Yeshiva World News

August 24: (UPDATE IN EXTENDED ARTICLE) San Francisco – A young Lakewood couple vacationing in California were involved in a single vehicle accident early Friday morning outside of San Francisco – as they were making their way down to Los Angeles for Shabbos. The yungerman was air lifted to Modesto by chopper with serious injuries R”L. Family members flew in for Shabbos to be at his side.

Please say Tehillim for Yosef Chanina ben Sorah Sima for a Refuah Shelaima.

UPDATE August 26 1:30PM EST: Please say Tehillim for the above name, who will be having a delicate surgery on Tuesday afternoon to try and repair his broken neck R”L.

(YWN Los Angeles reporter)

Among New Jersey’s delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Denver is one whose story moved from the shadows of Nazi death camps to the rare echelons of American power and prestige and who is back in Germany helping the world understand why he fled, according to a report in the Asbury Park Press.

The report said W. Michael Blumenthal, 82, lives in Princeton and Berlin, Germany. He served in the Democratic administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s and then Jimmy Carter in the 1980s.

Werner Michael Blumenthal was born near Berlin in 1926 and at 13 saw his family sell all its possessions to buy his father’s freedom from a concentration camp, then flee to Shanghai.

Seven years later, as a brighter dawn followed World War II, the family arrived in the United States, where Blumenthal took degrees from Berkeley and Princeton, then moved on to be Kennedy’s deputy assistant secretary of state for economic affairs and Johnson’s deputy special representative for trade negotiations.

Moving slalom in and out of the corporate, government and university habitats, Blumenthal became Carter’s treasury secretary, where he served from 1977 to 1979.

He said he is not a latecomer to the Obama camp.

“I have been a supporter of Obama since the beginning,” said Blumenthal.

Blumenthal, at 82, is not the oldest Jersey delegate here. That bouquet goes to New Jersey’s senior U.S. Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, who is 84. Former Gov. Brendan Byrne, 84, and Essex County Democratic chairman Philip Thigpen, 82, are also older.

APP

A terrorist in a federal penitentiary for plotting attacks on Southern California military and Jewish sites has been sentenced to an additional 22 years in state prison for a gas station robbery.

Levar Haney Washington of Torrance was sentenced Monday by Torrance Superior Court Judge Mark Arnold for a 2005 Chevron gas station robbery.

Prosecutors say he was part of a prison gang cell of radical Muslims that planned terrorist attacks and intended to finance them through robberies.

The 30-year-old Washington was sentenced in December to 22 years in federal prison for a weapons charge and conspiring to wage war against the United States.

(Associated Press)

Emboldened by a three-week experiment to shut streets to car traffic on the East Side of Manhattan, bicycle activists are preparing to press Mayor Bloomberg to rid Prospect Park of car traffic by arguing that a car-free park would become part of his lasting legacy.

Advocates of a car-free Prospect Park say they have successfully whittled away at the number of hours that cars can use the park each day and are within striking distance of having them banned altogether.

With vehicular traffic allowed only for two hours in the morning and two hours at night Monday through Friday, they argue that ridding the park of cars at all times wouldn’t be too much of a stretch.

A organization is asking for a three-month, car-free summer in 2009, which they said would give the city the opportunity to study the effects of the street closures on traffic patterns and park usage.

Critics of a car-free park have argued that it would lead to traffic congestion around the park and clog neighborhood streets during morning and evening commute times.

Next month, teenagers who worked with Transportation Alternatives will present the mayor with some 7,000 postcards signed by park users in support of a car-free summer next year.
The students also tracked the speed of cars using the park this summer and found that more than 90% exceeded the speed limit, often by more than 20 miles an hour.

A spokesman for the city’s Department of Transportation, Scott Gastel, said the city implemented a partial closure to vehicles a year ago, but has no plans at this time to completely close the park to vehicles.

(Source: NY Sun)

On Monday, YWN reported that Barak Obama had blasted Agriprocessors in a comment to a reporter. The following is the official response to Barak Obama issued by Nathan Lewin on behalf of Agri: 

This is a shocking statement from a former president of the Harvard Law Review and former constitutional law professor who has sworn, as a United States Senator, to uphold the Constitution which prescribes a presumption of innocence until guilt is proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Before he made public accusations accusing a meat-packing plant of hiring 13 and 14 year olds “only……to avoid paying people decent wages and providing them decent benefits” and declared that the minors were assigned to work with “buzz saws and cleavers,” did Senator Obama look at the evidence or consider the plant’s categorical denial of these allegations?

Agriprocessors recruited only those who were over 18 and knowingly accepted for employment only applicants who said they were over 18. Applicants may have lied about their age to get a job.

Agriprocessors fired four girls in 2007 when it discovered, from its own internal investigation, that they were under age.

The Iowa Labor Department conducted an on-site inspection in April 2008 with an expert at spotting minors and did not identify to Agriprocessors any person on its work-force who looked to be under 18.

No one alleges that any employee who was later identified as under 18 was working at Agriprocessors with “buzz saws and cleavers.”

Everyone on the Agriprocessors payroll, regardless of age, received wages and benefits at or above industry standards.

(Nathan Lewin: Washington attorney for Agriprocessors who was an officer of the Harvard Law Review, a law clerk for a Supreme Court Justice, a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice in the 1960’s, and now teaches a constitutional law seminar at Columbia Law School.)

Agudath Israel of America, one of the nation’s largest Orthodox Jewish organizations, is set to come out against the Hekhsher Tzedek, a new kosher symbol floated by Conservative rabbis to verify compliance with ethical behavior in the treatment of animals and laborers, KosherToday reports.

The organization’s Moetzes Gedolei Hatorah (Council of Torah Sages) is said to have authorized the organization to publicly oppose the new symbol initiated by Rabbi Morris Allen, a Conservative rabbi from Minneapolis who subsequently obtained the endorsement of the Conservative rabbinate. Sources say that Agudath Israel’s position will be consistent with the position taken by other mainstream Orthodox organization and certifying agencies, which basically oppose the broadening of the traditional definition of kosher, despite Rabbi Allen’s assertions that the new symbol would be in addition to the traditional kashrus symbol.

The organization is scheduled to release its position in the coming days, virtually assuring that the Hekhsher Tzedek symbol will not be accepted by kosher businesses and the majority of core kosher consumers. Kashrus organizations, headed by the Orthodox Union, have argued that they fully rely on government oversight to protect consumers from the ethical considerations that the Conservative movement is concerned about.

The Hekhsher Tzedek issue has become the focus of widespread media attention, including a front page article in Saturday’s New York Times, but most media sources have failed to make the point that the Hekhsher Tzedek is opposed across the board in the Orthodox community. Even rabbis who told KosherToday that they welcomed the kind of concern for ethics that Rabbi Allen is advocating, are questioning how the standard could be practically implemented, why it is applied only to kosher foods and not to all Jewish-owned businesses (or, for that matter, non-Jewish), and how the kosher consumer could afford to fund such a new certification at a time of rapidly rising food prices.

The debate surrounding the Hekhsher Tzedek symbol largely revolves around the beleaguered Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa, which continues to be beset by an ongoing onslaught of allegations. On Friday, the Iowa Department of Labor slapped the company with $101,000 in fines for 31 alleged violations, 8 of which dealt with one extension cord. Agriprocessors had hired a former OSHA official who told a group of 20 visiting Orthodox rabbis on July 31st that the plant was “99% compliant with federal and state OSHA requirements.”

(Source: Kosher Today)

The following article was written by Chaim Abrahams (the plant manager at Agriprocessors) – as a guest column for today’s Des Moines Register.

Gov. Chet Culver in his Sunday op-ed essay urged Agriprocessors to “take the high road” and join the family of responsible businesses in Iowa. We believe that we are indeed on course to take the “high road.”

Agriprocessors moved to Iowa two decades ago precisely because the company had a vision: to create a source of kosher meat that could supply the nation’s growing demand for kosher foods with healthy, good-quality and reasonably priced meat. Agriprocessors chose to locate its plant in Iowa because of what the state had and continues to offer. Iowa offers honest, hard-working people – people who work for our company and people who supply the company with products and services.

With the grace of God, Agriprocessors flourished in the state of Iowa while benefiting the citizens of Iowa. It provided jobs to many hundreds of people and stimulated economic growth not only in Postville but throughout the state. Agriprocessors is very much a part of Iowa’s dream, creating a value-added product from the great beef in Iowa for export nationwide.

Agriprocessors fully subscribes to the governor’s call to begin to take the high road and join the family of responsible businesses in Iowa since it wholeheartedly believes that it is doing precisely that. In just the past few months, it has taken a number of important steps that certainly fulfill that challenge.

While the governor’s first bill in office was to raise the minimum wage from $6.25 per hour to $7.25 an hour, Agriprocessors has raised its minimum starting wage from $7.25 per hour to $10 per hour (for workers with skills). The company has also instituted affordable and quality health care for all of its workers, another prime concern of the governor.

Agriprocessors regrets that some of its employees may have used fraudulent documents to lie about their age. Agriprocessors has been in contact with the Iowa Department of Labor ever since it raised the issue early this year. It repeatedly asked the department to advise it of underage workers who may have fraudulently presented documents to work at the plant. The department did its own audit in April and did not find any underage workers. The company policy is clear: “No one under 18 may be employed at the plant.” When it did learn of several underage workers in the plant, they were immediately dismissed.

Agriprocessors hired Jim Martin, a former U.S. attorney in Missouri, as its new compliance officer to ensure that the company is in complete compliance with all federal and state regulations. It has implemented safety training sessions for all of its supervisors and for all of its workers. The company means it: Safety is its No. 1 concern. Everyone at Agriprocessors knows that, its officers, employees on the line and supervisors.

Agriprocessors hired a former Occupational Safety and Health Administration official to monitor its compliance with all federal and state safety requirements. Agriprocessors is a modern and safe place to work, as anyone who has visited the plant recently can plainly see. It has also hired an experienced staffing company to do its hiring, and it is voluntarily using the new federal e-Verify system.

The water-treatment problem that the governor raises was a problem years ago not only for the company’s plant but also for another business as well. While the other company cut and ran, Agriprocessors stayed the course and invested heavily in a high-technology water-treatment plant that is a model of environmental friendliness and is the envy of companies across the country and, indeed, throughout the world. Ironically, Agriprocessors never received any credit for this bold action.

We are pleased to invite the governor to visit the plant, to meet with our leadership and to see the truth firsthand. In such a meeting, we would be delighted to hear the governor’s suggestions as to how we can further improve to fulfill the governor’s challenge to us. In addition to meeting with us, the governor should meet with members of our community, the mayor of Postville, with our happy employees and our supervisors and our compliance officers.

In the end, we are certain that the governor will see firsthand that our plant is anything but a “jungle,” and, when all of the bitterness of the last few months is taken out of the equation, that we are indeed on course to being on an even “higher road.”

DMR

CBS4 is reporting that at least four people are under arrest in connection with a possible plot to kill Barack Obama at his Thursday night acceptance speech in Denver. All are being held on either drug or weapons charges.

Law enforcement sources said that one of the suspects “was directly asked if they had come to Denver to kill Obama. He responded in the affirmative.”

Sources told CBS4 police found two high-powered, scoped rifles in the car along with camouflage clothing, walkie-talkies, a bulletproof vest, a spotting scope, licenses in the names of other people and methamphetamine.

The Secret Service, FBI, ATF and the joint terrorism task force are all investigating the alleged plot.

Developing………

5:40PM EST: The Des Moines Register reports: A day after drawing fire from Iowa’s governor, the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant took heat from a presidential candidate.

Democrat Barack Obama alluded to the controversial plant while answering an immigration question from a voter here today.

“We’ve got to crack down on employers who are taking advantage of undocumented workers,” he said. “When you read about a meatpacking plant hiring 13-year-olds, 14-year-olds – that is some of the most dangerous, difficult work there is. … They have kids in there wielding buzz saws and cleavers? It’s ridiculous. And the only reason they’re hiring these folks is because they want to avoid paying people decent wages and providing them decent benefits.”

Obama didn’t name Agriprocessors, but he was responding to a woman who asked about the situation in Postville. The plant has been accused of hiring underage and illegal-immigrant workers, though managers deny doing so knowingly.

Besides cracking down on employers who hire illegal immigrants, Obama said the country should strengthen its borders while making it possible for longstanding residents who are here illegally to earn citizenship by paying fines and back taxes and learning English.

“We’re a nation of laws and we’re a nation of immigrants, and I think those two things can go hand in hand,” he said.

DMR