Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 2116 - 2140 of 2213
As the siren began to wail, the children ran quietly down the steps of the Science and Technology Elementary School in Pisgat Zeev, a northern suburb of Jerusalem built on post-1967 land. They sat on the floor in the four classrooms in the basement, all outfitted as bomb shelters. The air quickly became stuffy in the windowless rooms. The teachers handed out crayons and pages to color, which most kids ignored. A few read books while others played cards. Some of the youngest students, sitting on the floor, looked scared. One little boy was... Full story
Haredi draft debate spurs Lapid threat to bring down government JERUSALEM (JTA)—Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid threatened to bring down the Israeli government if a bill requiring the enlistment of haredi Orthodox men does not include imprisonment for avoiding conscription. Lapid, who serves as finance minister, made the threat on Monday during a party meeting following marathon talks the previous night of the Peri Committee, also known as the Knesset Committee for Promoting Equal Share of the B... Full story
Jacob Ostreicher, a haredi Orthodox father of five who remains under house arrest in Bolivia, does not believe he will ever be free and often unplugs his home phone because he is too depressed to speak with his family, according to his wife, Miriam Ungar. He just can’t see himself ever coming back to his home in Brooklyn, she said. “We all feel that. I really know they will never let him go,” she said, adding that Bolivian officials “make up reasons” to detain Ostreicher indefinitely. “This cou... Full story
On May 21, Iran’s Guardian Council released a list of “approved” candidates for the upcoming June 14 presidential election. As expected, the list of eight candidates included a number of hardliners loyal to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, crushing any hope that Iran’s next president would bring about new policies that would end the nuclear standoff with the West, economic sanctions and domestic political repression. Nevertheless, many in the West are interested in the upcoming election. The last election in 2009 launched major protest... Full story
ELEM vans go where the children are in Israel—venturing into dark and dangerous streets. The vans, and the volunteers on them, go to places where already-troubled children—some involved with vagrancy, drugs, homelessness, sexual exploitation, or other criminal or anti-social behavior—can encounter greater peril. At the forefront of these efforts to get troubled youths off the street is the ex-wife of former Israeli prime minister and defense minister Ehud Barak. “Kids know the van means safety,... Full story
JERUSALEM—The Israeli parliament, or Knesset, is quiet on Sundays. The plenum does not meet, and the carpeted hallways are silent. But at the end of one corridor, in Room 2021, there’s a lot of foot traffic in and out of Rabbi Dov Lipman’s office. Every 10 minutes, an aide escorts the next petitioner into the office. Most have never met Lipman. They have all made appointments through his office, and each is here with a different issue. “The government is planning to start imposing an 18 percent... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA)—Who knew what, and when? Those are the questions critics are asking following the disclosure that the Claims Conference received an anonymous letter in 2001 identifying several fraudulent Holocaust-era restitution claims—nearly a decade before the organization halted a massive fraud scheme. By 2009, when the magnitude of the scheme was discovered, the fraud had been running for 15 years and managed to extract more than $57 million in illegitimate payouts. Last Friday, World Jew... Full story
Chabad center taking in Oklahomans displaced by deadly tornado (JTA)—A Chabad center in Oklahoma City opened its building as a shelter for those displaced by a deadly tornado. The Chabad Community Center of Southern Oklahoma also is collecting supplies for those left homeless by the tornado that tore through an Oklahoma City suburb on Monday afternoon, leaving at least 24 people dead, including several children, and injuring hundreds. “While we feel the pain of others, we’re very thankful that we’re able to respond—to use all our energy an... Full story
LOS ANGELES—The Rev. Kenneth Meshoe, a member of the South African Parliament and founder of the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP), sees irony in how the anti-Israel attitudes of his country’s mainstream politicians are depriving them of benefits the Jewish state could bring them. “African politicians who have contaminated water will boycott Israel, whose technology and whose scientists could help bring clean water to the many thousands of Africans who now don’t have it and need it desp... Full story
An Israeli government review of the death of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura during the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000 has officially debunked a French television report suggesting he was killed by direct Israel Defense Forces fire. The 36-page report, which was presented to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday, further concluded that it was highly likely that the boy survived the incident unscathed and therefore may still be alive. The boy’s father, Jamal, urged an international inquest into t... Full story
(JTA)—Itzik Shanan and Abbas Suan watched last week as 100,000 English soccer fans sang along to a live performance by a multiracial quartet at London’s Wembley Stadium. Shanan, who started a campaign to eliminate racism from Israeli soccer, and Suan, a well-known Arab-Israeli player, were in Britain for five days of anti-hooliganism training in advance of Israel’s hosting next month of a major international soccer tournament. For Shanan, the operatic rendition of “Abide With Me,” a Christian... Full story
WASHINGTON (JTA)—When it comes to the latest Arab peace initiative, two questions are circulating in Washington: Why Qatar? And why now? The three answers: Because Qatar is rich; it is scared; and why not? Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al Thani, the Qatari prime minister and foreign minister, in recent weeks has driven the revivification of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, moderating it slightly to hew closer to the outlines touted by the Obama administration since 2011. The updated v... Full story
By Ben Sales JERUSALEM (JTA)—Haredi Orthodox youths mobbed the Western Wall plaza by the thousands to protest Women of the Wall as they held their monthly prayer service. The youths, many of them students from haredi Orthodox yeshivas, filled the Western Wall Plaza by 6:40 a.m. on Friday, May 10, about 20 minutes before Women of the Wall, a women’s prayer group that holds monthly services at the site, also called the Kotel, began praying. Because haredi Orthodox women had packed the wom... Full story
DAKAR, Senegal (JTA)—Struggling to be heard over a flock of bleating sheep, Israel’s ambassador to Senegal invites a crowd of impoverished Muslims to help themselves to about 100 sacrificial animals that the embassy corralled at a dusty community center here. The October distribution, held as French troops battled Islamists in neighboring Mali and one month after Muslim radicals killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya, is held annually in honor of Tabaski, the local name of the Muslim Eid al-... Full story
Shiny clothes, reflective signs and routes painted in ultra-colors brightened the nighttime sky of Beersheba, the capital of the Negev, on May 2 as the city hosted Israel’s first Glow Run, the newest trend in the running world scene. The event was a resounding success, bringing 5,400 runners from all over the country and 700 soldiers together in the desert city of Beersheba, an even bigger turnout than expected. Jews, Arabs, new immigrants, veteran Israelis, students, and others who share a l... Full story
Israel’s Cabinet approves reduced defense cuts JERUSALEM (JTA)—Israel’s Cabinet unanimously approved a proposal to moderate cuts to the defense budget as part of sweeping austerity measures. The Cabinet opened its 2013-14 budget talks on Monday with discussions on defense. Following a meeting of the security cabinet that lasted much of Sunday, Treasury Minister Yair Lapid agreed to a reduction in the defense budget of 3 billion shekels, or $840 million, with another 1 billion shekels, or $280... Full story
This semester, Tel Aviv University inaugurated a pioneering business development program aimed at Palestinian executives, designed jointly by LAHAV Executive Education, and Kellogg-Recanati Executive MBA program at TAU’s Recanati Business School with USAID. Addressing the unique challenges facing Palestinian high-tech companies, the 12-day course gave participants the tools to effectively manage their business, court foreign funding and break into international markets. Mustafa Deeb, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector l... Full story
Since the Boston Marathon explosions in April, the largely Muslim Russian territory of the North Caucasus has come back to the forefront via Chechnya, where the family of the Boston bombers’ father originated, and nearby Dagestan, the native land of the bombers’ mother. Flashbacks to the wars of the 1990s between Russia and Chechen separatists, and alerts of Islamic insurgency spilling out of Chechnya, appear more prominently in news outlets. Just a couple of weeks ago, a bomb exploded and kil... Full story
Brussels as the headquarters of the European Union is the nominal “capital of Europe.” One would expect the city to be the center of enlightenment—the exemplification of political and social tolerance and freedom of speech, assembly and religion, not to mention an advocate of human rights. Disappointingly, recent events have shown that Brussels has increasingly become a place of lies, deliberate disinformation, political manipulation, anti-Semitism and attacks on Israel. Recent developments, particularly Islamist political as well as physi... Full story
TEL AVIV (JTA)—Twice in three days, Israeli warplanes entered Syrian airspace and fired on suspected weapons caches bound for Hezbollah—and nothing has happened in response. Some experts are predicting that will continue to be the case following airstrikes near Damascus last Friday and Sunday that are widely believed to be the work of the Israel Defense Forces. According to reports, the strikes targeted shipments of long-range, Iranian-made Fateh-110 missiles capable of striking deep into Isr... Full story
TEL AVIV (JTA)—Following a court ruling in their favor, leaders of an organization pushing for women’s prayer rights at the Western Wall have withdrawn their endorsement of Natan Sharansky’s compromise proposal to expand the egalitarian section there. A Jerusalem District Court ruled two weeks ago that Women of the Wall members who pray together in the regular women’s section of the Western Wall are not contravening the law. That was teh ruling at the Heritage deadline. Members of the group have been routinely arrested or detained in recent... Full story
TEL AVIV (JTA)—To get married in Israel, Dima Motel had to bring his family photo album and two of his ancestors’ birth certificates to a rabbinical court. Then an investigator quizzed his mother in Yiddish. Israel’s Chief Rabbinate often asks Russian immigrants like Motel to prove that they’re Jewish, sometimes requiring documentary evidence that can be hard to obtain. Those who won’t submit to the process or who can’t firmly establish their Jewish bona fides can’t get legally married in th... Full story
TEL AVIV (JTA)—The museum dedicated to the memory of Yitzhak Rabin raises nearly half its money from labor leaders. It’s just not the labor you think. Members of U.S. labor unions raised $1.4 million for the Yitzhak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv last year, 45 percent of the center’s total 2012 fundraising. Since 2005, American unions have raised $12 million for the center. Labor leaders say programs at the center, which celebrates the slain Labor Party prime minister who signed the 1993 Oslo Accor... Full story
Iran calls for Arab countries to unite against Israel JERUSALEM (JTA)—Iran called on the countries of the Middle East to unite against Israel in the face of an attack on Syria. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said the countries of the region should stand together against the “assault,” the Reuters news agency reported, citing the Iranian Fars news agency. Syrian state media accused Israel of the early Sunday morning attack on what it identified as the Jamraya milit... Full story
After the United States revealed that it now believes Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has used chemical weapons against rebel forces, the Israel Air Force reportedly struck a Syrian chemical weapons site near Damascus last weekend. The Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebel group posted a video of smoke rising from a chemical weapons site that it claims Israeli jets struck last Saturday, the Israeli newspaper Maariv reported. FSA said the jets flew over the palace of Assad before the strike, and that a... Full story
