(JTA) — Several participants in a rally at the Israeli consulate in New York on behalf of the three kidnapped Israeli teens later joined a second rally nearby focused on the kidnapping of 200 Nigerian girls. The second rally was outside the Nigerian consulate. The girls’ mass abduction by the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram spurred…
A committee of the Presbyterian Church (USA) passed a resolution endorsing divestment from three U.S. companies that “profit from Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands.” The Middle East Issues Committee in 45-20 vote on Tuesday at the church’s 221st General Assembly advanced the measure to divest from Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola Solutions. The resolution likely will…
Israel re-arrested 51 Palestinians freed in a 2011 prisoner swap deal, the army said on Wednesday, in the sixth day of a hunt for three missing teenagers believed abducted in the occupied West Bank. Israel accuses Hamas Islamists of kidnapping the seminary students, who disappeared on Thursday while hitchhiking from a Jewish settlement. There has…
(JTA) — The Reform movement posted a prayer. Chabad asked followers to pledge to do a mitzvah. The Jewish Federations of North America set up a Web page to express solidarity. The disappearance of three Israeli teens in the West Bank last week is being taken as a call to action uniting many disparate elements…
A gay black man who says he was beaten by a group of Hasidic men in Brooklyn sued five of his alleged assailants and a local Jewish volunteer security patrol. Taj Patterson, 22, who was brutally beaten on Dec. 1 in the Williamsburg section, filed the lawsuit Monday in Brooklyn Supreme Court against the five…
The former chief financial officer of New York’s Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty was sentenced to four months in prison for his role in a $9 million kickback scheme. The sentence of Herbert Friedman, 80, was announced Tuesday in a news release from the New York State attorney general’s office. Friedman had pleaded guilty last…
(Reuters) — A U.S. judge declared a mistrial in the case against a New York state senator accused of trying to buy his way onto the Republican ticket in the 2013 New York City mayoral race, lawyers in the case said. U.S. District Judge Kenneth Karas in White Plains, New York, scuttled the trial of…
The Metropolitan Opera has decided to cancel its global simulcast of the controversial work ‘The Death of Klinghoffer,’ which some critics say is anti-Semitic. The Met will still stage the production about the victim of a Palestinian terror attack but will scrap plans to beam it around the world. “I’m convinced that the opera is…
A South African rabbi was jailed and resigned from his synagogue after attempting to blackmail another rabbi. Cape Town Rabbi Bryan Opert stepped down from the Milnerton Hebrew Congregation and was jailed for 48 hours after trying to blackmail Rabbi Ruben Suiza, the longtime head of the city’s Sephardic community, Haaretz reported. The case was…
Canadians were evenly split in their support for Israel and the Palestinians, according to a new poll. The survey by the Toronto-based Forum Research found that 17 percent of respondents sided with Israel in the Middle East conflict, while 16 percent favored the Palestinians. Fully 64 percent said they lean toward neither side, and 3…
Prosecutors have decided not to go forward with charges against Grammy Award-winning musicians Paul Simon and Edie Brickell after the couple had a fight in April at their Connecticut home, a court clerk said on Tuesday. Simon, 72, and Brickell, 48, who married in 1992, were scheduled to appear in Norwalk Superior Court for a…
