JERUSALEM (JTA) — Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro will join a Tel Aviv-based think tank as a visiting fellow. The Institute for National Security Studies announced the appointment on its website on Sunday. Shapiro will participate in several of the Institute’s research programs, including those on Israel-U.S. Relations, Israeli-Palestinian Relations, the Arab World,…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israel’s Cabinet voted to decriminalize recreational use of marijuana. The cabinet voted on the policy at its regular meeting on Sunday. An inter-ministerial committee will now create legislation in order to implement the new policy, which still must be ratified by the Knesset. Thecommittee will present its recommendations to the government by…
RIO DE JANEIRO (JTA) — The oldest Jewish document of the New World will be returned to Mexico more than seven decades after it disappeared. The 1595 autobiography of Luis de Carvajal, who was a New Christian or “converso” Jew in Mexico, will be returned this month, the Mexican consulate in New York said on Friday. The document…
(JTA) — The Federal Communications Commission has granted Jewish Community Centers throughout the country a temporary waiver allowing them to receive caller information, in response to the recent series of bomb threats on the Jewish institutions. The waiver, approved on Friday, comes days after 29 JCCs and Jewish schools across the country received called-in bomb threats, the fifth such…
(JTA) — A Jewish Community Center in Massachusetts was evacuated after a bomb threat was found written on the wall of the men’s locker room. The Springfield Jewish Community Center was evacuated at about 3 p.m. on Friday. The city’s Arson and Bomb Squad, as well as police and firefighters, searched the building but did…
A family in Aleppo says it is Jewish, and is asking Israel to rescue it from the Syrian city decimated by civil war. “We are asking the government of Israel not to abandon us and to help us leave this place for any other country,” said a woman in a recorded plea in Arabic that…
The United States should “never” change as an “island of safety” for Jews, said Israeli President Reuven Rivlin. Rivlin commented on the spate of anti-Semitic bomb scares and cemetery attacks in the United States, saying that a “dark, bad, evil wave of anti-Semitism” has struck American Jews. “There is one lesson from the Holocaust: Never…
RIO DE JANEIRO (JTA) — A new opera based on an 86-year-old Yiddish poem about a Taino indigenous chief who resisted the Spanish invaders will have its premiere in Havana next month. “Hatuey: Memory of Fire,” will first be performed in Havana on March 3, reported the New York Times. Composed by Frank London of the Klezmatics, the…
([JTA](http://www.jta.org ” “JTA”)) — A Jewish group from Rio De Janeiro, Brazil’s second-largest city, invited as a speaker a polemic right-wing congressman whom Jews in Sao Paulo had dis-invited from a speaking event following pressure by far-left activists. Rio’s Hebraica sports and cultural club invited Jair Bolsonaro, a prominent congressman who is an advocate both…
(JTA) — Ivanka Trump took a private tour the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum last week. Reports of the visit, said to have taken place last Monday, originated on Friday with Bloomberg, citing an unnamed person the news service reported was familiar with her visit, which was not announced publicly. She reportedly was accompanied by…
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Thursday to voice opposition to what the Israeli leader charged were Iran’s attempts to establish a permanent military foothold in Syria. “In the framework of a (future peace agreement) or without one, Iran is attempting to base itself permanently in…
