I’ve said to many of my clients who’ve successfully completed Weight No More’s stabilization and maintenance programs, “Didn’t you want to look better and feel better all those other times you lost weight on diets? Wasn’t your mind made up with just as much determination? Weren’t you sick and tired of being heavy before?
As a legislative assistant working for Assemblyman Steven Cymbrowitz for the past three years, I have had the privilege of seeing first hand the many benefits the free health screenings our office has provided for thousands of community residents.
The Maimonides Cancer Center—Brooklyn’s only dedicated cancer center—has been designated as a “Breast Imaging Center of Excellence” by the American College of Radiology, a national professional organization serving more than 34,000 diagnostic/interventional radiologists, radiation oncologists, nuclear medicine physicians, and medical physicists. This designation recognizes the cancer center for earning accreditation in mammography, stereotactic breast biopsy, and breast ultrasound, including ultrasound-guided breast biopsy.
For thousands of years, Jews have sanctified their married life by beginning it with a traditional Jewish wedding. The beauty, simplicity and nobility of the Jewish wedding ceremony is dictated to us by Talmudic tradition and rabbinic law. The ceremony is based on the name that the Talmud grants to the Jewish concept of betrothal and marriage—“kiddushin,” meaning sanctification and holiness. Though marriage is a contract between a man and a woman for living together, it is much more than that. At the root of the Jewish marriage ceremony is the understanding that a marriage is much greater than the sum of its individual parts.
As a culmination of their year-long series of programs called The Jews of Spain: Past and Present, the American Sephardi Federation joined with Congregation Edmond J. Safra of Manhattan and Ramaz School/Kehillath Jeshurun for a nine-day heritage tour of Spain called Roots of Sefarad. Led by Rabbi Dr. Elie Abadie and Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, the group of 51 Sephardim and Ashkenazim together explored the famous and infamous sites which exemplify the Jewish experience in Spain under Muslim and Christian rule.
Recently, several hundred people gathered at the Park East Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side for a most befitting tribute to the life and legacy of famed Zionist leader and visionary Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky on the occasion of his 70th yahrzeit. Due to the geo-political realities of the age of terrorism, security was tight at the venue as attendees went through airport style checks as they entered.
Scotland is perhaps the only country in Europe to have no history of Jewish persecution. Indeed, Jews in Scotland have a rare uninterrupted history, starting in 1290, when Jews were expelled from England under the Edict of Expulsion. There is some history of Jews existing in Scotland prior to the Edict, but no definite record of Jewish communities.
The New York metro area has 2 million Jews, more than everywhere else, except Tel Aviv. But it’s a big drop after that. LA has 650,000. Philly, DC, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco each have about a quarter million. A few more American cities have between 50,000 and 100,000. But when you get down to the top 40 American cities, we’re talking less than 10,000 in a metro area.
Luxembourg was founded in 963 CE by Count Siegfried. The first record of Jews living in the capital, the City of Luxembourg was in 1276. In the early 14th century, small numbers of Jewish immigrants from the adjacent area founded more settlements.
SPECIAL MUSEUM PACKAGE
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the Museum at Eldridge Street, and the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust have joined to launch the Gateway to America Heritage Tour, a special promotion that encourages visitation to immigrant heritage sites and offers $2 off admission to these institutions.
Guests may download a Gateway to America Passport at www.mjhnyc.org/heritagetour and present it at each museum to receive the discount.
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the Museum at Eldridge Street, and the Museum of Jewish Heritage each offer a unique approach to depicting the immigrant experience. Collectively, they tell a powerful and comprehensive story about immigration to New York City. The locations of the museums—one on New York Harbor across from the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and two on the Lower East Side—provide evocative backdrops for this heritage tour.
There is no better way to celebrate summer than to have family and friends over for a relaxing barbecue. It is always a good idea to brush up and learn new barbecuing skills to ensure a more organized event. Best of all, grilling is a great way to load up on flavor without added fat and calories.
Much to a calorie watcher’s delight, barbecuing is the perfect light cooking technique and great grill recipes usually require only a minimal amount of prep work and ingredients. Here are some easy preparation ideas:
Start Early: Many recipes can be prepared in advance. For example, ground meat can be made into patties and frozen until they need to be used. Vegetables like celery and carrots can be cut up and stored in containers in a bit of water.
Over the past few years, the Sephardic Pizmonim Project at pizmonim.com has had the ambitious goal of finding and recording every pizmon melody missing from our community’s red pizmonim book, Sefer Shir Ushbaha Hallel veZimrah. This long-term goal is being accomplished one recording at a time; we are down from 220 missing pizmonim in 2006, to 190 in 2007, 130 in 2008, and 117 in 2009.
Unlike many of my peers whose goal it is to make their “first million” by the time they hit their 26th birthday, my long-standing and more realistic personal goal was to hit the milestone of missing only 100 pizmonim by June 29, 2010, my 26th birthday.
A lot of progress has been made this year from January to June, as many great associates of mine in New York and Jerusalem (Joey E. Mosseri, Isaac J. Cabasso, Victor Esses, Ezra C. Ashkenazi, Joey Harari, Sam Cohen, Mario Safdie and Uri Amram) have been helping me accomplish this goal by volunteering their valuable time searching for people around the globe who may be able to record for us the missing melodies. By June 14th, after a lot of pressure on all the people mentioned above, the number of missing songs was still stagnant at 101 with no lead in sight and no indication that I was going to accomplish my goal of reducing the list to 100 missing pizmonim by my birthday deadline.
The Sinagoga del Tránsito (or Synagogue of Samuel ha-Levi) was once an important house of worship in Spain for Toledo’s large Jewish population. It is an excellent example of 14th-century Spanish Jewish architecture, especially noted for its superb stucco and Hebrew inscriptions.
Founded and financed by Samuel Levi, treasurer and advisor to King Pedro I of Castile, the Sinagoga del Tránsito was built in 1357. It is said that Levi imported 
cedars from Lebanon for the building’s construction—à la Solomon when he built the First Temple in Jerusalem.
The bell tower was added by the Christian religious order of Alcántara, who took over the building after the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492.
During the war against Napoleon, the synagogue became a military barracks.
Jews first settled in Bolivia (which was then part of Peru) when Marranos from Spain arrived in the country. Some Jews worked in the silver mines of Potosi, others were among the pioneers who founded the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra in 1557. The only existing documents from that period are those of the Inquisition, which was established in Peru in 1570 and signaled the demise of the Marrano community.
It was not until the 1900s that substantial Jewish settlement took place in Bolivia. In 1905, a group of Russian Jews arrived, followed by a group from Argentina, and later by several Sephardic families from Turkey and the Near East. The Jewish community nonetheless remained minuscule until the first tide of Jewish immigration came in the early 1930s. Desperate to escape the increasingly vehement persecution in their homelands, thousands of refugees from Nazi-dominated Central Europe, the majority of them Jews, found refuge in Latin America in the 1930s. Bolivia became a principal recipient of this refugee influx by the end of the decade when Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico—traditional “countries of choice” for European immigration—applied severe restrictions to the entrance of newcomers.
