Daily Archives: August 25, 2005

City Questions Circumcision Ritual After Baby Dies

The city’s intervention has angered many Orthodox leaders, and the issue has left the city struggling to balance its mandate to protect public health with the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.

ANTI-SEMETIC GRAFITTI IN KINGSTON AVE SUBWAY STATION

Crown Heights residents are enraged by racist, anti-Semitic graffiti that was found scrawled on support columns in the Kingston Ave subway station.

The graffiti was first noticed Monday morning by a straphanger and when he saw it still there on Tuesday morning went ahead and made SHMAIS.com and the MTA aware of it.

“Death to the racist Jews!”, “Hitler had the right idea re the Jews just not enough time to get it right!” and “Al Qaeda has the right idea how to deal with Bush & Company” were some of the grafitti found scrawled on the support columns on the lower level of the station.

In an e-mail response to the straphanger, Melissa Glasgow of MTA responded in part: We sincerely regret the conditions you observed. Please note that all New York City Transit subway cars and stations are checked daily to ensure proper conditions, and any graffiti that is observed is removed in a timely manner as part of our regular cleaning cycles. In addition, uniformed and undercover officers from the New York City Police Department’s Transit Bureau patrol our facilities at all times to thwart illegal activity, including graffiti vandalism. Please be assured that your complaint has been referred to supervision in the appropriate operating departments for their review and appropriate corrective action. They will take this opportunity to inspect the location you mentioned and ensure a clean and proper environment for our customers and area residents.

Sium and Hachnosas Sefer Torah in Memory of the Shmueli Sisters, ob’m

A Sium and Hachnosas Sefer Torah will be held today (Thursday) in memory of the sisters Sterna Esther and Chaya Mushka Shmueli (aged 12 -14) who had tragically drowned in a pool in Virginia last year. The procession will start from the home of the Shmueli family on 722 Montgomery St. between Kingston and Albany and head towards 770 at 5:00pm.

Chabad Makes Major Inroads at Universities

Toward the end of the spring semester this past May, a Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi and about a dozen students celebrated a major victory at Tufts University. After nearly two years of vying for recognition as an official student group at the liberal arts college in Medford, Mass., Tufts’s student government finally recognized Chabad.

Rabbi Tzvi Backman and his wife, Chanie, will be Chabad’s campus emissaries, or shlichim, at Tufts, and they’re part of a rapidly growing group. Since 2001, nearly 30 new “Chabad houses” have opened on college campuses across the country, with an additional 10 slated for the upcoming school year.