Results tagged “rabbi”

Well, the New York Post earned its fifty cents today. Let's start with the cover, which at first glance seems like a work of fantasy but actually documents a real-life, tough-talking rabbi and his plastic pistol-packing "God Squad." Jewish security forces are hardly new to New York (Hasidic communities like the Satmar Jews in Williamsburg have their own private patrols, for instance), but none have produced a training video as uplifting as this one. A mix of Wes Anderson, Adam Sandler, and the "Sabotage" video, it depicts Rabbi Gary Moscowitz, who was an NYPD cop for nine years and holds a black belt in karate, training his fellow Jews to defend their synagogues. Enjoy!

The young son of the Brooklyn rabbi and his wife who were killed in the terror attacks in Mumbai celebrated a tearful second birthday yesterday. A community leader described the scene as Moshe, the orphaned son of Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, was watched over by his maternal grandparents, "He had been crying. He is too small, you see, and all this must be affecting him so much." Indian officials had not yet sent the couples' bodies to be buried in the Holy Land because they are performing an autopsy on them--something prohibited by Jewish law. Today India's top security official resigned amidst growing questions around the nation's vulnerability to this week's attacks.

After Indian commandoes stormed a Chabad-Jewish Center in Mumbai, where some of the workers had been taken hostage, the NY Times reports, "In the end, six of the hostages were killed, including the Brooklyn couple who operated the center."

When Pope Benedict XVI visits NYC this month, one of his stops will be to a synagogue on Manhattan's Upper East Side. It will be the first time a Catholic pope has visited a Jewish temple on U.S. soil, although it will be Benedict's second visit to a synagogue as pope after a 2005 trip to his native Germany. The visit continues a movement for ecumenicism and interfaith dialogue that was strongly supported by the current pope's predecessor.

An influential group of rabbis have put the kibosh on a concert planned for next Sunday at MSG’s WaMu theater. Billed as The Big Event, the show was to be headlined by popular Hasidic pop singer Lipa Schmeltzer and raise money for an Israeli charity that finances weddings for orphans. But after an edict was issued against the event, Schmeltzer dropped out, saying, “I have to get out of the fire.”