Daily Archives: April 18, 2006

Longmont welcomes first Jewish center

Longmont, Colorado – When Lisa Trank wants to attend synagogue, she drives roughly 15 miles to Boulder. She frequently travels there for other types of Jewish programs, too — including children’s events, adult classes or lectures — because Longmont has no Jewish community center, synagogue or rabbi.

Trank, 47, said she yearns for a nearby synagogue. Now, she won’t have to wait much longer.

In September, an ultra-orthodox rabbi from New York and his wife will begin setting up a Jewish center in town.

“I think it’s fabulous,” said Trank, the marketing director for Boulder’s Jewish Community Center and a member of Pardes Levavot, a Boulder Jewish Renewal congregation. “It reflects that the Jewish community is growing in Longmont, and it’s diverse enough that all aspects of Judaism can be reflected.”

Rabbi Yakov Borenstein, 24, and his wife, Shayna, 21, will move to Longmont from Brooklyn, N.Y., in early September to start a Chabad center, offering Longmont a synagogue, Jewish education classes and regular Jewish programming for the first time, Borenstein said. Chabad is an ultra-orthodox sect of Judaism.

“There is a Jewish awareness in Longmont,” Borenstein said. “There is a strong yearning for it. A lot of people are very, very interested.”

New Orthodox Jewish center hosts area’s first traditional Seder for Passover

Fort Collins – “Why is this night different from all other nights?”
The familiar question that Jewish children have been asking for more than 3,000 years during Passover took on added significance in Fort Collins this week.

Organizers of a community Passover Seder conducted Wednesday night say the ages-old traditional meal was brand-new for Northern Colorado.

The new Chabad Jewish Center of Northern Colorado sponsored the event, which Rabbi Yerachmiel Gorelik said was the first fully traditional community Seder in the area.

Revitalizing tradition

Worcester Academy may be the best-known boarding school in the city, but there is another local school that draws students from far away and which reopened its dorm this year: Bais Chana, a tiny Jewish school on Midland Street for girls in Grades 7-12.

The school is part of Yeshiva Academy, which accepts students from all strands of Judaism, but the girls at Bais Chana live by the Chabad-Lubavitch tradition: They keep their knees, elbows and collarbones covered, they don’t sing and dance in front of the opposite gender (a restriction specific to females), and many of them voluntarily surround themselves with Jewish culture, from the music in their iPods to the early-morning spiritual studies they organize themselves.

Seders in Moscow

On each of the seven floors of Marina Roscha, Moscow’s hulking, modern Jewish Community Center, Chabad-Lubavitch hosted a communal Seder, each catering to a specific segment of Russia’s Jewish community. Among the various Seders, including the senior Seder, the Passover program for young professionals, and the Israeli businessmen and families, some 3,000 guests were present.

Across the CIS, huge numbers–500 communal Seders, 1,000 children in Passover camps, a half million families served at the 437 soup kitchens–were the norm, but a closer look reveals the changing face of the CIS Jewish community there, and Chabad’s ability to keep pace with new realities.

Psalms book spares rabbi

Amid the aftermath of the Palestinian suicide attack today that killed nine comes news of a miracle as a rabbi’s life reportedly was spared when a book of Psalms held in a pocket next to his heart was ripped in two by a piece of shrapnel.

Chabad Rabbi Avishai Batshvilli and his wife were among the people at a crowded fast food stand near Tel Aviv’s old central bus station when a suicide bomber blew himself up as Israelis celebrated the fifth day of the Passover holiday. Along with the dead, more than 60 were wounded, at least 10 of them seriously. The same restaurant was hit by a suicide attack in January, wounding 20.