JDC

Israeli and Jewish aid officials are denying an Israeli TV report alleging that Ethiopian immigrant women have been coerced into taking contraceptive shots.

The report, which aired Saturday night on Israeli Educational Television, charged that coercive contraception is behind a 50 percent decline in the Ethiopian birth rate in Israel over the last decade.

Alan H. Gill has been tapped to serve as the next CEO of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, where as the group’s executive director of International Relations he has helped build a global operation to support the JDC’s
humanitarian efforts in more than 70 countries and Israel.

A year since its creation, the grandly named Global Planning Table remains the great white hope of the Jewish Federations of North America, which held its annual General Assembly here this week.

Introduced a year ago, the GPT aims to reshape the way federations spend money outside their local communities by making decisions on collective spending more transparent and communal. Federation officials hope this will stem the decline in overseas spending and bring more clout -- and money -- to federations’ collective action.

In the wake of the announcement that American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) Executive Vice President and CEO Steven Schwager will step down as CEO, the organization has named veteran Jewish community executive and leader Darrell Friedman as interim CEO, effective July 1.

Friedman spent 17 years as CEO of The Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore and has been a strategic consultant to major national and international Jewish organizations.

Russia has long been known for its musicians — and for the grueling conservatories in which those musicians are trained. The notion of learning and playing an instrument for pleasure is a foreign one, but with the support of PresenTense, the Jewish social entrepreneurship incubator, Sergey Novikov is trying to change that.

Two days after rebuffing repeated Israeli offers of aid, Turkey on Tuesday accepted help and Israel quickly sent an aid convoy that included seven tents to shelter some of those whose homes were destroyed in Sunday’s 7.2 magnitude earthquake.

A refugee from Nazi Germany who spent much of World War II in Shanghai and came to the United States in 1947, Claus Hirsch was scanning some wartime photographs one recent day — and he spotted a familiar face.

In his 16 years living in Tokyo, Phillip Rosenfeld has seen a few earthquakes shake Japan’s capital.

But when the ground started shaking and buildings swaying on March 11, he immediately knew this one was different.

“This was much more severe than anything that happened for a very, very long time,” said the Cleveland native who runs a travel business based in Tokyo and was with a friend spending his first day in Japan. “When the earthquake struck I was walking down the street and just stood in place as the ground began to sway more and more.

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- President Obama named a top American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee official as chairman of his faith-based council, as well as a top Conservative rabbi to the council.

Susan Stern, the government affairs adviser to the JDC, will chair the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, a Feb. 4 White House announcement said.