SURFSIDE, Fla. (JTA) — Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava speaks fluent English and what she calls passable Spanish, but some of her constituents use a Yiddish word to describe her. “She’s heimishe,” said Jacob Solomon, the longtime president of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, using the Yiddish word for homey and reassuring. “And she’s…
First, conflict diamonds. Now, conflict tahini? Tahini, that creamy, silky condiment made of toasted and ground sesame seeds, is at the center of a vicious civil war in Ethiopia’s Tigray province. The war, and the famine conditions that now affect close to a million people there, may be upending the cultivation of what has become…
(JTA) — In October, one day after Facebook announced that it would ban Holocaust denial, Izabella Tabarovsky received an unexpected message from the platform. A 2019 post of hers promoting an article she had written on Holocaust remembrance was being removed for violating Facebook’s “Community Standards on hate speech.” No further information was provided, and…
Arizona is not necessarily a hospitable place, and I’m not just talking about the drought and extreme heat. There’s a lot of hate in my home state. From a sheriff who championed racial profiling and trafficked on an antisemitic web site to a legislature that just decimated what was left of the state’s public education…
As of Monday afternoon, there were 150 people – over 50 of them Jewish – still listed as unaccounted for in the collapse of the Champlain Towers South condominium in Surfside, Florida. As the search under the implacable, sodden pile of rubble dragged on into a fifth day, turning up only scattered remains and more…
The Olympic Games begin in Tokyo July 23, but no international spectators will be permitted. It’s an unfortunate turn of events for the city’s Jewish community, said Jerry Rosenberg, a former president of the Jewish Community of Japan, an egalitarian synagogue in Tokyo. In fact, Rosenberg said the 100-family congregation “had big plans” for the…
Antisemitic, white nationalist and insurrectionist organizations are lining their pockets with unpaid taxes, according to a new report by the Anti-Defamation League released Monday. These groups have established more than 30 nonprofit organizations exempt from state and federal income and unemployment taxes, and in some cases, property taxes, state income taxes, sales taxes and employment…
A Miami rabbi who is providing spiritual support to grieving families near the Surfside, Fla., disaster site estimated that at least 50 Jewish people — and perhaps many more — are missing after Thursday’s collapse of the condominium tower. Rabbi Julie Jacobs leads Beth David Congregation, an unaffiliated synagogue in Miami where Miami-Dade County Mayor…
SURFSIDE, Fla. (JTA) — One kind of disaster, volunteer medic Baruch Sandhaus said, has a “lot of patients” — a harrowing scene with many people and their injuries to treat. The sudden collapse of one of the residential Champlain Towers buildings this week in Surfside, Florida, a town in Miami-Dade County with a large Jewish…
The wall of remembrance for the missing people in the collapsed condominium tower in Surfside, Florida is on a chain link fence facing the building that fell around them. Pictures of happy couples, smiling families, many with Jewish surnames, seem to float in a wire net woven with roses and other flowers, wilting in the…
(JTA) — Among Rabbi Mayer Berger’s first thoughts on seeing the 12 stories of the Champlain Tower South pancaked upon themselves: This is like Sept. 11. Then as now, destruction of unimaginable proportions claimed many lives without warning, in a manner that rendered traditional practices for burying the Jewish dead impossible to perform. Those practices…
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