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In public events and private thoughts, Centre County residents paid homage Monday to the victims of the attacks on the United States five years ago.
They recalled the Sept. 11, 2001, moment when they first heard that America was under siege, and they were urged to remember the victims without reliving the fear wrought by terrorists.
“They want to rule us by fear,” U.S. Rep. John Peterson, R-Pleasantville, told a small gathering in front of the Old Main administrative building on the Penn State campus. “Islamic radicals want to destroy the freedom of religion that America was founded on.”
The congressman paid tribute to National Guardsmen from Pennsylvania, saying 16,000 of the 19,000 Guardsmen have been deployed abroad and 34 have been killed in Iraq.
Nova Scotia, Canada – Old men and young boys danced and sang on Spring Garden Road in Halifax as they celebrated the dedication of a new Torah on Sunday.
The arrival of the scroll containing the Jewish holy book had the atmosphere of a wedding.
The newly completed Torah, which was to join two existing Torahs used by the Chabad Lubavitch community of the Maritimes, was wrapped in velvet and crowned with silver and carried to its new home under a wedding canopy led by bagpipers.
The dedication is a rare and special event, said Mark Ludman, who carried the new Torah during part of the procession.
“They’re painstaking to make,” he said. “Each one is handwritten and there can be no errors in it.”
David Eliezrie is a rabbi — the head of a Yorba Linda synagogue. One of his sons is a rabbi, and two of Eliezrie’s daughters married rabbis.
The three children are schluchim, or members of rabbi-and-wife emissary teams sent around the world under the Chabad-Lubavitch banner, a small, growing and controversial Hasidic branch of Judaism.
In an era where some denominations — Roman Catholicism, for example — have left pulpits empty because of clergy shortages, the offspring of Chabad rabbis are following in their parents’ footsteps in such numbers that a surplus of about 200 new rabbis and their wives are now staged in Brooklyn, awaiting assignments around the world, Lubavitch officials said.
To become an emissary is “like getting into Harvard, only better,” said Naomi Blesofsky, 24, one of David Eliezrie’s daughters. “To live this life gives you purpose and is an honor in our community.”
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