Israel

Samantha Power, recently nominated as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, listens to President Obama as he announces the nomination of Susan Rice to be the next National Security Advisor at the White House, June 5, 2013. (Alex Wong/Getty/JTA)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Samantha Power brings to foreign policy an activist impulse that many in the pro-Israel community wish was more prevalent among American diplomats. Except Power, a former White House national security council staffer nominated this week by President Obama to represent the United States at the United… Read more »

Adam Green with fellow British fans of the English soccer club Chelsea on their way to a match in Amsterdam, May 15, 2013. (Cnaan Liphshiz/JTA)

(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… Read more »

Dov Lipman, an American-born haredi Orthodox Knesset member for the centrist Yesh Atid party, speaking on the Knesset floor, March 2013. (Miriam Alster/Flash90/JTA)

TEL AVIV (JTA) — Dov Lipman has staked his budding political career on his reputation as a moderate haredi Orthodox leader, someone uniquely positioned to broker compromise between Israel’s increasingly polarized secular and religious communities. The problem is that Israel’s haredi leaders say he’s not actually haredi. Once seen… Read more »

Palestinian Authority Minister of Health Dr. Hani Abdeen visits 8-year-old Sarah Ghanem, from the village of Durah near Hebron, while she is treated at Hadassah Hospital’s pediatric oncology-hematology department in Jerusalem on Sunday, May 5. (Courtesy Hadassah)

Palestinian Authority Minister of Health Dr. Hani Abdeen visited Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem on May 5. The hospital said Abdeen was the first P.A. health minister to visit the facility. Abdeen, accompanied by other senior officials from the Palestinian Authority, met some of the dozens of Palestinian physicians who… Read more »

Ilan Fluss from Mashav, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s aid agency, helps to implement an advanced irrigation system in Senegal in 2011. (Israel21c)

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… Read more »

Pascale Bercovitch, an Israeli handcyclist who competed in the 2012 London Paralympics, has overcome the loss of her legs to become a world-class athlete. (Courtesy Pascale Bercovitch)

TEL AVIV (JTA) – Pascale Bercovitch has a firm handshake and a ready smile. She’s hard to keep up with as she takes an elevator to a cafe on the ground floor of her gym in northern Tel Aviv and talks about her hopes to compete in 2016 in… Read more »

Young Israeli Orthodox women turn out by the hundreds to protest Women of the Wall's monthly prayer service at the Western Wall, May 10, 2013. (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, 20 minutes… Read more »

An Iron Dome anti-missile battery was moved near the Israeli border town of Haifa in the hours following a second airstrike on Syrian targets, May 5, 2013. (Avishag Yashuv/Flash90/JTA)

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 on Friday and Sunday that are… Read more »

Natan Sharansky, head of the Jewish Agency for Israel, is tasked with finding a solution to the growing battle over women’s prayer restrictions at the Western Wall. (Miriam Alster/Flash90/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 last week that Women of the Wall members who… Read more »

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… Read more »

The Yitzhak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv, a museum dedicated to the memory and lifework of the slain Israeli prime minister. (Courtesy Rabin Center)

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… Read more »

From the creation of the world’s first hybrid cucumber in the 1950s to the building of particle collectors for Switzerland’s Large Hadron Collider, which led to the 2012 discovery of the Higgs Bosun or “God Particle”(a subatomic particle that accounts for the existence of matter and diversity in the… Read more »

In January, separated from my American Jewish Press Association group while touring Old Jaffa, I had little choice but to walk five miles back to our Tel Aviv hotel. For me, it was a happy opportunity to stroll along the Tel Aviv promenade by the Mediterranean Sea. I passed… Read more »

Israelis on a motorcycle pique the interest of haredi Orthodox Jews in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea Shearim. (Photo: Serge Attai/Flash90/JTA)

Natan Sharansky’s proposal last week to expand the space for non-Orthodox prayer at the Western Wall could be historic (see related story, page 10). But for most Israelis, changes at the Western Wall are of only trivial interest. Far more pressing are state restrictions on marriage and conversion, Sabbath… Read more »

Birthright participants visiting Masada, summer 2012. (Taglit-Birthright)

NEW YORK (JTA) — With the summer travel season fast approaching, providers of Israel programs for teenagers are bracing themselves for what several say could be a season of historically low travel in a year unaffected by major security concerns. Over the past decade, Israel travel among those aged… Read more »

WASHINGTON (JTA) – A legislative effort led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to enable Israelis to enter the United States without visas may be stymied by the government – Israel’s government. The hitch is Israel’s inability or unwillingness to fully reciprocate, something required for visa-free travel to… Read more »

Lesley Sachs, director of "Women of the Wall," is detained by police due to her wearing a "tallit" (prayer shawl) visible at morning prayers together with "WOW" at the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest site, in Jerusalem on April 11, 2013. (Miriam Alster/Flash90/JTA)

JERUSALEM (JTA) — Natan Sharansky said the implementation of his plan to expand the non-Orthodox prayer site at the Western Wall could begin in as little as one month. In an interview Thursday with JTA, Sharansky sounded cautiously optimistic about his proposal to create an egalitarian space equal in… Read more »

Illustration from the new book "Tiny Dynamo," which promotes the most important and interesting innovations to emerge from Israel. (Courtesy Megan Flood)

NEW YORK (JTA) — While a great deal of international and media focus has been placed on Israel’s military conflicts, the country quietly has become an energetic, ambitious incubator of entrepreneurialism and invention. What follows is a timeline chronicling some of the most important and interesting innovations produced by Israelis during… Read more »

Guy Gelbart

During the recent Passover holiday, we celebrated the ending of our slavery and becoming a free people. After fleeing Egypt, we were liberated but not yet free. Even after receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai, we were not yet free. It took more than 40 years, a full generation,… Read more »

Bicycle rental vending machine and bikes in Tel Aviv. (Sheila Wilensky/AJP)

A short ride on a luxury wooden bicycle can take much longer than expected in south Tel Aviv. The roads are fine, Maxime van Gelder says, “but people keep asking you to stop and take their picture with the bike.” Van Gelder, the 22-year-old marketing director for the 2-year-old… Read more »