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My Favorite Museum

Hello, my name is Batya and I live in Brooklyn. One day last year, on Chol HaMoed Succos, my bubby took me on the subway to a tall, shiny museum building. It looked very new. It wasn’t a quiet, serious museum about science, or one that has lots of paintings. It was a museum all about me — and you — and it was fun!

An ‘exodus’ at B’klyn museum

Even as frogs began falling from the ceiling, a group of fifth-graders visiting the new Jewish Children’s Museum in Brooklyn didn’t miss a beat.

They knew what to expect as dozens of the toy amphibians, suspended on strings, stopped short of their heads.

They were experiencing – vicariously – one of the biblical 10 plagues depicted in “The Exodus,” an unusual interactive show at the $35 million, one-of-a-kind museum in the borough’s Crown Heights section.

Timed to coincide with Passover, which begins April 13, the story of the Jews’ enslavement in ancient Egypt and their miraculous escape is brought to life in an educational and entertaining voyage through history that is being presented through April 17.

Welcome or not, cell phones set for subway

One of life’s ironic oases of solitude — the peace people find amid the roar of a New York City subway — could soon be gone.

As New York plans to make cell phones work in subway stations, experts say Americans eventually could be connected everywhere, underground or in the air.

“It’s technically feasible, both for airplanes and subways,” said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. “It’s the social aspect that’s really the most intractable.”

People fall into two camps, one that defends the right to make calls no matter the inconvenience to others and the other that likes an undisturbed atmosphere, he said. Business people tend to belong to first camp, and leisure travelers to the second, he added.

In 1918, a Scab Motorman Caused Worst Wreck in Subway History

When the Brooklyn subway lines had strikebreakers drive trains in 1918, the result was a disaster.

The worst accident in the history of the New York subway system—the Malbone Street wreck of 1918, which killed at least 93 people—happened because an inexperienced strikebreaker drove a train too fast.

On Nov. 1, 1918, ten days before the end of World War I, motormen of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers went on strike against the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, the forerunner of the BMT. BRT officials decided to keep the trains running, using nonstriking workers to drive them.

One of the strikebreakers was Edward Luciano (a.k.a. Antonio Luciano, Anthony Lewis, and Billy Lewis), a 23-year-old BRT dispatcher who’d never driven a train outside of the yards before. He did a 10-hour shift on the Culver line (now the F train), a relatively straight and level route. When rush hour came, the BRT put him on a second shift on the curvier, hillier Fulton Street-Brighton line, which demanded much more skill.

Israel’s Bleeding Wound

In the name of peace, an embattled nation declares war on itself.

In early September, news coverage got swamped with a nation-shaking disaster and a harrowing evacuation in the United States. The event overshadowed another evacuation—possibly just as nation-shaking—that had occurred not two weeks before on the other side of the world.

Israeli soldiers called it the most difficult mission they have ever been asked to carry out in service to the democracy they love. With few exceptions, they dutifully obeyed orders to evict all 9,000 Jewish residents from their homes in settlements throughout the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank—even as they withered inside.