South Bay thanks Chabad couple for 25 years — past and future

When friends of Yosef and Dena Levin wanted to salute the couple for 25 years of community service, the Palo Alto Chabad rabbi and rebbetzin at first said no. Self-aggrandizement just isn’t their style.

But so many admirers insisted on holding an event, the Levins ultimately relented. Now the couple will just have sit back and accept the accolades from a grateful Jewish community.

The “champagne brunch” celebration for Yosef and Dena Levin takes place Sunday, Feb. 26 at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

Conveying New Vigor

Meet the new look of cool on college campuses today: black suit, buttoned white shirt, long side-burns and a beard. They’re not rock stars, movie stars or sports stars, but they are the new stars on the religious college scene.

Rabbi Dov Wagner is orthodox and leader of the Chabad Jewish Student Center, a charismatic Jewish organization on campus. Fifteen years ago, there were only 25 full-time Chabad Student Centers throughout the United States; today there are 85, with more than 200 campuses served by a Chabad Center. What does Wagner attribute to the explosive growth of this orthodox-based college organization on mostly secular campuses?

Synagogue case in Hollywood raised concern in ’04 about religous bias

Elected officials locked in a federal lawsuit over a Jewish synagogue’s right to worship in a single-family home have been worried for at least two years that purported miracles performed at a Catholic woman’s home could hurt them in court.

The U.S. Department of Justice and the Chabad Lubavitch are suing the city, accusing city officials of denying the Jewish group a zoning variance based on its religious denomination.

A majority of commissioners expressed serious concerns about the city’s treatment of Rosa Lopez, who says the Virgin Mary visits her home monthly, compared with that of the Chabad Lubavitch, which converted a Hollywood Hills house into a synagogue for daily worship, according to transcripts of closed-door meetings held in 2004.

Worries of Anti-Semitism Spread in Russia

Pogroms and purges of Jews are a thing of the past in Russia, but as women scrubbed the bloodstained floors of Moscow’s Chabad Bronnaya synagogue on Thursday, a day after a man burst in and stabbed worshippers, alarm spread over increasingly open anti-Semitism.

Jewish leaders warned official indifference is fueling a wave of hate attacks and called for a crackdown on aggressive nationalist and fascist groups that have mushroomed in recent years. Police should guard outside synagogues and other Jewish sites, they said.

“We expect government and law enforcement agencies to take real measures to ensure this doesn’t happen again,” Russia’s chief rabbi, Berel Lazar, said. “If there is indifference, nothing will change.”

Salvaging homes, restoring lives

For one week during winter break, Matt Peterson and Laneia Seumalo scooped muck, carted out moldy furniture, gutted waterlogged homes and heard one tear-jerking story after another in Hurricane Katrina-ravaged New Orleans.

“You don’t realize the full impact of what happened until you’re there,” Seumalo said.

The two University students joined students from more than 30 U.S. colleges to converge in New Orleans to help victims of Hurricane Katrina, part of a joint project between the Chabad on Campus National Foundation and Lubavitch Rabbi Yochanan Rivkin, director of the Chabad Jewish Student Center at Tulane, whose efforts have been praised by President Bush.

Kabbalah class looks at alternate view of time

Portland is one of 160 locations around the world where a new course in Kabbalah will be offered starting Feb. 8.

The purpose of the course, called “The Kabbalah of Time,” is to help individuals cope with the implications of our increasingly high-speed world.

It is an eight-week course offered through the Jewish Learning Institute, the adult education arm of Chabad Lubavitch.

“We live in an age obsessed with time,” states the promotional material for the course. “On the one hand, we have managed to speed up many of our mundane daily activities so that they take a fraction of the time they once did. Yet we do not find that we are more serene or happy. To the contrary, there are ever-increasing demands and intrusion on our time, creating an increasingly fragmented existence.”

Chabad A Key to Worldwide Kosher Growth

Major kosher certification agencies have in recent years dramatically increased kosher supervision in some 75 countries throughout the world, contributing to the worldwide explosion of kosher foods, particularly ingredients, but many in the kosher food industry credit the worldwide Chabad (followers of the late Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, Lubavitcher Rebbe) movement for many of these gains.

Some of the mashgichim (kosher supervisors) in remote locations in Southeast Asia and elsewhere are in fact emissaries (shluchim) of Chabad who “freelance” for some of the largest kosher certification agencies. “They just happen to be everywhere,” said a leading authority on kosher, “and it makes sense to utilize their knowledge and understanding of the local community.” There are no numbers of the number of shluchim who double as mashgichim but one source told Kosher Today that it is in the high hundreds.

This involvement by Chabad is over and above the service the organization provides to tourists and businessmen who visit many locations that do not have any kosher food. The latest Chabad Center to open is in Warsaw, where a new center will also feature a kosher restaurant. Chabad has also been involved in educating many Jews about the benefits of kosher with such programs as group visits to supermarkets. A New York kosher purveyor said that “when you add up what they’ve done for kosher over the years, it’s huge.”

Officers Went Missing During Gunfight

After recieving a bunch of calls inquiring about the massive police movement yesterday [Wednesday] at around 7:20pm, here is clarification as to what has happened. Nearly every police officer in the 71st precincts district responded to a call of shots fired, leaving very few squad cars parked at the station.

An officer patroling on foot called in an incident of shots being fired on Winthrop & E. 94th St. and following this report the dispatcher was unable to get back in touch with the unit. The dispatcher immediately classified it as an officer unaccounted for, sparking this huge response to make sure the officer was ok.

It took some time but all the officers that were on foot were accounted for, and thank G-D no Police Officer was hurt, but the original call for the shots fired was accurate, a man was shot and police continued to look for the shooter.