Israel has made an initial request for its annual U.S. defense aid to increase to as much as $5 billion when its current aid package, worth an average $3 billion a year, expires in 2017, U.S. congressional sources said on Wednesday. Israel wants $5 billion per year in military aid for 10 years, for a…
Jews have a long history of U.S military service. Sephardic plantation-owner Francis Salvador became the first Jew to die in the American Revolutionary War when he fell fighting the Loyalists in South Carolina in 1776. Abraham Lincoln appointed Jacob Frankel as the first Jewish chaplain during the Civil War, to serve the growing number of…
(Reuters) — Israel’s armed forces see a growing threat in instant messaging applications — both to battlefield secrecy and to the privacy of women soldiers. According to official military journal Bamahane, the number of troop indictments for sex crimes has almost doubled since 2012, with “infringement of privacy” counts, some involving the collection and sharing…
The F-35 fighter jet is Israel’s latest big purchase / Wikipedia The Israeli parliament has become a turbulent place in the past few weeks — even more so than usual. What with key politicians getting fired, there’s been lots of chatter about what this shake-up will mean for the Israel-U.S. relationship. But it may not…
Two Jewish veterans testified in Congress against allowing chaplains to engage in sectarian prayer in nondenominational settings. Mikey Weinstein, the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Association and a former U.S. Air Force judge advocate general, and Rabbi Bruce Kahn, a retired Navy chaplain, were among five witnesses to appear Tuesday before the subcommittee on…
(JTA) — Mementos of Jacob Goldstein slide across the 3-foot-by-4-foot horizontal screen: his photograph, his name, an Operation Urgent Fury headline denoting the 1983 military campaign in Grenada, Goldstein’s explanatory text summarizing his role during the invasion. Even more striking than the photograph showing the uniformed rabbi wrapping tefillin on the Grenada beach with his…
Colonel Jennifer Natalya Pritzker is not much for the spotlight. Like the rest of her family, the massively wealthy Chicago-based real estate scions, she rarely gives interviews. But the 63-year-old, whose official title is Colonel (IL) Jennifer N. Pritzker IL ARNG (Ret), doesn’t have to say much for her mission to be clear. With an…
Shortly after his aliyah to Israel six years ago, then 73-year-old Morton Freiman met with Ofek Buchris, commander of the Israel Defense Forces’ Golani Brigade, and informed him that he wanted to join the Israeli army. When Buchris asked Freiman, a retired plastic surgeon from Miami, what he could do for the IDF, Freiman said…
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