Atlantic Beach continues costly war to stop Chabad
The Village of Atlantic Beach is incurring sizable financial costs as a result of its long-running dispute with Long Beachbased Chabad Lubavitch of the Beaches over the organization’s effort to open an outreach center at the foot of the Atlantic Beach Bridge.
•The village’s egal costs have totaled about $375,000 — so far
•The village may also have to pay Chabad at least $400,000 stemming from a federal court’s finding of violations of the Chabad group’s constitutional rights.
At the same time, Atlantic Beach’s 1700 year-round residents are facing a local tax increase of 50 percent or more. That steep hike is unrelated to the Chabad case and stems from the village’s past mismanagement of its finances.
Not only money is at stake. The reputation of the South Shore community that’s adjacent to the Five Towns has also been badly damaged. The move to keep Chabad out of Atlantic Beach partly reflects intolerance toward pious and proselytizing Jews whose culture
2025
DR. ALAN MAZUREK
Jewish Star columnist
atching video after video of the hostages released over the last few weeks brings forth feelings of happiness for the individuals released and their enormously grateful loved ones, along with feelings of unease and despair at the apparent surrender to terrorist demands.
Watching the barbaric hordes, salivating and celebrating like wild beasts around Arbel
and beliefs are not shared by a majority of residents.
The controversy dates to 2021 when Chabad of the Beaches paid $950,000 for a 10,000-square-foot property at the foot of the bridge, a prominent location was listed for sale following the closure in 2019 of a Capital One branch.
The village made no move to buy the building during the two-year period when it remained vacant and available. But soon after Chabad’s purchase, the village sought to use its eminent-domain power to seize the property, with the stated intention of opening a community center and a lifeguard operations facility there.
Some Atlantic Beach residents voiced opposition to the seizure of Chabad’s property. They noted that the village already owned other parcels suitable for a community center. Constructing it at an alternate location would avoid the cost of compensating Chabad for the taking of its property via eminent domain, the critics said.
Yahud and Gadi Moses as they were released, fills us with anger, despair and uncertainty. Was the price worth it? As the value of a human life is incalculable, this question has no answer.
The release of Agam Berger, one of several women military observers at Nahal Oz on the Gaza border (whose warnings were ignored by higher-ups), provided a spark of hope. A gifted violinist, she was a baalat teshuva who, it’s been reported, during her captivity kept Shabbat as best as possible, did not eat meat to maintain kashrut, and even fasted on Tisha B’av. As result of her daughter’s commitment to Shabbat, her mother, Meirav, asked that Agam not be released on Shabbat, to avoid any fur-
Park St., at the foot of the Atlantic Beach Bridge, was formerly a CapitalOne branch that included drive-thru banking. The proposed use of the property by Chabad of the Beaches would feature a drivethru for kosher-food pickup.
KEVIN J. KELLEY
LI Herald columnist
The Justice Department announced on Monday that following President Donald Trump’s executive order on “Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism,” it had formed a multi-agency task force to respond to Jewhatred.
Trump’s order called on every federal agency to submit a report to the president within 60 days about efforts to combat Jewhatred following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in southern Israel.
Leo Terrell, senior counsel to the assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights, who has been tapped to lead the task force, called antisemitism “repugnant to this nation’s ideals.”
“The department takes seriously our responsibility to eradicate this hatred wherever it is found,” Terrell stated. “The Task Force to Combat Antisemitism is the first step in giving life to President Trump’s renewed commitment to ending antisemitism in our schools.”
Terrell, who is black and Christian, is a civil rights attorney and former talk radio
host. who has repeatedly spoken out in media appearances about the failure of the federal government to properly defend Jews in the aftermath of Oct. 7.
In a Sept. 2024 interview on Fox News, Terrell said that the domestic and foreign policy of the Biden administration involved Jews being “thrown under the bus” in pursuit of Muslim and Arab votes in Michigan.
“The federal government could step in and stop this,” Terrell said of antisemitic protests on college campuses. “Where’s the Department of Justice? Where’s the FBI? Where are the federal arrests of all this hatred towards Jewish Americans? It does not exist.”
According to the Justice Department, the task force’s “first priority” will be to counter Jew-hatred in the education system.
“The Task Force will include representatives from the US Department of Education, US Department of Health and Human Services and other agencies as it develops,” per the department. —JNS
The USA targets Jew-hate Trump mobilizes his Justice Department Department of Education opens 5 probes
The US Department of Education opened five investigations of alleged Jew-hatred on Monday — at Columbia University, Northwestern University, Portland State University, University of California, Berkeley and University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
The investigations, under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, come shortly after President Trump told the federal government to respond to Jew-hatred “vigorously.”
“Too many universities have tolerated widespread antisemitic harassment and the illegal encampments that paralyzed campus life last year, driving Jewish life and religious expression underground,” stated Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary of education for civil rights.
“The Biden Administration’s toothless resolution agreements did shamefully little to
hold those institutions accountable,” Trainor said.
“Today, the department is putting universities, colleges and K-12 schools on notice: this administration will not tolerate continued institutional indifference to the wellbeing of Jewish students on American campuses, nor will it stand by idly if universities fail to combat Jew-hatred and the unlawful harassment and violence it animates.”
Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, stated that “for the past two years, our committee has uncovered an appalling amount of antisemitism taking place on college campuses.”
“We’ve also heard heartbreaking testimony from Jewish college students who were excited to attend their dream university only
to face threats and harassment from their own classmates and teachers,” he said. “I’m glad that we finally have an administration who is taking action to protect Jewish students and hold schools like Columbia, Northwestern, and UC Berkeley accountable for their failures.”
Kenneth Marcus, founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, stated that “this is exactly the right step to be taking and the right time to be taking it.”
“The administration is sending a clear message to the higher education community that the U.S. Department of Education is prioritizing the current antisemitism crisis,” stated Marcus, a former US assistant secretary of education for civil rights.
“Rather than sitting back and waiting for
Atlantic Beach war against Chabad…
Opponents of the village’s action also questioned the underlying intention of the eminent-domain initiative. Its “suspicious” timing appeared intended to exclude Chabad from Atlantic Beach, a resident suggested at a public meeting.
Chabad filed suit in July 2022 seeking to block the seizure, arguing that the village had acted in a “discriminatory” manner.
Federal District Court Judge Joanna Seybert ruled in Chabad’s favor two months later.
“The village’s acquisition decision was made in a manner intolerant of Chabad’s members’ religious beliefs and which would restrict Chabad’s practices because of its religious nature,” she ruled.
The judge’s decision also made reference to “antisemitic community comments.”
In a court filing, Chabad presented documented instances of biased remarks made by village officials.
•In one such communication village trustee Patricia Beaumont declared that Chabad is “buying the world town by town, city by city.” She added: “The have the numbers — they procreate.”
•In another message, Linda Baessler, then also a trustee, warned that Chabad’s arrival in
Atlantic Beach would be “a nightmare.”
•And Mayor George Pappas, who rejects any implication of antisemitism on his own part or the village’s, responded “very true” to a text claiming that “most people don’t want the Chabad and just don’t want to say it. Any secular Jew doesn’t want them.”
• • •
Objections to the outreach center do not stem only from prejudice. Some potential neighbors of the Chabad property at 2025 Park St. have expressed concerns about potential negative environmental impacts of Chabad’s intent to include a kosher-food drive-thru as part of its educational, programming and religious services center. A possibly dangerous increase in traffic will result from this operation, these residents say.
But Chabad appears unwilling to compromise on this issue.
It recently terminated a 2023 out-of-court settlement whereby the village agreed not to pursue eminent domain proceedings and to pay Chabad $400,000 over four years. Chabad exercised its option of rejecting the settlement on the grounds that the Atlantic Beach Zoning Board of Appeals, in a decision last November, failed to conform with a stipulation that the group’s requested variances had to be approved.
The dispute could thus return to court. Atlantic Beach would then incur additional legal costs and might have to pay Chabad considerably more than the $400,000 initially agreed upon.
Chabad of the Beaches, established in 2007, has been generally accepted as a good neighbor in that city.
Its leader, Rabbi Eli Goodman, could demonstrate this quality by making concessions regarding building design, in the course of negotiations now underway with the village’s law firm.
Chabad of the Beaches will not win favor among Atlantic Beach residents, including those without animus toward the group, by continuing to pursue a maximalist agenda that will further destabilize the village’s precarious finances.
It should be possible for both sides to behave in a conciliatory manner. Atlantic Beach could apologize for past expressions of prejudice, and Chabad could alleviate objections regarding potential traffic, parking and noise problems associated with its center.
Open-mindedness on both sides will heal wounds and ensure a future of peaceful coexistence.
complaints to pile up, federal investigators are finally doing their jobs: identifying colleges that need to be investigated and taking firm, public measures where needed. The cavalry has arrived,” he added.
“The Brandeis Center has been urging this approach since Oct. 7, 2023, and we were repeatedly disappointed that the prior administration failed to accept our recommendation.”
The Trump administration is sending a “clear sign” that it will “respond to campus antisemitism with the boldness, vigor and seriousness it deserves,” Marcus stated.
“This announcement is a win for anyone who cares about civil rights,” he added. “The Department of Education is showing us today that it can, and will, build on the White House’s bold executive orders with enforcement and action around the country.” —JNS
Rubio acting USAID head
President Donald Trump named Secretary of State Marco Rubio as acting administrator of the US Agency for International Development on Monday, saying that the agency “has long strayed from its original mission of responsibly advancing American interests abroad, and it is now abundantly clear that significant portions of USAID funding are not aligned with the core national interests of the United States.”
“It’s been run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out,” Trump said.
“My frustration with USAID goes back to my time in Congress,” Rubio told reporters. “It’s a completely unresponsive agency. It’s supposed to respond to policy directives at the State Department and it refuses to do so.”
Rubio said that he’s delegated authority, as acting director, “to someone, but I stay in touch with him.”
“USAID is not an independent nongovernmental entity. It is an entity that spends taxpayer dollars and it needs to spend it, as the statute says, in alignment with policy directives they get from the secretary of state, the National Security Council and the president,” he added. —JNS
President Donald Trump signs executive orders on the first day of his second term on Jan. 20,. White House
Air Force rabbi shows ‘Jokes’ book in W’mere
By Nechama Bluth, The Jewish Star
A US Air Force chaplain who lives in Hewlett introduced his new book, “Jokes, Quotes, and More,” to a Woodmere audience last week.
The book is a compilation of Rabbi Levi Welton’s favorite jokes and inspirational quotes.
The quotes have gotten him through hard times, he told a book release event at the home of Brian and Naomi Ross that the book’s illustrations, which he did himself, were designed to lift spirits.
Rabbi Welton previously published two other books.
The first was a memoir, “Be Like The Moon: A Chassidic Memoir,” which presents positive a view of living in a Jewish home. At the time he kept coming across books that covered the subject negatively. “We should be loud and proud,” he said.
“My Animal Teacher,” Rabbi Welton’s second book, for children, is about animals with connections and lessons from the Torah.
Rabbi Levi Welton has degrees in science, education and film. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and now lives in the Five Towns with his wife and three children.
His books are available on Amazon.
Rabbi Welton holding his memoir, “Be Like The Moon: A Chassidic Memoir,” with his son Dovid Welton, holding “My Animal Teacher,” at a book release event at Woodmere home of Brian and Naomi Ross. D. Bluth
Bibi picks Glick as new international media aide
By Etgar Lefkovits, JNS
Israeli-American
columnist
and JNS senior contributing editor Caroline B. Glick is returning to the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem to serve as International Affairs Adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Glick, who worked with Netanyahu over a quarter century ago before becoming a widely-read columnist, took up her new position on Sunday. Her final column appeared in last week’s edition of The Jewish Star.
“Life takes you in different directions, and I am going back to the office where I worked nearly three decades ago as the prime minister leads Israel through the most difficult period in the history of the Jewish state,” Glick said. “I take it as a profound compliment that at this critical juncture in our history, Prime Minister Netanyahu has asked me to join him as he continues his historic fight to secure the future of the Jewish state and people.”
Glick has been an emphatic critic of the ceasefire agreement with Hamas. Netanyahu is still committed to both annihilating Hamas and ensuring that Gaza never again poses a threat to Israel, she said, two of Jerusalem’s three declared war goals which, she added, have not been met yet.
Glick warmly endorsed President Donald Trump’s plan to resettle some of Gaza’s residents in Egypt or Jordan, calling it a “brilliant and feasible” idea which Israel should actively pursue despite public opposition to the move by the two neighboring Arab countries.
She noted that Egypt has in the past transferred two islands to Saudi Arabia, and said the proposal could help Israel achieve its war aims.
The coming year offers historic opportunities for change in the Middle East in the wake of the 15-month Israel-Hamas war and Trump’s reelection, she said, including a peace deal with Saudi Arabia and preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
“The strategic landscape of the Middle East has been transformed by Israel’s accomplishments in the war, and [this] affords us the opportunity both to expand our circle of ties and prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear capability, which is a requirement for Israel’s survival,” she said.
On a personal note, Glick, 55, who was born in Houston and raised in Chicago, said her family will also have to get used to her new role.
“My family is going to have to eat a lot of TV dinners or learn how to cook,” she said.
Trump stuns, says US will ‘take over’ Gaza
By Andrew Bernard, JNS
President Donald Trump said on Tuesday night that the United States will “take over” and rebuild the Gaza Strip.
“The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too,” Trump during an explosive press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House.
“We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous, unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings,” he said.
The US takeover of Gaza could involve the deployment of American troops, according to Trump. “We’ll do what is necessary,” he said. “If it’s necessary, we’ll do that.”
Trump said that the United States would take a “long term ownership position” of the land.
During the 40-minute press conference, he said that the reconstruction of Gaza would create economic development and supply “unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area.”
“This was not a decision made lightly,” he said. “Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent in a really magnificent area that nobody would know.”
The president repeated his plan for Palestinians to be relocated outside of Gaza in regional countries during the rebuilding of Gaza.
“It could be numerous sites, or it could be one large site, but the people will be able to live in comfort and peace,” Trump said. “We’ll make sure something really spectacular is done.”
Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and the Palestinian Authority wrote to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday to reject the idea of resettling Palestinians outside of Gaza. But Trump said on Tuesday that “neighboring countries of great wealth” could pay for the relocation of Gazans.
Trump suggested that under US ownership and development, Palestinians could return to Gaza but that it would become an international zone.
“This is not for Israel,” Trump said. “This is for everybody in the Middle East — Arabs, Muslims, this is for everybody.”
“I think you’ll make that into an international, unbelievable place,” Trump said. “Palestinians will live there. Many people will live there.”
Elements of what Trump described were redolent of the so-called “Trump peace plan” that he unveiled in 2020, which included developing Gaza’s waterfront into a tourism destination.
“I don’t want to be cute. I don’t want to be a wise guy, but the Riviera of the Middle East,” the president, who is also a hotel magnate, said.
“This could be so magnificent.”
Trump said that his Gaza development plan did not rule out a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“It doesn’t mean anything about a two-state or one-state or any other state,” Trump said. “It means that we want to give people a chance at life. They have never had a chance at life, because the Gaza Strip has been a hell hole.”
He added that he intends to visit the enclave, which Hamas has controlled, as part of
a regional tour.
“I’ll visit Gaza,” he said. “I’ll visit Saudi Arabia, and I’ll visit other places all over the Middle East. The Middle East is an incredible place.”
Netanyahu said that he believes that Trump’s vision is in line with his war goal of ensuring that Gaza can never pose a threat to Israel again.
“President Trump is taking it to a much higher level,” Netanyahu said. “I think it’s worth paying attention to this. We’re talking about it. He’s exploring it with his people, with his staff. I think it’s something that could change history, and it’s worthwhile, really pursuing this avenue.”
Trump said that he had not yet made a decision about the United States recognizing Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, but that there will “probably” be a decision on the question “over the next four weeks.”
Netanyahu called Trump the “greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, all this in just two weeks,” Netanyahu said of Trump’s executive actions since the start of his second term. “Can we imagine where we’ll be in four years? I can.”
Prez: It’s max pressure on Iran, UN agency exit
By Andrew Bernard, JNS
President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders on Tuesday to reimpose “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran and to withdraw the United States from the UN Human Rights Council and UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.
In an apparent indication of the changes in
unhappy to do it.”
Trump’s second executive order once again withdrew the United States from the UN Human Rights Council, the global body’s Genevabased rights organization that critics accuse of being systemically anti-Israel.
The order also withdraws the United States from the United Nations Educational, Scientific
any multilateral organization that admits the authority as a member, and Trump withdrew from UNESCO entirely in 2019.
The Biden administration rejoined in 2023, using a congressional waiver about combatting Chinese influence to fund a portion of US dues and arrears to the cultural organization.
UNESCO has further been accused of antiIsrael bias over a 2016 resolution about the terminology surrounding the Temple Mount and the Western Wall Plaza, which it referred to as “Al-Aqsa Mosque/Al-Haram al-Sharif” and “alBuraq Plaza ‘Western Wall Plaza,’” respectively.
The UNRWA order extends a ban on US funding that Congress imposed last March after Israel alleged that some 30 employees of the aid organization participated directly in the Oct. 7 attacks in southern Israel and that nearly 1,500 of its 13,000 staff in Gaza are members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Trump said he hopes that the order can spur reform through the UN system. “I’ve always felt that the UN has tremendous potential,” he said. “But it’s not being well run, to be honest.” “They gotta get their act together,” he added.
By Melissa Berman, LI Herald with The Jewish Star
Nathaniel Lazan,
husband
Lazan, a YI Hewlett founder, 92 NY street adds Yad Vashem tag
of Holocaust survivor and author Marion Blumenthal Lazan, died on Jan. 26 at age 92.
Lazan’s legacy lives on at the Young Israel (Ahavat Yisrael) where he was a founder and president emeritus.
The shul began began in the basement of Lazan’s home where services were held everyday for two years.
“He always took davening very seriously, assiduously saying every word out loud,” Michael wrote.
He was devoted to Judaism, the Jewish people and a supporter of Israel. He volunteered at an army base for six weeks, during the Lebanon War in 1982.
“He always was careful to do the right thing and do it immediately,” son Michael Lazan wrote in an email.
Lazan was his wife’s scheduler, social media manager and fan-mail manager for her many speaking engagements.
At 44, he had a stroke that paralyzed half of his body that he was able to overcome and resume regular activities. He was diagnosed with cancer six years ago and had surgery at 87 helped him beat the cancer.
Lazan was born in the Rockaways and grew up in the Averne section until he was 13.
His family moved to Woodsburgh and he attended Woodmere High School
(now Hewlett High School) and then went to Bradley University in Illinois. He was a pilot in the Air Force and an owner of Selby Fifth Avenue, a chain of shoe stores.
He is survived by wife, Marion Blumenthal Lazan; his children, David and Lisa Lazan, Robert and Susan Lazan, and Michael and Rachel Lazan, along with his grandchildren Arielle and Moshe Spern, Joshua and Allyssa Weinberg, Gavreil Lazan, Dahlia and Gilad Kessler, Yoav and Noa Lazan, Jordan Lazan, Hunter Lazan, Ian Lazan, and Casey Lazan.
He is also survived by his great grandchildren Leah Spern, Rachel Spern, Ahuva, Spern, Esther Spern, Chaya Spern, Atara Spern, Rebecca Weinberg, Yehudis Weinberg, Shoshana Weinberg, Be’eri Lazan, Rimon Lazan, Ayala Lazan.
“Dad, we love you and we will miss you,” son Michael wrote.
A funeral was held at Boulevard-Riverside Chapels in Hewlett, on Jan. 27. He was buried at Old Montefiore Cemetery in Elmont.
The family has asked that donations in his memory be made to the Israel Chesed Center in Hewlett,
By Vita Fellig, JNS
The way Dani Dayan figures it, many people will walk along 67th Street in Manhattan, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, and notice the new sign for “Yad Vashem Way” and have no idea what the first two words mean.
“Some of them, not all of them, but some of them will Google ‘Yad Vashem’ and learn about the Shoah,” Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, told JNS at the street naming last week.
“This is one more way to accomplish the goal of bringing people to learn about the Shoah,” he said.
A dedication ceremony for the new street name was held across the street from the new sign, at Park East Synagogue. Ofir Akunis, the consul general of Israel in New York, was on hand, as were local officials, including.
Rabbi Arthur Schneir of Park East and a Holocaust survivor, told attendees that he hopes the sign will inspire people to visit Yad Vashem in Israel.
“This is a very personal
moment,” he said. “I was liberated in Budapest in January 1945, and Auschwitz was liberated on Aug. 27. Millions of Jews were still under the yoke of the Nazis, and thanks to the allies, the United States, France and England who were united at the time with the Soviet Union, we were liberated.”
“I could have been one of the one-and-a-half million children who never made it,” he said.
Dayan told JNS that Holocaust denialists cannot “present authenticity, because they lie, and we therefore should use the advantage of our authenticity to educate.”
“We have to find innovative ways to spread knowledge, to tell the story of the Shoah, through education, through museums, through exhibitions, through films, through all kinds of ways that engage new audiences,” he said.
But Holocaust education alone is insufficient to combat Jew-hatred.
“’m not claiming that Shoah education is a silver bullet and the cure for antisemitism,” Dayan said.
Nathaniel Lazan with his wife Marion Blumenthal Lazan, at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Peoria, Illinois, in 2019. Courtesy Matthew Spern
AND DINE
Preparing for a chocolate filled celebration
Chocoholics get ready to celebrate. What we have known for years is now known to the rest of the world — chocolate is good for you!
“Theobroma cacao,” the scientific name for chocolate translates to “the food of the gods” and, while it may not rival broccoli as a health food, there are enough healthful benefits to enjoy it as part of a healthy diet.
Chocolate is a plant-based food that is rich in the same flavonoids that are found in wine and green tea. New research has shown that the flavonoids and antioxidants in chocolate help stop the oxidation of LDL, the bad cholesterol that clogs arteries. The magnesium in chocolate is also beneficial for the heart.
A recent study of 8,000 men showed that those who ate chocolate lived a year longer than those who did not. But chocolate is also good for women. Chocolate is the best natural source of magnesium, which is helpful in dealing with symptoms of PMS. There is a premenstrual drop in progesterone, which some researchers believe is the cause for monthly mood swings. Adding magnesium to the diet has been proven to increase progesterone and decrease symptoms. There is definitely a medical reason for those monthly chocolate cravings!
Chocolate candy, while containing sugar, is the best choice of candy for children because it does not stick to their teeth. In fact, it may have some cavity fighting properties, probably due to its calcium content. And, for those who watch their weight, nutritionists have been adding dark chocolate to the diets of people trying to lose weight and have found that their cravings for other sweets dropped enough to allow them to be more accepting of a restricted diet and therefore more likely to stay on it and make it a lifetime commitment.
The most healthful chocolate is that which contains the most coca solids, a minimum of 70% or more. To get that, stay away from mass produced candy bars and milk chocolate. Instead, try semi-sweet or darker chocolate from the smaller producers such as Scharfenberger,
Vallhrona, or Callebaut. All are widely available and luxuriously delicious. Organic chocolates are also widely available and come in all different percentages of cocoa solids. Taste them and decide which is best for you. Remember the more cocoa solids, the less sugar.
On the negative side, recent findings have found mostly naturally occurring lead and cadmium in some chocolate (some lead and cadmium are created by the processing and shipping methods of the beans). This is of concern, especially for children, so I do recommend that you search for those manufacturers who produce chocolate with the least amounts of these two heavy metals. My limited research has shown that darker chocolate from Mast, Ghiradelli, Valrhona and Taza have lower amounts of lead and cadmium.
Despite this disconcerting news, chocolate is still a more healthful treat than most other candies and is a safe ingredient to use for delicious desserts.
Chocolate Fudge Cake (Dairy)
This is a fabulous, fudgy cake that is best served with soft whipped cream or vanilla ice cream. It is also delicious warm. Be careful not to overbake.
Ingredients:
2 cups whole milk
1-1/2 cups sugar, scant
1 cup (2 sticks) butter
1 tsp. vanilla or almond extract
8 squares unsweetened chocolate
1 tsp. baking powder
2-1/4 cups sifted unbleached flour
4 extra large eggs, separated
Directions:
Heat the milk, sugar, butter and chocolate over very low heat. Stir constantly until melted and smooth. Set aside to cool.
Sift the flour and baking soda and set aside. Beat egg yolks in a large bowl until fairly light. Add the chocolate mixture and beat until blended. Add the vanilla or almond, mix well and then stir in the dry ingredients.
In a separate bowl beat the egg whites until stiff, but not dry. Fold into cake batter until no streaks show. Pour into 9x13 greased pan and bake at 375 for 50 minutes or until a cake tester comes out clean. Cake may crack on top.
Let cool for 10 minutes and then remove from pan onto plate. Cool thoroughly and serve with whipped cream, vanilla ice cream, or simple powdered sugar.
Homemade Double Dutch Chocolate Pudding (Dairy)
Why bother to make chocolate pudding when it is so readily available in the store. Because it tastes better and is made without any chemicals that you can’t pronounce. It’s fun for kids to help prepare and is truly an old-fashioned comfort food.
Ingredients:
• 1 cup sugar, scant
• 1/3 cup Dutch cocoa powder (measure generously)
• Tiny pinch salt
• 2-1/4 cups milk (whole or 2%)
• 2 squares semi-sweet chocolate (2 oz), finely chopped
• 3 Tbsp. butter
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 3 Tbsp. cornstarch
• Directions:
Whisk the sugar, cocoa, cornstarch and salt together in a large saucepan. Add about half the milk and whisk until smooth. Add the rest of the milk and whisk until evenly combined. Heat on medium until the mixture comes to a boil, stirring constantly.
The mixture will begin to thicken and bubble. Continue cooking for exactly one minute more, stirring constantly until mixture is very thick. Remove from heat and add the vanilla, butter and chocolate, whisking until melted. Pour into individual bowls or one large bowl. To avoid a skin, (which kids sometime like) Place plastic wrap directly on the pudding and refrigerate until cold. Or, serve warm with cold whipped cream.
Homemade Hot Chocolate Mix (Dairy)
Hot cocoa is a delicious winter treat that sustains children from December through March. There are many hot cocoa mixes on the market, but they all have trans-fats in their partially hydrogenated oils, so they are not very healthful. Homemade hot cocoa tastes richer, and has more milk which provides lots of calcium and no transfats.
Ingredients:
• 1-1/4 cups confectioner’s sugar, try to use a bit less
• 1-1/2 cups Dutch processed cocoa
• 2-1/2 cups powdered milk
Directions: Mix together and place in an airtight container. Mix two to three heaping tablespoons of mix with 8 ounces of hot, not boiling water.
Chewy Double Chocolate Fudge Cookies (Pareve)
Pareve cookies are not always easy to find, so make your own! These are exceptionally delicious.
Ingredients:
• 5 oz unsweetened chocolate
• 1 cup Canola oil
• 2-1/4 cups sugar
• 4 extra large eggs
• 2 tsp. pure vanilla extract See No joke on page 10
Chocolate Fudge Cake.
Homemade Double Dutch Chocolate Pudding.
Homemade Hot Chocolate Mix.
cincyshopper.com
• 2 cups flour
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 3 to 4 oz finely chopped semisweet chocolate
• Sugar for rolling the cookies
Directions:
Melt the chocolate with the oil in a double boiler or carefully in a microwave or saucepan. Stir often until just melted. Set aside to cool.
When cool, pour the chocolate into a large bowl and add the eggs, whisking until evenly incorporated. Add the sugar and the vanilla and mix until thoroughly blended.
Mix the baking powder and salt into the flour and then mix the flour into the chocolate, using a fork. Blend well. Add the finely chopped semisweet chocolate and then cover with plastic wrap. Chill for about an hour.
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
Roll the dough into balls about an inch in diameter. Roll the balls in the sugar and place on a cookie sheet. Bake for about 10 to 12 minutes until tops are cracked. You may need to increase the oven temperature, but not the time. cool before removing from the cookie sheet. Makes about 50 cookies.
Double Baked Flourless Chocolate Cake (Pareve or Dairy)
Rich black cocoa really enhances the cocoa flavor. I adapted this from, Food and Wine, adding vanilla, black cocoa and using much less sugar!
Ingredients:
• 8 oz excellent quality bittersweet chocolate (Valrhona or Callebaut, 66 to 72%)
• 2 sticks unsalted butter or good quality pareve margarine like Earth Balance
• 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 7 large eggs, separated
• 1-1/3 cups sugar
• 1 tsp. pure vanilla extract
NOTE: For a darker flavor, remove 3 tablespoons of regular cocoa powder and replace with 4 tablespoons black, unsweetened cocoa powder
Directions: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 9-inch spring-form pan and line the bottom with parchment paper. Butter the paper. Dust with cocoa powder and tap out extra. Melt the chocolate and the butter just until barely melted. Remove from heat and stir to complete melting. Add the cocoa powder and whisk until smooth. Set aside.
Separate the eggs, placing the whites in the bowl of an electric mixer and the yolks in another bowl. Beat the whites until soft peaks form. Gradually add 2/3 cups of sugar, and beat until stiff, glossy peaks form. Scrape the whites into another bowl, shake off the beaters and scrape the bowl clean.
Add the yolks to the bowl of the electric mixer and beat with the remaining sugar and vanilla until light, thick and pale, about 3 to 4 minutes. Remove the bowl from the stand and fold in the chocolate mixture just until barely blended. Fold in the egg whites just until no white streaks remain. Scoop 2 to 3 generous cups of the batter into a bowl, cover and refrigerate.
Scrape the rest of the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top. Bake for 45 minutes, until the cake is puffed up and a tester comes out clean. Remove and let the cake cool completely. Spread the reserved batter over the top, leaving a 1-inch border around the edge. Refrigerate for 60 minutes. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Remove the ring and place the cake in the center of the oven. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until there is a thin crust on top. Remove from the oven and let cool 10 to 15 minutes. Serve with ice cream or whipped cream. Serves 10 to 12. Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
Double Baked Flourless Chocolate Cake.
mountsinai.org/southnassau
Jewish Star Torah columnists:
•Rabbi Avi Billet of Anshei Chesed, Boynton Beach, FL, mohel and Five Towns native •Rabbi David Etengoff of Magen David Yeshivah, Brooklyn
•Rabbi Binny Freedman, rosh yeshiva of Orayta, Jerusalem
Contributing writers:
•Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks zt”l,
former chief rabbi of United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth •Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh
Weinreb, OU executive VP emeritus •Rabbi Raymond Apple, emeritus rabbi, Great Synagogue of Sydney •Rabbi Yossy Goldman, life rabbi emeritus, Sydenham Shul, Johannesburg and president of the South African Rabbinical Association.
Contact our columnists at: Publisher@TheJewishStar.com Five Towns Candlelighting: From the White Shul, Far Rockaway, NY
תבש לש בכוכ
Fri Feb 7 / Shevat 9
Beshalach Candles: 5:02 • Havdalah: 6:12
Fri Feb 14 / Shevat 16 Yisro Candles: 5:10 • Havdalah: 6:20
Fri Feb 21 / Shevat 23
Shabbos Mevarchim • Mishpatim Candles: 5:18 • Havdalah: 6:29
Fri Feb 28 / Shevat 30
Rosh Chodesh Adar • Shekalim • Terumah
Candles: 5:27 • Havdalah: 6:37
Fri March 7 / Adar 7
Tetzaveh • Shabbos Zachor Candles: 5:34 • Havdalah: 6:44
Fri March 14 / Adar 14
Ki Sisa (Fri is Purim, Sat is Shushan Purim) Candles: 6:42• Havdalah: 7:52
Beneath silence, music is language of the soul
rabbi Sir JonaThan SaCkS zt”l
For the first time since their departure from Egypt, the Israelites do something together. They sing.
Then Moses and the children of Israel sang this song to the L-rd. Exodus 15:1
Rashi, explaining the view of Rabbi Nehemiah in the Talmud that they spontaneously sang the song together, says that the Holy Spirit rested on them and miraculously the same words came into their minds at the same time. In recollection of that moment, tradition has named this week Shabbat Shira, the Sabbath of Song. What is the place of song in Judaism?
There is an inner connection between music and the spirit. When language aspires to the transcendent and the soul longs to break free of the gravitational pull of the earth, it modulates into song. Music, said Arnold Bennett is “a language which the soul alone understands but which the soul can never translate.” It is, in Richter’s words “the poetry of the air.”
Tolstoy called it “the shorthand of emotion.” Goethe said, “Religious worship cannot do without music. It is one of the foremost means to work upon man with an effect of marvel.”
Words are the language of the mind. Music is the language of the soul. So when we seek to express or evoke emotion we turn to melody.
•Deborah sang after Israel’s victory over the forces of Sisera (Judges 5). Hannah sang when she had a child (I Sam. 2).
•When Saul was depressed, David would play for him and his spirit would be restored (1 Sam. 16).
•David himself was known as the “sweet singer of Israel” (II Sam. 23:1).
•Elisha called for a harpist to play so that the prophetic spirit could rest upon him (II Kings 3:15).
•The Levites sang in the Temple. Every day, in Judaism, we preface our morning prayers with Pesukei de-Zimra, the “Verses of Song” with their magnificent crescendo, Psalm 150, in which instruments and the human voice combine to sing G-d’s praises.
Mystics go further and speak of the song of the universe, what Pythagoras called “the music of the spheres.”
Music can break through the most overpowering disconnections in our experience of time.
This is what Psalm means, when it says:
The heavens declare the glory of G-d; the skies proclaim the work of His hands. … There is no speech, there are no words, where their voice is not heard. Their music carries throughout the earth, their words to the end of the world. Psalm 19 Beneath the silence, audible only to the inner ear, creation sings to its Creator.
So, when we pray, we do not read: we sing. When we engage with sacred texts, we do not recite: we chant.
Every text and every time has, in Judaism, its own specific melody. There are different tunes for Shacharit, Mincha, and Maariv. There are different melodies and moods for the prayers for a weekday, Shabbat, the three pilgrimage festivals, Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot (which have much musically in common but also tunes distinctive to each), and for the Yamim Noraim, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
There are different tunes for different texts. There is one kind of cantillation for Torah, another for the Haftara from the prophetic books, and yet another for Ketuvim, the Writings, especially the five Megillot. There is a particular chant for studying the texts of the written Torah, for studying Mishnah and Gemara. So by music alone we can tell what kind of day it is, and what kind of text is being used. There is a map of holy words, and it is written in melodies and songs.
Music has extraordinary power to evoke emotion. The Kol Nidrei prayer with which Yom Kippur begins is not really a prayer at all. It is a dry legal formula for the annulment of vows. There can be little doubt that it is its ancient, haunting melody that has given it its hold over the Jewish imagination. It is hard to hear those notes and not feel that you are in the presence of G-d on the Day of Judgment, standing in the company of Jews of all places and times as they pleaded with heaven for forgiveness. It is the holy of holies of the Jewish soul. (Lehavdil, Beethoven came close to it in the opening notes of the sixth movement of the C Sharp Minor Quartet op. 131, his most sublime and spiritual work).
Nor can you sit on Tisha b’Av reading Eichah, the Book of Lamentations, with its own unique cantillation, and not feel the tears of Jews through the ages as they suffered for their faith and wept as they remembered what they had lost, the pain as fresh as it was the day the Temple was destroyed. Words without music are like a body without a soul.
For many years I was privileged to be part of a mission of song (together with the Shabbaton Choir and singers Rabbi Lionel Rosenfeld and chazzanim Shimon Craimer and Jonny Turgel) We journeyed to Israel to sing to victims of terror, as well as to people in hospitals, community centers, and food kitchens. We sang for — and with — the injured, the bereaved, the sick and the broken hearted.
We danced with people in wheelchairs. One boy who had been blinded and lost half of his family in a suicide bombing, sang a duet with the youngest member of the choir, reducing the
nurses and his fellow patients to tears. Such moments are epiphanies, redeeming a fragment of humanity and hope from the random cruelties of fate.
Beethoven wrote over the manuscript of the third movement of his A Minor Quartet the words Neue Kraft fühlend, “Feeling new strength.” That is what you can sense in those hospital wards. You understand what King David meant when he sang to G-d the words: “You turned my grief into dance; You removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, that my heart may sing to You and not be silent.” United in song, you feel the strength of the human spirit no terror can destroy.
In his book, Musicophilia, the neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks (no relative, alas) tells the poignant story of Clive Wearing, an eminent musicologist who was struck by a devastating brain infection. The result was acute amnesia. He was unable to remember anything for more than a few seconds. As his wife Deborah put it, ‘It was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment.’
Unable to thread experiences together, he was caught in an endless present that had no connection with anything that had gone before. One day his wife found him holding a chocolate in one hand and repeatedly covering and uncovering it with the other hand, saying each time, ‘Look, it’s new.’ ‘It’s the same chocolate’, she said. ‘No’, he replied, ‘Look. It’s changed.’ He had no ability to hold onto his memories at all. He lost his past. In a moment of self-awareness he said about himself, ‘I haven’t heard anything, seen anything, touched anything, smelled anything. It’s like being dead.’
Two things broke through his isolation. One was his love for his wife. The other was music. He could still sing, play the organ, and conduct a choir with all his old skill and verve. What was
it about music, Oliver Sacks asked, that enabled him, while playing or conducting, to overcome his amnesia? He suggests that when we “remember” a melody, we recall one note at a time, yet each note relates to the whole. He quotes the philosopher of music, Victor Zuckerkandl, who wrote, ‘Hearing a melody is hearing, having heard, and being about to hear, all at once.
Every melody declares to us that the past can be there without being remembered, the future without being foreknown. Music is a form of sensed continuity that can sometimes break through the most overpowering disconnections in our experience of time.
Faith is more like music than like science. Science analyses, music integrates. And as music connects note to note, so faith connects episode to episode, life to life, age to age in a timeless melody that breaks into time. G-d is the composer and librettist. We are each called on to be voices in the choir, singers of G-d’s song. Faith teaches us to hear the music beneath the noise.
So music is a signal of transcendence. The philosopher and musician Roger Scruton writes that it is “an encounter with the pure subject, released from the world of objects, and moving in obedience to the laws of freedom alone.” He quotes Rilke:
Words still go softly out towards the unsayable
And music, always new, from palpitating stones
Builds in useless space its G-dly home.
The history of the Jewish spirit is written in its songs. The words do not change, but each generation needs its own melodies.
Our generation needs new songs so that we too can sing joyously to G-d as our ancestors did at that moment of transfiguration when they crossed the Red Sea and emerged, the other side, free at last. When the soul sings, the spirit soars.
The news brings tears of joy, tears of despair…
Continued from page 1
ther chillul Shabbat. This incredible act of determination and self-sacrifice (which was successful, with Agam being released on a weekday), won plaudits across the political and religious spectrum, from Charedi rabbis to Chiloni (non-religious) politicians.
What can be more unifying for the Jewish people than an identification of the fundamental commonality of the peaceful, holy Shabbat, the day of rest for all of us, a day that is G-d‘s gift to the Jewish people. This emphasis on Torah observance, specifically Shabbat observance, by a single young Jewish woman resonates with our own feelings and expectations of national redemption.
Many have sensed that the events since Oct. 7 have been “Biblical” in scope. We are at the threshold of the geula, redemption. We ache for it, we feel it, we can taste it. Never has the cry “We want Moshiach now!” been more insistent. So when we see the actions of a young Jewish woman, a soldier and an artist, who acts not as a victim but as a proud believing Jew, you are unabashedly proud as well.
When you read her declaration to the world upon her return from captivity, “bederech emuna bacharti, u’bederech emuna shavti (in the path of Faith I have chosen, and in the path of Faith I have returned),” how can you not be filled with tears of joy and hope?
This confirms the ancient prophecy of sefer Malachi (3:24) that we read every Shabbat Hagadol before Pesach: “V’heishiv lev avot al banim, v’lev banim al avotam (He shall restore the heart of fathers to children and the heart of children to their fathers).”
It is written in Malachi that Hashem “will come suddenly and strike the whole land with desolation and therefore He will send the ‘angel of the covenant’ to bring people to repentance and to be ready before Hashem when He comes to judge the Earth and the kingdom will be His.”
Rashi says that Elijah “will say to the children, through love and desire, go and speak to your fathers to hold fast to the ways of Hashem.
And so will the hearts of the children be turned toward their fathers.”
Agam is the harbinger of the “angel of the covenant” to turn our hearts to repentance. Hashem, we are ready before You. We want Moshiach now.
Shabbat shalom.
Dr. Alan A. Mazurek is a retired neurologist, living in Great Neck, Jerusalem and Florida. He is a former chairman of the ZOA. Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
This week’s column is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Mazaurek’s mother Leah Reiza bat Nachman, on the occasion of her first yahrtzeit, to whom he owes everything for his existence as a Torah observant Jew.
There’s always been music in our spirituality
Rabbi DR. tzvi heRsh weinReb Orthodox Union
This week’s parsha, Beshalach, narrates the miraculous splitting of the sea and the sublime song of praise composed by Moshe and sung by all of Israel, including his sister Miriam and the women who joined her with music and dance.
This Shabbat is, therefore, known as Shabbat Shira, the Sabbath of Song, an occasion to reflect upon the central role of music and song in Jewish religious tradition.
Negina, Jewish melodies, and at times even secular music, live within me always — as I walk
the streets of Jerusalem, as I mourn our current national sorrows, as I celebrate the release of our precious hostages, as I stand by the open graves of our heroes and heroines, and especially as I dance with the Torah on Simchat Torah — although those songs are now tempered by tears after the events of October 7, Simchat Torah 2023.
The origins of “music in my mind” trace back to my grandparents and to my great-grandmother, who sang Yiddish lullabies to me in my infancy, some of which I remember to this day.
But most of all, I credit my musical inclinations to my father, a popular baal tefillah and master of Chassidic songs and melodies. I would stand by his side when he led tefilot in shul, even as a very young child, and I accompanied him at the table as he sang the zemirot
One of the strategies used by father to stimu-
late my interest in Jewish liturgical music was to take me with him to visit the diversity of synagogues that then dotted the map Boro Park, where I was raised in the 1940s and 1950s. They included Chassidic shtieblach, Yemenite batei knessiot, minyanim in the private homes of elderly sages, and large formal synagogues blessed with famous cantors and choirs.
One of those synagogues was Congregation Beth-el, later enlarged to Young Israel Bethel. The spiritual leader there was Rabbi Israel Schorr, an outstanding scholar, teacher, and preacher. He was educated in pre-Holocaust Galicia and studied under the famed Rabbi Mayer Arik. Rabbi Schorr served the congregation for well over sixty years, before his demise in the year 2000.
The cantor there at that time was the worldrenowned Chazzan Moshe Koussevitsky.
My parents had a close connection to Rabbi Schorr, who officiated at their marriage. My mother attended Rabbi Schorr’s weekly classes regularly, whereas my father favored the chazzan and would take me with him especially on special occasions such as this week’s Shabbat Shira. What better opportunity to take one’s reluctant ten-year-old boy to synagogue than the Sabbath of Song graced by a world-class cantor!
I recall sitting in the crowded domed synagogue, impressed for a while by the indubitable talent of Moshe Koussevitsky. But I also recall my growing boredom as his rendition seemed to endure an eternity for this fidgety 10-year-old. Then the rabbi mounted the pulpit. I was sure that we were in for a long sermon and that I could not possibly sit still for the next half hour
See Weinreb on page 22
Surviving wilderness, connecting with Hashem
Parsha of the week
Rabbi avi billet
Jewish Star columnist
After Moshe followed the instructions that made the waters of Marah drinkable, we are told, “There he taught them ‘chok u’mishpat’ and there he tested them.” The simple translation of the term “chok u’mishpat” is “a decree and a law,” while “survival techniques and methods” is Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan’s translation of choice, on the heels of Ramban and the Tur. Survival techniques?
Be a drone for a minute and take a bird’s eye view of what transpired. Slaves went out of Egypt and into the wilderness with limited provisions, not knowing if they were on a three-day journey
or a full exodus. Now they’ve seen their masters drowned in the sea and they are on the other side; they know there’s no going back.
Maybe Ramban and the Tur are onto something, maybe the Israelites need courses in “Wilderness Survival 101” and “How To Make It Through a Few Weeks Travel To the Promised Land With the Shirt on Your Back.”
Rav Kasher, in his Torah Shleimah Commentary (note 270) shares a few salient points, organized in progression.
•First, the Pesikta, which explains how the Torah begins with interpersonal laws.
•Second, the Ramban, who explains Moshe needed to give the people basic instructions for how to survive in the wilderness.
•Third, how to call out to G-d when hungry or thirsty, without resorting to complaining.
•Fourth, they should learn to love their neighbors and to follow the advice of the elders
to “walk humbly with your G-d.”
•Fifth, they should engage peacefully with neighbors who come from outside the Israelite camp, to engage in commerce.
Sixth, he aimed to give them mussar (ethical behavior lectures) to avoid being like other traveling bands who engage in every abomination.
Most directly, he quotes Rabbeinu Chananel, who emphasizes that Moshe had to teach them the ways of the wilderness.
Another possibility is that G-d had taught Moshe botany, herbology and pharmacognosy, so he could use plant life they’d come across for medicinal purposes while traveling and engaging with other human beings.
I find all of these perspectives fascinating because they imagine a real experience for the Israelites. It comes before the gift and promise of the manna while people needed real solutions to real problems.
It is one thing to consider the miraculous existence of the Israelites in the wilderness as something supernatural, it is entirely different to consider the truth. That they needed to learn the ways of the world — how to conduct a business transaction, for example. And they needed to learn military skills and tactical actions so they could confront an Amalek on the battlefield. They needed to learn about medicine and what is safe to eat, what is helpful, and what is poisonous.
How many of us could survive without electricity? How many of us could survive in a wilderness or in forests? The story of Rav Yisroel Zev Gustman having had a lesson in edible plants from Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzienski before WWII is reportedly why he would lovingly water plants in his yeshiva later in life — as gratitude for the opportunity to survive made possible by the See Billet on page 22
Destroy, don’t make peace, with illogical evil
At 6:22 am on Oct. 23, 1983, a member of the Islamic Jihad got into his 19-ton yellow Mercedes Benz truck on an otherwise normal day, and headed for Beirut International airport, where the 24th Marine Amphibious unit was deployed.
The marines were expecting a water truck; instead, they got a truck full of explosives. The jihadist drove his truck into the Marine Barracks, killing 241 American servicemen, the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States Marine Corps since World War II’s Battle of Iwo Jima. Sentries at the gate were under orders to keep
their weapons at condition four (no magazine inserted and no rounds in the chamber), which made it difficult to respond quickly to the truck.
Only one sentry, LCpl Eddie DiFranco, was able to load and chamber a round. However, by that time the truck was already crashing into the building’s entryway. The suicide bomber, an Iranian national named Ismail Ascari, detonated his explosives, which were later estimated to be equivalent to approximately 21,000 pounds of TNT. The force of the explosion collapsed the four-story building into rubble, crushing many inside.
On Feb. 7, 1984, as a result of this terrorist attack, President Reagan ordered the Marines to begin withdrawing from Lebanon; the withdrawal was completed on Feb. 26, 1984.
Following the US lead, the rest of the multinational force the (including British, French and Italian), was withdrawn by the end of February.
We should have seen it coming.
Ten years later, in February 1993, a terrorist detonated another truck bomb below the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring over 1,000. The attack was meant to bring down the North tower. Eight years later, on Sept 11, 2001, they succeeded, bringing down both towers and murdering close to 3,000 civilians.
We should have seen it coming.
On the same day in 1983, Less than ten minutes later, a similar attack occurred against the barracks of the French 3rd Company of Paratroopers, 6 km away in West Beirut. A truck exploded, bringing down the nine-story building and killing 58 French paratroopers. Many of the paratroopers had gathered on their balconies moments earlier to see what was happening at the airport. It was France’s worst military loss since the end of the Algerian War in 1962.
There have been too many more such assaults since, even before Oct. 7, 2023.
This week’s portion, Beshalach, witnesses the destruction of the ancient world’s mightiest empire. After ten plagues, Pharaoh cannot let go, pursuing the Jewish people out of Egypt and driving his army forward into the splitting sea, into what will be their destruction. At last, after 210 years of servitude, the Jewish people are free, and the empire which represented the ultimate evil at the time, which enslaved our people and murdered baby boys by throwing them into the Nile, was destroyed. And yet, Devarim 23:8 enjoins us not to hate (abhor) an Egyptian, because we were strangers in their land! What is wrong with abhorring the descendants of such an evil people? Perhaps it would be better to be commanded to hate them, and never to forget what they did to us, lest the
See Freedman on page 22
From heart of Jerusalem
binnY
Star columnist
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Open borders not a Jewish religious principle
JnS
The blizzard of executive orders and policy changes enacted by President Donald Trump in the first days of his second administration have, as a New York Times headline put it, left many liberals and Democrats “dazed and on the defensive.” But when it comes to the issue the president campaigned the hardest for — enforcing the law to stop illegal immigrants and to deport those who have no legal right to stay in the United States — the Jewish left isn’t simply rolling over and taking it.
On immigration, left-wing Jewish groups and, in particular, the liberal religious denominations seem ready to head to the barricades to oppose the administration’s stands. That means not merely opposing in principle Trump’s efforts to secure what became an open southern border for much of the Biden administration, it involves bitter opposition to the efforts of Trump’s “border czar” —Tom Homan, the former head of US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement or ICE — to deport illegal immigrants.
Homan hit the ground running in the first week of the new administration as ICE agents began a series of raids to round up those who fit into the top priority for the deportation program: illegal immigrants who have committed crimes and individuals with active court orders mandating their expulsion.
Tears for illegals
This has produced a series of reactions from people on the left that can only be described as hysteria — with the most prominent being a since-deleted Instagram post of singer/actress Selena Gomez, who has been active in the cause of obtaining amnesty for all illegal immigrants. Weeping about the deportations, she said how “sorry” she was that she couldn’t stop Trump and Homan from unapologetically enforcing the law.
And while not garnering as much attention as Gomez, a broad coalition of liberal Jewish entities shares her views. A letter to this effect was signed by 87 Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the National Council of Jewish Women, Jewish Women Inter-
national, Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, HIAS, the Jewish LGBTQ group Keshet, the Israel-bashing J Street lobby and, most importantly, groups that represent the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements of Judaism.
Their broadside denounced Trump’s policy as “persecution,” and accused the president of “spreading fear” and tearing communities apart. It did so while claiming to speak in the name of “Jewish values.” They also drew a direct parallel between the tens of millions of economic migrants who have streamed into the United States in recent years and the history in which Jews have “been forced to flee, denied access to safety, scapegoated, detained and exploited.”
In particular, the groups condemned any federal actions in which law-enforcement officers might enter houses of worship to apprehend those with active warrants on them. They they seemed to be asserting that churches, synagogues, mosques and any other religious institution should have legal impunity to host illegals, no matter what crimes they’ve committed, as if they were conjuring up a scene from Victor Hugo’s the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
This is familiar territory for these particular groups, but especially for those who espouse liberal Judaism. For decades, they have been repeating the same mantra about Jews being a community of immigrants and that religious law commands the Jewish people to “love” and “help” the stranger” because they themselves were once “strangers in a strange land.”
Indeed, for the overwhelming majority of American Jews who think of themselves as political liberals, this issue has become one of the keystones of their faith, both politically and religiously.
Their devotion to assisting migrants and lowering legal barriers to immigration is, in large measure, a vestige of the Jewish experience in America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During that period, as the country filled its open spaces and sought workers for labor-intensive industries that were growing at unprecedented rates, mass immigration was allowed.
Inappropriate Shoah analogies
Even then, immigrants were expected to do so with the permission of federal authorities and could not enter while suffering from serious diseases or without some means or guarantees that they could support themselves.
Illegals hiding from authorities to avoid deportation should never be compared to Anne Frank or other Jews slaughtered in the Shoah.
Still, support for liberal immigration laws, which were repealed by Congress a century ago, became imprinted on the Jewish community as integral to their identity. That was reinforced when anti-immigrant sentiment, mixed with the politics of pre-Second World War isolationism and antisemitism, caused the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt to largely close the gates of the country to Jews seeking to evade the death sentence that hung over them in Nazi-occupied Europe.
But as with much else about American Jewish liberal politics in the 21st century, these historical memories do more to distort our understanding of contemporary problems than enlighten them.
Contrary to actress Natalie Portman and former President Joe Biden, those illegals currently hiding from authorities because they are in danger of deportation for also being violent criminals, should never be compared to Anne Frank or other Jews slaughtered by the Germans and their collaborators.
Idon’t doubt that liberal Jews who are outraged by Trump’s immigration policies genuinely believe that their positions are rooted in Judaism, as well as being intrinsically moral. But they are wrong on both counts.
The Torah may enjoin Jews to treat the stranger fairly and with compassion. It does not, however, compel biblical Israel to have open borders any more than it should be understood as an argument for the same policy for the United States in 2025.
For every verse about being welcoming to those not in their home countries, others enjoin the community to protect itself against lawbreakers. Obeying the laws of the nations where they reside is also a Jewish principle. And that is not invalidated by absurd comparisons — be they implicit or directly stated — between the plight of illegal immigrants currently in America, who overwhelmingly came for economic reasons, and Jews fleeing for their lives from the Nazis in the 1930s and ’40s.
Whether or not liberal Jews who oppose his policies are comparing Trump to Hitler or calling him an authoritarian or fascist, the assumption that their stand has anything to do with “social justice,” which is supposedly the cause they care most about, is equally off-base.
No other issue is a better illustration of the class divide in 21st-century America than that of attitudes toward illegal immigration.
In the last two decades, the Democratic Party has become an institution that treats opposing enforcement of immigration laws as one of its guiding principles. It has done so at a time when its adherents have increasingly come from the country’s credentialed elites while shedding many, if not most, of the working-class voters who were once its core constituency. It is therefore unsurprising that Jews — a slice of demographics that is among the country’s most educated population — are among the sectors of voters who are most loyal to the Democrats.
JonaThan S. TobIn
Editor-in-Chief
Deportees unload from a Customs and Border Protection transport vehicle after being sent back to Mexico from Nogales, Ariz., on Jan. 22.
John Moore, Getty Images
Israel is bracing for an unimaginable requiem
THANE ROSENBAUM
Distinguished University Professor Touro College
Over the weekend, the 42-day first phase of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire saw the release of three more hostages: AmericanIsraeli Keith Siegal, French-Israeli Ofer Kalderon and Argentinian-Israeli Yarden Bibas. They were exchanged for 183 Palestinian prisoners.
•The hostages were innocent civilians.
•Some of the prisoners were hardened killers, many having committed serious crimes for which they were serving life sentences. They are unlikely to dedicate the remainder of their lives to world peace.
Israel has already released over 500 prisoners. Eighteen Israeli hostages are now free, too.
For the nearly 80 years of its existence, Israel has demonstrated amazing resilience. A suicide bomb goes off in a pizza shop during the Second Intifada. Ambulances and forensic examiners race to the scene. Soon thereafter, once body parts are removed and blood washed away, Israelis resume their lives. The lunch crowd gravitates to a different cuisine.
I fear that the legacy of Oct. 7 will chart a different post-traumatic course. This crime scene will forever have chalk outlines and yellow tape surrounding Israeli hearts.
Oct. 7 is Israel’s longest war. It commenced with a catastrophic breach of state sovereignty and has resulted in the most prolonged, by far, of all national tragedies. Does the hardened sabra psyche know no limits? Will it be possible to once again summon the fortitude to normalize their lives, as they have so often been compelled to do in the past?
Oct. 7 and its aftermath is an entirely singular species of national trauma, the apex of a na-
tional tragedy that is permanently scarring and poignantly unendurable.
Even these hostage-for-prisoner exchanges have resulted in bittersweet moments that mostly only deepen wounds — retraumatizing Israelis, shocking their collective nervous systems with how much has been lost.
Hamas releases hostages like a ragtag high school football team throwing a pep rally for homecoming. The captives are paraded and jostled through streets. They are made to mount viewing stands and forced to wave at cheering Gazans — as if to give thanks for all that hospitality. All the while Hamas showcases semiautomatic assault rifles, not fig leaves. The stage is adorned with a banner reading: “Nazi Zionism will not win.”
Gaza’s Health Ministry claims that 47,000 Palestinians have been killed in this war. Yet Hamas releases hostages with all the pomp and pomposity of an army announcing its “glorious victory” to the world.
If Hamas is claiming victory, then this war is far from over.
The second phase of the ceasefire cannot and should not go ahead, because there are far too many terrorists and complicit civilians still alive in Gaza. Palestinians are apparently more pumped up for battle this week than Kansas City Chiefs fans.
Meanwhile, Gazans are celebrating in the streets. Do they resemble a people chastened, chagrined or defeated?
The normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia can wait. Israel has unfinished business to accomplish first — to wipe off those smug looks hiding behind keffiyeh masks in Gaza. President Trump should respect, as Joe Biden didn’t, that Israel knows its hellhole of a region and the duplicity of its fiendish players.
The release of Yarden Bibas this week had the same deflating effect as Julius Caesar’s final words following his friend Brutus’s betrayal: “the most unkindest cut of all.”
Where is the rest of the Bibas family? Shira, Yarden’s wife, and their two little children, Ariel and Kfir, kidnapped in their mother’s arms on Oct. 7, aged four and nine months, respectively? Israeli officials have expressed “grave concern” about their status. Hamas self-servingly claims that all three were killed in an Israeli airstrike.
Given that Hamas “promised” to release women and children first, that they were not included among the 18 released thus far id deeply troubling.
Upon the father’s release, reports surfaced that Hamas had not only beaten and caged Yarden, but tortured him with updates about his family: one day they were alive, the next murdered, only to be revived again, over and over.
How will such a man find the strength to begin anew, given all that has already been taken away from him?
Meanwhile, Israelis remain haunted, as should all human beings, by the two tiny red-headed boys last pictured in their Batman pajamas. Israelis have been anticipating their return for 16 months. They wanted to smother them in kisses and spoil them. Better still: throw a national birthday party for them, to make up for the ones misspent in Gaza.
Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University. Write: Columnist@TheJewish Star.com
It’s ‘The Hunger Games’ as hostages are released
If you’ve ever imagined a dystopian scene from “The Hunger Games,” it likely resembled the recent despicable Hamas parade in Gaza City.
On Jan. 25, four young Israeli women — Karina Ariev, Daniella Gilboa, Naama Levy and Liri Albag — were released from captivity. These young soldiers, who had been violently abducted from the Nahal Oz base during the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, were subjected to months of abuse and torment. But their release was not a show of humanity. Instead, it was a macabre pageant meant for humiliation and propaganda.
A stage adorned with anti-Zionist banners reading “Zionism will not prevail” — in Hebrew, Arabic and English — was erected for this occasion. Hundreds of cheering Gazans surrounded the stage, alongside armed and masked Hamas fighters. The young women were paraded like prizes of war, forced to wave to the jeering crowd as they were marched across the platform dressed in military attire given to them by their captors.
This wasn’t a desperate act of an impoverished people (the narrative that has been spun this entire war). It was a corporate-like production meant to instill fear, maximize Jewish suffering and publicize Hamas’ supposed dominance.
Of course, we are all thrilled to have our hostages returned. Their freedom after such a harrowing ordeal is cause for immense relief and gratitude. But how they are returned should matter. The way Hamas conducts these hostage releases is dehumanizing and calculated to prolong Jewish pain and humiliation until the final
moments. This is not just a hostage handover; it is a theater of terror.
On Jan. 18, a similarly grotesque display unfolded when three Israeli civilians — Romi Gonen, Emily Damari and Doron Steinbrecher — were released after more than 470 days in captivity. They were surrounded by heavily armed Hamas terrorists and jeering Gazans as they were escorted into a Red Cross vehicle.
Media descriptions of this exchange only added insult to injury. The New York Times described the women as walking “under their own power,” failing to acknowledge the threatening, chaotic environment. PBS referred to the crowd as “jostling,” a term that downplayed the aggression and volatility of the mob as it clawed at the Red Cross vans.
The International Committee of the Red Cross — a body tasked with upholding universal humanitarian standards — facilitates these chaotic exchanges without apparent objection to the humiliating displays. They legitimize these farcical ceremonies by signing Hamas-created certificates which the hostages are handed as though they were participants in some twisted ceremony.
Gonen, Damari and Steinbrecher were even given “gift bags” from Gaza.
CNN’s Becky Anderson interviewed the president of the ICRC, Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, just days later, on Jan. 22, when Egger admitted in the interview that “there were hundreds of thousands of people in the street, and I still believe there are means to coordinate more tightly and to have certain mechanisms in place that would avoid the exposure of those that need to be brought back to their families.”
Hamas knows precisely what it is doing. These operations are meticulously planned. They broadcast these exchanges live on Arabic TV and stage multiple-thousanddollar digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera-
wielding crews capturing every angle, with the videos edited and mass-produced for global consumption and released within hours.
Consider the stark contrast in how other hostage releases in recent memory have been handled. When Brittney Griner was freed from Russian custody, her exchange was conducted quietly, shielded from public spectacle. Likewise, Trevor Reed, an American Marine arrested in Russia, was released with no cheering crowds and no parade only a tarmac exchange.
broadcast Hamas’s narrative to the world. International leaders commend the release of hostages but fail to acknowledge this final humiliation inflicted on them up to the last moment. Has the international community tacitly accepted this degradation as an acceptable cost for freeing Jews?
Imagine if Jewish hostages were treated with the same dignity afforded to others. Picture a release conducted with privacy, calm and respect for the victims’ humanity. Of course, this won’t happen — just as there was never a global
to mock the Jew and
Yet for Israeli hostages, the release is radically different — a final
See Karsh on page 23
hurrah
Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists and civilians in Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip as Israel hostages Arbel Yehud and Gadi Mozes, along with five Thai hostages, were released to the Red Cross on Jan. 30. Abed Rahim Khaatib, Flash90
Yarden Bibas, 34, Shiri Bibas, 32, and their children, then-9-month-old Kfir and 4-year-old Ariel, were abducted by Hamas on Oct. 7. Courtesy
JACKI KARSH
Multimedia Journalist
Israel alone forced to fight for its right to exist
GLOBAL FOCUS
Liberal and left-wing adversaries of Israel indulge in an abiding fantasy that one day the Jewish state, which they falsely regard as an ethnostate built upon an ideology of Jewish supremacy, will be replaced by a single state of Palestine. They fancifully believe that it will be a multiethnic democracy granting equal rights to all its citizens, regardless of religion or national origin.
As fantasies go, this one has enjoyed a good deal of mileage, surfacing every few years at times of tension in the Middle East and gripping the attention of a handful of intellectuals. More than 20 years ago, as the Second Intifada raged in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the late historian Tony Judt caused waves with a New York Review of Books essay titled, “Israel: The Alternative,” which depicted the Israeli polity as a nationalist anachronism that needed to be dismantled.
This week, Peter Beinart, one of the more cloying Jewish adversaries of the Jewish state, did much the same with a New York Times piece titled “States don’t have a right to exist. People do,” treading on similar ground.
As depressing as it is to admit, it’s important to push back against these arguments — not because they hold any intrinsic worth but because they provide, at least on the surface, a framework for anti-Zionist arguments to be articulated by those who are too embarrassed to scream “Go Back to Poland!” at Jews waving Israeli flags, yet who essentially sympathize with that sentiment.
Beinart, who excels at presenting commonplace ideas as his own unique insights, argues that states have no innate worth, but that the people who live under their rule certainly do. The origins of this idea of the state lie with the thinkers of the
classical liberal tradition — from Immanuel Kant to John Stuart Mill to Isaiah Berlin, who countered the emphasis on human beings as servile to the state found in the writings of thinkers like the 17th-century English philosopher Hobbes and the 19th- century German philosopher Hegel.
While the goal of a minimal, legally accountable state is a laudable one, like most ideas, it can evolve in bizarre directions unanticipated by its formative thinkers; in this case, that out of more than 200 states in the international system, the existence of only one of them — the State of Israel — is up for debate.
Beinart is vexed by the consensus among US politicians that the right of the State of Israel to exist needs to be unashamedly upheld. He cites China and Iran as examples of states whose forms of government — Communist and Islamist
— are regularly attacked by Americans. If it’s legitimate to advocate for the dismantling of these regimes, then why doesn’t the same principle apply to a state run by a regime that stresses Jewishness over everything else?
The comparison is a false one.
There is a key distinction between the concept of a “state” and that of a “nation,” but the two are often conflated because the independent, sovereign state has been the most enduring aim of advocates of national self-determination.
The Soviet Union disappeared, but its constituent nations did not (Russian President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to crush Ukraine notwithstanding), while much-welcome regime change in China and Iran would not result in the elimination of those nations either. It also implies a knuckleheaded moral symmetry between a country like China,
which incarcerates its Muslim Uyghur minority in concentration camps, forcing them to eat pork and drink alcohol, and Israel, where core human and civil rights are guaranteed under the law for all citizens, Jewish or not.
In the formula that Beinart recommends, however, there is no guarantee that the Jews of Israel would survive as a national group once the name “Israel,” which for Beinart and other anti-Zionists is the ultimate symbol of Jewish supremacy, was wiped from the map. Indeed, it’s far more likely that Israeli Jews would confront mass expulsion and genocide at the hands of Hamas and its allied factions than be welcome participants in a multinational “Palestine.”
Beinart fails to grasp that the Oct. 7, 2023 pogrom by Hamas, which he writes about in a creepily dissociative manner, remarking merely that “Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters killed about 1,200 people in Israel and abducted about 240 others,” is regarded by the vast majority of Israelis as a sign of what the terrorists have in store for all of them. The recent scenes in Gaza, where baying, hysterical Palestinian mobs have surrounded women hostages being released from Hamas captivity under the current ceasefire deal are a testament to that.
Beinart argues that the question of whether Israel has a right to exist is irrelevant. He considers that it is more appropriate to ask, “Does Israel, as a Jewish state, adequately protect the rights of all the individuals under its dominion?” Actually, the more pertinent question is this: Can Palestinians, nurtured on a diet of dehumanizing antisemitic hatred that expressed itself with perfect horror on Oct. 7, agree to a living arrangement with Israelis — one state, two states, a federation, some other model of governance — that is secure and sustainable? Or is some kind of deprogramming, akin to the denazification of Germany after World War II, a necessary first step?
It’s instructive that as Beinart’s essay was being
See Cohen on page 23
Even Trump critics should cheer his USAID kill
Observing the Trump administration’s battles with USAID has brought a bit of satisfaction and even some schadenfreude.
Its website has been down for a few days and several of its security officials were placed on leave after a clash with Department of Government Efficiency agents, with Elon Musk writing in a social-media post that “USAID is a criminal organization.”
President Donald Trump said USAID was run by “a bunch of radical lunatics.”
I have been following USAID’s deeds since at least 2007. In that fiscal year, USAID had invested $50 million in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The Bush administration requested an increase to $77 million for the next fiscal year. That year, I noticed an advertisement it had published in Israel.
The ad made it clear that it was treating the areas of Judea, Samaria and Gaza as a separate territorial entity, even bypassing the Palestinian Authority. Using its financial weight, USAID was not only supposedly improving lives and economies, but influencing the diplomatic developments and desired political outcomes of America’s foreignpolicy chieftains.
What also became clear, as I further investigat-
ed, was that USAID not only ignored but actively sought to undermine any acknowledgement of the right of Jews to live in their historic homeland.
Some 14 years later, at a U.S.State Department press briefing on April 7, 2021, then-spokesman Ned Price informed the media that US economic, development, security and humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people would be “restarted” and that the “assistance, of course, will be provided consistent with US law.” The aid included $75 million in “economic and development assistance in the West Bank and Gaza,” and USAID would directly fund “peacebuilding programs” in the amount of $10 million. UNRWA would receive $150 million in “humanitarian assistance.”
Just last week, the Washington Free Beacon reported that the Biden administration had “funneled $3 million to Palestinian Authority ‘security forces’ for weapons training” — and this after its members carried out attacks on Israelis.
Allow me to return to Price’s reference that the financial assistance needed to be “consistent with US law.” A reporter inquired of Price, “When you say that all this aid is going to be provided in — well, consistent with US law, I’m curious as to how actually you’re going to do that.”
The reporter added, “US law — there’s several of them — says that the US cannot provide money to the Palestinian Authority, or — perhaps more importantly — money that would be fungible … as long as they continue to pay stipends to people convicted of anti-Israel or anti-UD attacks and their families. So how exactly are you going to square this?”
Price responded by first characterizing the aid announced as being “consistent with our interests, it is consistent with our values, it is consistent with the interests of those in the region … as well as the interests of our Israeli partners.” Of course, he was trying to avoid the issue of the funds being consistent with the law, specifically the Taylor Force Act and the Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act. How
would he do that?
Well, he would basically outright bluff his way through.
He declared, “I just want to underscore that all of this aid is absolutely consistent with relevant US law, including those two statutes. … We provide assistance in the West Bank and Gaza through experienced and trusted independent partners on the ground, and it’s these partners who distribute directly to people in need.” He assured the media that the administration has “aggressive risk mitigation systems in place aimed at ensuring. …US taxpayer-funded assistance is reaching those for whom it is intended.”
Continuing to be pressed, Price asserted that the PA is not the direct recipient of the assistance, only their “creditors.” He then repeated that “what we are doing is in service of our interests, our values, consistent with US law, and betters the lives of the people in the region.”
Last February, during the Gaza campaign, the world became aware of the role that UNRWA, as well as the “creditors” of the PA. play in facilitating, encouraging, assisting and teaching Arab anti-Israel terror. Even World Central Kitchen was forced to fire dozens of employees in Gaza in December due to terror ties. Several USAID em-
Samantha Power, the USAID administrator, at a World Food Program warehouse in Amman, Jordan, being used to prepare aid for shipment to Gaza on Feb. 26, 2024. USAID
Pro- and anti-Israel supporters square off in dueling protests at Washington Square Park 10 days after the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel. Spencer Platt, Getty Images via JNS
We are Jews. The indigenous people of the land of Israel. We are Zionists. At home in Zion (Jerusalem) in Midinat Yisrael.
Public Notices
LEGAL NOTICE PUBLIC NOTICE OF COUNTY TREASURER’S SALE OF TAX LIENS ON REAL ESTATE
Notice is hereby given that I shall, commencing on February 18, 2025, sell at public on-line auction the tax liens on real estate herein-after described, unless the owner, mortgagee, occupant of or any other party-ininterest in such real estate shall pay to the County Treasurer by February 13, 2025 the total amount of such unpaid taxes or assessments with the interest, penalties and other expenses and charges, against the property. Such tax liens will be sold at the lowest rate of interest, not exceeding 10 per cent per six month’s period, for which any person or persons shall offer to take the total amount of such unpaid taxes as defined in section 5-37.0 of the Nassau County Administrative Code. Effective with the February 18, 2025 lien sale, Ordinance No. 175-2015 requires a $175.00 per day registration fee for each person who intends to bid at the tax lien sale. Ordinance No. 175-2015 also requires that upon the issuance of the Lien Certificate there is due from the lien buyer a Tax Certificate Issue Fee of $20.00 per lien purchased.
Pursuant to the provisions of the Nassau County Administrative Code at the discretion of the Nassau County Treasurer the auction will be conducted online. Further information concerning the procedures for the auction is available at the website of the Nassau County Treasurer at:
https://www.nassaucountyny.gov/526/County-Treasurer
Should the Treasurer determine that an in-person auction shall be held, same will commence on the 18th day of February, 2025 at the Office of The County Treasurer 1 West Street, Mineola or at some other location to be determined by the Treasurer.
The liens are for arrears of School District taxes for the year 2023 - 2024 and/or County, Town, and Special District taxes for the year 2024. The following is a partial listing of the real estate located in school district number(s) 15, 7 in the Town of North Hempstead, Town of Hempstead only, upon which tax liens are to be sold, with a brief description of the same by reference to the County Land and Tax Map, the name of the owner or occupant as the same appears on the 2023/2024 tentative assessment roll, and the total amount of such unpaid taxes.
IMPORTANT
THE NAMES OF OWNERS SHOWN ON THIS LIST MAY NOT NECESSARILY BE THE NAMES OF THE PERSONS OWNING THE PROPERTY AT THE TIME OF THIS ADVERTISEMENT. SUCH NAMES HAVE BEEN TAKEN FROM THE 2023/2024 TENTATIVE ASSESSMENT ROLLS AND MAY DIFFER FROM THE NAMES OF THE OWNERS AT THE TIME OF PUBLICATION OF THIS NOTICE. IT MAY ALSO BE THAT SUCH OWNERS ARE NOMINAL ONLY AND ANOTHER PERSON IS ACTUALLY THE BENEFICIAL OWNER.
512 HUNGRYHARBOR ROAD LLC 16,034.01 39567 00370
MALAMUD TRUST B 7,892.84 39572 01030
HOFFMAN MELVIN & CHARLOTTE 16,120.09
39592 00100
MERMELSTEIN JOSEPH 14,161.23 39594 00010
CARR J KULANSKI & M 6,919.71 39595 00070
BATALION DOVID & TAMARA 8,100.31 39596 00010
CIACCIO AMY & FRANK 7,457.83 39596 00020
KURKOMELIS KIRBY & JOAN 3,174.67 39602 00120
MATOS MANUELA 15,129.94 39602 00240
KLEIMAN S ASSOULINE & H 18,834.48 39610 00320
JACOBOVITCH YAAKOV 3,381.59 39611 00060
RESNICK DEBORAH E 13,601.61 39611 00240
DINARDI JOHN 13,343.26 39612 00150
ROSEN JUNE 5,051.74 39613 00190
WENGER JEFFREY & CINDY 3,209.89 39616 00090
MURDAKHAYEV GENNADIY 4,767.34 39616 00160
LEVINE HARRIET E TRUST 11,713.36
39627 00730
FLEISCHER SHEILA 10,169.69 39627 00910
LONGACRE HOLDINGS LLC 8,044.42
39627 01220
INIP CAPITAL LLC 20,614.77
40 A 11060
PEARSALL ROCK LLC 12,635.50
40 B 00140
FREIFELD RUTH 2,159.05
40 B 0227UCA02600
GOTTLIEB EVA 9,230.51
40 B 0227UCA02600
REGENCY 301 PRPTS LLC 1,729.32
40 B 0227UCA02600
COHEN TERENCE TRUST 9,035.18
40 D 02840
MELOHN ELIZABETH & POLLAK MELIS 27,598.06
40 E 01100
LOEB MICHAEL & HOFSTEDTER CHANA 16,987.01
40 E 01170
LOEB MICHAEL & HOFSTEDTER CHANA 1,016.05
40 E 02170
HIRSCHFELD NAFTALI N & SARAH 23,881.01
40 E 02300
MELOHN ELIZABETH & POLLAK MELIS 1,124.79
40 E 03420
KAHATI OFIR & CINTIA A 3,060.46
40 G 00330
DAVIDSON KAREN 6,922.65
40 G 00480
CHASE JR JOSEPH V & CHRISTINE 6,995.10
40 L 02230 223,251
HANCE DAVID 10,653.97
40 L 25930
CARRERO KEVIN L 5,623.19
40001 02320
ROSE CHERYL S 10,620.23
40002 02080
GUAREFTZ HOLDINGS LLC 1,900.05
40003 00950 95-96
29 EAST AVENUE LLC 9,711.01
40003 01010 101-102
ZIC LLC 10,246.86
40003 01070 107-108
GONZALEZ LUCIA 3,862.42
40008 00660 66-67
MEADOWMERE PROPERTY MANAGEMENT 8,513.17
40008 00780 78-79
HANCE DAVI 10,756.99
40010 00150 15-16
GORIS B DIAZ & HERMINO 9,883.27
40010 00270 27-28
691 BURNSIDE AVE INC 9,144.44
40012 02270 JOHN P PICONE INC 6,005.53
58073 00540
58084 00280
SIEGAL GAIL S 80,205.90
58085 00500 50-53
YANNICELLI DEBORAH 5,114.63 58143 00400
YANNICELLI DEBORAH 574.82 58143 00410
CLEARWATER HOLDING INC 13,302.36 58146 00340 34-43,233
WEINRIB NEIL A & MACKAY KIMBERL 20,007.98 58148 00270
EISDORFER JAMES & RAE 3,492.35 58148 00400
CESARE THOMAS D & CONTI-CESARE 4,615.59 58150 00390
OFFIR SAMUEL & SHOSHANA 7,235.22 58152 00200
SILVER JOEL & DIANE 7,725.26 58154 00060
POLSINELLI THOMAS & DONNA 5,375.52 58157 00400
Town of norTh hempsTead school:7 GreaT neck Ufsd
Name
729 MIDDLE NECK LLC 8,930.63 01001 00020 2-3 729 MIDDLE NECK LLC 6,379.07 01001 00040
TSAI HSUEH TZU & CHANG MING HON 8,550.48 01023 00570 57-61,358
STEPHENS HILL DENISE 375.01 01035 02240 HU RUIMING 21,736.86 01039 00480 48,448
ADEKALIMI IRAJ 18,756.59 01040 00250
GRAYSON LE S CEWZAN, MYRA 4,016.37 01042 01290
RAFAELOFF WEIZMAN N 3,268.16 01062 01330
STARZ PROPERTIES LLC 58,897.03 01063 00880
BANILIVI RAHMATOLLAH & MEHRANGI 14,294.00 01063 00980
BANILIVI RAHMATOLLAH & MEHRANGI 690.79 01063 01110
BRIGHT HOME NY LLC 15,414.68 01064 02090
MALEKAN BAROUK & ESHAGHZADEH LI 6,943.36 01076 00120
HEDVAT MANOUCHER 4,611.04 01076 01500
STEBELSKY NADESCHDA 2,646.93 01077 00200
FISKUS RACHEL C 23,445.11 01078 00100
SARSFIELD JAMES B & MARY 20,018.09 01081 00090
MOTTAHEDEH MERHDAD & TANYA 11,435.70 01092 00110 11-14
YACOBI ARIEL & KARINE 9,150.94 01097 01450 145,147
AURORA LIGHTS INC 21,351.19 01099 01040 104,203
NAIMOLLAH SHAHAB & ARMAGHAN 24,257.15 01112 00560
KASHANI MORDECHAI 11,981.67 01128 00040
BELL GERTA & JONES ALINE 4,500.22 01128 00050
KASHANI MORDECHAI 10,144.17 01128 05480
COUNTY OF NASSAU 679.33
01129 03690
COUNTY OF NASSAU 1,186.31 01129 04310
YOUSSEFI NASSER & GADI AKHTAR 2,826.91 01136 01650
DILAMANI LILA 744.00
01136 01790
ARYEH ESKANDER & HEZGHIA 1,471.03
01140 00220
00050
KASHIMALLAK LIOR & JASMIN 7,440.15
01142 00260
Public Notices
Continued from previous page
0053UCA01600 53 CA 160 UNIT
EBRANI NORA & TANYA 1,358.23 02376 0053UCA01600 53 CA 160 UNIT 504
HUNDRED CUTTERMILL ASSOC 847.96 02376 0053UCA01600 53 CA 160 UNIT 628
KHAZZAM ALFRED & RODNEY
02376 0053UCA01600 53 CA 160 UNIT 636
HAKIMIAN ELAN A 410.24
02376 0053UCA01600 53 CA 160 UNIT 681
Hakimian Brian 699.45
02376 0053UCA01600 53 CA 160 UNIT 685
HAKIMIAN ELAN A 904.56
02376 0053UCA01600 53 CA 160 UNIT 688
PAVILLION GROUP LLC 395.38
02376 0055UCA01870 55 CA 187 UNIT 3 METRO SEED LLC
02376 0055UCA01870 55 CA 187 UNIT 35
PAVILLION GROUP LLC 814.57
02376 0055UCA01870 55 CA 187 UNIT 43 171 STERLING LLC 7,014.84
02376 0056UCA02320 56 CA 232 UNIT 112
NERAYOFF STEVEN 4,893.21
02376 0056UCA02320 56 CA 232 UNIT 412 BHANSALI PUSHPA & USHA 15,217.85 08 A
TERMS OF SALE
Such tax liens shall be sold subject to any and all superior tax liens of sovereignties and other municipalities and to all claims of record which the County may have thereon and subject to the provisions of the Federal and State Soldier’s and Sailors’ Civil Relief Acts.
However, such tax liens shall have priority over the County’s Differential Interest Lien, representing the excess, if any, of the interest and penalty borne at the maximum rate over the interest and penalty borne at the rate at which the lien is purchased.
The Purchaser acknowledges that the tax lien(s) sold pursuant to these Terms of Sale may be subject to pending bankruptcy proceedings and/or may become subject to such proceedings which may be commenced during the period in which a lien is held by a successful bidder or the assignee of same, which may modify a Purchaser’s rights with respect to the lien(s) the property securing same. Such bankruptcy proceedings shall not affect the validity of the tax lien. In addition to being subject to pending bankruptcy proceedings and/ or the Federal and State Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Acts, said purchaser’s right of foreclosure may be affected by the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act (FIRREA), 12 U.S.C. ss 1811 et. seq., with regard to real property under Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) receivership.
The County Treasurer reserves the right, without further notice and at any time, to withdraw from sale any of the parcels of land or premises herein listed.
The rate of interest and penalty which any person purchases the tax lien shall be established by his bid. Each purchaser, immediately after the sale thereof, shall pay to the County Treasurer ten per cent of the amount from which the tax liens have been sold and the remaining ninety per cent within thirty days after such sale. If the purchaser at the tax sale shall fail to pay the remaining ninety per cent within ten days after he has been notified by the County Treasurer that the certificates of sale are ready for delivery, then all deposited with the County Treasurer including but not limited to the ten per cent theretofore paid by him shall, without further notice or demand, be irrevocably forfeited by the purchaser and shall beretained by the County Treasurer as liquidated damages and the agreement to purchase be of no further effect.
Time is of the essence in this sale. This sale is held pursuant to the Nassau County Administrative Code and interested parties are referred to such Code for additional information as to terms of sale, rights of purchasers, maximum rates of interest and other legal incidents of the sale.
Furthermore, as to the bidding,
1. The bidder(s) agree that they will not work with any other bidder(s) to increase, maintain or stabilize interest rates or collaborate with any other bidder(s) to gain an unfair competitive advantage in the random number generator in the event of a tie bid(s) on a tax certificate. Bidder(s) further agree not to employ any bidding strategy designed to create an unfair competitive advantage in the tiebreaking process in the upcoming tax sale nor work with any other bidder(s) to engage in any bidding strategy that will result in a rotational award of tax certificates.
2. The tax certificate(s) the Bidder will bid upon, and the interest rate(s) bid, will be arrived at independently and without direct or indirect consultation, communication or agreement with any other bidder and that the tax certificate(s) the Bidder will bid upon, and the interest rate(s) to be bid, have not been disclosed, directly or indirectly, to any other bidder, and will not be disclosed, directly or indirectly, to any other bidder prior to the close of bidding. No attempt has been made or will be made to, directly or indirectly, induce any other bidder to refrain from bidding on any tax certificate, to submit complementary bids, or to submit bids at specific interest rates.
3. The bids to be placed by the Bidder will be made in good faith and not pursuant to any direct or indirect, agreement or discussion with, or inducement from, any other bidder to submit a complementary or other noncompetitive bid.
4. If it is determined that the bidder(s) have violated any of these bid requirements then their bid shall be voided and if they were the successful bidder the lien and any deposits made, in connection with, said bid shall be forfeited. This list includes only tax liens on real estate located in Town of Hempstead. Such other tax liens on real estate are advertised as follows:
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Nassau County does not discriminate on the basis of disability in admission to or access to, or treatment or employment in, its services, programs, or activities.
Upon request, accommodations such as those required by the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) will be provided to enable individuals with disabilities to participate in all services, programs, activities and public hearings and events conducted by the Treasurer’s Office. Upon request, information can be made available in braille, large print, audio tape or other alternative formats. For additional information, please call (516) 571-2090 ext. 13715.
Dated: February 05, 2025
Weinreb…
Continued from page 13
or more. But I did not count on Rabbi Schorr’s wisdom, common sense, and brilliant sense of humor.
He began his sermon with the phrase in the weekly portion: “Az yashir Moshe,” which is usually translated, “Then Moshe sang,” but which literally means, “Then Moshe will sing,” in the future tense.
Our Sages comment: “Shar lo ne’emar, ela yashir (it does not read Moshe sang but rather will sing.” While the adult audience sat back waiting for the long sermon that would soon unfold, we 10-year-olds yawned and wished we could escape to the nearby playground.
But then Rabbi Schorr continued, quoting the commentary, “Az yashir Moshe, shar lo ne’emar” and proceeded in his heavily accented but sophisticated English to announce: “This brief passage can be rendered into simple English: ‘When Moshe sings, Shorr [shar] does not speak.’ I therefore heed the commentary, and when Moshe Koussevitsky speaks, I, Israel Schorr remain silent.”
Iand my peers breathed a sigh of relief. My father, whose custom it was never to speak in shul in words other than those in the prayer book, commented to me in Yiddish as we left the synagogue, “Der Rav hatt sechel! (This Rabbi has common sense!)”
In the many years since, I have come to appreciate the late rabbi’s deeper meaning. He conveyed to his constituency the lesson that there are times when musicality of prayer overrides verbal teachings of prayer, when an inspiring cantorial rendition surpasses a rabbinic lecture.
Thus, Moshe did not react to the moment of a miracle with a long speech. Rather, he chose poetry over prose and sang a song so impactful that later generations recite his words daily, to this day.
Sometime later, I married into a family whose ancestral heritage is of noted Chassidic music. My wife Chavi’s grandfather was the Modzitzer Rebbe, Rav Shaul Taub, the composer of hundreds of melodies.
Rav Shaul, in his posthumously published writing, raises a question about the culmination of the Song of the Sea’s narrative, a description of how Miriam led the women in singing the song’s refrain to music — timbrels and flutes and dance.
“Where did those musical instruments come from?” asked Rav Shaul.
He answered that wise Miriam was confident that as the Israelites left Egypt, there would be moments of threat and crisis. But our people would enjoy miraculous divine intervention that would allow us not only to triumph over threat and crisis, but to celebrate joyously in gratitude to the Almighty. She foresaw that those musical instruments would then come in handy.
And in a further comment, Rav Shaul quotes this passage in Psalms 106:
Vaya’ar batzar lahem b’shamo et rinatam. (He saw that they were in distress when He heard their song.)
Tears open the gates of Heaven. Song perhaps even more so. Happy Shabbat Shira!
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
Continued from page 13
plants he knew were safe or beneficial owing to the lessons from Rav Chaim Ozer.
When my family visited Mount Vernon, we marveled over how meat would be stored without a refrigerator and how all kinds of household chores for which we rely on electricity were done without it. Perhaps we should all visit Amish country and learn a thing or two about how to live in a world without electricity.
Taking a slightly different turn, we can easily understand that just as there are different ways to live and survive in the wilderness, on the miraculous front and in the natural arena, the same principle would apply to how we live our Jewish lives today.
There are different theories as to how many correct paths exist in Jewish life and observance. Whether it is “eilu v’eilu,” 49 tameh v. 49 tahor, or 70 faces, there are a number of ways in which people can get close to G-d.
Nowadays, we too often see people saying things like “My way or the highway.” This is tragic, because seeing things in only one way is anti-Torah. It could be that one way works for me, but my way may not work for you and your way might not work for me.
I can’t find the quote, but in a recent “offthe-derech” memoir, I found a very provocative insight about this.
The author suggested that Hassidism was founded on the notion that a person can come to G-d through multiple different paths. The author lamented that some Hassidic sects now have exactly the opposite view and are unembracing of the outside world and cold or indifferent (these are certainly generalizations) to Jews who are not like them (except when doing chesed or kiruv).
This kind of rigidity exists in many circles. While we often acknowledge that what another person is doing shouldn’t bother us, we are very often judgmental and the way others live their Judiasm really does bother us.
It’s time to recognize that 70 faces means 70, and not “my way or the highway.” Do what works for you but don’t be critical of the person whose approach is different, but is nevertheless grounded in the Torah.
We learn from Rav Kasher’s collection of ideas that there are many ways to live, to connect with the world, and to connect with G-d.
It was madness — murdering the 6 million Jews meant destroying or exiling one of Western Europe’s strongest economic-base populations, along with hundreds of thousands of World War I veterans and vast amounts of genius and wealth. The correct decision, to put aside their hatred of us for a higher cause, could only happen if the reasoning for destroying us was outweighed by the reasoning for utilizing us. But that only works if there is a reason for hating us.
This was the fatal mistake many Jews made in the ghettos; it made no sense to murder such a large compliant labor force in the midst of a war, so they meekly followed orders assuming the best.
They assumed the Nazis were logical and they could not think of a reason that would override the logical conclusion that it made more sense to keep them alive. They were not incorrect from a logical perspective; they were wrong because the Nazis’ hatred of us was not logical — they hated us for who we are. Just like Amalek.
Hitler writes very clearly in Mein Kampf (it’s actually one of the few lucid points in the entire book) that he could never forgive us for introducing G-d into the world, and with it the idea of an objective right and wrong. Hitler’s dream of returning the world to its natural state of ‘might makes right’, and supremacy of the fittest who survive, could never exist side by side with the Jewish world of an objective right and wrong, where every human being is created in the image of G-d, and no one person is ever ‘better’ than another.
aware of or indifferent to the fact that the position they are now endorsing is antithetical to the interests of working-class and poor Americans. To the consternation of Democrats and their corporate media cheerleaders, public opinion has shifted in Trump’s direction on a host of issues. A recent Times article made this clear. On illegal immigration, the numbers are staggering across the board. Polls conducted by ABC News, CBS News, Marquette University and New York Times/Ipsos show that respondents favor deporting all illegal immigrants by decisive majorities, ranging from 55% to 64%. That contrasts with the numbers from eight years ago that showed that only 36% to 42% were in favor. It amounts to a national consensus in favor of enforcing the law, and gives Trump and Homan a mandate.
Democrats can read the poll numbers and sense the confidence with which the new GOP administration is carrying out the will of the voters; what’s lacking from them is any real understanding of why Trump’s policies are so popular. That’s very much the case with illegal immigration since the credentialed elites who vote for the Democrats assumed that the rest of the country felt the same way as they did.
Biden’s open border policies had a lot to do with this. The former president’s nonenforcement rules, which he attempted to reverse in 2024 as the election began slipping away from the Democrats, allowed as many as 10 million illegals to enter the country.
Freedman…
Continued from page 13
Rabbi Billet, who grew up in the Five Towns, is a mohel and spiritual leader of Anshei Chesed Congregation in Boynton Beach. Write: Columnist@ TheJewishStar.com ugly head of evil rear its head again one day?
We are commanded to remember the day we left Egypt on many occasions, but there seems to be no emphasis on remembering the terrible evil the Egyptians perpetrated against our people.
Contrast this with what happens at the end of the portion (Shemot 17:8) when we are attacked by the Amalekite nation and go to war. There (ibid. 17:14-16) we are told that no less than G-d Himself will destroy and erase even the memory of the Amalekites and we are apparently (ibid. 17:16) commanded to “wage a battle for Hashem” against Amalek forever! Indeed, 40 years later, on the eve of the Jewish people’s entry into the land of Israel, Moshe will remind the Jewish people (Devarim 25:1719) to remember and not forget what the Amalekites did to us and to blot out their memory from under the heavens.
Why are we told to treat the Egyptian kindly and yet blot out the memory of the Amalekite?
After all, the Egyptians enslaved us for over 200 years, whereas Amalek fought one battle, on one day, against us in the desert.
Perhaps, as Rav Sacks (in his Covenant and Conversation 5775) suggests, the difference is in what motivated these evil entities.
Pharaoh (Shemot 1:9) justifies his initial enslavement of the Jewish people by proclaiming that the “Israelites are becoming numerous and too strong for us.”
In other words, they hated us and wanted to enslave us — for a reason. And what they did made sense; they utilized us for slave labor which, though evil, at least made sense. Even their killing of Jewish male infants was to prevent a supposed Astrological prediction that a Jewish messiah was being born, and hence there was no reason in the Egyptian eyes to murder the baby girls.
But Amalek attacked us for no reason.
By the end of WWII it was clear the Nazis had abandoned any logical pretense for destroying us. In the summer of 1944, when the German’s greatest challenge was supplying their front lines to stand up to the advancing Allied Forces, they were also diverting 80 percent of their rail assets to transport the 400,000 Jews left in Hungary to the death camps in Poland.
And this will never change; the Jewish people will never abandon its notion of an objective ethic, we will never stop believing in one objective right and wrong. In fact, the Talmud expresses that “Whenever one does not show mercy to the created beings, it can be recognized that he is not from the seed of Abraham our patriarch” (Beitzah 32b).
So all Hitler could do was destroy us, and the only way to end that was to destroy Hitler. They hated us simply because we exist. You can fight causal hatred and evil by removing its cause; but you cannot fight pure evil, you can only destroy it.
One of the mistakes we are sometimes guilty of in the West is to assign a rationale to hatred where none truly exists. The terrorist entities of the world: Hamas, ISIS, Hezbollah, Iran, and, yes, the Palestinian Authority, do not hate us for any good reason, they hate us because of who we are.
That’s why whenever one reason is proven incorrect they come up with another, and it is the reason why, every time we find a solution for whatever we believe is the causal of their antagonism and hatred, a new one comes to the surface. Sadly, such hatred can never be resolved; it must be destroyed.
But this still leaves us with two possibilities: we can destroy the haters, or we can change the way they are educating their children. No one is born hating, hatred must be taught. Nazism had to (and still needs to) be destroyed, but once Germany was conquered and the next generation of German children was taught tolerance and love, things began to change.
And that is exactly what must be done today. It will not be easy and will not be quick, but we must find a way to educate the next generation of Arab and Muslim children to love and respect those with different perspectives and beliefs; it is the only to create a future that is better and brighter.
And as for Hamas, ISIS, Hezbollah, Iran, and all the other promulgators of hatred and violence for the sake of hatred and violence, perhaps it is time to understand what the Torah was sharing with us about Amalek thousands of years ago: there is no compromise with evil; it can only be destroyed.
Food for thought, from Jerusalem.
Rabbi Freedman is rosh yeshiva at Yeshivat Orayta in Jerusalem. Write: Columnist@The JewishStar.com
That consisted of approximately 8 million “encounters” with those entering without permission tabulated by the government and perhaps as many as 2 million more so-called “gotaways” who evaded apprehension.
This has led to a situation where the number of illegals currently in the country is far higher than the 11 million figure used by the left-wing media for the past decade. It could be as high as 30 million if one considers that an authoritative Yale University study estimated that in 2018, there were at least 22 million illegals in the United States.
But the building of a consensus about the need to deport illegals is more than a function of non-enforcement. The flood of migrants into the United States has had a devastating impact on working-class Americans.
Starting in the 1990s, globalist economic policies meant more competition for US-made goods and depressed wages for employees of companies that had to compete against cheap foreign labor. The NAFTA trade agreement also wiped out an estimated 700,000 American manufacturing jobs. The entry of China into the World Trade Organization further accelerated the decline of American manufacturing and wages.
That was the context for the impact of the massive surge in illegal immigration that has taken place in the last two decades and culminated under Biden. The presence of so many people willing to work for little money and no benefits delighted corporate America but also further drove down wages and contributed to rising costs in health care, housing and education.
The left still labors under the delusion that the working poor are their natural constituency. But the fact that real wages for the working class dropped at least 5% over the last four decades while the highest earners got richer created a constituency for Trump that now crosses racial and ethnic lines.
Outrage about the Democrats’ erasure of the border has grown, along with the understanding that this virtual invasion has come at a high cost to many working people. They suffer disproportionately from the impact of the opioid epidemic made possible by the spread of fentanyl in the United States by drug cartels operating at the southern border, which largely run the business of smuggling illegals. The situation has also impacted border communities and then even northern cities, where many of the illegals wound up, which have been forced to deal with the needs of so many migrants.
Continued from page 14
Not ‘social justice’
While Jewish liberals think they are defending the values of their faith and identifying with the plight of their antecedents, they seem un-
Contrary to the assumptions of the left, those who support deportation orders for illegals are not racist, as even most Hispanics favor enforcement of the law. That explains why Trump received nearly half of their votes last November. Nor are they xenophobic. What they do understand is that an open
border policy is a gift to the credentialed elites and large corporations wanting a steady supply of migrant serfs to work for them at near slave-labor wages that Americans won’t tolerate.
The assumption spread by the open borders lobby that without illegal immigrants, American agriculture couldn’t operate is also a myth. Nearly 90% of farm laborers are not illegals. And a similar percentage of all illegal workers are not in agriculture. The largest sector for illegals working in the United States is construction, not picking crops.
Hunger for cheap labor
When highly educated liberal Jews who also number among the wealthiest sectors of the population cry crocodile tears for illegals, they also assert that no one will do the jobs that illegals will take. But that often just means they want to continue to hire what they inaccurately call “undocumented” immigrants to clean their houses, mow their lawns or watch their children for cutrate wages. They also like the fact that restaurants, including high-end ones, can use busboys and dishwashers who are illegal, therefore lowering the costs of fine dining.
Corporations feel the same way about the illegals who work in their industries. All this makes it harder for American workers to get decent wages when so many illegals are available to undercut them.
This hunger for cheap labor is understandable from an economic point of view. But it has nothing to do with “social justice” or tikkun olam, and it’s time Jewish liberals stopped pretending that they did.
It’s long past time for the most educated and wealthy Americans to stop pretending that enforcing immigration rules is Trumpian tyranny and that refraining from doing so helps the poor or working-class Americans. They also need to give up characterizing the arrest and deportation of the large number of violent criminals who benefited from non-enforcement policies as a tragedy worth lamenting.
What amounts to open borders is antithetical to the rule of law as well as hurts those struggling to make a living. Invoking the immigrant past of most Jewish families or citing biblical precepts that should not be confused with 21st-century party platforms doesn’t change that.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
Karsh…
Continued from page 15
rallying cry demanding that Hamas release these innocent people in the first place.
The tragic reality is that the global Jewish population will have to endure this awful charade for several more weeks. We will have to watch as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad continue to parade our people in front of the cameras.
The childishness of it — the banners, certificates, staged applause — is as infuriating as it is dehumanizing. And yet, the world will remain silent, unwilling to call out the deliberate final act of cruelty so plainly on display.
The world has accepted that chaos and humiliation are the price Jews must pay for their freedom.
Jacki Karsh is a six-time Emmy-nominated multimedia journalist and a board member of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles. Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
Cohen…
Continued from page 16
published, Donald Trump raised the idea of resettling Gaza residents in other countries, a solution that right now is more palatable to Israelis than trading more land for a non-existent peace. There are, of course, an equal mix of advantages and problems associated with such a radical move, but if the Palestinians want to remove it from the table, then they need to focus on subjecting their own society to fundamental reform. Because that’s another aspect that Beinart is unable to grasp; pa-
tience is at an end, despair is rising, and measures previously beyond the pale now look feasible and, dare I say so, desirable on many levels.
As the philosopher Karl Popper — another advocate of the minimal state bound by the rule of law — put it: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. We must therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate intolerance.”
Ben Cohen, a senior analyst with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Write: Columnist@ TheJewishStar.com
Medad…
Continued from page 16
ployees and workers have been killed in Gaza.
The terror links are not new. The Washington Times reported on March 4, 2007, that USAID
provided more than $140,000 in assistance to the Hamas-controlled Islamic University in Gaza, including scholarships to 49 of its students.
While no US assistance was directed to the Islamic University the previous year, USAID continued to fund multimillion-dollar programs through American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA), which is building a high-tech facility for the school.
USAID also gave $2.3 million in aid in 2006 to Al-Quds University, which has student groups affiliated with designated terrorist organizations on campus and last month held a weeklong celebration of the man credited with designing and building the first suicide belts more than a decade ago.
In addition to support for terror, USAID also props up the diplomatic damage done to Israel’s administration of Judea and Samaria, and its sovereignty in Jerusalem.
Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria are excluded from student grants, visits of artists, sports persons, literary figures and other “soft” programs in a quite discriminatory fashion, which would
probably be illegal if practiced in the United States. That problem is avoided neatly by a clause in their tenders that reads: “Targeting assistance to certain populations as defined in the Project Description will not be construed as discrimination.”
Moreover, this discrimination over the past two decades and more was intended to convince the PA that Jews could be ignored, that Jerusalem could be redivided and that there was no need for Jews of Bet El to dialogue with Arabs of Ramallah since USAID defined their programs as fundamentally apartheid-like. No Jews allowed was the subtext, as I wrote here in a column in 2018.
Samantha Power, who served as the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development from 2021 until January of this year, used her powers politically, diplomatically and ideologically to Israel’s disadvantage. There should be little disappointment expressed at ending USAID.
Yisrael Medad is an American-born Israeli journalist and political commentator. Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
