Remembering the Holocaust in Romania

By: Jewish Architectural Heritage Foundation

On Sunday, September 11, 2005, the Jewish Architectural Heritage Foundation (JAHF) and AMHN, its Romanian sister organization, will dedicate Romania’s first fully functional Holocaust memorial museum. A formal ceremony will be held on the grounds of the museum in Simleu Silvaniei, Romania, at 12:00 PM local time. Supporters include the Romanian government, the Honorable Warren L. Miller, Chairman, U.S. Commission for Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, prominent Holocaust survivors such as Elie Wiesel and Oliver Lustig, American Jewish leaders Rabbis Andrew Baker and Shea Hecht, and many others.

The Northern Transylvania Holocaust Memorial Museum will highlight the Jewish life of the region before the Holocaust and the sequence of events that led up to the darkest period in its history, focusing on regional Romanian and Hungarian history at the time. A fully functioning synagogue, which will be used during the upcoming dedication ceremony, is also included. Other features include video presentations, survivor testimonials and Jewish artifacts recently found at the site.

Fire Department Gets Jewish Chaplain

The Rockville Volunteer Fire Department is in the center of a heavily Jewish area of Maryland, but it was only last month that the 85-year-old fire department got its first Jewish chaplain.

At their monthly meeting in July, the 225 members voted to accept a young Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi, Chesky Tenenbaum, as a chaplain. Tenenbaum recently moved to Maryland from Brooklyn’s Crown Heights to become the assistant rabbi at the Chabad of Upper Montgomery County.

Jewish Boy dies after falling from tree in camp

A 13-year-old Brooklyn boy tumbled 50 feet to his death at a Highland summer camp after the tree limb he had climbed broke, state police said yesterday.

Shalom Rabinowitz was climbing a pine tree behind his bunkhouse with a friend about 4 p.m. Monday when the branch he was on broke. Rabinowitz dropped 50 feet, striking several branches as he fell, police said.
Site of the camp.

Jewish values mesh with Scout ideals

When Boy Scout troop 711 from Alaska lost four of its leaders in a freak electrical accident on the first day of the recent National Scout Jamboree here, the one Jewish Scout in the Alaska contingent was left in a quandary.
On the Sunday morning of the gathering, when jamboree activities were suspended for a few hours, all of Noah Magen’s troop mates were headed to religious services for their respective faiths. But what does a Jewish Scout do on Sunday?

Beard Ban Deters Chabad Rabbis From Becoming Chaplains in Army

By most measures, Yisroel Newman, 25, and other young Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis like him are the obvious solution to the army’s severe shortage of Jewish chaplains.

These young rabbis are trained by a movement dedicated to reaching Jews wherever they may be, no matter how remote. The peripatetic military lifestyle would not be much more difficult than the postings that some recently ordained young Chabad rabbis have received in Siberia, with no more than a few thousand dollars to start a Jewish community.

Chabad Honors Champion in Quest for Sacred Texts

These are more than just words on documents,” said U.S. Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota. “There is a very powerful and special meaning that they have. That’s why I’m so devoted to the cause of returning the Schneerson documents from Russia.”

The Senator was speaking at an event honoring his leadership in the ongoing effort to regain the sacred Schneerson Collection. Senator Coleman addressed a group of 150 Chabad rabbis and students who had gathered in S. Paul’s Adath Israel Synagogue last week.

Putting On Tefillin High Up in the Sky

“The sky is the limit”, said the shliach Rabbi Anshelle Perl of Mineola, New York, as he ascended the air balloon with a couple of Chabad associates. Rabbi Perl pointed out the significance of ‘staying above’ and close to G-d and his guest, Mr. Myron Katz, agreed to put on tefillin ‘high in the sky’.

Anne Frank home inspires Sept. 11 museum

Days before the fourth anniversary of the 2001 attacks, a photographer is offering intimate images of death and love inside ground zero at a new museum that brings you nose-to-nose with the smoldering pit.

“If people want to come past the security gates and see what our world was like down in the hole, this is as close as they can come to it,” said Gary Marlon Suson, the official ground zero photographer for the Uniformed Firefighters Association, the city firefighters’ main union.

Suson spent eight months at the site with recovery workers searching for the remains of the 2,749 people who died on a sunny September morning, including 343 firefighters. His time in “The Pit” comes alive at the Ground Zero Museum Workshop of photographs, videos and artifacts, opening Sept. 8.

Construction of synagogue halted as leaders cite lack of funds

STAMFORD — Chabad Lubavitch of Greater Stamford has stopped construction on a $7 million synagogue because the congregation ran out of money last year to fully build, landscape and furnish it, according to leaders in the group.

The Jewish congregation had expected to finish the building, which is shaped like an open book, this month. Backers of the project say they still hope to finish the religious center at 752-760 High Ridge Road by next year.

Neighbors, however, are frustrated, saying the site is unkempt and the entire project is poorly planned.

Leaning back in his office chair during an interview, Rabbi Yisrael Deren sighed and explained “the situation was one where we had the option of either borrowing more money to go ahead and complete it or slowing the construction down considerably and raising the money.”

Jewish Values, Halacha and Secular Law are Combined in Jewish Mediation (Beis Din) Service

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, a prominent figure in Jewish advocacy and the Chair of Jewish Law and Ethics at Loyola Law School, has joined with Michael Lapin, a well-known attorney, civic leader and member of the Jewish community in Orange County, to bring to the field of alternative dispute resolution a different approach — that of underscoring mediation with the perspectives of Jewish law and values. They have formed Jewish Mediation Service to serve the southern California community.

City Questions Circumcision Ritual After Baby Dies

The city’s intervention has angered many Orthodox leaders, and the issue has left the city struggling to balance its mandate to protect public health with the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.

ANTI-SEMETIC GRAFITTI IN KINGSTON AVE SUBWAY STATION

Crown Heights residents are enraged by racist, anti-Semitic graffiti that was found scrawled on support columns in the Kingston Ave subway station.

The graffiti was first noticed Monday morning by a straphanger and when he saw it still there on Tuesday morning went ahead and made SHMAIS.com and the MTA aware of it.

“Death to the racist Jews!”, “Hitler had the right idea re the Jews just not enough time to get it right!” and “Al Qaeda has the right idea how to deal with Bush & Company” were some of the grafitti found scrawled on the support columns on the lower level of the station.

In an e-mail response to the straphanger, Melissa Glasgow of MTA responded in part: We sincerely regret the conditions you observed. Please note that all New York City Transit subway cars and stations are checked daily to ensure proper conditions, and any graffiti that is observed is removed in a timely manner as part of our regular cleaning cycles. In addition, uniformed and undercover officers from the New York City Police Department’s Transit Bureau patrol our facilities at all times to thwart illegal activity, including graffiti vandalism. Please be assured that your complaint has been referred to supervision in the appropriate operating departments for their review and appropriate corrective action. They will take this opportunity to inspect the location you mentioned and ensure a clean and proper environment for our customers and area residents.

Sium and Hachnosas Sefer Torah in Memory of the Shmueli Sisters, ob’m

A Sium and Hachnosas Sefer Torah will be held today (Thursday) in memory of the sisters Sterna Esther and Chaya Mushka Shmueli (aged 12 -14) who had tragically drowned in a pool in Virginia last year. The procession will start from the home of the Shmueli family on 722 Montgomery St. between Kingston and Albany and head towards 770 at 5:00pm.

Chabad Makes Major Inroads at Universities

Toward the end of the spring semester this past May, a Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi and about a dozen students celebrated a major victory at Tufts University. After nearly two years of vying for recognition as an official student group at the liberal arts college in Medford, Mass., Tufts’s student government finally recognized Chabad.

Rabbi Tzvi Backman and his wife, Chanie, will be Chabad’s campus emissaries, or shlichim, at Tufts, and they’re part of a rapidly growing group. Since 2001, nearly 30 new “Chabad houses” have opened on college campuses across the country, with an additional 10 slated for the upcoming school year.

Congregation Suspends Rabbi in Drug Arrest

The congregation’s leaders were like disappointed parents. Earlier this month, their widely popular rabbi had been charged with possessing marijuana and driving while his ability was impaired by drugs, both misdemeanors. Now, the board of trustees at Congregation Sons of Israel had to decide on the proper punishment.

In the end, after a meeting that began on Tuesday night and lasted until 2 a.m. on Wednesday, they decided that the rabbi, Steven C. Kane, 50, should receive a 30-day paid suspension.

Yeshiva bochur killed in stabbing in Old City Jerusalem

A young British yeshiva student was killed last night after a Palestinian man stabbed him with a 30-centimeter kitchen knife in the Old City of Jerusalem, close to the Jaffa Gate, police sources said.

His companion, a fellow student from the United States, was moderately wounded. The two victims, both in their twenties, had been studying at an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva in the Old City.

After the attack, the American managed to reach a police station some 200 meters away and led police to his critically injured friend at the site of the stabbing.

New Cameras to Watch Over Our Subway System

Officials unveiled the high-tech future of transit security in New York City yesterday: an ambitious plan to saturate the subways with 1,000 video cameras and 3,000 motion sensors and to enable cellphone service in 277 underground stations – but not in moving trains – for the first time.

Moving quickly after the subway and bus bombings in London last month, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority awarded a three-year, $212 million contract to a group of contractors led by the Lockheed Martin Corporation, which is best known for making military hardware like fighter planes, missiles and antitank systems.