Steve Lipman

Shortly after he moved here in 2001, Rome-born journalist Maurizio Molinari went shopping in a Manhattan supermarket where he found a wide variety of certified-kosher items. “It was not a Jewish store,” he notes.
Before Sukkot he noticed lulav-and-etrog sets being sold by vendors along West 72nd Street. No one seemed surprised, he says. “For the non-Jews, it was normal.”
One day he went to a Barnes & Noble bookstore. A “huge Judaica section” stood out. Most of the shoppers in the store, as he recalls, weren’t Jewish.

Rabbi Abraham Klausner, an American rabbi who as a chaplain in the U.S. Army served as an advocate for the needs of Jewish Holocaust survivors, died June 28 in his Sante Fe, N.M., home of complications of Parkinson’s Disease. He was 92.
For 25 years he had served as spiritual leader of Temple Emanu-El in Yonkers, N.Y., retiring in 1989.
The first American Jewish chaplain to arrive at Dachau after its liberation in 1945, he coordinated efforts on behalf of survivors in the American zone of Germany who remained in displaced-persons camps for years after the war.

Five weeks after the Jewish world celebrated the Festival of Weeks, the Samaritans celebrated theirs.
On Sunday, Shavuot on the lunar calendar of the Samaritans — descendants of Jewish tribes exiled from the Holy Land nearly three millennia ago — several scores of members of the extant group made their annual pilgrimage to Mount Gerizim, their holy mountain near Nablus in the West Bank.
 

The New York Kollel, a 12-year-old adult education program that has met at the Reform movement’s rabbinical seminary in Manhattan and offered advanced yeshiva-style studies from a non-denominational, non-Orthodox perspective, is giving its last classes this summer.
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, which has housed and helped support the Kollel since 1995, announced this spring that it would close the program, following a two and a half year “strategic planning process” that found the Kollel to be a financial drain.

A cup of coffee and a Danish.
For the last 20 years, lunchtime for Rabbi T. has meant a two-and-a-half block walk from one Lower East Side institution, Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem, the yeshiva where he teaches Talmud, to Gertel’s, a kosher bakery where he buys a snack and sits at a small table, reviewing a Hebrew text. (Many members of the haredi community are publicity-shy.)
Starting Monday, Rabbi T. will have to get his lunch somewhere else.

For 24 hours this week, the Cambria Heights neighborhood of Queens became one of New York City’s biggest Jewish areas.Some 50,000 Jews visited the neighborhood on Tuesday.
That day — Tammuz 3 on the Hebrew calendar — was the 13th yahrtzeit of the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh and last rebbe of the Chabad-Lubavitch chasidic movement.
Buried next to Rabbi Yosef Schneersohn, his predecessor and cousin, Rabbi Schneerson is interred in a covered plot of the Old Montefiore Cemetery, the Ohel, which has become a pilgrimage site since 1994.

Plans to host a Gay Pride Parade in Jerusalem last year brought protests from Israel’s Orthodox community.
The parade was cancelled, a casualty of public concern over the military battles at the country’s northern and southern borders.
Last week Tel Aviv’s annual Gay Pride rally took place, and both gay marchers and Orthodox protestors turned out.

For Jewish boys through the ages, the bar mitzvah, usually in a local synagogue, usually on a Saturday morning, is a communal passage from childhood to adulthood.
For a growing number of 13-year-olds, the passage takes place in the shadow of Judaism’s holiest site. Sometimes on a Monday or Thursday morning, or on Rosh Chodesh, when the Torah is chanted.

In Israel dog-bites-man is not news.
But leopard-tries-to is.
Arthur Du Mosch, a 49-year-old tour guide who made aliyah from Amsterdam 22 years ago, awoke early Monday morning to find a wild leopard in his bedroom in Sde Boker, a Negev kibbutz.
Du Mosch says the feline, which was too old to seek prey in the wild, was part of a pack that had been hunting domestic dogs and cats in the area recently, chasing the family’s house cat, Zehava, through an open window.

There was mixed news for Benjamin Rubin, a Sabbath-observant hockey player in Canada’s top development league, at the end of his first season the other day.
In a post-season talk with owner-coach Patrick Roy of the Quebec Remparts in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, Rubin, 18, heard that he is one of the team’s “most talented players.”