JewishTVNetwork.com, an online Jewish video source, will show Yom Kippur services live over the Internet. The broadcast of Kol Nidre from the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, the oldest Reform synagogue in Los Angeles, will begin Friday at 4:45 p.m. PST. JewishTVNetwork.com was launched earlier this year by JTN Productions, a non-profit production company that is developing, among other projects, a six-hour documentary for PBS called “The Jewish Americans.” CEO Jay Sanderson told JTA that the Jewish community has been slow to embrace new media opportunities, and he hopes his Internet venture will revolutionize Jewish life in America. “If the Jewish community really responds to this and sees this opportunity — which honestly the Jewish community is the last community to embrace media in terms of its possibilities — I think that we’re going to be able to deal with a lot of our issues in a different way,” Sanderson said. JewishTVNetwork.com is attracting several thousand users daily to its library of Jewish content streaming over the Internet. But Sanderson believes the Kol Nidre event, which represents the network’s first foray into live Internet broadcasting, opens up a range of possibilities. “You don’t have to get on an airplane to go to Israel to be in Israel. You don’t have to walk in to a synagogue to feel spirituality,” Sanderson said. “But once you’ve seen the Kol Nidre service, next year maybe you’ll go to Kol Nidre services.”
The mother of an Israeli soldier held hostage by Hezbollah called on the Lebanese people to revolt.
Miki Goldwasser, whose son Ehud was kidnapped along with fellow army reservist Eldad Regev on the Lebanese border last year, published an open letter Thursday in the London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq al-Awsat urging the Lebanese people to turn against the Iranian-backed militia.
“You deserve another reality for your homeland,” Goldwasser wrote in the appeal, which was directed at Lebanese readers.
She said Israel has recovered from the war that followed the July 2006 abductions, “while in Lebanon there is no democracy or freedom, and it is drowning.” Goldwasser blamed this on the control exerted by Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.
Goldwasser concluded by urging Lebanese to do “soul searching” over the current Muslim festival of Ramadan, when it is traditional to make goodwill gestures such as prisoner releases.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
