Search Results for 'History of Crown Heights'

Sealed with a bris

Former Soviet Jews affirm their faith with late-life ritual

Valeriy Kozlov did the unthinkable: He went under the knife for religious reasons.

Kozlov, a Belarus native, followed the example of his friend Leonid Marder, a Russian emigre who was circumcised at age 66. Both resettled in Reisterstown, Md., a city near Baltimore that is home to many Jews from the former Soviet Union.

“As with any operation, a person is afraid of blood — of being cut,” Kozlov said. “But when a person becomes more spiritual, he understands that physical pain is less significant.”

Our Dirty Laundry Goes Out Into The Public AGAIN

Just as I had predicted, here is the first article I found

Lubavitch’s Open Wound At 770

Destroyed plaque honoring rebbe points to new round in battle over messianism and control of movement.

Pro-messianist forces are believed to have destroyed plaque honoring Lubavitcher rebbe early Tuesday morning. Michael Datikash

If ever an architectural feature of a building’s exterior stood as a symbol for the life within, then the defaced plaque honoring the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson at Lubavitch headquarters in Crown Heigh ts is it.

Like the jagged fault line that eventually brings down the mansion in the famous Edgar Allan Poe story “Fall of the House of Usher,” the cornerstone — which has been vandalized many times over the past few months and was violently ripped out this week — has come to represent a movement bitterly split by those who believe Rabbi Schneerson is the messiah and those who do not.

Building Falls in Brooklyn

A row house undergoing renovations in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, collapsed yesterday in a cascade of bricks, cinder blocks, mortar and scaffolding. At least two construction workers buried beneath the rubble were among the 11 people who were injured, one critically, the authorities said.

The collapse occurred about 1:15 p.m. at 103 Meserole Street on a residential block just east of Williamsburg’s enclave of Hasidic Jews.

Firefighters, who were on the scene in less than five minutes, encountered a score of shaken, dust-covered workers who had escaped the wreckage, and who feared that others, buried under debris on the building’s second floor, had been killed.

“I started calling their names, and no one answered,” said Benitas Joseph, 36, one of the workers who escaped serious harm and immediately scrambled through the piles of debris in search of those who were trapped. “I was frightened,” he said. “I thought everybody was dead.”

Yankel [Rosenbaum] Kin Target Hospital

Fourteen tumultuous years have done little to heal the hurt of Fay Rosenbaum, whose son Yankel was stabbed to death in a 1991 race riot that came to symbolize a dark and angry period in the city’s history.

Rosenbaum’s family, including the 71-year-old matriarch, is back in the city from Australia, once again seeking justice in the Hasidic scholar’s death. This time, they want to show that Yankel Rosenbaum got shoddy treatment from city doctors after Lemrick Nelson left him dying on a Crown Heights street.

“I don’t forgive and I don’t forget,” Fay, 71, told the Daily News in an exclusive interview Wednesday, just before the Brooklyn Supreme Court judge hearing the family’s civil case against the city issued a gag order.