New York News

The great boxing writer, Jimmy Cannon, said this is the way it should be with champs: “They should go down the streets with people following them and crowds coming up on their feet shouting when they enter a fight club. It ought to be plenty of money rolling in and fast action and the excitement of true fame. ... They moved around to the sound of strangers calling their names and a sense of being the biggest men alive.

Somewhere in our emotional attic, next to dog-eared baseball cards and yellowed Herald Tribunes, are comics from the 1950s and ’60s. Look at the old Action Comics or Adventure Comics: In contrast to what’s on sale today, the drawings were less busy, the stories more coherent, the themes more about human emotions and the problems of secret identities than about obtuse scenarios of world destruction. There was more soul, less science fiction.

‘What has 600,000 legs, 300,000 hearts and speaks with one voice?” In the hazy pre-dawn of an already hot July 14, Alecia Sachs, 43, from Miami, waved a placard with that question outside the “Today” show’s street-level studio window.

It began with a visit to a single grave.

About a decade ago, Rabbi Manfred Gans, spiritual leader of Congregation Machane Chodosh in Forest Hills, accompanied a congregant, a recent widower, to the man’s late wife’s grave in Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, L.I. The congregant, Jack Kremski, and his wife, Anna, were Holocaust survivors, natives of Czestachowa, in Poland.

The chairman of an organization of blind Jews contends that the major publisher of Jewish religious material for the blind and visually impaired has de-emphasized the publication of Braille prayer books.
Harold Snider said the publisher has neglected the religious material in favor of large print books for recreational reading already available through the Library of Congress.
Snider heads the National Federation of the Blind in Judaism, which he says has 50 members.

Each day this week, Rabbi Jacob Goldstein of Brooklyn, chief chaplain of the New York National Guard, recited morning prayers at a sukkah erected in the plaza facing the main doors of Saddam Husseinís main presidential palace in Baghdad.
"It's a six by eight sukkah and it is there for all to see," he said by phone from Baghdad. "So there I am every morning, benching lulav and esrog," he added referring to the ritual objects used in prayers during Sukkot.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, honored on successive nights this week here by prominent Jewish organizations, spoke forcefully of his support for Israel and commitment to rid his country of anti-Semitism. And though sometimes described as haughty, he sounded nothing like that on Monday night when he said he was unworthy of receiving the Elie Wiesel Foundation Humanitarian Award and spoke of his self-doubts in making difficult national decisions.

Even 60 years later, Philip Bialowitz of Queens is haunted by the Nazi killing factory at Sobibor, Poland.
"I still have sleepless nights," Bialowitz, 74, confides. "I still see the killings. You could see the smoke miles away. They killed my two sisters and a niece at Sobibor. My niece was 8 years old and knew she was going to die."
He says that when he first arrived at Sobibor, someone asked if he came with his family.

As a move is under way to expand the search for Nazi-era Swiss bank account holders, the group established to speed the payment of life insurance policies from that period is coming under attack for allegedly working against the heirs' interests.
A lawsuit filed on behalf of two Holocaust survivors now living in California asserts that because the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims is funded by the insurance companies, it is "inherently biased." The suit also alleges that the commission works to"diminish or deny" claims.

Following his retirement after 36 years as the senior rabbi of the Shelter Rock Jewish Center in Roslyn, L.I., and then being called on to serve the past year as the interim senior rabbi of Temple Israel in Great Neck, Myron Fenster is clearly enjoying himself.
"I got compliments this year I never heard," he says with a broad grin.
And now, as he again contemplates retirement at the end of November, Rabbi Fenster plans to draw upon his 54-year rabbinical career during his High Holy Days sermons.