Thirty years ago, in 1983, Rabbi Pinchas Gruman, an esteemed scholar of Jewish texts who also holds a doctorate in philosophy, was the chair of the Rabbinical Council of California’s (RCC) committee dedicated to enforcing Jewish dietary law at establishments under its supervision.
“By the way, I forgot to mention,” Georgia Freedman-Harvey said at the end of a long interview, “I was a bone marrow donor for a stranger 10 years ago.” That Freedman-Harvey physically gave of herself wasn’t a surprising revelation.
A resolution passed by the UC Irvine undergraduate student council calling on the university to divest from companies that “profit from Israel’s occupation of Palestine” has been rejected by the UCI administration.
On Nov. 6, California taxpayers will once again be asked to bail out Sacramento. As the Orange County Register points out, years of fiscal mismanagement means these “will be the 12th, 13th and 14th times over the past decade that Californians are being asked to increase their taxes.”
The Orange County chapter of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), after being denied a venue at two local synagogues, is claiming Jewish community leaders have sought to prevent ZOA from generating public discussion critical of a controversial student program.
Thirty University of California Jewish studies faculty members asked the Orange County district attorney to drop criminal charges against 11 Muslim students. The faculty members, from seven University of California campuses, are the second Jewish group to come out in support of the students, who have been charged with disrupting a February 2010 speech by Israeli U.S. Ambassador Michael Oren at the University of California, Irvine. The Jewish Voice for Peace organization also supports dropping charges against the students.
Several hundred people demonstrated outside the Yorba Linda Community Center in Orange County on Feb. 12, where two controversial Muslim activists addressed a fundraiser held by the Queens, N.Y.-based Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA).
The Orange County district attorney’s office announced on Feb. 4 that it was filing misdemeanor charges against the 11 students arrested in February 2010 for disrupting a speech by Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). The defendants — students at UCI and the University of California, Riverside when the incident took place — have been charged with one count each of conspiracy to disturb a meeting and disturbance of a meeting. Arraignment is scheduled for March 11.
The start of the new academic year at Irvine\’s Tarbut V\’Torah Community Day School (TVT) ushered in what could be a new era in its outreach to Orange County\’s Jewish community.
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