Daily Archives: November 3, 2005

Chabad on campus: A haven for students
…a question mark for Hillel

It was 11 p.m. on a Friday night in mid-September and Pam Newman had just finished enjoying the weekly Shabbat meal with 80 or so students at the Hillel House on the campus of UConn at Storrs. Then Newman, the organization’s director, gathered up a bunch of students and headed over to the school’s new Chabad@UCONN outpost just, as she put it, “to hang out and say hello.” As Newman was leaving Chabad at 12:30 a.m., another group of students was arriving. The next morning Rabbi Shlomo Hecht, the new executive director of Chabad@UCONN, joined the Hillel House minyan, then returned again in the evening for the community Havdalah service.

And that’s the way it’s been ever since Hecht, his wife and two young sons, arrived in Storrs this past summer, and Hillel students helped them move in: Hillel students bake challahs on Thursday night and send a couple over to Chabad for Shabbat. Hecht goes food shopping in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, and picks up a few things for Hillel, too. The two Jewish groups ran separate programs for the holidays…but came together for a blow-out Simchat Torah celebration n as they did last year for Purim when Rabbi Yosef Wolvovsky of Chabad East of the River ran the program.

Bloomberg’s Comfort Level

Jews poised to become the mayor’s biggest ethnic bloc, while Ferrer faces uphill battle.

It should have been no surprise that Mayor Michael Bloomberg chose to make his first campaign appearance with his predecessor, Rudolph Giuliani, at a breakfast to which more than 1,000 Jews had been invited at the Hyatt last Friday.

By packing the room with Jews, a great number of them Orthodox, Bloomberg was assured a hearty and enthusiastic response from a crowd that was enamored of him and his fellow Republican and erstwhile chief executive.

UN establishes annual Holocaust Day

The 191-member U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday established January 27 as an annual commemoration day for the 6 million Jews and countless other victims murdered in the Nazi Holocaust during World War Two.

The watershed resolution, agreed to by acclamation after two days of speeches, is aimed at making the new “International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust” a symbol against genocide for future generations.

“I feel moved and privileged to present this historic resolution today, as an Israeli, a Jew, a human being and the child of Holocaust victims,” Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Dan Gillerman, said in introducing the measure.

Now that there’s a Sanhedrin, who needs the Supreme Court?

When the “new Sanhedrin” was established in Tiberias a year ago, hardly anyone took it seriously. The 71 rabbis who came to the northern city 1,660 years after the original Sanhedrin (the assembly of 71 ordained scholars that was both supreme court and legislature in Talmudic times) held its last meeting there, were welcomed by many in the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox sectors with smiles tinged with derision.

The declaration of the Sanhedrin’s reestablishment was perceived as both a curiosity on the margins of the right and as a rebellion against halakhic conventions; as a perhaps daring step, but one that was also a warning; far-reaching, but to a large extent provocative.

Info To Be Menachem Avel Meyer Eichler, Bella Levin & Dvorah Lifshitz

R. Meyer Eichler – CH, Bella Levin – CH and Dvorah Lifshitz – CH are sitting Shiva after the passing of their father R. Tzvi Eichler OBM.

They will be sitting in Meyer Eichlers house at 702 Eastern Pkwy. on the corner of Brooklyn Ave. and the phone number there is (718) 756-6060

Shachris on Friday will be at 8:00am and Mincha at 1:00pm.

Shachris on Sunday-Tuesday is at 7:15am and Mincha at 4:15pm and Maariv 7:30pm

Wednesday they are getting up from Shiva and Shacharis will be Davend at 7:15am.

Mrs. Clinton Plans a Trip to Israel to Discuss Security With Sharon and His Aides

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s aides said on Wednesday that she was planning to go to Israel next week to discuss American-Israeli relations, in a trip that may help her strengthen her support among Jews in New York as she faces re-election next year.

The visit by Mrs. Clinton, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, will include meetings on security issues with top Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres, the deputy prime minister. In her meeting with Mr. Sharon, Mrs. Clinton plans to discuss developments stemming from Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and to reiterate her condemnation of remarks made by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran calling for the destruction of Israel.

HASID MUGGED ON WAY TO PRAYERS

A Hasidic milkman was brutally beaten and robbed in a Brooklyn synagogue as he arrived for prayers early yesterday, police said.

Mier Rosen, 57, a dairy delivery truck driver, walked a few doors down from his home on Bedford Avenue to the Brei Mordchi of Cleveland synagogue at 2:48 a.m. to take a mikvah — a ritual purification bath — before attending morning prayers when a robber lurking on the premises attacked him.

Coast to Coast, Canada and Oxford: Hundreds of Campus Students Converge for Shabbat With Chabad

From Oxford, England. From Columbus, Ohio. Dartmouth, Boston, Princeton, NYU, USC . . . Four hundred students, from tony ivy league universities to schools devoted to the art of the party, are making their way to Brooklyn, New York, for the annual National Shabbaton at Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters November 4-6.

Stephen Sullivan, an international business major from Ohio State University, signed up for the trip for a second helping of the experiences he remembered from last year’s Shabbaton weekend. “It’s an opportunity to meet Jewish kids from around the country,” said Sullivan. “And you experience a good Shabbat both with people like you and with people whose experience is different. Everyone is so accepting. They don’t judge.” Besides, “New York is a lot more exciting than Columbus.”

A Great German Word

I am not a great fan of German achievement. I believe – horrors! horrors! – that a Lexus or a Cadillac is better than a BMW or a Mercedes. But I do acknowledge that Germans have a way with words. They created words that other languages simply do not have.

Schadenfreude is such a word. In case you are not familiar with it, it takes seven English words to define it: “malicious satisfaction in the misfortunes of others.” The dictionary also explains it with a quote from the New York Times about historian Peter Gay – who felt Schadenfreude as a Jewish child in Nazi-era Berlin, watching the Germans lose coveted gold medals in the 1936 Olympics; he said that it “can be one of the great joys of life.”