(JTA) — The Israeli Supreme Court’s recent landmark ruling on conversion is a truly historic decision – for Israeli and American Jewry. While the case only concerns a few individuals, the general rules and unequivocal language have wide significance for both Israeli and American Jewry. The ruling represents another… Read more »
Israel
Netanyahu dares Abbas to meet: “I’ve cleared my schedule for the week”
Jerusalem (TPS) ‒ Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took advantage of his meeting with the Czech foreign minister to challenge Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Monday. “President Abbas said on Israeli television a few days ago that if I invite him, he’ll come,” Netanyahu told Czech Foreign Minister Lubomír Zaorálek,… Read more »
For parents of soldiers lost in Gaza, the war never ended
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KFAR SABA, Israel (JTA) — One family lost their son in late July 2014. The other lost theirs on the first of August in the same year. One family has lobbied the United Nations and crossed an ocean in hopes of bringing their son’s remains back. The other mostly stays… Read more »
Israeli conversion ruling dents Chief Rabbinate’s control of ritual
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TEL AVIV (JTA) — The Israeli Supreme Court decision on Jewish conversion changes almost nothing. But down the line, it could change a lot. Under the March 31 ruling, the state of Israel must recognize Jewish conversions performed in private Orthodox conversion courts not run by its Chief Rabbinate.… Read more »
From left to right, Israelis sour on ‘opportunist’ Donald Trump
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TEL AVIV (JTA) — He’s crude. He’s blunt. He’s inauthentic. He is not a man of peace. Left and right, religious and secular, Arab and Jew, Israelis don’t have many kind words for Donald Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner. In interviews this week, several prominent Israelis described Trump as an… Read more »
How 3 Arab-Israeli kids from a poor village with limited Internet access won a tech prize
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HAIFA, Israel (JTA) — Tamim Zoabi knew that if he and his classmates could win at the Young Engineers’ Conference, it could mean a ticket to a better life – a coveted university scholarship for this truck driver’s son from a poor village in northern Israel. But no Arab team… Read more »
Revisiting Ethiopian aliyah after 30 years through photos and film
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TEL AVIV (JTA) — Orli Malassa doesn’t remember ever feeling anything but Israeli. To her parents, who came to Israel from Ethiopia in 1983 when she was 5 years old, Malassa’s accent-free Hebrew, fluent use of Israeli slang and effortless assimilation into the Jewish state has felt nothing short… Read more »
Hasid stabbed in neck by terrorist credits heroism to God
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PETACH TIKVAH, Israel (JTA) — Only after Yonatan Azriaev grabbed the terrorist’s arms and threw him against a wall of soft drinks did he think he was about to die. Azriaev, a member of the Breslov Hasidic sect, had been handing out religious pamphlets in the open-air market… Read more »
Pew finding on expulsion of Israeli Arabs prompts sharp reactions
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TEL AVIV (JTA) — In a survey that spanned politics, religion and interfaith relations, one statistic stood out: nearly half of Israel’s Jews support expelling the country’s Arabs. The Pew Research Center’s study of Israelis’ attitudes, which had its findings released Tuesday, had asked respondents whether they agreed that… Read more »
Pew: 48 percent of Israeli Jews want Arabs out of country
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TEL AVIV (JTA) — Nearly half of Jewish-Israelis want to expel Arabs from the country. That’s one of several findings from a new survey of Israeli attitudes on religion, politics and Jewish identity conducted by the U.S.-based Pew Research Center. Coming just three years after Pew‘s much-discussed study of… Read more »
American business student killed in mass stabbing in Tel Aviv
(JTA) — A 29-year-old American business school student was killed in a stabbing attack in the Jaffa area of Tel Aviv. Taylor Force, a student at the Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management, was on a school trip to Israel when he was killed Tuesday evening, the university said. As… Read more »
Israel touts gay-friendly climate, but rights fight faces religious firewall
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TEL AVIV (JTA) — As last Tuesday ended, it felt like Israel’s gay community had taken a major step forward. On Feb. 23, eight separate Israeli parliamentary committees convened to discuss a broad set of issues facing the country’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. Lawmakers from a range of parties… Read more »
Obama weighs in on BDS settlement fight — but battle likely won’t end there
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WASHINGTON (JTA) — The controversy over whether laws protecting Israel from boycotts should include West Bank settlements found its way into a presidential signing statement last week, but President Barack Obama’s decision to ignore a trade law’s requirement to oppose boycotts of Israeli settlements likely won’t settle the argument.… Read more »
How Syria and natural gas are pushing Israel and Turkey back together
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TEL AVIV (JTA) – After years of false starts, Israeli negotiators went to Geneva last week for talks aimed at ending a long-running conflict with a regional adversary. It’s not the Palestinians. It’s Turkey. Once a key partner of Israel, Turkey in recent years has been a thorn in… Read more »
Kahane’s widow: Jewish extremists ‘have nothing to do with’ Kahane’s ideology
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JERUSALEM (JTA) – Her husband was assassinated and her grandson is in prison. But Libby Kahane, widow of the late far-right Rabbi Meir Kahane, has remained faithful to her husband’s ideology. She repeats his call for Israel to expel its Arab population. She believes the Israeli left, Jewish media… Read more »
Op-Ed: Why the Western Wall deal is a victory for now, but not forever
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(JTA) – On the morning of Dec. 1, 1988, a group of about 70 Jewish women entered the sacred space of the Western Wall. The women represented all the major streams of Judaism. Some wore prayer shawls or kippahs. Some did not. One woman cradled a Torah in her… Read more »
50 years on, Bernie Sanders still champions values of his Israeli kibbutz
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SHAAR HAAMAKIM, Israel (JTA) — Every morning, Bernie Sanders would wake up at 4:10 a.m. to pick apples and pears. Leaving the cabin he shared with a few other American college student volunteers, Sanders would have a quick bite of bread before heading out to the orchard. After 2… Read more »
Candy-making Holocaust survivor believed to be world’s oldest man
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(JTA) — A Holocaust survivor in Haifa many now be the oldest man in the world. Yisrael Kristal, 112, achieved that status after Yasutaro Koide of Japan, also 112, died on Jan. 12, Haaretz reported. Kristal’s grandson, Oren, received an email from the Gerontology Research Group, an international organization… Read more »
At Sundance, ‘The Settlers’ trains lens on movement’s extremist fringe
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PARK CITY, Utah (JTA) – What is a settler? That’s the question that opens the new documentary film “The Settlers,” which premiered last week at the Sundance Film Festival here. Written and directed by Shimon Dotan, the film offers an answer almost immediately: a religious fundamentalist driven by messianic… Read more »
Western Wall prayer fight ends with historic compromise
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TEL AVIV (JTA) — Israel’s government on Sunday approved a compromise to expand the non-Orthodox Jewish prayer section of the Western Wall, putting to rest the decades-long fight between Women of the Wall and Israel’s haredi Orthodox religious establishment. The deal achieves what had been an elusive goal: an interdenominational consensus on Judaism’s… Read more »