Booming Jewish community attracts interest

Montana, and most likely Bozeman, is the next place in the world that the Chabad Lubavitch movement plans to place a full-time rabbi, according to a rabbi who has spent the past two summers working with Montana’s far-flung Jewish community.

Chabad, headquartered in Brooklyn, N.Y., considers Montana to be “the No. 1 spot in the world for its next rabbi,” said Rabbi Chaim Bruk.

Bruk will probably be that rabbi, he said. He and seminary student Arik Denebeim, 20, have been traveling around Montana for the past month and was back in Bozeman and Big Sky over the Labor Day weekend.

Bochur beaten in Kiev arrives in Israel for treatment

The yeshiva student who was severely beaten by drunken skinheads in Kiev last week was brought to Israel on Monday night for treatment at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv.

Representatives of the hospital visited the young man in Ukraine last week and, feeling that he required better medical care, convinced the hospital to fund his treatment in Israel.

The man, suffering from serious wounds to his head and to his lungs, was said to be unconscious and breathing with the help of a respirator.

His prognosis was not known.

Chabad Telethon to Aid Hurricane Relief Efforts

Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin, announced today that Chabad will urge donors during its upcoming “Celebration 25” Telethon to add to their usual contributions in order to support Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. The California-based organization has joined as a full partner in a broad relief program undertaken by Chabad-Lubavitch of Louisiana, and is providing vital financial, material, and logistical aid to those in need.

“It’s impossible to see the images of destruction and loss coming from the Gulf Coast and not be moved to action,” said Rabbi Cunin. “Our hearts go out to the hundreds of thousands who are suffering from this disaster, and we will continue to do everything we can to help the survivors. On September 25, we will ask our generous Telethon donors to contribute an extra amount during this emergency that they can earmark for hurricane relief. Chabad has a long, proud tradition of nonsectarian crisis intervention, and now is the time for all of us to step forward,” said Rabbi Cunin.

Chabad Search and Rescue Effort Grows

LUBAVITCH HEADQUARTERS, NY — Chabad’s Rescue and Relief mission is working round the clock to locate and rescue hundreds of individuals who have not made it out of New Orleans. Of the 35 individuals thus far rescued, most were elderly with medical

Early Tuesday morning Chabad RR deployed additional relief workers from New York equipped with satellite radios, gas powered phones, chainsaw axes, and thousands of non-refrigerated self-heated meals for the rescue teams and survivors. More will be sent as the needs are assessed, says Rabbi Mendel Sharfstein who is coordinating the effort for Lubavitch Headquarters. conditions, some of whom were found dehydrated and in precarious circumstances

Several Chabad yeshiva students will also be deployed to southern Mississippi to visit some of the ravaged Jewish communities. “We will need to hire our own security personnel to protect the students as they do their work,” says Sharfstein.

The Mountains Called, and New Yorkers Answered

It doesn’t take much to get the circle up and running. Every morning, shortly after the children have been mercifully spirited away to day camp, Deborah Goldman or Bonnie Keller or perhaps Agi Gruenbaum will drag a rickety folding chair to the shade of the giant white pine, pull out her latest embroidery project and before long, the circle – a jagged amoeba is more like it – will come to life with a dozen or more women who make Ganz Bungalows their summer home.

To the accompaniment of buzzing cicadas, they vigorously hash over the latest news from Israel, discuss upcoming weddings and embellish details from the previous evening’s skunk sighting. When the skies deliver rain, they shift closer to the sheltering boughs of that great pine and hope for the best.

A New Orleans Shliach’s Diary

This morning (Thursday) Rabbi Chaim Lazaroff took Rabbi (Zelig) Rivkin and myself to the Astrodome, the staging ground for the evacuees, where we spent several hours searching for familiar faces and counselling people. We also had a chance to network with the Red Cross and other groups that are heading up the relief effort in Houston. We met a New Orleans Times Picayune reporter who is Jewish and spent some time with him.Meanwhile, Bluma, Malkie and Yosef Rivkin have been manning the phones trying to contact people and follow up with the myriads of messages from people who want to locate loved ones, offer help etc.

Why Does the Left Hate Israel?

For decades, most American Jews have believed there were far greater threats from the fringe right than the fringe left in this country. While this view may have been reasonable in the past, it is certainly not so today. The fringe right still exists- the neo-Nazis in Northwest Idaho, Matthew Hale, and David Duke, and the remnants of the KKK. But the views of the fringe right have been marginalized by their repudiation by virtually all mainstream elements on the political right.

The fringe left, on the other hand, has evolved into a broader left, and become more mainstream. The political perspective of this new left is vehemently anti-Israel, and the power and reach of this movement represent a real threat to Israel, and by extension to Jews who support Israel.

Jewish gravestones vandalized in Hartford

A Jewish congregation says dozens of monuments have been broken and overturned by vandals in a burial plot in Hartford.

The West-Hartford based Congregation Agudas Achim discovered the damage yesterday. They say it’s not the first time damage has happened at the Zion Hill Cemetery.

Damage has also happened din 1985, 1990, 1995 and 2000. That has many congregation members questioning if the acts have been random.

‘A History of the Jews in the Modern World’:
The Best of Times?

Nearly all Jewish historians typically treat the modern age as the best of times and the worst of times — and these seemingly mutually exclusive propositions are both, in one way or another, true. Beginning in the late 18th century with the emancipation conferred by the French Revolution, no other group in the West has benefited so much from modernity, with its emphasis on education, social mobility and individual success. Jews worldwide increasingly saw civic and political freedom as inevitable, as part of the contemporary world’s largess. The exemplars of the modern age are disproportionately Jews: the Rothschilds, Marx, Einstein, Freud, Kafka and George Soros.

Crown Heights spurs interest in central Brooklyn

Once an isolated Brooklyn enclave that only received attention for its ethnic tensions and their ugly aftermaths, Crown Heights is on the cusp of a real estate revival.

The 1991 riots between the neighborhood’s Orthodox Jews and Caribbean- and African-American residents belong to another century. Today, brokers say Crown Heights feels much like Harlem seven years ago, just before it established itself as the fastest-growing section of Manhattan.

Israel gives into US pressure
Halts Plan to Add Homes Near Maale Adumim

Israel has bowed to the United States and frozen a much-criticized plan to add 3,500 new housing units near a large West Bank settlement called Maale Adumim, according to Ehud Olmert, a close ally of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his vice prime minister.

But Mr. Olmert’s comments, made in an interview published today in The Jerusalem Post, were more an indication of political repositioning in Israel’s heated right-wing political competition than any enunciation of new policy. Israel has made it clear many times that any building near Maale Adumim, in the development area known as E-1, would not begin for at least two to three years.

New Orleans Rabbi Evacuates To Gainesville

In the days since Hurricane Katrina pounded the Gulf Coast, a New Orleans rabbi has been taking refuge at a Jewish center in Gainesville, communicating with friends and family through the Internet and cell phone text messages.

The rabbi, Yochanan Rivkin of Chabad at Tulane University, left New Orleans with his wife early Sunday afternoon, before the deadly storm hit. The drive eastward to Tallahassee was more than double the six hours it normally takes; the rabbi arrived at Gainesville’s Lubavitch Jewish Center on Monday morning.

Weiner Enters Fray Over PA Frozen Assets

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn), a candidate for mayor of New York City, has entered the battle over Palestinian Authority assets frozen as the result of a lawsuit by the family of terror victims. Last week Weiner filed a “friend of the court” brief with US District Court in White Plains on behalf of the family of Yaron Ungar, an American citizen killed along with his wife Efrat by Hamas terrorists in 1996.

Weiner’s brief supports a request by the Unger family for seizure and sale of the PLO’s UN mission in Manhattan, and for the funds from the sale to be used to pay part of a $116 million judgment against the PA and the PLO in the case. The Palestinian groups are refusing to pay; an appellate judge has found them both in default. The New York case is just one front in a broader legal battle over the frozen assets.

Center serves as local haven for hurricane victims

As the effects of Hurricane Katrina become more serious with each day that passes, the Lubavitch-Chabad Jewish Center in Gainesville is working to keep the hope and faith alive.

Tulane University’s Chabad Director Rabbi Yochanan Rivkin, who left New Orleans last week with his wife and four children, created a temporary command post at the center, through which hurricane survivors can communicate with relatives and find nearby relief centers.

Rivkin and Rabbi Berl Goldman, director of the center, led a small prayer service Wednesday evening for those still in New Orleans. It began, “Deliver me, O God, for the waters have reached unto my soul.”

Slow motion disaster, one agonizing day at a time

This much the rabbi knows. As of Wednesday morning, his sister, brother-in-law and their seven children were alive after spending two days on the second floor of their flooded home in suburban New Orleans.

Everything else is uncertain.

“They’re safe for now, thank God,” said Rabbi Yisroel Spalter of the Chabad Lubavitch synagogue in Weston. “But I’m very concerned.”

After two days of agonizing worry, Spalter feared the worst.

“The phones were dead, the cell phones were dead,” Spalter said.

Lubavitch Establishes Hurricane Relief Fund

Lubavitch World Headquarters announced that it has established a disaster relief fund to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina.

The Chabad Disaster Relief Fund will accept contributions “earmarked for relief aid for victims of Katrina and to the rebuilding of the Jewish community facilities destroyed by the hurricane,” said Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, chairman of the agencies in charge of the Chabad-Lubavitch representatives worldwide.

As Chabad representatives of all the affected states coordinate with Chabad Houses in cities where evacuees are temporarily being housed, helping them find food and lodging, they anticipate a severe crisis in the aftermath of the hurricane.