Rabbis Billet and Freedman on Vayeshev 4-5 Bookworm on Thanksgiving’s Jewish roots 10 Schools 14
THE JEWISH VOL 12, NO 45 Q NOVEMBER 22, 2013 / 19 KISLEV 5774
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‘Israel will defend itself’ By Malka Eisenberg Naftali Bennett, pivotal Knesset member and head of the Jewish Home party, warned of the continuing Iranian threat and the importance of the eternity of Israel in a 35 minute speech Saturday night at the Young Israel of Woodmere. He stressed the importance of Israel as the home of the Jewish people and not just as a “shelter state” and that Israel is a “lighthouse in the storm” of the turbulent Middle East. “Is Israel really the safest place for Jews?” he asked. “There are other places: Teaneck, New Jersey; Woodmere; Perth, Australia. If our whole meaning is to be a shelter
MK Bennett reminds Woodmere YI that Torah is Israel’s raison d’être state, that’s not a good enough reason. There is a better reason — it’s the Torah [that is Israel’s] raison d’être.” Bennett said the principal mission of his current U.S. visit is to raise alarms over the crisis with Iran. “They don’t want to break out now, they want to keep the pipeline and are waiting for the right moment, when the sanctions are relieved, when the West is preoc-
cupied with something. Maybe in 10 months, 20 months, but the moment they break out it is done ala North Korea. The current deal of the P5+1 is a bad deal. They can keep the ability to break out at any given moment. A good deal would be to dismantle the whole thing. Then it would take them three years to rebuild from scratch.” “In any event,” he continued, “Israel has the capability to defend Continued on page 12
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Bearded cadet fought ‘law’—and won LIRR vandals
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ure to enforce that rule against officers other than Fishel Litzman.” “This is a great day for religious freedom in America,” Litzman, 39, said of the decision that “will enable me to carry out my life-long dream of serving the people of the City of New York as a uniformed police officer. I am very grateful for the
support I received from those inside and outside the New York City Police Department during this long ordeal.” “The Lubavitch standard does not allow him to trim his beard,” Lewin told The Jewish Star. “He applied for religious accommodation. He had been training for months and was at the top of his class. It was his life-long ambition to be a New York City Police Officer. It was unconstitutional to throw him out — of course they have to take him back.” The next step for Lewin, who has argued 27 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and is widely known as a champion of civil rights and Jewish causes, is to file a proposed order requesting that Litzman be reinstated. Litzman, a resident of Monsey and father of five, worked since 2002 for Maimonides Medical Center as a paramedic and from 2006 for New York Presbyterian Hospital and the village of Kiryas Joel as well. In 2009 he took the Police Officer Continued on page 12
The biz of holiday mashup
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By Jacob Kamaras, JNS.org Nov. 28 marks Thanksgiving Day, as well as the first day of Chanukah. It would be a natural reaction for an American Jew, when noticing that overlap during a casual reading of the calendar, to smile or even laugh. But Dana Gitell took things much further. A marketing professional living in Norwood, Mass., Gitell coined and trademarked the word “Thanksgivukkah,” launched a website as well as Facebook and Twitter pages for the joint holiday, and partnered with Juda-
ica retailer ModernTribe.com on a line of t-shirts and greeting cards to mark the occasion—one that, according to one analysis of the Jewish and Gregorian calendars, won’t occur again for more than 75,000 years. Gitell, who had known “Thanksgivukkah” was coming for five years, said the more she thought about it, the more she came to appreciate the significance behind the overlap of two holidays which “both celebrate religious freedom” and have “similar themes.” Continued on page 3
Shabbat Candlelighting: 4:13 pm. Shabbat ends: 5:17 pm. 72 minute zman: 5:45 pm. This week’s Torah Reading: Vayeshev
triple attacks in Five Towns By Jeffrey Bessen In the first 10 months of this year there have been three times as many bias graffiti incidents at Five Towns Long Island Railroad train stations as there were in 2012, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Last year there were four such incidents, all at the Cedarhurst LIRR sta- 6ZDVWLND DW &HGDUKXUVW VWDWLRQ tion. So far this year, 3KRWR FRXUWHV\ -HIIUH\ /HE the MTA has reported seven incidents at Cedarhurst, four in Lawrence and one in Hewlett, a total of 12. On Oct. 30, Cedarhurst resident Jeffrey Leb saw a swastika scratched onto a panel of one of the station’s Continued on page 12 passenger shelters.
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By Malka Eisenberg The first step in the reinstatement of a Chabad-Lubavitch New York City Police Cadet was handed down in a ruling on Friday by a federal district Judge in Manhattan who upheld the constitutional claim of the cadet that his First Amendment rights were denied. Fishel Litzman was “thrown out” of the Police Academy for refusing to trim his beard to one millimeter in length, said Nathan Lewin, Litzman’s attorney. Litzman has never trimmed his beard, as is customary with Chabad Chasidim, but even so, it naturally only grows about a half inch from his skin. Judge Harold Baer noted that there are many exceptions to the New York City Police Department’s unpublished rule limiting facial hair to a one millimeter length and the rule was not applied uniformly. Lewin said that “Judge Baer’s opinion properly emphasizes the discrepancy between the NYPD’s announced limitation on facial hair and the Department’s fail-