In June, an Episcopalian church in Maryland announced it was ” title=”being married and with children” target=”_blank”>being married and with children. Now the Catholic Church is looking to welcome in more parishes and priests that are leaving the Episcopal Church.
According to ” title=”rest here” target=”_blank”>rest here.
Vatican establishes order for former Episcopal parishes and priests Read More »
A good night cap to the holiday season.
Santa and Jesus sing duet Read More »
Iran said on Monday it had successfully test-fired two long-range missiles during a naval exercise in the Gulf, flexing its military muscle to show it could hit Israel and U.S. bases in the region if attacked.
In response to mounting Western pressure over its nuclear ambitions, Iran started a naval drill in the Gulf last week and warned that it could shut the Strait of Hormuz if sanctions were imposed on its oil exports, the country’s main revenue source.
The 10 days of naval wargames and the warning over the Strait, a narrow Gulf shipping lane through which 40 percent of world oil passes, have rattled oil markets and pushed up crude prices.
Analysts say Iran’s increasingly strident rhetoric is aimed at sending a message to the West that it should think twice about the economic cost of putting further pressure on Tehran.
“We have successfully test-fired long-range shore-to-sea and surface-to-surface missiles, called Qader (capable) and Nour (Light) today,” Deputy Navy Commander Mahmoud Mousavi told state television.
Tehran denies Western accusations that it is trying to build atomic bombs, saying it needs nuclear technology to generate electricity.
The United States and Israel have not ruled out military action against Iran if diplomacy fails to resolve the Islamic state’s nuclear row with the West.
TIGHTER SANCTIONS
Iran said on Monday it had no intention to close the Strait of Hormuz, but it has carried out “mock” exercises on shutting the vital waterway.
“No order has been given for the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. But we are prepared for various scenarios,” state television quoted navy chief Habibollah Sayyari as saying.
The U.S. Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain, said it would not allow shipping to be disrupted in the strategic waterway.
Mousavi said observers from the country’s closest Arab ally, Syria, would attend the last day of its 10-day naval exercise.
The European Union is considering following the United States in banning imports of Iranian crude oil. U.S. President Barack Obama signed new sanctions against Iran into law on Saturday, stepping up the pressure with sanctions on financial institutions that deal with Iran’s central bank.
If enforced strictly, the sanctions could make it nearly impossible for most refiners to buy crude from Iran, the world’s fourth biggest producer.
The U.N. Security Council has already imposed four rounds of global sanctions on Iran over its refusal to halt sensitive nuclear activities.
Iran has so far shown no willingness to change its nuclear course but Iranian media reported on Saturday that nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili would write to the EU foreign policy chief to say Tehran was ready for fresh talks on its nuclear program.
Talks between Iran and six world powers – the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany – stalled in January.
Additional reporting by Hossein Jaseb; Editing by Mark Trevelyan
Iran test-fires long-range missiles in Gulf drill Read More »
In 2008 Jewish MLB lovers were introduce to Josh Whitesell. The Diamondbacks first baseman wasn’t the biggest or fastest, but many of us hoped he would have some staying power. Unfortunately he didn’t. Well that is not entirely true, it just wasn’t on American soil.
His raw home run hitting power lead the DBacks organization to keep him around in the minors. After a great spring training in 2009 Whitesell was sent back down to minors. He later signed a contract with the Wahsington Nationals, which began his bizarre turn of events. Whitesell was traded to…Tokoyo and sign a contract with the Tokoyo Yaklut Swallows.
He played great and the Swallows tripled his salary. He finished the season batting .309 with a .399 on base percentage and a .591 slugging percentage. After all his success, Whitesell became in demand, but again not in America. This past month, The Chiba Lotte Marines announced that they signed former big league first baseman. We are yet to see if Whitesell will make it back to the majors or even America. Best of luck.
And Let Us Say…Amen.
– Jeremy Fine
www.TheGreatRabbino.com
Where Are They Now? Josh Whitesell Read More »
I saw Speaker Newt Gingrich six or seven weeks ago in New Hampshire, and I saw him again Sunday morning, January 1st in Des Moines. Back then, he looked fresh and combative, this Sunday he looked tired, almost exhausted. Maybe it is the roller coaster that took him up to be a top tier candidate and then down again, to be a struggling candidate. Or maybe it is just waking up the morning after New Year’s without having enough time to drink proper coffee and shape up for yet another day of vigorous campaigning. Whatever the reason, he was offered a coffee and bagel with cream cheese and lox, courtesy of rabbi Yossi Jacobson and his Maccabee’s Deli, “the only Kosher deli” in town. And he spent an hour or so with the Jewish community of Des Moines – that is, with the Jews wanting to hear him in this relatively intimate setting. A couple of tables, a couple of chairs, cheese cake ($3.5), Bagel and lox ($5), coffee ($2), rabbis (Reform and Orthodox healthily mixing) – and one columnist.
Gingrich already said that he would not vote for Ron Paul if the Texan happens to win the nomination – in the short conversation we had following the event he told me he doesn’t believe such a thing could happen. But he finds it necessary to go back to this topic in the meeting with the Jewish Iowans. It is crucial he says that “we” (by “we” he might have meant the US, or the GOP) will not have “leaders who believe that Iran is not important”.
Gingrich seemed to remind his listeners that voting on Tuesday is the only way to stop Paul’s recent surge, an idea that finds some receptive audiences among Des Moines Jews. I was spending Friday evening at the B’nai Jeshurun Temple where I heard from a couple of people, among them registered Democrats, that they intend to vote “against Paul” in the caucuses (they will have to switch to do that). I asked Gingrich later if he was not concerned by the fact that so many GOP voters find Paul an acceptable candidate, if this doesn’t weaken the Republican position on all foreign matters, Israel included. His answer was sharp: “As Republicans learn more about Paul’s positions he would drop” – namely, his numbers would drop. Gingrich believes that “overwhelmingly, Republican voters are concerned about Iran” and would not buy Paul’s apologetic tone regarding this crucial matter (for more on this, read all about Jewish voters and the Ron Paul effect).
Gingrich himself was asked the predictable question about the necessity of an attack on Iran and gave the rehearsed answer: “I would not tolerate a nuclear Iran”. A preemptive strike should be a last resort measure. “If we got to a point of no alternative, I’d prefer a [military] strike to a nuclear Iran”. The “long term” solution, though, is “regime change”. His solution for the Palestinians’ continued “war” – Gingrich doesn’t see how “eleven missiles fired at Israel in one month” (November) can be considered otherwise – doesn’t go this far and is more tactical. He doesn’t seem to regret the “invented people” episode, and goes into a long explanation of the complexity of the situation. For any peace to be achieved Palestinians would have to be convinced first that Israel is not going anywhere, ever.
His remedy is simple: cut “all funding” for the Palestinians. He’d cut it without much hesitation. “The North defeated the South” only after understanding that there’s a need for “total war” – and that is the way to go with the Palestinians today, so Gingrich believes. He is “worried a lot less” about the Saudi aircraft deal, he told us. The Saudis “are terrified by Iran” and he “suspects that the Israelis privately approved the deal”.
He was asked a couple of questions on the relations of church and state by concerned members of the community who do not appreciate the intensity with which GOP candidates use Christian rhetoric for political purposes. On Monday evening some of these Jews – and probably others – will attend a “pre caucus event” on “freedom from religion in politics” that is sponsored by “Skeptics of Central Iowa”. Leaflets for this event were distributed among the attendees of the Gingrich talk, but the candidate himself would not budge much on this issue. Not now, a mere two days before religious Iowa is going to the polls. What “Jefferson said is that there should not be an official church”, not that religion should not play any role in America’s political life. Such a ban would be “bad for our culture”, he said. Then he posed for a photo with three rabbis: David Kaufman, Reform, Leib Bolel, Orthodox and Yossi Jacobson, Chabad (you can see this photo on the Rosner’s Domain Facebook page – and don’t forget to click the Like button).
What Gingrich told the Des Moines Jewish community? Read More »
Dozens of female demonstrators in Israel sat near the driver at the front of gender-segregated buses to protest the separation of men and women.
The protesters rode buses Sunday evening leaving from Jerusalem and Ramat Gan through the haredi Orthodox community of Bnei Brak and through Beit Shemesh, where a Modern Orthodox girls school on the cusp of a haredi Orthodox neighborhood has thrust the issue of the exclusion of women in the public sphere into the spotlight.
Be Free Israel, which according to its website is a nonpartisan movement working on behalf of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, organized the protest of the mehadrin, or sex-segregated, bus lines. Men also participated in the protest.
Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that voluntary sex segregation is permissible on public bus routes.
Also Sunday, the chief rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces told a meeting of military rabbis that they must work to prevent the exclusion of women in the military.
“There will be no exclusion of women in the IDF,” Rabbi Rafi Peretz said. “We especially, who know the importance of respecting a woman, must make sure this controversy won’t penetrate our ranks.”
Females sit in the front to protest gender-segregated buses Read More »
Jerzy Kluger, the Polish Jewish boyhood friend of the late Pope John Paul who had a major influence on the pontiff’s revolutionary relations with Jews, has died, friends said on Monday.
Kluger, who was 92, died in a Rome hospital on new year’s eve of complications from bronchitis and was buried on Monday in Rome’s Jewish cemetery. He had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and had been living in a home for the elderly east of the Italian capital.
Kluger and Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, were classmates in the southern Polish city of Wadowice and were friends from first grade through high school.
“The young Karol Wojtyla learned a lot about Judaism from Kluger,” said Italian author Gianfranco Svidercoschi, who was an aide to the late pope and wrote a book about the pontiff’s friendship with Kluger.
“He had a great influence on the pope’s life,” Svidercoschi, who wrote about their friendship in the 1993 book “Letter to a Jewish Friend,” told Reuters.
“The young Wojtyla visited the Kluger home in Wadowice, helped Jerzy with his studies, particularly Latin, and started a friendship that would influence his relations with Jews for the rest of his life,” said Svidercoschi, who was editor of the Vatican newspaper during part of John Paul’s pontificate.
They lost track of each other when World War Two broke out with the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and did not see each other again until 1965.
During the war, Kluger was arrested by the Russians and sent to a gulag in Siberia along with his father.
After Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Kluger was freed and joined Polish forces fighting with the Allies in Africa and Europe under General Wladyslaw Anders and took part in the pivotal battle of Monte Cassino south of Rome.
Towards the end of the war, when he discovered that his mother had been killed in the Auschwitz death camp, he decided to stay in Italy. He studied engineering in Turin and later moved to England.
He settled in Italy again in the early 1960s, working for an import-export company and re-connected with Archbishop Karol Wojtyla in 1965 when Wojtyla was in Rome for the Second Vatican Council. Until they met for the first time since 1938, each presumed the other had died in the war.
After Wojtyla became the first non-Italian pope in 455 years in 1978 they intensified their friendship and Kluger helped organize reunions between the pope and classmates from Wadowice either in Rome or during the pontiff’s trips to Poland.
Kluger was in Rome’s synagogue when Pope John Paul made his historic visit there in 1986 and called Jews “our beloved elder brothers”.
When the pope made his first trip to Israel as pontiff in 2000, Kluger was in attendance at the Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust.
Their friendship continued right up to the pope’s death in 2005.
“The passing of Jerzy Kluger is both a moment of individual sorrow for the loss of another courageous survivor of the Holocaust, as well as symbolic remembrance for the link with Pope John Paul under whom a revolution in the advancement of Catholic-Jewish relations was realized,” said Elan Steinberg vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants.
“Their childhood friendship was seared by their shared experience of coming under the Nazi yolk in Poland. There can be no question that John Paul’s warmth and gestures to the Jewish people was shaped by his personal witness of Nazi horrors,” Steinberg said.
Reporting By Philip Pullella; Editing by Peter Graff
Jewish friend who influenced Pope John Paul dies Read More »
The Muslim Brotherhood, which is leading in the national elections in Egypt, said it will not recognize Israel.
The party’s deputy head, Rashad Bayoumi, stold the Al-Hayat Arabic newspaper that the Muslim Brotherhood also would work to cancel the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.
“No Muslim Brotherhood members will engage in any contact or normalization with Israel,” he reportedly said in the interview with the London-based paper published Sunday.
“The Brotherhood respects international conventions, but we will take legal action against the peace treaty with the Zionist entity,” Al Hayat reported, according to Reuters.
Last week, the Salafi Al-Nour party, which won up to 30 percent of the vote in the first two rounds of parliamentary elections in Egypt, reportedly said in a statement that the party will “stand firmly against normalization between the two countries in all forms, and are against ties with any entity that wants to harm the Egyptian identity.”
The statement came after a spokesman for the party said in an interview with Israel’s Army Radio that the party would respect all treaties signed by Egypt, including the 1979 pact with Israel, though party leaders later clarified that the party is looking into the matter.
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood says it will not recognize Israel Read More »
The head of a regional council in southern Israel filed a complaint with the United Nations after mortar shells fired from Gaza were found to contain the banned substance white phosphorous.
Two mortars that landed in the Eshkol Regional Council, with a population of 13,000, contained white phosphorous, which is banned by international law for use in populated areas. Phosphorus can cause severe burns and other injuries.
It reportedly was the fourth time that white phosphorus has been found on mortars fired from Gaza on Israel.
The complaint by Chaim Jelin was filed with U.N Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
Jelin wrote, “The Israel Defense Forces, charged with protecting the residents of the State of Israel, are criticized and judged due to their being the military of a U.N. member state. In contrast, Hamas, the ‘neighborhood bully,’ is not subject to international laws, and feels free to use illegal weaponry against an innocent civilian population—without being judged or criticized by any international body. I call upon you to put an end to this hypocrisy!”
Israel files complaint with U.N. over Gaza phosphorus Read More »
