Magen League Holds Anti-Missionary Seminar
in the Crimea

SEVASTOPOL, Ukraine – With a traditional sounding of the shofar, Chief Rabbi of Sevastopol Benyamin Wolf launched a region-wide seminar conducted by the Magen League aimed at resisting missionary activity. This is the third such seminar to be held by this organization in Ukraine this year. The event involved representatives of Jewish communities and organizations from throughout Crimea, including the chairman of local communities, directors of local ‘Chesed’ charities, leaders of youth organizations and editors of Jewish publications.

Led by the President of the Magen League, Professor Alexander Lakshin, and the organization’s Director in Ukraine, Igor Kuperberg, the two-day seminar allowed participants to get acquainted with the basic strategy of missionary activity, aimed at converting Jews to other religions, as well as the tactics they use and the ways the local communities can take action to counter such propaganda.

Israel Hoping To See Wish List In U.N. Reforms

Israel and its supporters are hoping that a comprehensive reform package to be adopted next week during the United Nations General Assembly will open the door to some of the key changes that Jerusalem has been demanding for years.

“We see in this General Assembly [what may be a] unique opportunity to see some of the changes take place,” Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., Dan Gillerman, told the Forward. “We are not naive and know we will not achieve all of them, because things take time at the U.N., but this is the 60th G.A. and there is an ambitious reform agenda, so this is a real chance.”

Gillerman warned, however, that Israel would not agree to a reform package that failed to address its concerns.

Pullout protester dies of injuries

The youth who set himself on fire a week ago in Jerusalem to protest the disengagement died of his injuries Tuesday evening. The youth, a 21 year-old immigrant from the United states, was hospitalized in intensive care in critical condition in the Hadassa Ein Kerem hospital in Jerusalem.

Mati Goldstein, a Magen David Adom paramedic who responded to the incident on August 31 in Jerusalem’s Gad Street, told Ynet: “I got the call and immediately made my way to the scene. I saw a man with burns all over his body. At first he had a hard time talking. He said he was hot. Later he said he he set himself on fire in protest of the disengagement plan.”

The New York Times Take On The Labor Day Parade

…At Crown Bagel, on Crown Heights’s central spine of Kingston Street, Hasidic Jews ate bagels with lox, bagels with guacamole and bagels with egg salad as music pulsed in the distance. They had not been to the parade, nor were they interested. “It’s not my style,” said Jacob Batz, the manager. “It’s loud.”

But others embraced the Caribbean vibrancy. A group of four rabbinical students donned do-rags with the colors of the Jamaican flag and stood outside the Chabad-Lubavitch World Headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway enjoying the music. “A lot of women, a lot of music, a lot of everything,” said David Lieder, 20, who was with Joel Lerner, 19, Avi Lapidus, 18, and Joseph Gelovitz, 20….

Swastikas painted on Chabad house, billboard

A Richmond Hill synagogue and billboards marking the site of a planned community campus were struck by anti-Semitic vandals last week.

Swastikas and SS lightning bolts were spray-painted in two-foot-high letters on a building housing the congregation of Chabad Lubavitch of Richmond Hill at Bathurst Street and Elgin Mills Road as well as on a sign outside the new Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Jewish Community Campus at Bathurst and Weldrick Road. The incidents took place in the early morning hours between Aug. 31 and Sept.1. Officers gathered evidence at the two crime scenes and Constable Don Yirenkyi of York Regional Police said the events are being treated as related hate crimes.

Chabad To Remake Historic Inn in Pa.

Rabbi Shraga Sherman knows about the murder and he’s heard about the ghosts. But it’s going to take a lot more than that to scare him away from the Colonial-era General Wayne Inn, a supposedly haunted building that he’s transforming into a synagogue, Jewish community center and upscale kosher restaurant.

Sherman, director of Chabad Lubavitch of the Main Line, is spearheading a $1.5 million renovation to give his growing Orthodox congregation a new home in the Philadelphia suburbs.

The plan is welcomed by the Lower Merion Historical Society, which has seen a parade of restaurant owners pull out of the National Historic Site, where guests have included George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette and the inn’s namesake, Revolutionary War Maj. Gen. “Mad” Anthony Wayne. The building has been vacant since 2002.

1 Dead, 5 Hurt In Labor Day Pre-Party’s

A 24-year-old Brooklyn man was killed and five other people wounded in separate incidents during pre-dawn celebrations leading up to today’s West Indian Day parade, law enforcement sources said.

Winfield Gaston, was fatally shot in the head around 10:20 p.m. as revelers took to the streets in Brooklyn for the pre-festival festivities known as J’ouvert.

“The West Indian Parade is [today], but they party the night before,” said a 33-year-old teacher who heard the fatal shots fired in front of his apartment building on Winthrop Street near Flatbush Avenue in Flatbush.

When silence is a sin

For months visitors to Gush Katif — may it be speedily rebuilt — were reporting that the people in Gush Katif had tremendous Emunah, faith in G-d.

That was before the catastrophe. Back then I questioned, was it really Emunah? It seemed to me that with the thousands of bombs falling and the miraculously small number of dead and injured, it was more like G-d was ‘in your face’ type of relationship. Gush Katif was a land of revealed miracles. No need for Emunah when there are multiple miracles every day. And you can add to the miracle of the impotent bombs, the miracle of growing world quality produce in sand.

Booming Jewish community attracts interest

Montana, and most likely Bozeman, is the next place in the world that the Chabad Lubavitch movement plans to place a full-time rabbi, according to a rabbi who has spent the past two summers working with Montana’s far-flung Jewish community.

Chabad, headquartered in Brooklyn, N.Y., considers Montana to be “the No. 1 spot in the world for its next rabbi,” said Rabbi Chaim Bruk.

Bruk will probably be that rabbi, he said. He and seminary student Arik Denebeim, 20, have been traveling around Montana for the past month and was back in Bozeman and Big Sky over the Labor Day weekend.

Bochur beaten in Kiev arrives in Israel for treatment

The yeshiva student who was severely beaten by drunken skinheads in Kiev last week was brought to Israel on Monday night for treatment at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv.

Representatives of the hospital visited the young man in Ukraine last week and, feeling that he required better medical care, convinced the hospital to fund his treatment in Israel.

The man, suffering from serious wounds to his head and to his lungs, was said to be unconscious and breathing with the help of a respirator.

His prognosis was not known.

Chabad Telethon to Aid Hurricane Relief Efforts

Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin, announced today that Chabad will urge donors during its upcoming “Celebration 25” Telethon to add to their usual contributions in order to support Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. The California-based organization has joined as a full partner in a broad relief program undertaken by Chabad-Lubavitch of Louisiana, and is providing vital financial, material, and logistical aid to those in need.

“It’s impossible to see the images of destruction and loss coming from the Gulf Coast and not be moved to action,” said Rabbi Cunin. “Our hearts go out to the hundreds of thousands who are suffering from this disaster, and we will continue to do everything we can to help the survivors. On September 25, we will ask our generous Telethon donors to contribute an extra amount during this emergency that they can earmark for hurricane relief. Chabad has a long, proud tradition of nonsectarian crisis intervention, and now is the time for all of us to step forward,” said Rabbi Cunin.

Chabad Search and Rescue Effort Grows

LUBAVITCH HEADQUARTERS, NY — Chabad’s Rescue and Relief mission is working round the clock to locate and rescue hundreds of individuals who have not made it out of New Orleans. Of the 35 individuals thus far rescued, most were elderly with medical

Early Tuesday morning Chabad RR deployed additional relief workers from New York equipped with satellite radios, gas powered phones, chainsaw axes, and thousands of non-refrigerated self-heated meals for the rescue teams and survivors. More will be sent as the needs are assessed, says Rabbi Mendel Sharfstein who is coordinating the effort for Lubavitch Headquarters. conditions, some of whom were found dehydrated and in precarious circumstances

Several Chabad yeshiva students will also be deployed to southern Mississippi to visit some of the ravaged Jewish communities. “We will need to hire our own security personnel to protect the students as they do their work,” says Sharfstein.

The Mountains Called, and New Yorkers Answered

It doesn’t take much to get the circle up and running. Every morning, shortly after the children have been mercifully spirited away to day camp, Deborah Goldman or Bonnie Keller or perhaps Agi Gruenbaum will drag a rickety folding chair to the shade of the giant white pine, pull out her latest embroidery project and before long, the circle – a jagged amoeba is more like it – will come to life with a dozen or more women who make Ganz Bungalows their summer home.

To the accompaniment of buzzing cicadas, they vigorously hash over the latest news from Israel, discuss upcoming weddings and embellish details from the previous evening’s skunk sighting. When the skies deliver rain, they shift closer to the sheltering boughs of that great pine and hope for the best.

A New Orleans Shliach’s Diary

This morning (Thursday) Rabbi Chaim Lazaroff took Rabbi (Zelig) Rivkin and myself to the Astrodome, the staging ground for the evacuees, where we spent several hours searching for familiar faces and counselling people. We also had a chance to network with the Red Cross and other groups that are heading up the relief effort in Houston. We met a New Orleans Times Picayune reporter who is Jewish and spent some time with him.Meanwhile, Bluma, Malkie and Yosef Rivkin have been manning the phones trying to contact people and follow up with the myriads of messages from people who want to locate loved ones, offer help etc.

Why Does the Left Hate Israel?

For decades, most American Jews have believed there were far greater threats from the fringe right than the fringe left in this country. While this view may have been reasonable in the past, it is certainly not so today. The fringe right still exists- the neo-Nazis in Northwest Idaho, Matthew Hale, and David Duke, and the remnants of the KKK. But the views of the fringe right have been marginalized by their repudiation by virtually all mainstream elements on the political right.

The fringe left, on the other hand, has evolved into a broader left, and become more mainstream. The political perspective of this new left is vehemently anti-Israel, and the power and reach of this movement represent a real threat to Israel, and by extension to Jews who support Israel.

Jewish gravestones vandalized in Hartford

A Jewish congregation says dozens of monuments have been broken and overturned by vandals in a burial plot in Hartford.

The West-Hartford based Congregation Agudas Achim discovered the damage yesterday. They say it’s not the first time damage has happened at the Zion Hill Cemetery.

Damage has also happened din 1985, 1990, 1995 and 2000. That has many congregation members questioning if the acts have been random.

‘A History of the Jews in the Modern World’:
The Best of Times?

Nearly all Jewish historians typically treat the modern age as the best of times and the worst of times — and these seemingly mutually exclusive propositions are both, in one way or another, true. Beginning in the late 18th century with the emancipation conferred by the French Revolution, no other group in the West has benefited so much from modernity, with its emphasis on education, social mobility and individual success. Jews worldwide increasingly saw civic and political freedom as inevitable, as part of the contemporary world’s largess. The exemplars of the modern age are disproportionately Jews: the Rothschilds, Marx, Einstein, Freud, Kafka and George Soros.