More than a dozen Americans and Israelis met recently in Israel to strategize plans for the TIPS (Tucson, Israel, Phoenix, Seattle) Partnership2Gether project for the coming year. Tucson volunteer Gail Ben-Jamin (known to her Israeli friends as Gila) and Oshrat Barel, the future shlicha or Israeli emissary to Tucson,… Read more »
Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benny Gantz (with binoculars) tours the Israeli border with Syria on May 21.
(Tal Manor/IDF Spokesperson/Flash 90/JTA) For much of the past two years, Israel has taken a singular approach to the Syrian civil war: Stay as far away as possible. But with a recent string of victories by forces loyal to President Bashar Assad and the crumbling of the U.N. peacekeeping force that has kept… Read more »
Demonstrators in Berlin protesting the deaths of pro-Palestinian activists in a clash with Israeli commandos aboard the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara, June 2010. (Sean Gallup/Getty) WASHINGTON (JTA) — Israel’s settlement building is increasingly isolating the country in Europe, leading to European Union policies that could reinforce Israel’s delegitimization, according to the top EU representative to the peace process. Andreas Reinicke, the EU’s special envoy for the Middle East peace process, said increasing frustration with… Read more »
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, who is to be named national security adviser, meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, October 2009. (Moshe Milner/GPO/Getty) WASHINGTON (JTA) — Susan Rice has said that a “huge” portion of her work at the United Nations was defending Israel’s legitimacy. Her new job will likely be no less Israel-centric. President Obama plans Wednesday to name Rice his national security adviser and replace her at the U.N. with… Read more »
Holocaust survivor Bill Kugelman, a Tucson resident (right, in blue), and Bryan Davis, director of the Holocaust Education and Commemoration Project of the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona, speak to students at the Tucson High Magnet School gallery after they viewed a poster exhibit, “Echoes of the Holocaust.” (Photo: Michelle Fealk/Tucson High Magnet School Gallery) Updated May 31, 2013 What’s not being told in posters depicting the Holocaust? That’s the question Bryan Davis, director of the Holocaust Education and Commemoration Project of the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona, asked students at the Tucson Magnet High School gallery on May 6 to ponder. The poster… Read more »
Fox News correspondent James Rosen, shown here interviewing Secretary of State John Kerry on March 5, 2013, was subject to a subpoena based on the same statute in the espionage act used to indict two former AIPAC staffers in 2005. (U.S. State Department) WASHINGTON (JTA) – With its talk of signal books, sketches and photographic negatives, the Espionage Act suggests a period long ago consigned to Cold War-era thrillers. In fact, the law is even older, first drafted in 1917, at a time when secret orders were conveyed by telegraph and semaphore… Read more »
Shira Ledman “Eileen” is struggling. Once an independent business woman, she now finds herself isolated and depressed due to age-related macular degeneration and limited mobility. Her isolation is ironic, since her three grown children have moved back in with her. But as each of these adult children has either a mental… Read more »
How do you break into the circle? A concierge service to help people navigate the Jewish community is one of several new initiatives to come out of the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona’s strategic planning process. (Allegro Photography, http://allegrophotography.com) Looking for a way to jump into a Jewish community “can be a very lonely place,” says Liz Kanter Groskind, a member of the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona strategic planning steering committee. That’s why a “concierge” service to help people at various stages of life find Jewish community… 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 »
Scouts standing at attention during a Boy Scouts of America Memorial Day ceremony. (ShutterStock/Sandi Mako) NEW YORK (JTA) — Jewish Scouting leaders are taking a vocal role in efforts to pass a historic resolution that would partially lift a ban on gays in the Boy Scouts of America. In a meeting of the National Jewish Committee on Scouting in February, members voted overwhelmingly in… Read more »
Members of the Jewish community in Canton, Ohio, celebrate the dedication of a new building housing the local federation and two synagogues, July 12, 2012. (Karen Phillippi) (JTA) — The Jews of Corpus Christi knew a decade ago they had to act fast to save their two synagogues.With at most 1,000 Jews left in the Texas town and only 60 families making up its membership, the 60-year-old Conservative synagogue was in shaky financial shape. So in… 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 »
Exterior of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw showing the "gap." (Ruth Ellen Gruber) WARSAW, Poland (JTA) — Krzysztof Sliwinski, a longtime Catholic activist in Jewish-Polish relations, gazed wide-eyed at the swooping interior of this city’s Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Nearly two decades in the making, the more than $100 million institution officially opened to the public last month amid… 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 »
Ron Blomberg Former New York Yankee first baseman Ron Blomberg made history as the first designated hitter in the major leagues. “In 1973 I screwed up the game of baseball and I’m very proud of it, and having a Jew to do it is great,” he told the AJP in a… Read more »
(L-R) Nancy Mellan, Diane Weintraub, Israeli artist Tzameret Zamir, Stuart Mellan and Ron Weintraub at Zamir’s mosaic of peace project on the anti-sniper wall at Netiv Ha’asara. The mosaic will spell the world ‘shalom.’ At my age (closing in on 60), I often tell myself, in a reassuring tone, that “age is just a state of mind.” Now that the State of Israel is turning a ripe old 65, I wonder, what is Israel’s state of mind? And how do we, American Jews,… Read more »
Israeli flags fly high at a recent Israel Festival in Tucson. (Marty Johnston/TJCC) “Israel’s Incredible Innovations” — 65 years’ worth of remarkable achievements in computing, medicine, agriculture, biotechnology, renewable energy and many other fields — will be front and center at the Israel 65 Festival on Sunday, April 21, which will be held from noon to 6 p.m. on the Jewish community… Read more »
A scene from internment by Wolfgang Gerson, watercolor on toilet paper, from Camp N in Sherbrooke, Quebec, circa 1940-1942. Gerson painted on whatever he could due to the scarcity of paper.
(Courtesy the Gerson family/Photo by Jessica Bushey) VANCOUVER, Canada (JTA) — When Austrian and German Jews escaped Nazism by fleeing to Britain during the 1930s, the last thing they expected was to find themselves prisoners in Canada, interned in camps with some of the same Nazis they had tried to escape back home. But that’s what… Read more »
Israeli peace activist Roni Keidar speaks in Tucson (Guy Gelbart) It’s not easy living 500 yards from the Gaza border. Roni Keidar, who lives in Netiv Ha’asara — the closest community in Israel to the Gaza Strip — is an Israeli educator and active member of Other Voice, a non-partisan group promoting peace and encouraging dialogue between Israelis and… Read more »
Stumbling stones honoring Jill Ranucci's great-grandparents, Rudolf and Laura Lowenthal, who died in the Sobibor death camp. (Courtesy Jill Ranucci) In October, I attended a Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) ceremony in Magdeburg, in the former East Germany, to honor my great-grandparents, Rudolph and Laura Lowenthal, who died in the Holocaust. My sister and two cousins, the other surviving family members, accompanied me. The first Stolpersteine were created by German artist… Read more »
