Fans of Israeli Basketball Team Spend Shabbat in Madrid

TEL AVIV, Israel — The Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team may not have won this year’s Eurocup, but the team and its fans had plenty to celebrate Friday night after besting Montepasci Siena, 92-85, to win Game 1 of the Euroleague Final Four in Madrid. Some 1,000 fans, students and members of the local Jewish community decided to toast the surprise victory by attending a Shabbat dinner sponsored by Rabbi Yaakov Gloiberman, director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Lod, Israel, and the European Centre for Jewish Students.

Walk Honors Memory of Friendship Circle Volunteer

S. DIEGO, CA — For its first-ever fundraising walk, the Friendship Circle of S. Diego, a Chabad-Lubavitch program that pairs teenagers with children with special needs, is dedicating the project to the memory of local community member Jenny Poliakoff, who passed away last year. The event has been named Jenny’s Walk.

A freshman at S. Diego State University when she died, Poliakoff was one of the Friendship Circle’s first volunteers, as well as its most-vocal. She gave the keynote address at its appreciation dinner two years ago.

The Hidden Spark in Every Jew

On my recent trip to Ukraine to celebrate the birthday of my father, I met Sasha, a fellow emissary of the Lubavitcher Rebbe and a student of my father. Sasha’s job is to visit Jews in the most remote corners of Ukraine and reconnect them to their roots. He related to me the following story:

“I recently received a strange phone call from a mining company that was digging near Anipoli, a small town in western Ukraine. They claimed to have discovered what appeared to be a mass Jewish grave from the Holocaust. At once, I dropped everything I was doing and contacted the chevra kadisha in Jerusalem, who immediately dispatched a delegation of rabbis to confirm this and help organize a proper burial and monument for these martyrs. A few weeks later, we decided to follow up with a Shabbaton for the relatives, to honour the memory of the martyrs. I brought along with me a group of young yeshiva boys from Kiev, plenty of kosher food and a portable ark with a Torah. It turned out to be a very moving Shabbat indeed, even beyond our wildest dreams.”