Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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After most of Daher Dhudy’s family was murdered in a bloody civil war in Somalia, the teen fled with his only surviving brother on a perilous journey through Egypt, reaching safety only when they crossed the border into Israel. “I never found any racism or discrimination” in Israel, the 27-year-old, who is black and Muslim, told a March 7 gathering at the Rutgers University student center in New Brunswick, N.J. Dhudy spoke of an Israel where he was able to find a safe haven, work, and receive a college scholarship, earning a degree in gover...
ROME (JTA)—When the white smoke rose last week at the Vatican, signaling to the world that the College of Cardinals had chosen a new pope, Catholics weren’t the only ones waiting with bated breath. Jews, too, were eager to see whether the new pontiff would be someone familiar with their concerns. Would he be a non-European unfamiliar with the Jewish people and the weighty legacy of the Holocaust? Would he carry on the legacy of his immediate predecessors and work to further Jewish-Catholic relat...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—He’s had to bite a few bullets to get there, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will lead Israel’s next government. Barring a last-minute surprise, Israel’s new governing coalition was to be sworn in this week: a center-right grouping of Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud-Beiteinu faction, the centrist Yesh Atid party, the religious nationalist Jewish Home party, the center-left Hatnua led by Tzipi Livni and the tiny, centrist Kadima. In total, the coalition will include 7...
AIRPORT CITY, Israel (JTA)—An Israeli soldier sits in an office chair in an air-conditioned metal chamber staring at two screens side by side. One shows a map with a moving dot. The other displays a video feed. Next to the soldier are three more identical stations. The soldier isn’t an air traffic controller but a pilot, and his aircraft is called an unmanned aerial system, more commonly known as a drone. Welcome to the next generation of the Israeli Air Force. Israel long has relied on sup...
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system intercepted nearly 400 Gaza rockets last November alone, with an 85 percent success rate, amid the Israel Defense Forces’ Operation Pillar of Defense. But the brains behind the system isn’t resting on his laurels. “I’m realistic, so I’m not putting all the eggs in one system, [even though] it had much success,” IDF Brig. Gen. Dr. Danny Gold, who had the initial idea for the Iron Dome, said in an interview with JNS.org at the 2013 Americ...
NEW YORK (JTA)—Unlike most economists, Manuel Trajtenberg does not spend his days cloistered in university classrooms and think tanks far from the public eye. The Tel Aviv University professor gained attention in 2011, in the aftermath of massive social protests that gripped Israel, when he led a high-profile committee that recommended a series of wide-ranging economic reforms for the country. Now as chairman of the Israeli Council of Higher Education, the charismatic Trajtenberg has taken up a...
Last week’s invasion of locusts from Egypt offered adventurous home cooks an opportunity to try something new for dinner last week—locusts, which most rabbis say are kosher, can be prepared many different ways. “You can sauté them like shrimp with garlic, baby cherry tomatoes, lemon and saffron,” Moshe Basson, owner and chef of the Eucalyptus restaurant in Jerusalem that specializes in Biblical foods, told The Media Line. “You can make them like french fries, or you can poach them like lobster, roll them in egg yolk, chickpea flour and spices...
CARACAS, Venezuela (JTA)—Students at the Ma’or HaTorah yeshiva in Caracas knew something was afoot Tuesday [March 5] afternoon when bodyguards driving bullet-proof vehicles started showing up unexpectedly at the gate, whisking teenagers from wealthy families to the safety of their homes. “After the second and third came, we realized this was serious,” Aron Misadon, a 16-year-old student at the school, told JTA on March 6. “At that point they closed the school and we all ran home.” That someth...
(JTA)—For more than a decade, Venezuelan Jews have been holding their breath, subject to the whims of a mercurial president who used his bully pulpit to intimidate, rail against Israel and embrace Iran. There was the police raid of a Caracas school in 2004, allegedly to search for evidence in the high-profile murder case of a prosecutor. There were the demands by President Hugo Chavez when war broke out between Israel and Hamas in December 2008 that his country’s Jews rebuke Israel for its con...
MAJDAL SHAMS, Israel (JTA)—At first glance, the identification cards of young Druze men looked identical to those of any Israeli, with a number, photo, name and address. The only difference is the citizenship line: Instead of listing “Israeli,” most of the Druze cards are blank. “If someone takes citizenship, he’s labeled as an extremist,” said Wafa Abusela, 19, sitting with his friends in a cafe in Majdal Shams, a Druze city in the northwest corner of the Golan Heights. “People won’t talk to hi...
AMMAN, Jodan—There’s more to the Red Sea city of Aqaba than pristine waters and breathtaking coral reefs. The liberalized duty-free area is seeking to become the gateway of commerce in the region, Jordanian officials say. The Aqaba Economic Zone Authority (ASEZA), which runs the port city independent of the government, has signed several agreements worth a total of some $500 million to expand the port’s handling capacity. To be completed in 2015, the port project is expected to pave the way for turning Aqaba into a solid transit hub servi...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—Palestinians were marching, rocks were flying, tires were burning and prisoners were hunger-striking. Prompted by accusations that Israel was responsible for the death of a Palestinian detainee while in an Israeli prison, West Bank Palestinians erupted last month in a wave of riots on a scale not seen since October 2000, when Palestinian civil unrest heralded the start of the bloody second intifada that would last five years. There are some strong parallels between February 2...
ROME (JTA)—Pope Benedict XVI’s eight-year reign as head of the world’s 1 billion Catholics sometimes was a bumpy one for the Vatican’s relations with Israel and the wider Jewish community. But it was also a period in which relations were consolidated and fervent pledges made to continue interfaith dialogue and bilateral cooperation. Both elements were evident in the tributes that flowed from Jewish leaders following the surprise announcement Monday that due to his advanced age and weakeni...
RAMALLAH—Six-month-old Muhamad Al-Zaben is already a celebrity among Palestinians, the so-called “Freedom Ambassador”. He is the result of smuggled sperm his father Ammar transferred to his mother Dalal during a prison visit in 2006. Now a Palestinian fertility specialist says four other Palestinian women have become pregnant using similar secret methods, as security prisoners and their wives find a way to become parents while the father is still behind bars. Faced with a ban against conjugal visits, the prisoners, accused of attacks against Is...
MAALE ADUMIM, West Bank (JTA)—For proponents of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, SodaStream would appear to be a straightforward target. The Israeli company, which sells a popular kitchen gadget that turns tap water into carbonated drinks, has a large factory in a West Bank settlement. When SodaStream announced that it would run an ad during the Super Bowl, the pro-Palestinian boycott campaign against the company reached a fever pitch. But for hundreds of Palestinians, SodaStream i...
NEW YORK (JTA)—Espacio Anna Frank says its goal is to promote tolerance by teaching the life story of the teenage diarist murdered by the Nazis. But is there something sinister lurking behind the Venezuelan organization’s benevolent facade? SEBIN, the Venezuelan intelligence service, seems to believe so. According to a dossier attributed to SEBIN, the Caracas-based group is actually part of an Israeli cloak-and-dagger operation aimed at undermining the leftist government of President Hugo Chavez...
Idlib, Syria—Nine-year-old Salima Hamid jerked her hips to the musical chants as the older male youths clapped their hands. Behind them in the crowd, Amal Nuran and her head-scarf-covered friends exchanged cell phone pictures snapped at the day’s anti-regime rally. “We all have a role to play in this revolution,” the 19-year-old law student tells The Media Line. “Even we girls can help by coming to the protests.” Later, however, outside of earshot of suspicious men, Nuran expressed her real feelings. “There is little for us to do beyond making...
The American businessmen and women appeared transfixed as they listened to the man behind the first Palestinian planned city depict his journey from vision to reality. Bashar Al-Masri was describing the day in 2008 when in Qatar on the first stop on a planned investment tour of the Gulf States to raise money for the project, he had asked for “between one and ten million dollars,” but “came away with a commitment for hundreds of millions of dollars”—enough to cover both the equity and financing. Rawabi—“hills” in Arabic—would soon be more than...
(JTA)—Wide-eyed and smiley, Elay-Gabriel seems utterly unaffected by the French media’s sudden interest in him. A dozen French journalists have visited the 18-month-old in recent months because he is trapped in a sort of legal limbo: He cannot obtain citizenship because the state does not recognize children born to surrogates abroad as French, even if one of their biological parents is a French national. Complicating matters is the fact that Elay-Gabriel is being raised by two gay Parisians—Isra...
AMMAN, Jordan—Street noises mix with a call to prayer coming from the King Hussein Mosque in downtown Amman, the city’s commercial center, while on a nearby street corner, Issam, a Syrian businessman, calmly answers a steady flow of phone calls and customers’ questions. The 44-year-old has successfully transferred his shoe business from Syria’s war-ravaged city of Aleppo to the Jordanian capital, starting his enterprise anew in Amman like hundreds—if not thousands—of other Syrian refugee businessmen that Jordanian officials say have settle...
(JTA)—In his many years of service for France’s spy agency, Claude Moniquet has seen much evidence linking Hezbollah to terrorist-related activities in Europe and beyond. The attacks, says Moniquet, a 20-year veteran of the DGSE intelligence service, go back as far as 1983, to the bombing of military barracks in Beirut that killed nearly 300 people, including 58 French soldiers. But the evidence, he says, was ignored. So Moniquet believes that Bulgaria’s announcement last week that it concl...
TEL AVIV—Israel’s first large gas field, Tamar, is due to begin producing natural gas next April. It is an economic bonanza for the state, and a security nightmare for the navy, tasked with protecting the huge area, much of which is outside Israel’s territorial waters. “These fields have strategic significance and could be easily a target for our neighbors,” a senior naval official in charge of planning, told The Media Line in an exclusive briefing in his office in Tel Aviv. “Usually to protect an area, we just make a sterile zone around it....
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon dedicated this year’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day to rescuers of Nazi victims who were not famous heroes but little-known people living “ordinary” lives. Yet some of those little-known rescuers—like Berta Davidovitz Rubinsztejn— lived anything but ordinary lives. When Berta celebrated her 90th birthday in New York this summer, one guest—Meir Brand, a white-haired grandfather of eight—made the trip from Israel. Berta calls Meir her son. He is, but not in any ordinary sense. In 1941, when B...
