Daily Archives: July 7, 2005

More Parking Chaos Thursday

Today (Thursday) there will be no parking and no traffic on Brooklyn Ave. from Eastern Pkwy. till Empire Blvd.

The D.O.T. finished scraping the roads and today they are going to pave it over. And end this Balagan.

Chabad: Rattling the Cage

Evidently, it was anti-disengagement saboteurs from the messianic wing of Chabad who scattered nails and oil on the highway into Jerusalem last week, says Internal Security Minister Gideon Ezra.

On the same day the highway was boobytrapped, some young Israeli rabble who’d taken over a Palestinian house in Gaza stoned a Palestinian teenager under an IDF soldier’s care. The house, which was spraypainted with Kahanist slogans and the warning “Sharon, we’ll murder you, too,” had messianic Chabad flags flying from the roof and Chabad posters pasted to the walls.

Special on Gaza Disengagement: Balagan

Balagan is a slangy Hebrew word, derived from Russian, used by the Israel Defense Forces to describe what is happening with Sharon’s Gaza disengagement strategy: “chaos; a screw up!”

It is less than 60 days before the 8000 residents of more than 20 villages that make up Gush Katif in the coastal Gaza district are to be moved to Netzarin, an oceanside setting in the northern Negev. The Sharon government has plied the Gaza settlers with the carrot of millions of shekels and the stick of preventive detention for their children should they balk at leaving under duress of military supervision.

Israeli Pilot Saves Woman In New York

Former IAF helicopter pilot crashes chopper into New York City’s East River and saves drowning passenger; receives praise from Mayor Bloomberg

An Israeli man who saved a British woman from drowning after the tourist helicopter he was piloting crashed in New York City’s East River was praised by Israel and by Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Thursday.

Yossi Ben-Bassat, 51, said the sightseeing chopper he had flown over Manhattan on Tuesday plunged into the water after he lost control of it. One of the six passengers, British tourist, Karen Butler fell into the water and was later found to have sustained a serious head injury.

Rabbi Groner to Sharon: You Are the Cause of Murder

Rabbi Leibel Groner, who was the personal assistant to the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson – the last Rebbe of the Chabad Lubavitch Chassidic sect, and someone acknowledged as a world-wide Jewish leader – shouted at Prime Minister Ariel Sharon during a meeting with Chabad rabbis at the beginning of the week. The explosion at the meeting was reported by the Sha’ah Tovah weekly, read among the Haredi public.

According to the report, Rabbi Groner shouted, “You are causing the murder of Jews…. How can you expect us to sit quietly by and not protest? Out of a sense of self-sacrifice, we will go and protest and we will do everything to prevent the Disengagement Plan.”

At that, the prime minister’s advisor for Haredi affairs intervened and quieted Rabbi Groner.