NYC mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa said Orthodox Jews are trying to take over the city

 https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/308717

 Video from 2018 surfaced this week of Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate for mayor of New York City, describing Orthodox Jews as a drag on the tax system.

“We’re not talking about poor, impoverished, disabled people who need help, we’re talking about able-bodied men who study Torah and Talmud all day and we subsidize them,” Sliwa says in the video. “And then all they do is make babies like there’s no tomorrow and who’s subsidizing that? We are.

“So are we the shmucks and putzes? Yes.”

Same-sex marriage in New York: A milestone a decade in the making

 https://www.lohud.com/story/news/2021/06/23/gay-marriage-ny-decade-later-same-sex-lgbtq-rights/7604811002/

 Marriage equality is one of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s earliest achievements, arriving at the end of the first legislative session of his first term, on June 24, 2011. Cuomo brokered the passage, convincing four Republican senators to cast votes of conscience to pass the bill.

The vote was a nail-biter. Not until Sen. Stephen Saland, R-Poughkeepsie, rose and gave his support was passage assured.

Israeli embassies fly the rainbow flag for pride month

 https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/308724

Israel’s embassies around the world have raised the rainbow flag today in accordance with Foreign Minister Yair Lapid’s directives, including in London, Oslo, and Vienna.

The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem raised a rainbow flag last Tuesday, and Foreign Minister Lapid said: "For the first time ever this morning, I ordered the Foreign Ministry to fly the pride flag for pride month events. The Foreign Ministry and its employees carry a message of tolerance and freedom."

It should be noted that Yair Lapid's deputy in the Foreign Ministry, Idan Roll, belongs to the LGBT community and lives with his partner, singer and songwriter Harel Skaat.

 

This is what we know about those missing in the Miami condo collapse

 https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/24/us/miami-building-collapse-victims-missing/index.html

 Jewish community members missing, rabbis say

Some members from The Shul of Bal Harbour synagogue are among the 99 people unaccounted for, Rabbi Sholom Lipskar told CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

"This is something that transcends our capacity for understanding," Lipskar said about the collapse. "It's a reality, we accept it and we have to learn as we do in our culture of resilience to move forward."

The outpouring of support has been unprecedented, Lipskar said.

"There are way more volunteers than we can use. Our synagogue big hall, which is a giant space, is filled with blankets, pillows, microwave ovens, chargers, food. It is an extraordinary outpouring and it's real and it's sincere," he said.

"The only thing that helps in these times is kindness and empathy and togetherness, because you can't take away the reality," Lipskar said, and for each family member waiting for news from a loved one, there are about five or six community members with them, giving support.

Temple in Jerusalem

 https://www.duhoctrungquoc.vn/wiki/en/Temple_in_Jerusalem

In his novel The Old New Land, depicting the future Jewish State as he envisioned it, Theodor Herzl – founder of political Zionism – included a depiction of a rebuilt Jerusalem Temple. However, in Herzl's view, the Temple did not need to be built on the precise site where the old Temple stood and which is now taken up by the Muslim Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock, which are very sensitive holy sites. By locating the Temple at an unspecified different Jerusalem location, the Jewish state envisioned by Herzl avoids the extreme tension over this issue experienced in the actual Israel. Also, worship at the Temple envisioned by Herzl does not involve animal sacrifice, which was the main form of worship at the ancient Jerusalem Temple. Rather, the Temple depicted in Herzl's book is essentially just an especially big and ornate synagogue, holding the same kind of services as any other synagogue.

Dr. Theodor Herzl & Building the 3rd Temple

 https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/dr-theodor-herzl-building-the-3rd-temple/

Yesterday marked the commemoration of the 17th of Tammuz, a day of fasting and reflection and the start of the “three week” mourning period culminating in the somber day of remembrance Tisha BaAv, the Ninth of Av. In addition to the other misfortunes which befell the Jewish people on this day, traditionally the 17th of Tammuz is the day when the walls of Jerusalem were breached in 69 C.E. leading to the destruction of the 2nd Temple 3 weeks later on the Ninth of Av. Throughout the centuries, the Jewish people have used this time period for both personal as well as national introspection. For the vast majority of people the Temple and its destruction, is only used as an instructive teaching platform for broader moral lessons. For many the questions and introspection focuses on the following: What was the root cause of the destruction? How can we make sure to not fall prey to it again? Do we see similar trends in the Modern State of Israel, and if so how should we combat those trends? However, regrettably, there seems to be only a small minority of the Jewish people who ponder and contemplate the need for the actual physical rebuilding of the Temple. What purpose did the Temple serve, and what meaning and insight would its rebuilding hold for the Jewish People Today?

Health Ministry official: 'No surprise' that the fully vaccinated are contracting Covid-19

 https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/308713

 He added that, “We weren’t surprised to discover that people who were fully vaccinated are among those contracting coronavirus now. Around the time when we emerged from the third wave of the virus, there were hundreds of vaccinated people contracting Covid-19, and some of them even died. So of course we're seeing that again now.”

Israeli Pfizer official: COVID vaccine effective against Delta variant

 https://www.jpost.com/health-science/israeli-pfizer-official-covid-vaccine-effective-against-delta-variant-671903

 The Pfizer-BioNTech  vaccine is highly effective against the Delta variant of COVID-19, a Pfizer official in Israel said on Thursday.

First identified in India, Delta is becoming the globally dominant version of the coronavirus, according to the World Health Organization.

"The data we have today, accumulating from research we are conducting at the lab and including data from those places where the Indian variant, Delta, has replaced the British variant as the common variant, point to our vaccine being very effective, around 90%, in preventing the coronavirus disease, COVID-19," Alon Rappaport, Pfizer's medical director in Israel, told local broadcaster Army Radio.

Government admits that half of new Covid-19 cases in last month were fully vaccinated

 https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/308653

Head of Public Health Services, Dr. Sharon Alray-Price, revealed the disturbing facts at a media presentation on Wednesday. According to her data, of the 891 cases of coronavirus confirmed in the last month alone, half had received both doses of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine.

 

אלפי ישראלים נסעו ל'מדינות אסורות' ולא נבדקו ל'קורונה'

 https://www.kikar.co.il/395037.html

 חלם: ישראלים טסים למדינות אסורות דרך מדינה שלישית. בשובם, איש לא בודק דרכונם • משרד הבריאות: "המשטרה אחראית". המשטרה: "מנהלת ההגירה אחראית"

New COVID cases top 100 for 2nd day; virus czar: Masks may soon return indoors

 https://www.timesofisrael.com/virus-czar-says-indoor-mask-mandate-could-come-back-tomorrow/

As new coronavirus cases rise in Israel amid an outbreak of the Delta variant, virus czar Nachman Ash said Wednesday that health officials would present the government with possible actions to curb the pandemic, including a potential imminent return of the indoor mask mandate.

Ash spoke as the Health Ministry said another 110 new coronavirus cases were identified in Israel the previous day, taking the number of active cases to 554. Tuesday’s new cases included 64 children and teens, and 14 individuals entering the country from overseas, the Kan public broadcaster reported.

“We’ll determine when to bring back the obligation to wears masks in closed spaces,” Ash told 103FM Radio. “It could be tomorrow or the day after.”

 

A New Theory of Western Civilization

 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/joseph-henrich-weird-people/615496/

 Could a marriage policy first pursued by the Catholic Church a millennium and a half ago explain what made the industrialized world so powerful—and so peculiar?

 One culture, however, is different from the others, and that’s modern WEIRD (“Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic”) culture. Dealing in the sweeping statistical generalizations that are the stock-in-trade of cultural evolutionary theorists—these are folks who say “people” but mean “populations”—Henrich draws the contrasts this way: Westerners are hyper-individualistic and hyper-mobile, whereas just about everyone else in the world was and still is enmeshed in family and more likely to stay put. Westerners obsess more about personal accomplishments and success than about meeting family obligations (which is not to say that other cultures don’t prize accomplishment, just that it comes with the package of family obligations). Westerners identify more as members of voluntary social groups—dentists, artists, Republicans, Democrats, supporters of a Green Party—than of extended clans.

Chief Rabbi: ‘Exhume Christian missionary from Jewish plot’

 https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/chief-rabbi-exhume-christian-missionary-from-jewish-plot-671767

Chief Rabbi David Lau has said that “every effort” should be made to exhume and rebury a Christian woman and covert missionary who was recently buried in a Jewish cemetery in Jerusalem.

The woman in question was buried in a multistory burial chamber above a Jewish woman, since she was believed to be Jewish at the time.

Jewish law prohibits Jews to be buried alongside non-Jews, and since the woman’s husband refuses to allow her to be exhumed and reburied, questions have arisen as to how to handle the situation. Amanda Elk was the wife of covert missionary and Messianic Christian Michael Elk who together posed as ultra-Orthodox Jews in the Jerusalem neighborhood of French Hill for at least five years.

Senate Republicans block Democrats' election bill

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57570587 

 The huge bill - which sought to make it easier for Americans to vote - ended up deadlocked 50-50 along party lines.

Mr Biden said the issue was the "fight of his presidency", but some Democrats accuse him of not fighting hard enough.

Advocates say the bill would have been the most far-reaching election measure since the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It comes as Republican-led states advance proposals - which Mr Biden has depicted as racially discriminatory - to tighten election laws, and as former President Donald Trump, a Republican, continues to peddle unfounded claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

The Democrats' For the People Act passed the House of Representatives in March in a near party-line vote, with one Democrat joining all Republicans in opposing the bill.