New York News

Lemrick Nelson's surprising admission that he killed Yankel Rosenbaum in a drunken stupor was his only possible defense, according to the former Brooklyn U.S. attorney whose office successfully convicted Nelson in 1997.

Carole Solomon declined when asked if she and her husband would join a Jewish federation "leadership" trip to Israel during a cease-fire in the Yom Kippur War.
"I said no because I had two little kids," Solomon, a self-described "very assimilated" fifth-generation German Jew, recalled of the 1973 invitation. "But this person said this was an opportunity to witness history. If you go, he said, you will never forget it, and if you don't go, you won't remember what you stayed home for."

Isaac Bashevis Singer sleeps in a cemetery plot as salacious as the plots contrived by the demons in his own short stories: He shares an earthly bed with his wife, her first husband, and her first husband’s second wife. To add to this witches brew, the tombstone calls Singer the winner of not the Nobel Prize but the Noble Prize, as if some yenta in Miami was describing his award.
If you were Singer’s restless soul, no doubt you’d also fly away from that New Jersey cemetery to be with your old friend Dvorah Telushkin.

There are few couplings more magical than late-night and radio. Whether its pre-“American Graffiti” Wolfman Jack, spinning rockabilly from an AM tower near the Mexican border, or Allison Steele, “the nightbird,” floating through the jazzy Manhattan air on the old free-form hipster FM, the wee small hours are when radio is most intimate and for you alone. You listen, blanketed by night’s darkness, in the car coming home from somewhere, or even on your pillow.

by Gary Rosenblatt
Editor And Publisher
When Natan Sharansky was told during his visit to New York last week that John Lennon’s song, “Imagine,” was the unofficial anthem of the recent Birthright Mega-Event in Israel — with thousands of young Jews from around the world linking arms as they sang it reverentially — he was upset, but not surprised.

Leah Dunne, a native of Patchogue, L.I., had to go to the Persian Gulf to shore up her connection with God.
Dunne, 23, a six-year Air Force veteran, since December has been serving at the Al Jaber Air Base in Kuwait. Her job is to watch third country nationals, those from such countries as Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Egypt, who work at the base.

With government funding to Jewish organizations being slashed and Jewish federation campaigns running either flat or down, a new study has discovered that billions of dollars from the country's biggest Jewish philanthropists are going to universities, health and the arts. And the Jewish community wants to learn why.
The study, by the Institute for Jewish & Communal Research, found that only 6 percent of the $5.3 billion in mega-gifts Jews donated to individual institutions between 1995 and 2000 went to Jewish institutions. A mega-gift is $10 million or more.

Three founders of an Orthodox yeshiva in Smithtown, L.I., upset over the school's closing last fall, have announced plans to start another Orthodox yeshiva in Suffolk County next year.
But their plan to open in the same building they helped erect 40 years ago (the Hebrew Academy of Suffolk County) has been complicated by the group that closed the elementary school after 20 years of operation.

Faced with a growing chorus of criticism from across the Jewish community and heart-wrenching news stories of survivors unable to pay medical bills, the organization that handles the allocation of Holocaust restitution funds is to re-examine its disbursement policy at its July board meeting here.

The last time Mordechai Gafni was in the news was two years ago, when the charismatic and controversial rabbi accused of sexual misconduct here and in Israel was dismissed as the rebbe of Bayit Chadash, a spiritual renewal community in Tel Aviv.
Faced with sexual abuse complaints filed with the police in Israel by several women who were former students or employees of Bayit Chadash, Gafni came to the U.S., issued a public statement apologizing to those he had hurt, said he was “sick” and needed treatment, and disappeared.