Holy Ground At The Pentagon

For the man who sponsored the first Torah for the Pentagon, it was a way to say thanks to this country.

“There is no better way for Jews to express their gratitude to America than to place a Torah in the Pentagon, which has preserved our freedom,” said Hank Sopher, a prominent New York real estate magnate and owner of Quik Park garages.

Sopher sponsored the writing of the Pentagon Torah, a first for the home of the U.S. military establishment.

Sholom Lipskar, a Lubavitch rabbi from Bal Harbour, Fla., and founding chairman of the Aleph Institute, presided over Monday’s Torah dedication in the Pentagon chapel. The scroll was placed in an ornate Israeli-built ark whose steel door is secured by a safe lock.

The ark rests in the spot where the 9-11 terrorists crashed the plane.

“Torah is perceived as a source of power and strength,” Rabbi Lipskar said. “We bring the Torah to this chapel, a holy place in the Pentagon, itself a center of power.”

Dozens of personnel from all branches of the military watched in fascination as the scribe, Rabbi Shmuel Wolfman of Jerusalem, completed the last letters of the scroll.

“The Torah is the source of all monotheistic faiths,” said Dov Zakheim, former undersecretary of Defense. “That’s where we all began.”

Rabbi Jacob Goldstein, the New York chaplain of the Secret Service, also attended the celebration. He had returned the day before from hurricane-stricken New Orleans, where he served for three weeks in a tent city at the airport.

In the past two years, Sopher has sponsored two other Torahs, also written by Rabbi Wolfman. One was for The Shul of Bal Harbour, Fla., the other for the Chasam Sopher Synagogue on Clinton Street on the Lower East Side.

Big Day For Joel

Yeshiva University president Richard Joel celebrated three “birthdays” on Sunday. In the morning he was in the middle of inaugurating the new Congregation Etz Chaim synagogue in Livingston, N.J., when his cell phone rang. His son Avery was calling with good news: Avery’s wife, Eliza, gave birth to a son, making Joel a grandpa for the first time.

That evening Joel addressed 718 people at the Waldorf celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx.

“I saw my grandson,” he announced. “He’s alive, he has all the equipment, and he’ll live in a world free of the diseases that my grandfather knew too well.”

Mindful of the Jack and Pearl Resnick Campus, Sen. Hillary Clinton paid tribute to board chairman emeritus Burton Resnick. “This university owes so much to the Resnick family,” she said.

Clinton slammed the Bush administration for its “shortsighted” approach to scientific progress by cutting the budget for research in medicine and science.

“We cannot turn the clock back on the scientific enterprise,” she said.

A child of the Bronx and a product of DeWitt Clinton High School, comedian Robert Klein said he too had ambitions to be a doctor.

“But something stood in my way — physics, chemistry, biology, attitude,” he joked.

Nevertheless Klein told all the medical practitioners and professors in the audience how a colonoscopy “opened a whole new world for me — more like Jules Verne than anything.”