Tagged FRONT

‘Diary of Anne Frank,’ coming to ATC, never more relevant

Naama Potok as Edith Frank and Anna Lentz as Anne Frank in Arizona Theatre Company’s upcoming production of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ (Goat Factory Media Entertainment)
April 5, 2018 / Phyllis Braun, AJP Executive Editor

David Ira Goldstein spent a week in Amsterdam this October as he prepared to direct “The Diary of Anne Frank,” which opens at Arizona Theatre Company later this month. Along with the Anne Frank House, the former ATC artistic director visited the National Holocaust Museum, The Resistance Museum, synagogues… Read more »

Passion for social justice inspires COC scholar
April 5, 2018 / Kaye Patchett, Special to the AJP
Avram Mandell

Doing the right thing and making your life count is the focus of Tzedek America Director and Founder Avram Mandell’s message during his April 13-15 visit to Congregation Or Chadash as the second Mitch Dorson Scholar-in-Residence. “Mitch was director of education at Temple Emanu-El and a history teacher at… Read more »

Art created at UA Hillel Holocaust vigil will be reminder for public schools

Attendees at the University of Arizona Hillel Foundation Holocaust vigil decorated frames bearing lines from a poem by Pavel Friedman, who died in Auschwitz. (Sara Harelson)
April 5, 2018 / Sara Harelson, AJP Intern

Flags and museum pods lined a section of the University of Arizona Mall this week, as volunteers took turns reading the names of lives lost in the Holocaust. The University of Arizona Hillel Foundation hosts a 24-hour Holocaust vigil every year in memory of the six million Jews whose… Read more »

Yom HaShoah rites to mark ghetto resistance

‘Freedom Fighter’ by Robert Russin, in the Tucson Jewish Community Center Sculpture Garden (Courtesy Jewish History Museum)
April 5, 2018 / Debe Campbell, AJP Editorial Assistant

“Resistance and Resilience: Facing Hatred with Courage Yesterday and Today,” marking the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, will be the theme of this year’s commemorative observance of Yom HaShoah at Congregation Anshei Israel on Sunday, April 15 at 2 p.m. The uprising lasted from April 19 to… Read more »

Temple Emanu-El to present ‘Music of the Shoah,’ Arizona Repertory Singers’ ‘King David’ oratorio

Arizona Repertory Singer member Betty Sproul rehearses her ‘King David’ role, the off-stage voice of the Witch of Endor, with music director Elliot Jones. (Eleonore Rowe)
April 5, 2018 /

Temple Emanu-El continues its concert series with two notable performances later this month, “Music of the Shoah” and the “King David” oratorio. On Wednesday, April 11 at 7 p.m., the eve of Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), Temple Emanu-El will present a concert of Jewish music either composed during… Read more »

Tucson plans big festival to celebrate Israel@70

Children march in the parade opening the Israel Festival in 2013. (Guy Gelbart)
April 5, 2018 / Phyllis Braun, AJP Executive Editor

On Sunday, April 22, Tucson will celebrate Yom Ha’atzmut, Israel’s 70th Independence Day, with the Israel@70: A Living Bridge festival, featuring live music, food, and activities for all ages. Admission is free for the festival, which will take place on a field between the Tucson Jewish Community Center and… Read more »

Israeli tennis star making her mark at UA

Talya Zandberg (Courtesy Zandberg)
April 5, 2018 / Sara Harelson, AJP Intern

Tucson’s latest import from Tiberias, Israel, is Talya Zandberg, the University of Arizona’s new tennis star. Zandberg began playing tennis at age 5, inspired by watching her older brother play. After serving two years in the Israeli Defense Forces, she committed to continuing her tennis career and furthering her… Read more »

Donald Trump wants the U.S. out of Syria. Israel thinks that’s a problem.

A view of a U.S. military base in Syria between Aleppo and the northern town of Manbij, April 2, 2018. (Delil Soueiman/AFP/Getty Images)
April 5, 2018 / Ron Kampeas, JTA

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Meeting last month with Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came away satisfied that he and the American president were in agreement on a wide range of issues, including Syria, where Israel wants to limit Iranian influence as the Syrian civil war wraps up. “We don’t have… Read more »

Why Netanyahu is blaming this organization for Israel’s migrant crisis

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking at the U.N. General Assembly at the world body's headquarters in New York, Sept. 19, 2017. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
April 4, 2018 / Ron Kampeas, JTA

WASHINGTON (JTA) — It’s been a busy, confounding week for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and the question of the African migrants. On Monday afternoon, after months of threats to deport the lot of them, Netanyahu said he reached an agreement with the United Nations that would have resettled half… Read more »

A Holocaust museum in Brooklyn tells the story through the eyes of Orthodox Jews

A set of tefillin and diary pages belonging to Isaac Avigdor, a young Polish rabbi imprisoned at Mauthausen, are on display at the Amud Aish Memorial Museum. Avigdor shared the smuggled tefillin with other inmates during his imprisonment. (Courtesy of Amud Aish)
April 3, 2018 / Jon Kalish, JTA

NEW YORK (JTA) — Like Holocaust museums the world over, the Amud Aish Memorial Museum in Brooklyn focuses on European Jewish communities that thrived before the Nazis came to power, the killing machine that led to millions of deaths, and the resilience of survivors both during the war and in rebuilding… Read more »

An exhibit on soccer during the Holocaust is on display at one of Buenos Aires’ biggest stadiums

The exhibition at River Plate's museum includes six illustrated soccer balls. This one was done by Diego Rodríguez, Augusto Costhanzo, Sergio Langer, Rica Núñez and Gustavo Nemirovsky. (Tabare da Ponte/Courtesy of "No Fue un Juego")
April 2, 2018 / JTA Staff

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (JTA) — One of Argentina’s most popular soccer clubs is hosting an exhibition of harrowing stories about the sport from the Holocaust era. “It Wasn’t a Game” (or “No Fue un Juego”) opened last week at the River Plate museum in the team’s stadium building complex… Read more »

Deaths on Gaza border hand Hamas a PR victory and Israel an angry internal debate

A Palestinian protester burning tires during clashes with Israeli forces near the border of the southern Gaza Strip, April 2, 2018. (Said Khatib/AFP/Getty Images)
April 2, 2018 / Marcy Oster, JTA

JERUSALEM (JTA) — When the smoke from the rifles of Israeli sharpshooters and the firebombs thrown by Gaza Palestinians cleared in the wake of the Palestinian March of Return, there were at least 15 Palestinians dead and hundreds of protesters injured. Israel, meanwhile, had a huge PR mess. Israeli… Read more »

The music of Holocaust victims returns to the Dutch concentration camp where they suffered

Alan Ehrlich, right, speaking with Francesco Latoro in Amsterdam, March 25, 2018. (Courtesy of Jewish National Fund-United Kingdom)
April 2, 2018 / Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA

WESTERBORK, Netherlands (JTA) — On a foggy Sunday, cheerful cabaret music pierces the silence that hangs over this former concentration camp, one of the largest facilities of its kind in Nazi-occupied Western Europe. Blasting from the recorder of an Israeli visitor last month, the music draws disapproving looks and… Read more »

Israel at 70: How 1948 changed American Jews

David Ben-Gurion, who was to become Israel's first prime minister, reads the new nation's Declaration of Independence in Tel Aviv, May 14, 1948. (Zoltan Kluger/Israeli Government Press Office via Getty Images)
April 2, 2018 / Ben Sales, JTA

(JTA) — One year after Israel’s establishment, in the dead of night, three students ascended a tower at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and raised the Israeli flag. The next morning, the Conservative rabbinical school’s administration took it down. That act of surreptitious Zionist protest was one… Read more »

Paris vigil for murdered Holocaust survivor brings together family, politicians and a Muslim rescuer of Jews

Daniel Knoll, on the left side of the podium with white kippah and no tallit, at a vigil for his mother at the Tournelles Synagogue in Paris, March 28, 2018. (Cnaan Liphshiz)
March 29, 2018 / Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA

PARIS (JTA) – French Jews mourning a Holocaust survivor murdered in her Paris apartment welcomed the presence of France’s interior minister, Gérard Collomb, at a vigil in her memory. “We appreciate authorities’ swift action for justice and continued support,” Joel Mergui, the president of the Consistoire Jewish group, said… Read more »

In handling of Holocaust survivor’s slaying, French Jews see a ‘lesson learned’

Jews participating in a memorial march in Paris for Mireille Knoll, March 28, 2018. (Cnaan Liphshiz)
March 28, 2018 / Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA

(JTA) — Last April, Traore Kobili threw his Jewish neighbor to her death from her third-story home in Paris while calling her a demon and shouting about Allah. French authorities waited 170 days before they declared the killing of Sarah Halimi an anti-Semitic hate crime — and that was… Read more »

Zach Braff is happy to be back on TV. ‘Scrubs’ fans should be, too.

Zach Braff stars in the new ABC sitcom "Alex, Inc." (ABC/Tony Rivetti)
March 27, 2018 / Curt Schleier, JTA

(JTA) — Lightning struck Zach Braff in 2001. The up-and-coming Jewish actor, who had appeared in a few films — perhaps most notably a small role in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan Murder Mystery” — landed the lead role of John “J.D.” Dorian in the hospital-based sitcom “Scrubs.” Along the way… Read more »

‘We march today because it’s what we have to do to sleep tonight’: Jewish students on the March for Our Lives

Jewish students leading the Reform movement to the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., March 24, 2018. (Hector Emanuel for the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism)
March 26, 2018 / Ron Kampeas, JTA

WASHINGTON (JTA) — The organizers of the March for Our Lives, almost all of them under 20, had a gun control agenda packed with specifics. They were able to get 800,000 people on and off of this city’s Pennsylvania Avenue in three hours. They attracted A-list celebrities. They turned… Read more »

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