Jack Rosenfeld hasn’t seen or heard from his childhood friend Amram Meir since they arrived together at Mauthausen concentration camp in 1945. He has no idea if he is alive.
August 2010:
The two men reunite in Teaneck.
Rosenfeld and Meir recall their last days together as if they were yesterday.
The Union for Traditional Judaism’s Teaneck headquarters sold at auction early last month, but a motion filed last week in U.S. bankruptcy court last week cast doubt on the transaction.
UTJ’s attorney, Janice Grubin, filed a motion on Aug. 27 requesting an extension for her client to file a Chapter 11 plan. Extending this period of exclusivity, during which the debtor can create a plan to pull itself out of bankruptcy without imposed outside solutions, is not atypical in bankruptcy cases, she said. The property went to auction on Aug. 4, which was won by 333 Realty for $1.45 million.
The discovery of swastika graffiti in Fort Lee by a local teen this week put the Anti-Defamation League’s revised definition of the hate symbol to the test.
The teen’s mother, who asked to remain anonymous, called the police Tuesday to the scene near McCloud Avenue where her daughter had discovered the swastikas painted on a large rock and a utility pole. On Wednesday she called The Jewish Standard and the Anti-Defamation League’s New Jersey region.
“I am concerned,” she said. “I do see it more and more. We never experienced anything (anti-Semitic) until the past couple of years.”
One year ago the YM-YWHA of Greater Clifton-Passaic celebrated its grand reopening, and the dedication of a newly renovated half-million-dollar playground. One month ago the Jewish Federation of Greater Clifton-Passaic, facing budget deficits and major drops in its fund-raising campaign in recent years, decided to sell the Y, a 105-year-old institution and the only Jewish community center in the Passaic-Clifton area.
The Y, also known as the Tri-County JCC, houses the federation, Jewish Family Service, the Riskin Children’s Center, and the Holocaust Resource Center. Federation leaders say they intend that these agencies would remain open after the sale of the building but remained noncommittal about Y programming beyond September 2011. The Y still expects to offer camp for the summer of 2011.
Farmer Ted Stephens arrives at the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly on Wednesdays from his farm in Sussex County, carrying loads of freshly picked vegetables.
Rabbi Steve Golden, the JCC’s Judaic director, sorts the produce before members of the JCC’s Special Services department arrive to bag the crops.
That evening, some 60 people arrive to pick up their shares of the harvest.
The New York Islamic center is a distraction from the real issues facing America, said Teaneck’s Mayor Mohammed Hameeduddin.
“Regardless of whether this goes up, it’s not going to create jobs, it’s not going to get us out of the recession, it’s not going to make America safer,” the mayor told The Jewish Standard earlier this week.
Hameeduddin is the only Muslim mayor in New Jersey. The Teaneck Township Council appointed him and Deputy Mayor Adam Gussen, an Orthodox Jew, in July, but the two have known each other since their days at Teaneck High School. They have not seen the mosque issue drive a wedge between them or Teaneck’s fragile unity.
“We don’t agree on everything,” Gussen said. “The goodwill we’ve put in the bank over a decades-long friendship carries us through any differences we may have.”
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the head of the Cordoba Initiative, should be praised for creating bridges between moderate Muslims and people of good will, according to Tenafly resident Alan Silberstein.
The pair’s relationship goes back decades to their days as engineering students at Columbia University in 1967. Rauf’s father was an Egyptian diplomat and the family had recently relocated from Kuwait. When the Six Day War broke out, the two students were working side by side at summer jobs in the religion department. They often ate lunch together and, rather than drive them apart, the war sparked discussion and mutual respect.
If the Cordoba House is built in the shadow of the Sept. 11 site, radical Muslims will increase their efforts to attack America because of a perceived victory in their war to transform the United States into a Muslim nation.
So says Dr. Tawfik Hamid, senior fellow and chair for the Study of Islamic Radicalism at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. Hamid is a former member of the terrorist Islamic organization Jamaa Islamiya with Ayman Al-Zawahiri, who later became the second in command of Al-Qaeda. For more than 25 years Hamid has spoken out in favor of reformation in the Muslim world based on peaceful interpretations of Islamic texts.
The Teaneck Board of Adjustment voted unanimously last week to grant a series of variances to Etz Chaim that would allow it to use portions of a Queen Anne Road home as a house of worship.
The vote ended more than seven months of hearings and debates with neighbors angry with what they said was the misuse of a residential property at 554 Queen Anne Road, owned by 554 Queen Anne Road Corp., which operates as Etz Chaim. Rabbi Daniel Feldman, who lives in the house with his wife, Leah, and their two children, has held weekly Shabbat services there for more than two years.
