News Brief

Soaked!

07/08/2009 | by Steve Lipman | Staff Writer

Open fighting broke out in Tel Aviv last week.

No casualties were reported, but hundreds of people got wet.

At the fifth annual Water Fight (waterwar5.info), some 500 young Israelis and tourists squirted each other in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square, the city’s central gathering spot, near the municipality building.
This year’s slogan was “Fighting over every drop,” the theme was water conservation and the general purpose was fun.

Water conservation in a water fight?

Remembering The Rebbe’s Yahrtzeit

07/03/2009 | Steve Lipman | Staff Writer

There was a sea in landlocked Cambria Heights on Sunday. A sea of kvitlach.

In the open space in front of the gravestone of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, rebbe of the Chabad-Lubavitch chasidic movement, his followers left small hand-written notes asking for health, a child, a shidduch or other needs from the heart. The notes were in Hebrew, English, Russian and a smattering of other languages.

Brotherly Love, From NYU To Israel

07/03/2009 | Sharon Udasin | Staff Writer

In what has become perhaps the most Americanized region in all of Israel, the sunny seaside city of Herzliya just landed a classic American import that it probably never expected: the Jewish state’s first-ever college fraternity.

Remembering The Rebbe’s Yahrtzeit

07/01/2009 | by Steve Lipman | Staff Writer

There was a sea in landlocked Cambria Heights on Sunday. A sea of kvitlach.
In the open space in front of the gravestone of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, rebbe of the Chabad-Lubavitch chasidic movement, his followers left small hand-written notes asking for health, a child, a shidduch or other needs from the heart. The notes were in Hebrew, English, Russian and a smattering of other languages.

Daughter: Keep Heschel’s Name Off ‘Nazi’ Road

06/24/2009 | by Stewart Ain | Staff Writer

In response to the decision of a neo-Nazi group to adopt a section of highway in Missouri and keep it clean, a state lawmaker wants to rename the road after Abraham Joshua Heschel, a prominent Conservative rabbi who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. But the rabbi’s daughter objects to the move.

“I don’t want Nazis stomping on the highway named for my father,” Susannah Heschel, a professor at Dartmouth College, was quoted by the Jerusalem Post as saying.

Jewish Sites Get Bulk Of Federal Security Funds Here

06/24/2009 | by Adam Dickter | Assistant Managing Editor

Federal grants for upgrading security will go to 68 applicants in New York State this year, and 75 percent of those are potential Jewish targets.

Sites in New York State received almost a third of the $15 million distributed nationwide for 2009 by the Department of Homeland Security. All but seven are in New York City.

The Jewish Community Relations Council, which assists Jewish organizations applying for the funds said there were a total of 138 applications in New York. The list of approved grants will not be publicized.