Israel

JERUSALEM (JTA) — In the years after he moved to Israel from Uruguay in 1995, Rabbi Mauricio Balter brought nearly 500 South American families to the Jewish state, some of whom settled near his home on the northern coast. A handful of the new arrivals were not Jews by… Read more »

KFAR SABA, Israel (JTA) — Michelle Kolath-Arbel squeezes a nipple, rolling it in her fingers with a look of mild disgust. This model, which Kolath-Arbel ordered from China two years ago for $50, is thick and crude and took three months to arrive in the mail. “It was hard,… Read more »

Martin Indyk, the U.S. special envoy for Ben Gurion International Airport on Jan. 5, 2014. (Matty Stern/U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv/Flash90)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — As the Obama administration prepares to unveil a framework plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, Jewish groups have responded by laying low. In contrast to the noisy Iran sanctions contretemps between the administration and much of the pro-Israel community, the leading centrist Jewish groups… Read more »

Yakov Burg, CEO of Psagot Winery in the Israeli West Bank settlement of Psagot, says boycotts of settlement goods haven't affected profits in a major way. (Courtesy Psagot Winery)

TEL AVIV (JTA) — Of the 200,000 wine bottles Yakov Burg produced last year, 16,000 went to Europe. The possibility of a boycott and repeated rumblings that Europe is planning to label goods produced in the settlements could decrease that number, but Burg isn’t worried. The CEO of Psagot… Read more »

Israel's Sochi-bound figure skaters who train in New Jersey: from left, Alexei Bychenko, Andrea Davidovich and Evgeni Krasnapolsky. (Hillel Kuttler)

HACKENSACK, N.J. (JTA) — Evgeni Krasnapolsky and Andrea Davidovich glide around the ice, shadowing one another to the accompaniment of Nino Rota’s “Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet.” At a rink in this New York City suburb, the figure-skating pair are refining their long program a few weeks before… Read more »

When the Israeli mobile maps start-up Waze accepted a buyout from Google for more than $1 billion in June, each of the company’s 100 employees walked away with an average of $1.2 million from the sale. An even bigger check, though, went to Baruch Lipner, a Canadian Israeli who… Read more »

Fifty-eight Israeli lawmakers marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day at Auschwitz, Jan. 27, 2014. (Cnaan Liphshiz)

OSWIECIM, Poland (JTA) — Watching thousands of Poles dance to Klezmer music just 50 miles from the Auschwitz death camp, Johnny Daniels could feel an ambitious plan taking shape. The experience last year at Krakow’s annual Jewish Culture Festival prompted Daniels, a 28-year-old Israeli and Holocaust educator, to organize… Read more »

Mosab Hassan Yousef, right, is the subject of "The Green Prince" by filmmaker Nadav Schirman, left, a documentary about Yosef's work spying for Israel and his friendship with his Israeli handler Gonen ben Itzhak, center. (Larry Busacca/Getty Images)

PARK CITY, Utah (JTA) — Perhaps the most difficult thing about watching the new documentary “The Green Prince” is feeling that you should not be there, that everyone in the theater should be asked to leave before any more Israeli intelligence secrets are divulged. When the Israeli newspaper Haaretz… Read more »

The Taglit-Birthright Israel program has expanded eligibility for its free 10-day trips to Israel for Jewish young adults ages 18-26, JNS.org has learned. Teenagers who went on an educational trip to Israel during high school were previously not eligible for Birthright trips, but can now participate, confirmed Noa Bauer,… Read more »

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper meeting with his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, in Ottawa in 2012.

TORONTO (JTA) — It took seven years, but one of Israel’s staunchest allies among world leaders has made his maiden voyage to the Jewish state. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper arrived in Israel on Sunday with his wife, Laureen. On Tuesday, Harper and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed… Read more »

(JTA) — A timeline of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s life. 1928 — Born Ariel Sheinerman in Kfar Malal, near Tel Aviv. 1942-48 — Member of the Haganah, the pre-state Jewish fighting force. 1948 — Wounded while serving as an infantry commander in Israel’s War of Independence. 1952-53… Read more »

Ariel Sharon is pictured in Jerusalem with the Temple Mount in the background on July 24, 2000. (Flash90)

Ariel Sharon, one of Israel’s last warrior statesmen, whose military and political careers were woven into his nation’s triumphs and failures, has died. Sharon, 85, died Saturday at the Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv after eight years in a coma. “He went when he decided to go,” said his younger… Read more »

Prof. Evyatar Erell with a prototype of the Seasons window.

“We spend most of our lives in a controlled environment,” says Evyatar Erell, associate professor of desert architecture and urban planning at Ben-Gurion University’s Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research. “We live and work under conditions that are different from those outside. When it’s hot, we turn on our… Read more »

TEL AVIV (JTA) — Growing up in the Urals, Pavel Polev was a precocious ice skater and a member of the Soviet Union’s national youth figure-skating team. But in 1992, at age 15, Polev’s life was upended when he joined the massive wave of Jews immigrating to Israel from… Read more »

Jewish Agency chief Natan Sharansky called for the release of Jonathan Pollard in his speech to the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly in Jerusalem, Nov. 12, 2013. (Yonatan Sidnel/Flash90)

TEL AVIV (JTA) — The disclosure last week that American intelligence spied on former Israeli prime ministers has given new momentum to the effort to secure a pardon for convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and several leading members of Knesset members have called in recent… Read more »

The century’s largest winter storm in Israel is over, but it left an aftermath of icy roads. You can imagine what fearsome traffic jams materialized. So it was on the morning of Dec. 16 on Road 443, which leads from Modiin to Northern Jerusalem, including our  Mount Scopus hospital. The road… Read more »

Young people sit a cafe table set up amid the snow on Jerusalem's Jaffa Road on Dec. 15, 2013. (Hadas Parush/Flash 90)

Only about 20 minutes outside of the city did it begin to appear — patches of white on the rough hills abutting the road, sprinklings of flakes on the pines. By the time our bus reached Mevasseret Tzion, near Jerusalem, the snow was blanketing the ground, building up in… Read more »

The city of Rahat is the largest Bedouin settlement in Israel. (Yossi Zamir/Flash 90)

WADI AL-NAAM, Israel (JTA) – In this unofficial Bedouin town of 14,000 not far from Beersheva in the Negev Desert, families live in clusters of shanties with intermittent electricity provided by generators or solar panels. A communal structure has soft plastic walls and dirt floors, with a small pit… Read more »

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry holding a joint news conference in Jerusalem, Dec. 5, 2013. (Kobi Gideon/GPO/FLASH90)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Amid simmering tensions over Iran policy, the Obama and Netanyahu governments appear to have quietly forged common ground in recent weeks on Israeli-Palestinian talks, with the United States accepting that a possible “framework” agreement might not address every outstanding issue in the negotiations. Such an agreement,… Read more »

Demonstrators gathered on Nov. 30, 2013 in the southern Israeli town of Hura during a protest against the government's plan to resettle some 30,000 Bedouin residents of the Negev. (David Buimovitch/Flash 90)

(JTA) — They can’t agree on the project’s goal. They can’t agree on who supports it. They can’t even agree on its name. But when it comes to the Israeli government’s plan to relocate 30,000 Negev Bedouin, representatives and allies of the Bedouin community agree with the right wing… Read more »