Shul House Rocked — Again!

BROOKLYN, NY — A Brooklyn Heights synagogue that has been repeatedly robbed and attacked was hit again last week — and rabbis believe it is the same man responsible for earlier break-ins.

“He’s broken in before,” said Rabbi Simcha Weinstein of Congregation B’nai Avraham on Remsen Street, which has been the site of repeated burglaries and attempted burglaries ever since the suspect, a serial burglar, was invited in for a meal five years ago.

In the Aug. 20 incident, cops said that the burglar broke in through the front door of the house of worship, which is between Henry and Clinton streets, at around 3:30 am.

This time, however, he was confronted by a member of the cleaning staff, who asked what he was doing there.

Rather than answer, he quickly ran out of the synagogue empty handed.

Rabbi Yisroel Meir Altein OBM, an Educator & Spiritual Mentor

Rabbi Yisroel Meir Altein, an educator, administrator and spiritual mentor in the local Lubavitch community for more than 60 years, passed away on Saturday, Aug. 22.

He was 86.

Altein came to Pittsburgh in the mid-1940s. As one of the oldest and longest serving emissaries, or shluchim, of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn, the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Altein watched the Lubavitch movement grow from a small outpost in the East End of Pittsburgh to a large school with a vast, regional presence in the community.

Around 1 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, more than 200 people gathered outside of the Lubavitch Center on Wightman Street in Squirrel Hill to read psalms as the hearse stopped in front of the synagogue Altein helped build. Then, a 30-car procession drove up Murray Avenue and on to the Homewood Cemetery, where Altein was buried.

Lubavitch Laptops – Tech Savvy Roving Rabbis

They may be in Thessaloniki or in the foothills of the Himalayas, but emissaries-to-be in the Rebbe’s Army — as befits the high tech-savvy Chabad movement — are online all the while.

This summer in Chabad’s long-running “Roving Rabbis” program, in which rabbis-in-training are dispatched to far-flung locales to help out local emissaries, they are also assigned to blog about their experiences of the movement’s flagship site, chabad.org. The posts tell riveting stories of survival during the Holocaust and simple ones of Jews living life far off the beaten path.