Eruv committee member Stuart Scheer of Cresskill assisting in the attachment of a lechi on one of the borough’s utility poles during construction of the new eruv on Nov. 10. Courtesy Lubavitch on the Palisades

After the sun sets Friday on the Borough of Cresskill, Shabbat-observant Jews can walk to shul carrying their tallit bags and pushing their baby strollers, thanks to the town’s newly constructed eruv.

Literally, an eruv is a small piece of black plastic or rubber over the town’s telephone poles. Figuratively, it is symbolic fence that encloses a safe space for observant Jews to carry items such as keys or tallit bags or push baby strollers on Shabbat and holidays, when they are forbidden from carrying anything in public spaces. On Nov. 10, Cresskill put up an eruv, thrilling the local Jewish community, according to Rabbi Mordechai Shain, director of Tenafly’s Lubavitch on the Palisades, which spearheaded the effort to create the eruv.

“People were singing and dancing,” said Shain. “They were so excited because the town gave it to them in a very respectful way.”

Cresskill resident Sofia Sasouness is grateful for the new addition. Although she drives to shul, her children, who often visit and attend Shabbat services with her and her husband, are observant of Shabbat restrictions.

“My daughter wouldn’t even carry a bottle of water with her to shul,” said Sasouness. “We’ve got to respect the people who believe in it.”

The eruv covers at least half of Cresskill. The boundaries run from Knickerbocker Road at the Tenafly-Cresskill border, follow Madison Avenue through Cresskill, continue down Engle Street, and reconnect with the Tenafly eruv on Knoll Road.

The eruv is not particularly visible; many in Cresskill are not even aware of it.

“It doesn’t really interfere with anyone’s life,” said borough councilmember Hector Olmo. “If the people that need it are using it, and it benefits them, then it’s fine.”

Chabad submitted a written request for the eruv at a Sept. 1 council meeting, which was quickly approved. Chabad provided a diagram of areas the eruv would cover and agreed to pay all costs of its establishment and maintenance, Olmo said.

After receiving permission from Cresskill, Orange and Rockland Utilities, and Verizon, Chabad was free to start construction. The installation of the lechis, the black rubber strips that form the symbolic doorway, cost $1,200, according to Lawrence Blenden, who spearheaded the project for Chabad. Blenden said that the total cost was less than $5,000.

The eruv costs very little to maintain. Unless the lechis break, the only additional cost is for the time spent checking it every week before Shabbat, he said. That fee is still being negotiated.

Cresskill was not responsible for any of the finances and Chabad reimbursed the police officer who directed traffic during the almost four-hour construction period for his time.

For neighboring towns, getting an eruv approved has not been such an easy task. Tenafly spent six years engaged in a legal battle. In 1999, when the eruv was first proposed at a council meeting, many residents opposed the idea, fearing that Orthodox Jews would overpopulate the town. Council members did not want to put an eruv on public telephone poles because they thought it was giving special treatment to one group. After a lengthy legal battle in federal court, Tenafly finally resolved the issue and put up an eruv in 2005.

Nearby towns of Englewood and Teaneck have also created eruvs.

“Having an eruv in the town enhances the community,” said Shain. He added that one of the biggest advantages is that families will be able to bring their children to services.

Olmo and Sasouness also said that the installation of the eruv will eventually bring more Orthodox Jews to the area.

After a decade of local wanderings, Chabad Jewish Center of Northwest Bergen County is in contract to purchase a former church as its permanent Franklin Lakes address.

“The building fits us like a glove,” says Rabbi Chanoch Kaplan, director since the inception of this Lubavitch center in 2000. “We’ll have classrooms, a 200-seat sanctuary that will double as a space for programs and celebrations, and office space.”

Until now, the center’s growing roster of programs has been housed in several locations. High Holiday services have been held in Ramapo High School’s 650-seat auditorium for the past two years. A Hebrew school, directed by Kaplan’s wife, Mimi, meets at a rented facility in Oakland. Community holiday programs are held at the Gerrard Berman Solomon Schechter Day School of North Jersey in Oakland, and Kaplan teaches classes at his home in Franklin Lakes.

The leadership of the Chabad Center expressed interest in the property owned by Reformed Bible Fellowship three years ago, but until now a tenant church has been renting it. In the fall, Chabad received word that the tenant intends to move, and discussions began. Following the necessary approvals on both sides, the center expects to close on the sale at the end of June, do a bit of remodeling, and open in time for the start of the Hebrew school and High Holiday season.

“We have a committee guiding the process of fund-raising, and we are open to people wanting to make dedications in memory or honor of somebody or just to do something for the community,” says Kaplan. He estimates the cost of purchase and renovation to be about $2 million. In addition, the center will purchase a parsonage for the Kaplans, as their present home is not within walking distance of the new location.

Kaplan described a growing Chabad community, which draws about 250 active families mainly from Wyckoff, Franklin Lakes, Oakland, and Mahwah. Jews in this vicinity also are served by Beth Haverim in Mahwah, Barnert Temple and Temple Emanuel in Franklin Lakes, and Temple Beth Rishon in Wyckoff, but Chabad is the sole Orthodox synagogue and community center in the area.

“We are here to bolster and augment the wonderful organizations already here, and add a special ingredient. My wife and I are full-time, 24/7,” says Kaplan. “We’re here to share our lives with the community.” They’re aided by volunteers and 13 paid staffers at the Hebrew school for about 100 children from pre-K to bar/bat mitzvah age. Mimi Kaplan, expecting the couple’s sixth child, also directs a summer camp.

“When we first came, we decided it was a great community with growth potential and open to what Chabad offers,” the rabbi says. “Our approach is unique — very open and engaging, actively reaching out to the community. For some it was tradition they were interested in, while others were seeking Jewish educational and cultural opportunities. People come to us for many different reasons and we try to accommodate everybody.”

Kaplan leads a public menorah-lighting on Chanukah at Wyckoff and Mahwah town halls. “In Wyckoff, we had 30 people at the lighting the first year, and now it’s upwards of 300,” he reports.

On rotating Friday nights, Chabad hosts Shabbat Around the World, a themed family dinner; an abridged beginners service; and Tot Shabbat for parents and young children. At weekly Saturday morning services, the congregation has celebrated bar and bat mitzvahs, baby-namings, and other lifecycle events.

In addition, the Kaplans have established local chapters of Lubavitch initiatives such as the multimedia Jewish Learning Institute adult education program; the Women’s Circle; Youth Zone, a social action club for third- to eighth-graders; a winter break camp; Cteen and JLI Teen groups; and Friendship Club, which pairs teenage volunteers with special-needs children.

“Our primary focus with our Friendship Club is Sunday Circle, a light Jewish-education program for children for special needs, where the kids come together with the volunteers and a professional for crafts and songs,” says Kaplan.

For Purim, beginning at sundown March 19, Chabad of Northwest Bergen will host a Saturday night event for adults with a comedian; the next day, the Hebrew school families and community are invited to a “Purim in Israel” party featuring Israeli crafts, entertainment, and cuisine.

“The connecting theme of everything we do is Jewish-oriented and meant to inspire,” says Kaplan, who grew up in a family of Chabad emissaries in Maryland. “We were the pioneers there, and that’s the type of life in which I found meaning and fulfillment. Being a Chabad rabbi is an opportunity to teach my children what it means to give to others and the importance of every individual.”

Rendering provided by Chabad Jewish Center of Northwest Bergen County

Rabbi Shlomo Bentolila, right, dancing with Congolese officials at a gala dinner March 1 celebrating 20 years of the Chabad of Central Africa in Kinshasa. Israel Bardugo/lubavitch.com

Congolese President Joseph Kabila probably had other things on his mind last week than the celebration in his capital city of Kinshasa marking the 20th anniversary of the city’s Chabad center.

On Feb. 27, about 100 fighters armed with assault rifles and rocket launchers staged two simultaneous attacks in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of them directed at Kabila’s residence in an affluent neighborhood of the capital. More than a dozen people were killed, including several Congolese soldiers.

But a few days later, Kabila managed to take time out to call the local Chabad director, Rabbi Shlomo Bentolila, during the Chabad celebration at the Grand Hotel, and to send a representative to deliver a speech on the president’s behalf.

The event coincided with the announcement that Chabad will open two new centers in the heart of Africa in the coming months — in Nairobi, Kenya, and Lagos, Nigeria. The one in Congo currently is the only Chabad in sub-Saharan Africa outside of South Africa.

“The work is not easy, but we are seeing, thank God, fruits, and we hope to continue to see that,” Bentolila, the Chabad director for Central Africa, told JTA by phone from Kinshasa.

Chabad will send emissaries to the new centers, which are located in the capitals of the two countries.

Chabad’s Africa operations — now 20 years old and encompassing activities in 14 countries — are no stranger to political unrest or the unique challenges presented by working on the continent.

Bentolila, a father of four from Montreal, has survived two Congolese wars, including the revolution that deposed Mobotu Sese Seku. The rabbi went outside to greet rebel forces taking the capital who passed by his synagogue on a Shabbat afternoon in 1997.

“Those past 20 years have not always been easy for you and for your family,” Antoine Ghonda, the president’s representative, said at the Chabad celebration, according to a transcript provided to JTA. “But since you believe in this country, its people, and its future, you continue to provide support.”

Like most Chabad emissaries who find themselves setting up shop at the perimeter of the Jewish world, Bentolila struggled in his early days in the Congo to secure kosher food and recruit a minyan for Shabbat prayers. Today the community has a supply of kosher meat, a ritual bath, and a small Jewish school.

Bentolila says the new centers were supported entirely by local philanthropy.

“We don’t go abroad to take money,” he said. “We support ourselves locally.”

Chabad centers in Africa play a unique role, serving Jews and Jewish communities comprised largely of expatriates — transient American, British, and Israeli Jewish businesspeople and their families and a few descendants of European Jews who fled to Africa during the Holocaust.

Unlike at many Chabad centers in other exotic locations, Chabad emissaries in Africa see relatively few tourists.

Chabad tries to do everything from fly in emissaries to lead seders and High Holidays services in cities all over the continent to helping orchestrate the return home of sick, stuck, or deceased Jews.

“There are both physical and spiritual challenges to working in Africa,” says Chananya Rogalsky, a Chabadnik from the Chabad-Lubavitch movement’s world headquarters in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, N.Y., who travels frequently to Africa to perform Jewish outreach work.

The day before a seder in Angola for some 150 guests, all the food spoiled when the hotel’s electricity went out on a typical stiflingly hot day. While Bentolila made sure enough food made it to the hotel in time for the seder, Rogalsky was left with little more than a box of matzoh and bottled water to make it through the remainder of the holiday week. He had some local fruit, but it turned his stomach.

The biggest scare, however, came when the Israelis at the seder starting running through the service so quickly that they reached the meal part in 15 minutes, he said.

“I thought to myself, ‘I can’t have a seder that ends in half an hour. This is ridiculous,’” Rogalsky said. “So we started singing songs, and everybody started singing along with us. That lasted five hours. Nobody left the hotel ballroom till after midnight. It was an unbelievable experience.”

JTA Wire Service

An aerial view of debris from the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck northern Japan on March 11. Alexander Tidd/U.S. Navy

Almost as soon as the catastrophe in Japan began unfolding last Friday, Jewish groups scrambled to figure out how to get help to the area.

In Israel, search-and-rescue organizations like ZAKA and IsraAid readied teams to head to the Japanese devastation zone. In Tokyo, the Chabad center took an accounting of local Jews and began organizing a shipment of aid to stricken cities to the north. In the United States, aid organizations ranging from B’nai B’rith International to local and national federation agencies launched campaigns to collect money for rescue, relief, and rebuilding efforts in the Pacific.

But then Shabbat came, and with it the news that a suspected Palestinian terrorist had brutally murdered five family members in the Jewish west bank settlement of Itamar, and the focus of the Jewish community seemed to shift.

“Not sure who to think about first,” Nadia Levene, a British-Israeli event-planner living in Jerusalem, wrote on Facebook on Tuesday. “The devastated remaining members of the Fogel family from Itamar, Gilad Shalit — five years in Hamas captivity — or the survivors of the Japanese tragedy and the dangers they may be facing.”

The Orthodox Union, which sent out a message last Friday calling on supporters to donate to the organization’s newly established earthquake emergency fund, sent out another urgent message two days later calling on donors to give money to the OU’s victims of terrorism fund.

As of late Monday, the totals collected by each fund were running neck and neck, the OU’s chief operating officer, David Frankel, told JTA.

“We have an obligation to care for our own,” Frankel said, “but the enormity of the tragedy that happened in Japan is so extraordinary that for the Jewish community not to have an outpouring of support would not only be a denial of one of our primary obligations to care for everyone in their time of need,” he said, but also a missed opportunity to honor the memory of Chiune Sugihara — the Japanese consul general to Lithuania who in 1940 helped save at least 6,000 Lithuanian Jews from the hands of the Nazis by getting them transit visas to Japan.

“The Japanese community helped us in our time of need; this is our way to help them in their time of need,” Frankel said. “We can never repay the debt, but this is the right thing to do.”

By Tuesday, Israeli teams composed of rescue personnel, emergency medical officers, and water pollution specialists had reached the suburbs of Tokyo, and they were in contact with aid workers in the northern part of the country where the tsunami hit hardest, according to Shachar Zahavi, chairman of IsraAid.

Several American Jewish organizations, including the Jewish federation in Chicago and the American Jewish Committee, are funneling money to IsraAid for disaster relief in Japan.

In Tokyo, the Chabad center commissioned a bakery in Sendai, one of the cities battered by the tsunami, to bake bread for its residents and surrounding areas. The center also trucked several tons of food and supplies to Sendai, Chabad officials said. The officials estimated that Chabad’s relief in Japan is costing approximately $25,000 per day.

In the United States, Jewish humanitarian organizations reported that the money was coming in fast for mailboxes set up to receive donations for Japanese disaster relief.

“We are determined to provide emergency relief as quickly as possible and to work with our partners to provide support over the longer term as well,” said Fred Zimmerman, chairman of the Jewish Federations of North America’s Emergency Committee.

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the main overseas partner for the Jewish Federations, said it had collected more than $400,000 by midday Tuesday.

What makes the Japanese situation a unique challenge for Jewish humanitarian organizations is the absence of relationships in a country that traditionally has been an aid donor, not a recipient.

Indeed, when the American Jewish World Service, which led the Jewish aid response to the 2004 Asian tsunami, was asked what its aid effort would be for Japan, the answer was none at all because AJWS has no partners in the country, spokesman Joshua Berkman told JTA.

The JDC found itself in a similar situation.

“We had no programs in Japan prior to the earthquake; we just worked with the local Jewish community,” said Will Recant, an assistant executive vice president at JDC.

But almost immediately after the earthquake and tsunami hit, the JDC consulted with the Jewish community in Tokyo to identify local Japanese nongovernmental organizations working in the affected areas. By Tuesday, JDC had begun funneling money to JEN, a Tokyo-based organization specializing in shelter reconstruction, support of the socially vulnerable, and emergency supply distribution that had managed to send personnel to the ravaged Japanese prefectures of Miyagi and Fukushima.

As with other disasters, Recant said JDC will stick around to help with long-term relief, budget allowing. Only money raised specifically for Japan will be spent on disaster relief. There is no money in JDC’s budget for additional nonsectarian, humanitarian work, Recant said.

While Japan continues to reel from the triple disaster of an 8.9-magnitude earthquake, a massive tsunami, and a subsequent nuclear crisis, experts in Israel are trying to figure out what lessons from Japan can be applied to the Jewish state, which lies on two fault lines, the Carmel fault and the Dead Sea fault.

Israel experiences tremors every so often, but the last time a ruinous earthquake struck the area was in 1927, when the west bank city of Nablus suffered serious damage. An 1837 earthquake destroyed much of the northern Israeli cities of Safed and Tiberias and left thousands dead.

Israeli building codes have been updated for better earthquake safety compliance, but regulations and enforcement still are said to lag behind places like California, which experiences larger and more frequent quakes.

“There’s still a lot that has to be done as far as building codes are concerned,” said Michael Lazar, a tectonics expert at the University of Haifa. “There’s an attempt to encourage people to renovate older buildings and make them earthquake-ready, but it really hasn’t caught on.”

A scenario in which Israel’s nuclear facility at Dimona, in the Negev, would face the kind of meltdown scenario situation that Japan is seeing now is much less likely, Lazar said, because Dimona is far from the tectonic lines that cross Israel.

“But,” he cautioned, “it’s hard to tell how an earthquake would disperse.”

UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey has opened an emergency relief fund to provide aid and support to the victims of the Japanese earthquake and ensuing tsunami and to help those in other potential disaster zones such as Hawaii and the U.S. mainland’s West Coast. To make a donation, go to http://www.ujannj.org.

Also visit .

JTA Wire Service

The Jewish Standard contributed to this report.