An Israeli man said a British Airbnb host refused to rent an apartment to him because, the host said, Israelis don’t respect “basic human rights.” Ben Kelmer, a Tel Aviv photographer, reserved a London apartment for a week in March through the online company, which has come under fire recently for listing properties in West…
In a landmark decision, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that mikvahs in the country must open up to non-Orthodox conversion rites. Until now, Israeli mikvahs have denied access for conversion immersions to Reform and Conservative converts. Israel’s mikvahs are run by Israel’s Religious Services Ministry, which operates in lock-step with the Orthodox-dominated Israeli Rabbinate. Thursday’s ruling,…
Jordan is refusing to extradite to France a man suspected of carrying out a deadly 1982 attack on a Jewish restaurant in Paris. According to Agence France Press, an unnamed Jordanian official said on Wednesday the country was rejecting France’s request to extradite Zuhair Mohamad al-Abassi,who was arrested in Jordan last June. Al-Abassi, also known…
The day after becoming the first Jew to win a presidential primary, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders visited his old neighborhood, a heavily Jewish area of Brooklyn. Sanders, an Independent senator from Vermont, led a CBS News reporter on a tour of Midwood section of the New York City borough, pointing out the rent-controlled apartment…
(JTA) — Five years ago, this city’s tiny Jewish community was so strapped for cash it couldn’t afford to fix the deep cracks in its synagogue’s moldy ceiling. The Jewish Community of Porto was also too poor to hire a full-time rabbi because of its small size (50 members) and the paucity of donors in…
President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might meet in Washington next month and complete a deal on future defense aid to Israel that has been dogged by disagreement, the U.S. ambassador to Israel said on Thursday. Current U.S. defense aid to Israel, worth about $3 billion annually, expire in 2018. Disputes over…
The U.N. human rights investigator for Gaza and the West Bank called on Israel on Thursday to investigate what he called excessive force used by Israeli security forces against Palestinians and to prosecute perpetrators. Makarim Wibisono, United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, also challenged Israeli authorities to charge or release…
Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign defended an endorsement from a controversial pastor who has called Adolf Hitler a hunter “raised up” by God and actively seeks to convert Jews. Kansas evangelical Pastor Mike Bickle, whose endorsement the campaign publicized last month, runs a project called “Israel Mandate,” one of whose goals is “partnering with Messianic Jews…
Scientists have for the first time detected gravitational waves, ripples in space and time hypothesized by Albert Einstein a century ago, in a landmark discovery announced on Thursday that opens a new window for studying the cosmos. The researchers said they detected gravitational waves coming from two distant black holes – extraordinarily dense objects whose…
A 94-year-old survivor of Nazi Germany’s Auschwitz death camp gave his testimony in court on Thursday, face to face with a former guard, who is charged with helping in the murder of at least 170,000 people. Leon Schwarzbaum, who lost 35 family members during the Holocaust, calmly recalled the camp’s horrors and when he had…
A New York clothing salesman known as the “Son of Sal” serial killer was convicted on Wednesday of three counts of second-degree murder in the 2012 shooting deaths of three shopkeepers in Brooklyn, including two Jews. Salvatore Perrone, 67, faces a maximum prison sentence of 75 years to life for the killings of Mohamed Gebeli,…
