Cindy Sadowsky with pre-school students at Temple Emanu-El Temple Emanu-El’s Olga and Bob Strauss Early Childhood Education Center will add a full-day kindergarten class beginning in fall 2011. The kindergarten will include a fully integrated secular and Judaic curriculum, with an emphasis on emergent education, in which a teacher observes children’s natural interests and expands on them… Read more »
President Obama and Israeli President Shimon Peres at their White House meeting talked about the Washington Post Op-Ed by U.N. investigator Richard Goldstone rescinding his conclusion that Israel had committed war crimes in the 2009 Gaza War, April 5, 2011. (Mark Neyman, Israel Government Press Office) WASHINGTON (JTA) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would launch an international campaign to cancel the Goldstone Report after its author, ex-South African Judge Richard Goldstone, wrote in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post that Israel did not intentionally target civilians as a policy during the Gaza War,… Read more »
Medical personnel clean the scene of where a bus exploded from a bomb, injuring 25 people, near the central bus station in Jerusalem, March 23, 2011. (Abir Sultan / Flash90/JTA) WASHINGTON (JTA) – It happens almost like clockwork: Something happens in the Middle East, and it reverberates across the Atlantic with new letters from the U.S. Congress. With so many relatively new members looking to establish their pro-Israel credentials, the reaction in Congress to the recent violence in Israel… Read more »
“A Small Act,” an award-winning documentary about a Holocaust survivor’s $15 a month contribution to educate a child in Kenya, will be screened Sunday, April 10 at 2 p.m. at the Tucson Jewish Community Center. In the 1930s, Hilde Back’s parents sent her from Germany to Sweden to escape… Read more »
Rain Borchardt, CUFI at UA president, with Irving Roth Holocaust survivor Irving Roth will be the keynote speaker when Christians United for Israel at the University of Arizona hosts its second Night to Honor Israel. The dinner event will take place on Monday, April 11, the 66th anniversary of Roth’s liberation from the Buchenwald concentration camp. It will… Read more »
The Jewish History Museum will exhibit “Discrimination Yesterday & Today: A Look at the Cause of the Holocaust,” April 3 through May 14. The exhibit will feature the FBI’s “Enduring Eyes” Holocaust posters and anti-Semitic literature and artifacts from the JHM permanent collection, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the… Read more »
Hadar Susskind J Street, a pro-peace, pro-Israel lobbying group and political action committee, is often presented in the media as a left-wing counterweight to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. But that’s not J Street’s mission, Hadar Susskind, J Street policy and strategic planning director, told a lunch crowd of about… Read more »
ZAKA volunteer holds a body bag containing one of the victims of the terror attack in the West Bank settlement of Itama, March 11, 2011. (Courtesy of ZAKA) JERUSALEM (JTA) — Demonstrations in solidarity with settlers and a Cabinet committee’s approval for new housing in the West Bank are among the Israeli responses to the suspected terrorist attack that killed five members of a West Bank Jewish family. An estimated 20,000 people attended the March 13 funeral at a cemetery… Read more »
Jill Rich Temple Emanu-El will honor Temple member and local humanitarian Jill Rich at a brunch on Sunday, April 3 at 10:30 a.m. at Skyline Country Club. Honored by President George H.W. Bush, charitable organizations and businesses throughout Arizona for her accomplishments over the years, Rich “is truly a treasured local… Read more »
Klezmer Company Orchestra The Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona and the Tucson Jewish Community Center will present a benefit concert, “Beyond the Tribes: A Latin Jazz and Klezmer Extravaganza,” featuring the Miami-based Klezmer Company Orchestra on Tuesday, March 29 at the JCC. The evening will start at 6:45 p.m. with Latin dance… Read more »
Biblical scholar James Kugel speaking about his new book, "In the Valley of the Shadow," in Pasedena, Calif., Feb. 3, 2011. (Sue Fishkoff) PASADENA, Calif. (JTA) — When Jewish biblical scholar James Kugel was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of cancer in 2000, he didn’t find religion. The world-renowned academic and author of numerous books, including the acclaimed “How to Read the Bible,” already was a practicing Orthodox Jew. Instead, Kugel… Read more »
Project Kesher activists Elena Kalnitskaya, Svetlana Yakimenko, Olga Krasko and Vlada Bystrova pose outside a U.N. workshop in New York on Feb. 25, 2011. (Project Kesher) (JTA) — When Elena Kalnitskaya of Ukraine talked about her organization’s women’s empowerment projects at a United Nations conference last month, she was presenting the face of social progress in her country. And she was doing it as a Jewish woman — not unusual, perhaps, for an American participant… Read more »
WALTHAM, Mass. (the Forward) — The 150th anniversary of the Civil War is upon us. April 12 is the anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, the war’s opening shot. From then, through the sesquicentennial anniversary on April 9, 2015 of Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House… Read more »
Demonstrator with an anti-Gadhafi sign outside the Libya Embassy in Cairo shows his solidarity for Libyans protesting their leader, Feb. 22, 2011. (Sierragoddess via Creative Commons) WASHINGTON (JTA) — They were the devils they knew. Though Israel lives in a dangerous neighborhood, surrounded by countries whose leaders or people wish its destruction, over the years it had adjusted to the status quo, more or less figuring out how to get by while keeping an eye… Read more »
Ron and Diane Weintraub Ron and Diane Weintraub, who helped found Tucson’s Israel Center, have Israeli connections that run deep. Long before their daughter Beth made aliyah in 1986 with her future husband and gave them four Israeli grandchildren, Ron had relatives in Israel, including an aunt from Cleveland who made aliyah in… Read more »
NEW HAVEN, Conn. (JTA) — The day after Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak was ousted by a widespread public uprising, I found myself presenting a lecture about Solidarity, the mass trade union movement that convulsed Poland 30 years ago and paved the way for the collapse of the Iron Curtain… Read more »
This is an extraordinary time for the Middle East, an unprecedented one, a glorious one – and it’s passing Israel by. Since Mubarak’s fall, we’re trying to be good sports, good losers, trying to grin and bear it, saying mabruk, congratulations, and all that. This week we’re rooting for… Read more »
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Israel changed Gabrielle Giffords’ life when the budding politician first visited the country in 2001 and it drew her close to Judaism. After the Arizona congresswoman was shot in the head a month ago, an Israeli innovation invented by an American immigrant to Israel may have… Read more »
Kathy Unger, chair of the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona board, makes calls on Super Sunday, Jan. 30, 2011. The Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona exceeded its Super Sunday phone-a-thon goal of $150,000 on Jan. 30, raising $194,967 toward its 2011 Campaign, with $17,295 of this total going to the Local Emergency Assistance Fund. Over 150 volunteers turned out for the event at the Tucson Jewish Community Center,… Read more »
In a scene from the film "Inside Hana's Suitcase," Hana arrives at Auschwitz in October 1944. Hallonot, Hebrew for windows, is an annual Coalition for Jewish Education program providing windows into different aspects of the Jewish world. CJE has partnered with the Tucson International Jewish Film Festival and the Tucson Symphony Orchestra to present this year’s Hallonot, “Voices and Views on the Holocaust,” which will… Read more »
