Looking back at the highs and lows of 5775

Cousins and Streit’s co-owners Aron Yagoda, left, and Aaron Gross, right, show off their matzah with Rabbi Mayer Kirschner, who makes sure everything is kosher.

Part one of two

NEW YORK (JTA) – As 5775 winds to a close, here’s a look back on the highs and lows (and everything in between) of the first half of the year that was.

September 2014

 •            At the annual U.N. General Assembly, President Barack Obama focuses his speech on ISIS, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu likens Iran to ISIS and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani blames the West’s blunders for fomenting the terrorists of ISIS. Meanwhile, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas issues a scathing attack against Israel for its conduct in the summer’s war with Hamas in Gaza.

October 2014

•             Rabbi Avi Weiss, an ardent political activist who espouses a liberal brand of Orthodoxy, announces his planned retirement from the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in New York. Weiss is the founder of the Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School for men and Yeshivat Maharat for female Orthodox clergy.

•             “The Death of Klinghoffer” — an opera based on the true story of an elderly American Jewish man killed by terrorists aboard an Italian cruise ship – opens at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York amid protests that the production is anti-Semitic and sympathetic to terrorists.

•             Chaya Zissel Braun, a 3-month-old American citizen, is killed when a Hamas terrorist crashes a car into a Jerusalem rail station. A second victim, a 22-year-old tourist from Ecuador, died several days later.

•             Relations between the Obama White House and Prime Minister Netanyahu reach a new low after an anonymous American official calls the Israeli leader a “chickenshit” in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic.

•             Open Hillel, the movement launched to counter the campus organization’s regulations on Israel programming, holds its first national conference, at Harvard University. The two-day gathering draws some 350 participants for a conference aimed at pushing back against Hillel International rules prohibiting programs that feature groups or individuals who “delegitimize” Israel or support the Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions movement against the Jewish state.

•             SodaStream, the Israeli at-home seltzer machine company, announces that it will close its West Bank factory and move the facility’s operations to southern Israel in 2015. The company says the move out of the Jewish settlement of Mishor Adumim is unrelated to boycott threats.

•             The core exhibit of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, a more than $100 million complex first conceived more than 20 years ago, is inaugurated with Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski and Israeli President Reuven Rivlin on hand.

November 2014

•             As Republicans retake the Senate in midterm elections, a state senator from New York’s Long Island, Lee Zeldin, is elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the sole Jewish Republican in Congress.

•             Four Jewish immigrants and a Druze policeman are killed during morning prayer services in a terrorist attack at a Jerusalem synagogue, Bnei Torah Kehillat Yaakov, in the Har Nof neighborhood. The victims include Rabbi Mosheh Twersky, the dean of the Torat Moshe Yeshiva and the grandson of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the founder of modern Orthodoxy.

•             Israel’s Cabinet grants initial passage to a controversial bill that would identify Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, prompting concern at home and among some American Jews that it will prioritize Israel’s Jewish character over its democracy. Acrimony over the bill sparks a coalition crisis that ends up dissolving the Knesset in early December and sending Israel to early elections scheduled for the following March.

•             Steven Pruzansky, a New Jersey Orthodox rabbi known for his incendiary rhetoric, is broadly criticized for publishing a blog post saying that Arabs in Israel are an enemy that must be “vanquished.” The post, titled “Dealing with Savages,” draws a strong rebuke from the Orthodox Union, which calls it “anathema to the Jewish religious tradition.”

•             As the Ebola epidemic spreads in three countries in Africa, IsraAid becomes the sole Israeli or Jewish organization on the ground in the hot zone.

•             A state monitor slams the East Ramapo Central School District in New York’s Rockland County for giving preferential treatment to Orthodox schoolchildren who do not attend public schools. The school board, which is majority Orthodox, had been under fire for years for allegedly diverting public funds to religious schools.

•             Jonathan Greenblatt, a former special assistant to President Obama, is named the next national director of the Anti-Defamation League. Greenblatt is slated to replace Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s leader since 1987.

•             World powers, led by the United States, extend the deadline in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program to June 30, 2015, prompting a call by AIPAC for new sanctions against the Islamic Republic. Ultimately, additional sanctions are not levied during the negotiations, which last until a deal is struck in early July 2015.

December 2014

•             France’s parliament, the National Assembly, votes 339-151 to urge the French government to recognize the state of Palestine. The vote follows similar motions passed the previous month by parliaments in Britain and Ireland.

•             An oil pipeline ruptures near the southern Israeli resort city of Eilat, causing a spill that is called one of Israel’s worst environmental disasters.

•             The United Auto Workers Local 2865, which represents more than 13,000 teaching assistants, tutors and other student workers in the University of California system, approves a resolution to join the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, becoming the first major U.S. labor union to hold a membership vote on Israel and BDS.

•             The European Parliament passes a resolution that supports, in principle, recognition of a Palestinian state as part of peace talks with Israel in a 498-88 vote with 111 abstentions. Meanwhile, the General Court of the European Union annuls Hamas’ inclusion on a blacklist of terrorist groups, saying the 2001 decision was based on press reports and not legal reasoning.

•             Alan Gross, a Jewish-American contractor for the U.S. government who had spent five years in a Cuban prison for helping connect Cuban Jews to the Internet, is released and returned to the U.S. as part of a deal to restore diplomatic ties between Washington and Havana.

•             Jewish immigration from France to Israel reaches an all-time record of nearly 7,000 in 2014, more than doubling the French aliyah rate in 2013 and far outstripping immigration to Israel from the United States. Overall, immigration to Israel hits a 10-year high in 2014 with approximately 26,500 new immigrants.

•             The Conservative movement youth group USY votes to relax rules barring teenage board members from dating non-Jews. 

•             President Obama signs the 2014 United States-Israel Strategic Partnership Act. The law, which unanimously passed the House and Senate, declares Israel a “major strategic partner,” upgrades the value of American weapons stockpiles in Israel and grants the Jewish state improved trade status.

•             As 2014 draws to a close, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics announces that the country’s population grew by 2 percent in 2014, to 8.3 million. Of them, 74.9 percent are counted as Jews, 20.7 percent as Arabs and 4.3 percent as others.

January 2015

•             Streit’s announces it is closing its historic, six-story matzah factory on New York’s Lower East Side, where the company produced the Passover staple for 90 years. It will relocate operations to New Jersey.

•             JTA, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, announces it is merging with MyJewishLearning to create 70 Faces Media. The new organization’s three primary brands – the news and syndication portal JTA.org, the Jewish encyclopedia MyJewishLearning.com and the parenting website Kveller.com – are to remain distinct.

•             Bess Myerson, the only Jewish woman to win the Miss America pageant, dies at 90. Myerson won the competition in 1945.

•             Four Jewish men are killed by an Islamic gunman during a hostage siege at a kosher supermarket in Paris two days after a pair of Islamic gunmen storm the Paris offices of a satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, killing 11. The supermarket gunman, Amedy Coulibaly, is killed when police storm the Hyper Cacher market. Almost simultaneously, police kill the perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo attack. The events, which prompt a massive anti-terrorism demonstration in Paris, stoke fears of French Jews about their future in the country.

•             Actor Michael Douglas is named the winner of the Genesis Prize. The $1 million award, given by a consortium of philanthropists from the former Soviet Union, is meant to recognize accomplished Jews who demonstrate commitment to Jewish values.

•             FEGS, a Jewish charity and one of the largest social service agencies in the United States, abruptly shuts down after losing $19.4 million in 2014. The 3,000-employee agency had said it served 12,000 people daily in areas such as home care, job training and immigrant services. The news comes just days after another major New York Jewish social services agency, the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, announces it is looking to merge or partner with other organizations or perhaps close altogether.

•             Alberto Nisman – the indefatigable Argentine prosecutor collecting evidence of culpability in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires – is found shot to death in his apartment, just hours before he is to present evidence to Argentina’s congress that he said implicated his country’s president and Jewish foreign minister in a scheme to cover up Iran’s role in the bombing.

•             New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is arrested on federal corruption charges. One of the state’s most powerful politicians and high-profile Orthodox Jews, Silver steps down as speaker but retains his Assembly seat while the investigation is ongoing.

•             House Speaker John Boehner invites Prime Minister Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress on Iran’s nuclear program. The move sparks a showdown with the Obama administration, which says the invite breaks protocol by circumventing the White House and is inappropriate given that the Israeli leader is in the midst of an election campaign.

•             Portugal’s government adopts legislation that offers citizenship to some descendants of Sephardic Jews, making Portugal the second country in the world after Israel to pass a law of return for Jews.

February 2015

•             Comedian Jon Stewart announces he is leaving “The Daily Show,” the mock news program he anchored for 16 years and built into a political and cultural touchstone.

•             Europe’s Jewish population is pegged at 1.4 million, down from 2 million in 1991 and 3.2 million in 1960, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. European Jews account for about 10 percent of the world Jewish population, compared to 57 percent in 1939, the eve of the Holocaust.

•             CBS News reporter Bob Simon, an Emmy Award-winning correspondent who was held captive in Iraq for 40 days while covering the Gulf War, is killed in a car crash in New York.

•             A gunman attacks the main synagogue in Copenhagen, killing a security guard. The attack comes hours after a gunman kills one person at a cafe in the city where a caricaturist who had lampooned Islam was speaking.

•             More than half of U.S. Jewish college students witnessed or experienced anti-Semitism, an online survey conducted by two professors at Trinity College finds

•             In a landmark case, a New York jury orders the PLO and the Palestinian Authority to pay more than $218 million in damages to American victims of six terrorist attacks that took place in Israel between 2002 and 2004 and were attributed to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and Hamas. The Palestinian Authority pledges to appeal.

Leonard Nimoy, the actor who portrayed the iconic character Spock on “Star Trek” for over four decades on television and in film, dies at 83. Born in Boston to Yiddish-speaking Orthodox parents, Nimoy had said he derived Spock’s trademark split-finger salute from the priestly blessing that involves a physical approximation of the Hebrew letter “shin.”