Local events for the week of April 1, 2011 more

There is affordable housing and day school tuition breaks, but can South Bend, Indiana, really coax a young Jewish family to leave the comforts of New York? “I thought I’d be living in New York for the rest of my life,” said Moshe Gubin, 34, a former resident of Kew Gardens Hills. more

In 1992 I approached Elisha Peleg, the sanitation Commissioner of Jerusalem, to help clean a Palestinian garbage dump on an obscure part of the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives. He enthusiastically consented and gave my colleagues and me, one thousand garbage bags, a steam shovel, a sanitation truck, and a platoon of soldiers to protect us. more

Kurt Flascher once marched with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. aiming to promote civil rights in the South. So when a Jewish organization called him about a protest rally in Borough Park on March 27, he offered them milk and cookies. But it was in jest, because the rally was outside his first-floor window, and the subject of the rally was Flascher himself. more

Often it is said that our community is moving to the right in its religious observance, but there is one missing aspect of this rightward shift. Throughout the centuries, Jewish communities have admirably maintained their unity through batei din, local rabbinic courts that settled civil matters between individual Jews. Their judgment was final, and it was anathema to ignore or disrespect their rulings. more

The family van can be quite a workhorse, between its owner’s commute to work, shuttling the children to after-school activities, and taking the grandparents to their doctor. The emotional toll of parenting and taking care of elderly parents was addressed by social worker Harriet Blank at a March 26 presentation sponsored by National Council of Young Israel and Ohel Children’s Home & Family Services. more

Calendar for the week of March 24 - 30 more

I remember visiting my grandparents when I was 14. They live in Hong Kong. We met in the airport and headed to baggage-claim. At the conveyer belt, my fifteen-year-old brother Jonathan pulled out his assigned-reading book, which he was pressured to finish before the weekend. more

Sergeant Poloni pulls up to the residence where Officer Mann already has the perimeter surrounded. “What’s the status?” Poloni asks. “We’ve got the Jewish extremist trapped in the building,” Mann informs. “He’s not going anywhere for maariv.” more

Stuxnet is the virus, which has infected the computers of the Iranian nuclear centrifuges, causing them to be damaged. The job of the centrifuge is to purify uranium so it could be used for reactors and/or weapons. Until recently Iran had repeatedly denied that the computer worm had affected its nuclear program. In November, the UN said Iran had temporarily halted most of its uranium enrichment. more