Features

Moshe Tabashi plays wheelchair basketball and wheelchair tennis. Though he couldn’t get down on his knee to propose to Einav Levi, he found a dramatic way to pop the question.

“Moshe is a problem solver,” says Einav. “When the paralysis in his legs couldn’t be reversed, he found a way to cope. And beyond coping – he lives life to its fullest.”

Of the many things that I admire my wife for, one (surely not the most significant) is her ability to walk into an empty room in a house and imagine how it might or ought to look with furniture and everything else that makes up a room. The couch can go there, the rocker there, that painting over there… it’s this remarkable ability to see beyond what presents right now and have an image of what it might be.

We all watched in dismay when Haiti was struck with a devastating 7.0 earthquake; the consequences of this natural disaster intensified by Haiti's status as the 2nd poorest nation in the Western hemisphere. One hundred days later, hundreds of thousands are living in tents in refugee camps without sanitation as the devastation and fear continues with little signs of progress.

When I received an email from the New Victory Theater announcing a family comedy show called "The Flaming Idiots", my trigger finger clicked to buy four tickets faster than I could stop it. Little did I know that, in between the crackerjack juggling and zany shenanigans, I would experience a dramatic illumination of my personal values.

 
In Israel, Lag b’Omer — the holiday that occurs this year on Saturday night and Sunday — has many traditions.
 
It’s a day off from school.
 
It’s a time when many 3-year-old boys get their first haircut and adult couples get married.
 
It’s a nationwide celebration of bonfires and picnics, especially a days-long Woodstock-type gathering for an estimated half-million people at Meron, a town in the northern Galilee.
 

Jason Gewirtz is the senior producer for a CNBC documentary called “Beyond the Barrel: The Race to Fuel the Future,” which began airing last week and focuses on Israeli innovation in the clean-tech industry. While Israel has become a hub for alternative energy research, the Jewish state has yet to put many of its ideas into practice and is still almost completely reliant on oil, Gewirtz says. Gewirtz and his crew also explore Canadian alternative energy usage at the Olympics, German entrepreneurship in solar energy and Chinese environmental research.

Tsipi Ben-Haim is a woman possessed with a mission to bring art to inner city youth. As the executive and artistic director of CITYarts, she has created 260 projects in 37 years in urban areas around the globe that bring people together to create murals and mosaics and unique “peace walls.”

At an awards dinner at the Ana Tzarev Gallery in Midtown, the Israeli-born dynamo told 300 supporters that her group has painted a peace wall in the Jacob Schiff Park at 138th St. and Amsterdam Ave. There is also a new one in Karachi, Pakistan.

Israel is 62 and on college campuses across the country that’s cause for celebration – and controversy.