosher delicatessen to open in Ireland in over half a century is proving a surprise hit among Dubliners since it opened its doors in March — and not only among Jews. Located in the southern part of the city, Deli 613 has been serving up a mix of local fare, such as salt beef sandwiches and chopped herring, alongside Israeli comfort food. And the cozy deli — named after the number of mitzvot, or commandments, in the Torah — has quickly cultivated a following. In May, the Irish Times awarded Deli 613 four and a half stars o...
(JTA) — Libyan Foreign Minister Najla Mangoush has been fired and has fled to Turkey following a meeting last week with Israel’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen. Libya and Israel do not have diplomatic relations, and when he first announced the meeting on Sunday, Cohen hailed it as another breakthrough in Israel’s growing ties with its neighbors. Israel normalized relations with several Arab countries in 2020 under the framework of the Abraham Accords, and is now publicly exploring an agreement with Saudi Arabia. The Israel-Libya meeting, which...
(JTA) — A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against the multinational food company Unilever tied to Ben and Jerry’s 2021 announcement that it would stop selling ice cream in what it called “Occupied Palestinian Territory.” Unilever is the ice cream maker’s parent company. The lawsuit, which was thrown out on Tuesday, claimed Unilever misled American investors by not immediately sharing the news of the boycott with them. The boycott, which sparked discussion across the Jewish world, is not in force: In December 2022, following a separate,...
(JNS) — Almost three years have elapsed since the signing of the Abraham Accords on the White House lawn. Everything appeared to be progressing smoothly until last month, when a planned visit of Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen to Bahrain was postponed due to “scheduling issues.” This set off concerns that Israel’s relationship with Manama is unstable. Critics at the time blamed the alleged cooling of relations on Israel’s security policy in Judea and Samaria, conflicts between Israelis...
(JNS) - A peace deal with Israel is a clear Saudi interest and will likely lead to further accords with additional Muslim countries, the acting American ambassador to Israel said Thursday. The remarks by Stephanie Hallett, the chargé d'affaires at the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, were the latest indication that American-led negotiations to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia are in high gear, with an accord thought possible in early 2024. "Saudi Arabia is the preeminent target of...
Gallant call saves man from jumping off sixth-story balcony (JNS) — Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant helped save a life this week by agreeing to take a call from a man who was threatening to commit suicide by jumping off his sixth-floor balcony. The incident began Monday in the northern city of Hadera, where an unidentified man in his 20s threatened to jump from his residential building. Video showed the man holding on to the outside of his balcony, with Israeli security forces maintaining a perimeter around the scene. The man first d...
(JNS) — In a dramatic turn of events, Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, said on Wednesday that it is terminating its longstanding relationship with its U.S. fundraising arm, amid an intra-organizational financial dispute which is the subject of an Israeli government investigation. The decision to cut ties with the American Society for Yad Vashem, which was established over four decades ago in order to assist with funding for Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Center and is its largest donor arm after the Israeli government, was take...
(JNS) — The Biden administration told the Israeli government last week that it would have to make considerable concessions to the Palestinians if a U.S.-brokered deal with Saudi Arabia is to succeed. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, who visited Washington on Aug. 17, that Israel’s government is “misreading the situation” if it presumes it won’t need to make concessions, two U.S. officials told Axios. Saudi Arabia will need to show Muslims the world over that it succeeded in extracting...
Jerusalem police nab Palestinians for US embassy break-ins (JNS) — Police recently arrested two Palestinians from the Hebron area for breaking into a U.S. embassy warehouse in Jerusalem and stealing property last month, the Israel Police said. The suspects, both men in their 20s from the town of Tarqumiyah, worked at a construction site near the embassy in the capital’s upscale Arnona neighborhood. According to the police, the pair took advantage of their work permit in Israel to steal “maintenance property” during a “series of break-ins...
(JNS) —America’s ambassador to the United Nations emphasized at Monday’s U.N. Security Council meeting last week, the Biden administration designated a Hezbollah-linked group—one that purports to be an environmental organization—a terror group. Linda Thomas-Greenfield also stamped the “terror” label on two Israelis who have been charged, but not yet tried, in a deadly incident earlier this month. “We strongly condemn the terror attacks by settlers in Burqa on August 4 that killed a 19-year-old Palestinian,” said the ambassador, notin...
An American professor is speaking out about an archive of Jewish texts, records and materials he discovered in an Iraqi government building during the 2003 war. Dr. Harold Rudd was instrumental in salvaging much of a Jewish archive damaged during an American airstrike in Baghdad and retrieving the documents for restoration in Washington, D.C. Rudd, a Pentagon consultant at the time, was on the ground during the initial American invasion of the country. But after an American missile struck the...
(JNS) — Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich made pointed comments on Monday directed at the Biden administration for its criticism of the Israeli government’s policies. “No country is as ethical as Israel, and no military is as ethical as the IDF. Anyone in the world who criticizes us is a hypocrite,” the Religious Zionism Party head said during an interview with IDF Radio. “No nation has been fighting an existential war against terrorism for decades more cleanly and carefully than the Jewish nation,” the minister continued. “I’m not even talkin...
(JTA) - A Russian court has extended the pretrial detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich for another three months. In a hearing on Thursday at Lefortovo District Court that was closed to press, a judge ordered Gershkovich to remain in detention until at least Nov. 30, a court spokeswoman said. Investigators from the FSB, a Russian state security agency, had requested the extension. Gershkovich, 31, is the American-born son of Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union. He was...
(JNS) — Republican presidential candidate and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy told JNS late last month that he supports most of former President Donald Trump’s policies on Israel and that he wanted to go further than the former president with respect to the Abraham Accords. In a recent interview with The Washington Free Beacon, Ramaswamy articulated a rather different aspect of his “Abraham Accords 2.0,” including ending military funding to Israel by 2028. “If we’re successful, the true mark of success for the U.S. and for Israel will be to get t...
(New York Jewish Week) — On his first trip to Israel as mayor, Eric Adams made all of the expected stops — meeting with the prime minister and president, visiting the Western Wall and the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, sampling from the offerings of the country’s tech scene. But he added another, less traditional agenda item: a meeting with two organizers of the ongoing mass protest movement against the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul. The 40-minute meeting, which took place Tuesday at the David Citadel Hotel in Jerusalem, made Adams o...
Israeli jailed in Madagascar for smuggling tortoises (JNS) — A Madagascar court has sentenced an Israeli man to two years in prison for attempting to smuggle dozens of rare tortoises out of the country, local media reported on Monday. The man, whose identity remains under gag order, was also fined $400. The 39-year-old from Beitar Illit, south of Jerusalem, was arrested two months ago at the airport after 59 rare tortoises were found in his possession. According to Ynet, the prosecution is seeking a sentence of 10 years in prison, with a f...
(JNS) — Earlier this summer we saw multiple media outlets using various methods to attempt to separate Jews from their holiest site, the Temple Mount. Now National Geographic continues this trend in a long article by Andrew Lawler that privileges the Muslim narrative regarding the site. (“An unprecedented look inside one of Jerusalem’s holiest—and most controversial—landmarks,” August 15.) The article does not ignore Jewish claims, but subtly denies their credence. For example, Lawler states that “Many Jews believe the dome [of the Rock] sta...
