Changing Face in Poland: Skinhead Puts on Skullcap

WARSAW — When Pawel looks into the mirror, he can still sometimes see a neo-Nazi skinhead staring back, the man he was before he covered his shaved head with a skullcap, traded his fascist ideology for the Torah and renounced violence and hatred in favor of God.

Another Tefillin Scare Arouses Suspicions of Border Officials

When a plane made an emergency landing back in January after a teenage boy donned the black Jewish prayer boxes known as tefillin, people across North America treated it as something of a humorous oddity.

But weeks after that incident, a similar case – this time of a super-vigilant passerby sounding an alarm among U.S. border officials – led to the detaining of a rabbi and his Jewish driver as they tried to return to New York from Canada.

It was just before sunset when Rabbi Eli Silberstein, director of the Roitman Chabad-Lubavitch Center serving Cornell University in Ithaca, suggested, as he had done time and time before, that his driver, Ken Kaplan, don tefillin while it was still daytime. The two men, who were heading to Montreal, stopped at a gas station in Watertown just before crossing the border.

“He likes me to put on tefillin, because I drive him all over the place,” said Kaplan, who has driven Silberstein for four years. Besides for the religious requirement, “it’s good luck.”

IDF Raid Called off After Facebook Slip

JERUSALEM [AP] — Israel’s military has “unfriended” one of its own — after a combat soldier potentially updated Israel’s enemies on Facebook.

The military said Wednesday that a planned raid on a West Bank village was called off after the soldier disclosed its details online. The military said the soldier posted the time and location of the raid on his Facebook page, saying that troops were planning on “cleaning up” the village.