Spiritual Leader

Which candidate will Yeshivas Lita, an institution of advanced talmudic learning here, choose as its new leader: the elderly and learned son/grandson of the school’s previous roshei yeshiva, or the younger and more charismatic faculty member who has no family ties to the yeshiva?
To find out, you’ll have to read “The Search Committee.”

Rabbi Gideon Shloush, the spiritual leader for a dozen years of Congregation Adereth El in Manhattan’s Murray Hill neighborhood, said an all-day conference he attended this week inspired him to change his reading habits.

He’ll read a printout of his synagogue’s membership list today.

Although his job is in Jersey City, John Atkins, a numbers cruncher for a financial firm, started his workday one morning last week outside Rockefeller Center.

So much for a quiet retirement.
About the time last month that Rabbi David Lincoln, senior spiritual leader for 21 years at Park Avenue Synagogue on the Upper East Side, stepped down from the pulpit, he appeared on a Jewish cable television show. Part of an interdenominational panel of Jewish leaders, he offered his comments on the series of scandals that have struck the Orthodox community in recent years.

When Yitzchak Gross had an unplanned day off from Ramaz High School last week, he stopped for a slice of kosher pizza on the way back to his home in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx — something that would have been impossible just six months ago.

Still hauling his school backpack, Gross, 17, found himself at Moishy’s, where everyone knows his name, immediate seating is always available and there’s rarely a line at the counter.

In what may be his last official Passover message to Jews, John Cardinal O'Connor, the spiritual leader for millions of New York Catholics, sent out a heartfelt letter to Jewish colleagues saying he is ashamed of the hateful actions of Catholics in the past, and asks that he be remembered by Jews as their friend.
The 78-year-old archbishop, who suggests that he will retire early next year, wrote that at Passover, he is reminded of "the steadfast faith of Jews throughout the generations."

Charging that the FBI is being compromised by political concerns, activist Rabbi Avi Weiss is seeking a meeting with U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft to discuss why the July 4 shootings at Los Angeles International Airport have not been classified a terrorist incident: in apparent neglect of the Justice Department's own guidelines.

Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, a towering figure in the Modern Orthodox community who long before it was fashionable fought for women unable to get Jewish divorces and who was instrumental in founding The Jewish Week, died here Monday. He was 98 and died of natural causes.

"What are you doing Alabama?
You got the rest of the union to help you along
What's going wrong?"
Neil Young, "Alabama," 1972
Alabama's small Jewish community has been watching the "Decalogue Debacle" with a mixture of grit and grimace.

Things are growing nastier at 3 W. 16th St. in Manhattan. Last week, the Young Israel of Fifth Avenue (YIFA), an Orthodox synagogue with about 200 members located at the Chelsea address, was barred from receiving its packages. That's because the building owner is refusing to accept the synagogue's mail.
The latest incident of anti-Semitism? Hardly.
The building owner is the National Council of Young Israel, the parent organization for nearly 150 Orthodox synagogues across the country.