The 40-year-old Glen Rock finalist in Redbook Magazine’s national “Hottest Husband” contest is also one of the only Jews among the 22 lucky guys. A Jewish hottie? Well, his wife certainly thinks so; she’s the one who nominated him.
“I’d like to go on the record that this is extremely embarrassing for me,” Bryan Kule told The Jewish Standard. Nevertheless, he added, “I’m flattered that my wife thought enough of me to put me in there.”
Kule said she told him about the nomination after she was informed that he made the finals.
Unity is the underlying theme for the formal dedication of Cong. Ahavath Torah’s two-story, 60,000-square-foot synagogue complex, planned for the first weekend in March and culminating in the shul’s annual dinner honoring Rabbi Shmuel and Barbara Goldin.
Yeshiva University President Richard Joel is scheduled to join the Englewood congregation that Shabbat as scholar in residence during services as well as at a Friday night Oneg Shabbat and Saturday afternoon seudah shlishit. A festive Shabbat morning service is to be led by Cantor Chaim Muhlbauer, with Joel delivering remarks to the community.
I don’t think there’s any way to better learn something than to be pushed into the middle of it and do it hands on,” commented a Ma’ayanot Yeshiva High School senior on an evaluation form for a teacher-training elective she recently completed. “It really gave me a feel for teaching.”
The object of the elective course, sponsored by the UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey’s Jewish Educational Service, is to address a looming teacher shortage in Jewish day schools.
“The issue is, who’s going to teach our kids?” said Minna Heilpern, JES director. “There are not enough educators coming down the pike, and not enough [graduate] schools for Jewish education. We could already see the problem coming 10 years ago.”
At Mile 18 of the ING Miami Marathon, 19-year-old Sivan Shachnovitz of Fair Lawn wasn’t sure she’d make it another step, let alone to the finish line. Just in time, her grandmother and a family friend bypassed the sawhorses and handed her energy-boosting jellybeans. Her mother and siblings met her around mile 24, walked beside her awhile, and cheered her on to the finish line, where her father awaited. It took her six and a half hours, but she made it the whole 26.2 miles.
Shachnovitz — and her 13-year-old brother Barak, who completed the half-marathon despite an earlier ankle injury — were among 250 marathoners running in support of Chai Lifeline at Miami Beach on Jan. 31. “Team Lifeline” garnered $1.2 million for the international organization, which aids seriously ill Jewish children and their families with programs including the medically supervised Camp Simcha.
Alexander Rashin of Teaneck has received Prakhin International Literary Foundation’s annual award for his 2003 book “Why Didn’t Stalin Murder All the Jews?” The award was presented on Jan. 31 by Dr. Boris Prakhin of Paramus at the foundation’s third annual award ceremony at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan.
Rashin, a computational biophysicist, was born in Kharkhov, Ukraine. He retains unpleasant childhood memories of life in the waning years of Josef Stalin’s reign.
“I was a little kid playing with my friends in the street, and a Russian neighbor shouted at us, ‘Pity that Hitler had not killed you all!’” Rashin related in his speech at the award ceremony. His family shared a two-family house with the local head of the MGB, the pre-KGB security agency that in 1938 had helped the Gestapo formulate plans for concentration camps and mass exterminations.
Many synagogues have a “yahrzeit wall” where families can dedicate plaques in memory of loved ones. A South Jersey synagogue extended the concept to memorialize Holocaust victims. And that inspired the New Jersey Holocaust Education Commission to develop a virtual statewide Wall of Remembrance.
“The commission members thought the synagogue’s wall was a wonderful idea for survivors, and we started to talk about building such walls around New Jersey,” said Paul B. Winkler, executive director of the NJHEC. “But we realized that was impossible. So we decided to do it on the Internet.”
Forty young men from a Beit Shemesh yeshiva met 40 young men from the Israel Defense Forces’ Dragon artillery battalion last Thursday.
The yeshiva students, including Eli Sklarin of Teaneck, had come to take part in the Sklarin family’s donation of 100 hydration packs (“shlukerim”) to the battalion. The soldiers, including 21-year-old former Teaneck resident David Englard, were mostly 18 and 19 like their visitors from Yeshivat Reishit Yerushalayim, a post-high school program.
“At the beginning, the two groups were standing apart awkwardly,” said Marc Prowisor, who facilitated the donation on behalf of One Israel Fund. “I described the project and then the company commander asked his guys to take the boys around and show how they live and what they do. You started seeing them getting closer, having conversations. You saw chemistry happening right before your eyes, even before the equipment was given out.”
Members of the North Jersey Board of Rabbis will offer a full menu of Jewish study opportunities at the inaugural “Sweet Tastes of Torah: A Community Night of Learning,” Feb. 6 at Temple Emeth, 1666 Windsor Road in Teaneck. Music and munchies also are on the bill.
“At a recent meeting, we were discussing the state of adult education in the community,” said NJBR President Rabbi Randall Mark of Wayne. Recently, regional learning initiatives including the Jewish Learning Project at the YJCC in Washington Township lost their funding.
“We thought we should do something broadly based,” said Mark. “Being a collection of pulpit rabbis, and having human — but not financial — resources, we thought of a one-night event to make use of those resources.”
Israel’s governmental bureaucracy has a reputation for wrapping every transaction in vast amounts of red tape and attitude.
Admittedly, the reputation is well-earned. I’ve heard plenty of horror stories and experienced a few myself (like the one-armed postal clerk who took a leisurely pita break as swarms of us waited in a hot, cramped vestibule). But I see more than a glimmer of hope that things are changing for the better.
Most of our bureaucratic experiences since making aliyah two and a half years ago have been unexpectedly pleasant, even easy. The concept of customer service is taking hold in Israel, along with take-a-number ticket dispensers (Israelis are incapable of orderly turn-taking) and more sophisticated methods to boost efficiency. Though some departments still enforce a maddening siesta break from 1 to 4 p.m., that’s changing too.
The Foundation for Jewish Camp has tapped Jeremy Fingerman of Englewood as its new chief executive officer. He succeeds Jerry Silverman, now CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America.
Fingerman, a Harvard Business School graduate who formerly headed Campbell Soup Co.’s U.S. Soup Division and the management group for Manischewitz foods, moved to Englewood with his wife, Gail, in September 2005. Their 10-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter attend The Moriah School there.
