Daily Archives: August 12, 2006

City lawyer defends rules to Chabad

Cooper City officials aren’t backing down from a synagogue that wants to challenge the city’s zoning rules, even if it means facing a religious discrimination lawsuit.

But they are at least willing to talk it out.

That’s what a letter from city attorneys to attorney Franklin Zemel said Thursday. Zemel is representing Rabbi Shmuel Posner, who has been trying to set up a Chabad outreach center in a Griffin Road shopping center for years.

Zemel recently won a zoning case in Hollywood, which awarded a Chabad synagogue $2 million and the right to operate a house of worship in a residential area.

Las Vegas Jewish Community Booms

Jumping from 55,000 in 1997 to 75,000 in 2000, the boom in Las Vegas’s Jewish community is well on its way to reaching, perhaps surpassing, the American Jewish Committee’s projected 2010 census of 100,000 Jews. But where exactly do all these Jews live? On the strip, among the neon?

First-ever fair to offer Israeli art, Kosher food, Klezmer

Guilford, CT – Judaism is the ancient tradition of a relatively small community of people. It was the first documented religion to hold as its central belief the idea of monotheism: the conviction that there is only one God, an omniscient source of all power who bonded with God’s “chosen people” since the days of the biblical forbearers Abraham and Sarah. It is the parent religion for Christianity and even Islam.

Now, Rabbi Yossi Yaffe, director of Chabad of the Shoreline wants to extend elements of this ancient faith and culture to believers – and non-believers with curious minds – by sponsoring the very first Shoreline Jewish Festival on the Green Aug. 13.

Coast Guard now allows religious headgear

The skullcap can stay on the Coast Guard auxiliarist’s head after all. Jack Rosenberg, a 35-year-old Hasidic Jew from Rockland County, N.Y., signed up for the Coast Guard Auxiliary last year and passed his training, only to be informed that regulations forbade him to wear his skullcap during some duties.

Much as he loves his country, Rosenberg was not about to doff his skullcap, which a Hasid normally sheds only to shower or to swim, so his uniform stayed in the closet.

Now he does not have to. The Coast Guard is issuing new regulations allowing members to wear religious headgear, a spokesman for the guard, Chief Petty Officer Daniel Tremper, said Tuesday. This brings the guard, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, into line with the armed forces under the Defense Department, which have permitted religious garb since 1987.