Empire Has Not Seen Its Last Crash Yet

Last night [Monday] at around 8:15pm a car service was seen speeding down Empire Blvd. and all of a sudden he sounded his horn and slammed on his breaks and hit a car that had been parked. The car that was struck was having mechanical issues and was pushed off the road into a parking spot but was left sticking of into the road a little. And the driver of the car service was screaming that the car that wouldn’t start all of a sudden started to pull out!

From the force of the impact the parked car was sent flying and completed 2 360’s ending up parked facing the other direction, and the car service in the middle of the road. One thing everyone was shocked about (even the responding officers) was the fact that no one was injured.

More pictures in the Extended Article.

Copycat Shul Attack

A teenager who threatened worshippers at a synagogue in southern Russia with a broken bottle has been sentenced to five days in prison.

The unnamed man, who was convicted on Saturday, a day after he stormed the shul in Rostov-an-Don, admitted he was inspired by television reports about an attack on a Moscow synagogue last week in which eight people were stabbed.

The copycat incident has lent weight to calls from community leaders in Russia in the wake of the Moscow attack for the government to do more to combat the increase in anti-Semitism in the country.

Following the stabbing, Russia’s Chief Rabbi Berl Lazar said: “We hope that law enforcement agencies and the Russian authorities will take real measures so that this will never be repeated.”

Jewish Community of Mission Viejo Celebrates 10 Years With Chabad

Creative to the hilt, it’s fitting that Chabad Jewish Center of Mission Viejo, CA, is housed in a former bank building. Transforming ennui into excitement has been Chabad’s trademark for the past ten years. Where else does the Chabad rabbi sing with a (Jewish) rock and roll band? But most striking is the reaction elicited by mention of Chabad of Mission Viejo’s 150-student strong Hebrew school.

Angela Khalil drives a half hour to bring her sons, Nathan and Ethan, to Chabad Jewish Center’s Hebrew school. “I love it. They are the best. I come all the way from Tustin because I fell in love with the program. My kids look forward to going to Hebrew school, and we have tried so many different temples,” said Khalil.

N.O. Day Schools Back In Business

Four months after Katrina, one Jewish school reopens and another decides to resume in August.
The walls have been repaired and repainted, the floor tiles replaced and last Thursday the doors at Torah Academy, a Chabad-affiliated school that incurred an estimated $750,000 in capital losses as a result of Hurricane Katrina, reopened to welcome 28 students in nursery school through eighth grade.

Administrators at Torah Academy, located in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, chose to resume classes, even though nearly half of its pre-storm student body would not be immediately returning.

Shaping the Future

Many students question the need to learn history. We can’t undo the past anyway, why waste time learning about it? The obvious answer is that through the study of history we can educate ourselves about our own country and other countries, as well as learn from past mistakes as history tends to repeat itself.

What happens, though, when history books misinform or mislead? The damage that is done when children are fed misinformation and lies is immeasurable. Yet according to two articles I read recently it seems that there are Western democracies that are feeding their students material that is clearly undermining other Western democracies.

New York Muslim Leader Backs Iranian In Saying Holocaust Is ‘Exaggerated’

The leader of a large Shiite mosque in Queens has joined the new Iranian president in disputing the Holocaust, saying the Nazi massacre of an estimated 6 million Jews during World War II “has been exaggerated.”

“The numbers which have been mentioned are too much,” the spiritual leader of the Imam Al Khoei Islamic Center in Jamaica, Sheik Fadhel al Sahlani, told The New York Sun. Sheik al Sahlani, who said his mosque has a membership of about 3,000, said that the killing of innocent Jews during the war was “an injustice” but that the extent of Nazi persecution needed further examination. “The numbers, the reasons, we have to study more,” he said.

South Bay thanks Chabad couple for 25 years — past and future

When friends of Yosef and Dena Levin wanted to salute the couple for 25 years of community service, the Palo Alto Chabad rabbi and rebbetzin at first said no. Self-aggrandizement just isn’t their style.

But so many admirers insisted on holding an event, the Levins ultimately relented. Now the couple will just have sit back and accept the accolades from a grateful Jewish community.

The “champagne brunch” celebration for Yosef and Dena Levin takes place Sunday, Feb. 26 at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

Conveying New Vigor

Meet the new look of cool on college campuses today: black suit, buttoned white shirt, long side-burns and a beard. They’re not rock stars, movie stars or sports stars, but they are the new stars on the religious college scene.

Rabbi Dov Wagner is orthodox and leader of the Chabad Jewish Student Center, a charismatic Jewish organization on campus. Fifteen years ago, there were only 25 full-time Chabad Student Centers throughout the United States; today there are 85, with more than 200 campuses served by a Chabad Center. What does Wagner attribute to the explosive growth of this orthodox-based college organization on mostly secular campuses?

Synagogue case in Hollywood raised concern in ’04 about religous bias

Elected officials locked in a federal lawsuit over a Jewish synagogue’s right to worship in a single-family home have been worried for at least two years that purported miracles performed at a Catholic woman’s home could hurt them in court.

The U.S. Department of Justice and the Chabad Lubavitch are suing the city, accusing city officials of denying the Jewish group a zoning variance based on its religious denomination.

A majority of commissioners expressed serious concerns about the city’s treatment of Rosa Lopez, who says the Virgin Mary visits her home monthly, compared with that of the Chabad Lubavitch, which converted a Hollywood Hills house into a synagogue for daily worship, according to transcripts of closed-door meetings held in 2004.

Worries of Anti-Semitism Spread in Russia

Pogroms and purges of Jews are a thing of the past in Russia, but as women scrubbed the bloodstained floors of Moscow’s Chabad Bronnaya synagogue on Thursday, a day after a man burst in and stabbed worshippers, alarm spread over increasingly open anti-Semitism.

Jewish leaders warned official indifference is fueling a wave of hate attacks and called for a crackdown on aggressive nationalist and fascist groups that have mushroomed in recent years. Police should guard outside synagogues and other Jewish sites, they said.

“We expect government and law enforcement agencies to take real measures to ensure this doesn’t happen again,” Russia’s chief rabbi, Berel Lazar, said. “If there is indifference, nothing will change.”

Salvaging homes, restoring lives

For one week during winter break, Matt Peterson and Laneia Seumalo scooped muck, carted out moldy furniture, gutted waterlogged homes and heard one tear-jerking story after another in Hurricane Katrina-ravaged New Orleans.

“You don’t realize the full impact of what happened until you’re there,” Seumalo said.

The two University students joined students from more than 30 U.S. colleges to converge in New Orleans to help victims of Hurricane Katrina, part of a joint project between the Chabad on Campus National Foundation and Lubavitch Rabbi Yochanan Rivkin, director of the Chabad Jewish Student Center at Tulane, whose efforts have been praised by President Bush.

Kabbalah class looks at alternate view of time

Portland is one of 160 locations around the world where a new course in Kabbalah will be offered starting Feb. 8.

The purpose of the course, called “The Kabbalah of Time,” is to help individuals cope with the implications of our increasingly high-speed world.

It is an eight-week course offered through the Jewish Learning Institute, the adult education arm of Chabad Lubavitch.

“We live in an age obsessed with time,” states the promotional material for the course. “On the one hand, we have managed to speed up many of our mundane daily activities so that they take a fraction of the time they once did. Yet we do not find that we are more serene or happy. To the contrary, there are ever-increasing demands and intrusion on our time, creating an increasingly fragmented existence.”