A firebomb attack on a synagogue in Rutherford is being investigated as an attempted homicide and a hate crime, Bergen County Prosecutor John Molinelli announced on Wednesday.
“You’re looking at 40 to 50 years in prison,” said Molinelli, addressing the “person or persons who are doing this act” at a Wednesday afternoon press conference.
“Turn yourself in and end this now,” he said. “We will ultimately solve this crime and make arrests.”
Around 4:30 a.m. Wednesday morning, several Molotov cocktails were thrown at Congregation Beth El, an Orthodox synagogue on a quiet residential street in Rutherford. One entered the second floor bedroom of the congregation’s rabbi, Nosson Schuman, and ignited his bedspread.
For several years, at least, Agudath Israel of America, the organizational arm of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, has demanded that allegations of child abuse be vetted by rabbis rather than directly reported to police. Increasingly, that position is coming in for harsh criticism. Much of that criticism is coming from within the ultra-Orthodox community itself, where advocates of victims of child molestation accuse their own rabbinic leadership of covering up the crimes of molesters, many of whom continued to prey on children for decades.
Agudah’s position is at odds with laws in New York and New Jersey that mandate reporting of child abuse in many circumstances.
As a long-time resident who is completing his first two-year term as mayor of Teaneck and was decisively re-elected to his third council term on Tuesday, Mohammed Hameeduddin has come to understand and revel in the commonalities between his Muslim community and the Jewish community which he serves, and which helped elect him.
Being on the campaign trail — such as it was, in the run-up to this past Tuesday’s municipal’s elections — highlighted one aspect of that commonality.
“The Jewish people of Teaneck are very similar to the Muslim community, because when you walk in, the first thing everybody makes sure to ask is ‘Did you eat?’ That’s the first question every grandmother asks. It’s very similar if you walk into a Muslim household from south Asia,” says Hameeduddin, whose parents came to America from India in the late 1960s.
Alexandra Casser began putting on t’fillin daily as a sophomore in Rutgers.
“T’fillin make davening Shacharis [morning service] more immediately relevant, since you are able to see that your actions respond to an explicit command in the text,” says the Demarest native. “There’s great satisfaction in being able to see that you are fulfilling a mitzvah described in the central text of Judaism.”
Now, Casser wants to make it easier for other women who want to try observing the mitzvah of t’fillin.
If leadership means to see a problem where no one else does, and then take the initiative to solve it, Ben Sagerman is definitely a leader.
The 17-year-old high school junior loved the experience of outdoor prayer he experienced at the Union for Reform Judaism’s Camp Eisner — and wanted to make that experience possible for his fellow congregants at Temple Avodat Shalom in River Edge.
So he built an outdoor sanctuary, a small ampitheater, in an empty space on Avodat Shalom’s property.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are Eve. On the advice of a snake, you have taken a bite from the forbidden fruit. Now, you offer it to your mate, Adam.
Wait a second. Why do you do that? Why don’t you keep it for yourself? What are you thinking? What is your motivation?
These are the sort of questions that are at the core of the “bibliodrama” programs that Peter Pitzele has been leading for 30 years, and which Pitzele will be bringing this weekend to Congregation Gesher Shalom in Fort Lee. Pitzele will serve as scholar in residence, the first endowed by Leonia’s Congregation Sons of Israel which was absorbed into Gesher Shalom last year.
“There are lots of different answers to these questions,” explains Pitzele. “The Bible is full of these gaps, these places where the text is silent.”
There was good reason for celebration in the board room of the Kaplen Jewish Community Center on the Palisades on Tuesday night. Two weeks before, the JCC had received a check for $1.5 million from the Henry and Marilyn Taub Foundation — marking the successful conclusion to six years of fundraising and construction that renovated the JCC’s 40-year-old building and brought in $32 million in donations from the community.
The board members had reason to drink champagne. They had succeeded in an audacious fundraising campaign — one whose scope had sparked heated discussions over the years. And they had reached into their own pockets to grow the institution they loved, that many of them had grown up in, giving to the original capital and endowment campaign and then, this past year, to what was called the Taub Community Challenge. That, in fact, had been a condition of Henry Taub, when he agreed, on his hospital bed shortly before his death last March, to donate $1.5 million: The JCC had to come up with $3 million from other donors, and within a year. “Henry wanted the community to step up and take ownership,” recalls Pearl Seiden, president of the JCC.
In May 1966, Sen. Thomas Dodd took to the Senate floor to denounce an article in American Judaism — as the magazine of what is now the Union of Reform Judaism was then known.
The article, calling for an end to the still-young war in Vietnam, argued that “Vietnam is not comparable to Munich and Hitler.”
Such anti-war views represented only “a vociferous minority,” Dodd claimed, calling support for the war by the Jewish War Veterans organization more reflective of religious opinion.
Now 88 years old, Albert Vorspan, the author of the article, remembers that era well.
“During Vietnam, we had a large, shrill voice and shook up the Jewish community,” he says.
The boy was 17 years old and he urgently needed an operation.
As a Jehovah’s Witness, however, he would rather die than receive a blood transfusion, believing it to be a transgression of the biblical prohibition against eating blood. His parents, also pious members of the religious group, agreed with him.
The doctors of the UCLA Medical Center, however, would not agree to perform a blood-free operation. They were not willing to risk losing a patient’s life because of his religious beliefs.
As a member of the medical center’s ethics committee, Rabbi Elliot Dorff was among those consulted.
David Marwell once hunted Nazis for the United States government.
Now, he is working to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive in a future in which there will be no surviving survivors to tell their first-person stories.
A former investigator for the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), since 2000 Marwell has headed the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.
He will be speaking at community-wide Yom Hashoah event Wednesday night at Temple Beth Sholom in Fair Lawn.
