Yeshiva World News

The following article appeared in todays NY Daily News: Stung by a series of gruesome deaths blamed on faulty elevators, the city Housing Authority plans to spend millions to fix the lifts that often infuriate and injure its 406,000 residents.

NYCHA will spend $5 million to hire new elevator inspectors and maintenance teams. An additional $107 million will go to replace 630 of its 3,335 elevators over five years.

NYCHA is installing computerized tracking so managers can “see” elevators from remote locations to determine where they are and if they’re working properly.

The system, in place in some developments, sends a stream of data to a central computer to help flag problems before an elevator goes out of service.

An important new program will install new cameras and encourage residents to report vandalism, a leading cause of elevator failure. The moves are long overdue, and driven by public and political pressure.

Tomorrow, when NYCHA Chairman Tino Hernandez testifies before the City Council, he will surely be grilled about the tragic death of Jacob Neuman, a 5-year-old boy who recently fell to his death while trying to escape a stalled elevator in Brooklyn’s Taylor Wythe Houses.

He’ll probably also be asked about the death of Lillian Milan, an asthma sufferer who died trying to walk up 10 flights in the Bushwick Houses in September 2007.

On any given day, nearly 200 NYCHA elevators are out of service. A recent report by the Daily News I-Team showed repairs can often take weeks or months.

To his credit, Hernandez not only didn’t duck my questions – he invited me to spend part of yesterday poking around NYCHA’s “elevator university.”

It’s a sprawling setup in a converted Long Island City warehouse with a staggering number of training stations, complete with motors, pulleys, cables and several generations of elevators converted into simulators.

Under the direction of John Ashton, an elevator guru with nearly 30 years at NYCHA, an army of 400 mechanics, inspectors and assistants who service NYCHA elevators train on the equipment and get dispatched to handle the hundreds of elevator failures that happen each day.

All of that is a great start, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem of NYCHA’s perennial budget deficits, estimated at around $200 million a year.

The bad news is that half the money for elevator repairs will come from other programs. That means more leaky roofs, broken pipes and furnaces that fail in winter.

Hernandez and his team are trying hard with not enough money, manpower or help from state and federal agencies.

The sad truth is that we won’t fix what ails NYCHA unless we give it the money it needs to do the job.

(LINK to NY Daily News)

(PHOTO LINK BELOW) Kehilas Beis Zion, Berlin, Germany, was honoured to welcome HaRav HaGaon Rav Shraga Feivel Zimmerman, Mara D’Asra of Gateshead, to the community, on Sunday. He was invited to be Mesader Kiddushin for the chasuna of Dovid Geballe, a former bochur of Yeshivas Beis Zion, Berlin who later moved to Monsey where he became a close Talmid of Rav Zimmerman. The kallah, Rivka Schwarz was a student at the Lauder Midrasha, the girl’s seminary and sister school of the yeshiva.

Yeshivas Beis Zion opened its doors in the summer of 2000. It was the brainchild of Rabbi Joshua Spinner, founding Director of Lauder Yeshurun, a group of projects aimed at reviving Jewish life in Germany and catering to the large number of immigrants form the former Soviet Union.

HaRav Zimmerman recalled how his grandfather, the last Rov in Frankfurt before the war, was deported by the Nazis, ym’sh and told the guests how they could not possibly realise the enormity of the miracle of attending an authentic yiddishe chasuna in Berlin, almost exactly seventy years after Kristalnacht.

The Yeshivas newly appointed Rosh HaYeshiva, HoRav Yoel Smith, shlita was present and was immersed in halachic discussion with the esteemed guest for much of the evening. He plans to stay in Berlin until Tuesday, during which time he has a rigorous schedule of teaching to the various programs that make up this new vibrant makom Torah in Central Europe.

The chasuna is the latest of a string of simchas matching bochrim and seminary students in Berlin, which has seen the community balloon over the past two years. In addition to the yeshiva and the seminary, there is a kollel, a kindergarten, the recently opened primary school and ‘Am Echad’, the National Outreach division of Lauder Yeshurun.

PHOTO LINK: Click HERE for photos.

(Dovid Rose – YWN Germany)

New York Gov. David Paterson says the recession, overspending by the state and Wall Street’s meltdown will result in a record $47 billion deficit over the next four years.

He says the current budget’s shortfall is $1.5 billion and the next fiscal year beginning April 1 will include a $12.5 billion deficit. A month ago, the current deficit was estimated at $1.2 billion.

He says the projected shortfalls in revenue compared to spending and debt are worse than the state faced after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and require drastic action to reduce spending.

He notes the state budget has increased from about $62 million in the 1994-1995 fiscal year to more than $120 billion today.

(CBS2 HD)

A former German soldier is on trial in Munich for Nazi-era atrocities.

Josef Scheungraber, now 90, is charged with having ordered the murders of 14 villagers in June 1944 as a reprisal for partisans killing two of his men. Scheungraber was sentenced to life in prison by an Italian court in 2006, but since Germany does not extradite its citizens, a trial was initiated in Munich in September.

A witness in one of the last trials related to Nazi-era atrocities told the Munich court on Oct. 23 that his fellow German soldiers balked at massacring Italian villagers in Falzano, Tuscany, but followed orders. The next court date is Nov. 13.

Allegedly under Scheungraber’s command, four civilians were shot before Battalion 818 of the German Army mountain combat engineers was ordered to blow up a barn in which 11 other civilians had been confined. Only Gino Massetti, now 79, survived the explosion and fire, and he testified on Oct. 7 that former Wehrmacht officers called to testify have failed to recall details about the incident, according to news reports.

The latest witness, an 84-year-old former engineer with the battalion, said he did not know who had ordered the massacre. He only knew that he and his fellow soldiers were reluctant to carry out the orders.

In September, Scheungraber’s attorney told the court that the accused — who lives today in Ottobrunn, Bavaria — had not known about the massacre when it happened.

(Source: JTA / Jerusalem Post)

NJ Democrat Dennis Shulman received a Big Apple of an endorsement this morning in his race against three-term Republican U.S. Rep. Scott Garrett in New Jersey’s 5th District.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has endorsed Shulman, 58, a legally-blind psychologist and reformed rabbi from Demarest, Bergen County, saying Shulman will make decisions based on “pragmatism, not ideology,” particularly on gun-control issues. “I am endorsing Dennis Shulman because I am impressed by his pragmatic, sensible approach” to fix the economy and keep guns out of hands of criminals, Bloomberg said in a press conference.

Shulman previously was endorsed in the campaign by New York Gov. David Paterson.

Garrett, 49, an attorney from Wantage, Sussex County, who is known as New Jersey’s most conservative congressman, has handily defeated prior Democratic challengers by double-digit margins. But Garrett is facing his toughest race yet in Shulman, who has been well financed and has relentlessly attacked Garrett on various fronts.

The 5th District House seat has long been a GOP seat. An endorsement by Bloomberg, who was elected as a Republican but switched to being an independent, may carry weight in Bergen County, which has the most votes in the 5th District and where Democrats have made large gains in voter registrations this year.

Rabbi Shulman’s pulpit is at Chavurah Beth Shalom in Alpine, NJ – a reformed Temple. Dennis Shulman is a frequent and popular lecturer at universities, psychoanalytic training institutes, synagogues and churches.

(Source: NJ Star Ledger)

The following article appears in today’s Times Herald Record: County Route 44 remains shut after nearly two weeks as Orange County officials await plans from Kiryas Joel to replace an unauthorized wooden walkway that the village erected beside the road.

The county closed part of the Monroe-Woodbury thoroughfare on Oct. 15 and refuses to reopen it until Kiryas Joel secures or blocks a loosened guardrail and applies for a permit for a permanent sidewalk.

No application had been submitted as of mid-afternoon Monday. Village officials had told the county they expected to submit their proposal on Monday or Tuesday, according to County Executive Ed Diana’s spokesman, Rich Mayfield.

“We have to be satisfied that it’s safe and secure before the road is reopened,” Mayfield said.

Kiryas Joel Administrator Gedalye Szegedin and Mayor Abraham Wieder didn’t return calls for comment. Moses Witriol, the village’s public safety director, was out of town and couldn’t be reached for an update, according to a dispatcher for the public safety department.

The wooden boardwalk was built this month along a stretch of Route 44 that crosses through part of Kiryas Joel where hundreds of condominiums have been built within the last several years.

Village officials have been pressing to build sidewalks there for pedestrian safety and had tried unsuccessfully to take possession of that strip of Route 44. Instead, county legislators offered them an easement for the work.

Then, on Oct. 15, county workers discovered the boardwalk had been built without permission and concluded that 500 feet of guardrail had been loosened in the process.

The county declared the conditions unsafe for drivers and walkway pedestrians alike.

Motorists must now use a detour through the village.

Diana has vowed to fine Kiryas Joel $1,000 a day until the road reopens and charge roughly $5,000 for the time county employees have spent so far on the matter. He also wanted the walkway removed, although he later said it could remain temporarily if the village blocks it with concrete barriers.

More than 75,000 Jews throughout the Keystone state got an email last Thursday from the “Republican Federal Committee of PA – Victory 2008” that compares a victory by Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., to Nazi victories before the Holocaust.

The e-mail suggested that a vote for Barack Obama would be a “tragic mistake,” and “Jewish Americans cannot afford to make the wrong decision,” adding that “many of our ancestors ignored similar warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s. Let’s not make a similar one this year!”

On Tuesday, the Associated Press reports that a former Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice is apologizing for signing the e-mail.

Sandra Schultz Newman says she regrets that she didn’t review the final draft more carefully before it was released.

Newman says “Some of the language was inappropriate and intemperate.” And she’s apologizing to anyone who was offended by what she describes as “this misguided e-mail.”

Meanwhile, Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director and a Holocaust survivor, issued the following statement:

Ugly, divisive personal attacks against a candidate for any political office should never be acceptable, and using Holocaust analogies is completely beyond the pale. 

Regardless of which candidate one supports, it is shocking and profoundly distressing that anyone would see fit to make such an odious, false and repugnant analogy.  Not only does it further debase the level of our political discourse, but it also diminishes and trivializes the virulent anti-Semitism and Nazi aggression that led to the slaughter of six million Jews and millions of others.

We hope that the signatories of this letter and those responsible for its dissemination will repudiate its message and apologize to both the candidate and the Jewish community.

(Moshe Altusky – YWN)

WCBSTV reports: Residents and commuters across the tri-state are waking up to shades of winter on this messy Tuesday morning.

A strengthening coastal storm is affecting conditions all over the northeast, with heavy rains and winds especially troubling in parts of New York City, Long Island, northern New Jersey, southwestern Connecticut and much of the lower Hudson Valley.

Rain intensity is fluctuating from light to heavy in the city. But parts of Sullivan and Ulster have not been as lucky, seeing heavier rains with even the possibility of snow.

CBS 2 HD Meteorologist John Elliot advises morning commuters to delay their start if possible. The flood advisory issued for parts of the tri-state is causing heavy delays on most roadways, including both highways and small side roads. But as Elliot points out, it will be the winds that pose the most danger for the tri-state on Tuesday. As the day progresses, the rain will slow down, but the winds will only strengthen.

Winter weather, winter storm, flood and wind advisories have been issued already for most of the tri-state.

Elliot says the conditions are reminiscent of a March day, with temperatures typical of a December day. Temperatures shouldn’t exceed a high of 45 degrees, with a low of 36 in the late evening hours.

The howling winds will continue though the evening. On the bright side however, the rains will have ended. But it will be quite chilly, with temps dipping into the mid 30′s in the city by day break on Wednesday.

The coastal storm will be centered well to our north by Wednesday morning, but the tri-state will still experience gusty winds. As the coldest air mass of the season continues to settle in we’ll have a tough time getting out of the 40s tomorrow.

(Source: CBS2 HD)