The Hasidic Educator Who Defies Opposition to Teach & Other Orthodox Jews in the News

Bergen Teens Trade Labor Day Plans For Flight to Houston to Help Rebuild After Harvey
A group of teen volunteers, including seven from North Jersey, have dropped their Labor Day plans to board a Houston-bound flight and help victims of Hurricane Harvey. The teens, ranging from 15 to 17 years old, were scheduled to board a 6:30 a.m. Sunday morning plane to Texas for a three-day mission with the New Jersey chapter of NCSY, a Jewish youth organization. There, the group will put on their hard hats, get to work and help locals rebuild.

This Hasidic Educator Teaches Secular Subjects To Boys — Despite Violent Opposition
Menachem Bombach’s home has been smeared with tar several times; his neighborhood was covered in pashkevilim, posters, denouncing him as a Haredi imposter and calling on him to “return to Tel Aviv,” and when he was recognized upon a visit to his childhood neighborhood Mea Shearim, locals threw bottles and diapers at him, tearing off his yarmulke. Bombach has faced this sort of protest ever since he first opened his school in Beitar Ilit three years ago — a high school for Hasidic boys that teaches math and science, and offers bagrut matriculation, exams. While this model has always existed in the Haredi Lithuanian community, though on the margins, this school is the first of its kind in the Israeli Hasidic world, and it’s quickly beginning to attract attention from prospective parents.

Ashley Blaker’s Happy New Year Wishes 
Comedian Ashley Blaker wishes you a happy Rosh Hashana. The Orthodox Jewish funnyman has become a favorite of all denominations with his wry wit and humor which knows no boundaries.

Judge Allows Orthodox Woman to Work Out in Skirt at Gym
She showed them who wears the pants. An Orthodox Jewish woman who was barred from working out in a skirt in her local Lucille Roberts gyms in Brooklyn has won the right to keep on her traditionally religious garb. The health-club chain said Tuesday that it will no longer turn away skirt-wearing gym-goers after being sued by school teacher Yosefa Jalal Wood-Isenberg in 2015.

Jewish Leadership, Vatican Discuss Collaboration on Common Interests
Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, President of the Conference of European Rabbis, has said that the Jewish rabbinic leadership has several common causes with the Catholic Church and the Vatican and that improved relations will help improve collaboration on those issues. The rabbi spoke to The Jerusalem Post after he led a delegation to Pope Francis on Thursday to present a Jewish perspective on Catholic Jewish Relations on the fiftieth anniversary of Nostra Aetate, in which the Catholic Church repudiated the notion of the collective guilt of the Jewish people for Jesus’s death in 1965.

Miami’s Jews Prepare To Welcome Irma As A Very Unhappy Shabbos Queen
With South Florida in Hurricane Irma’s crosshairs, many in Miami’s Jewish community are staying put for what is shaping up to be a very stormy — and possibly dangerous — Shabbat. Even as Florida Gov. Rick Scott warned than Irma, a Category 5 storm, may be “bigger, faster and stronger” than Hurricane Andrew, the 1992 storm that led to nearly 100 deaths in Florida, many in Miami who decided to ride out the storm expressed a wait-and-see mentality.

Chabad Family in St. Martin Rides Out Hurricane Irma in Ritual Bath
It was 5 a.m. Wednesday and Hurricane Irma was pounding the tiny Caribbean island of Saint Martin. Rabbi Moishe Chanowitz and his wife, Chana, the Chabad movement’s emissaries there, gathered their five children and hunkered down in an unlikely place: a mikvah, which helped save their lives. The storm killed at least eight people on St. Martin and a councilman told Reuters that 95 percent of the 34-square-mile island was destroyed. Irma’s winds reached around 180 miles per hour and decimated trees and homes, flinging cars around in its wake.

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