Passover is Over: Now What?

While Jewish rye and bagels replace matzah after the week-long
Passover ban on leavened bread, social scientists might want to chew
on a fifth question: What is it about this particular holiday that
makes otherwise unaffiliated and non-observant Jews care—enough to go
out of their way to honor the holiday?

They often don't know anything about kosher or Shabbat, but when
Passover comes around, something kicks in, and whether they call
themselves agnostics or secular or just plain uninvolved, many find
themselves gravitating to other Jews, to a Seder table, and often even
to the strictures of a weeklong diet that forbids consumption of pizza
and pasta.

It's a peculiarity that Chabad-Lubavitch representatives around the
world have come to recognize, and, in the interests of Jewish
education and Jewish continuity, to capitalize on in a big way. Not
only in terms of the numbers--though it wouldn't be hard to
extrapolate a figure of more than half a million Jews who were at a
Chabad Seder on April 12th--the impact itself is substantive. Whether
it's the 120 Jews in Guatemala City who sang the Dayenu with Rabbi
Sholom Pelman, the 600 in Rostov-on-Don with Rabbi Chaim Fridman, or
the 2,000-plus in Nepal with Rabbi Chezy Lifshitz, the effect of a
spirited, content-rich Seder experience with Chabad has a long
half-life that opens a path for many who make their way, gingerly,
slowly, perhaps, but steadily, towards becoming more involved and
educated about their heritage.

passover is over

wow!!!

Synagogue ripped on its parking

The Beaches Leader

Chabad at the Beaches, a Jewish worship group in Ponte Vedra Beach, has grown considerably since its creation two and a half years ago.

And since the group is based out of a home across from the Ponte Vedra Beach Branch Library on State Road A1A, complaints from neighbors about noise and parking have grown as well.

"As that congregation has grown, so has the parking problem," Curtis Long, a next-door neighbor at 523 A1A, told trustees of the Ponte Vedra Municipal Service District (MSD) Monday night.

Long was seeking "some relief" from the dozens of cars that are sometimes parked at an angle on the eastern shoulder of A1A.

Long said he and his wife must sometimes come to a complete stop on the busy highway to carefully maneuver between cars parked along their driveway on the grass.

Although Wayne Flowers, attorney for the MSD, advised the board that it has no authority over such land use issues, most of the trustees agreed that something should be done about the cars parked at the Chabad house.

"The parking to me seems extremely dangerous," said Trustee Al Hollon.

Gary Jurenovich agreed, adding that "the bumpers of those cars are right on the white line." MSD Chair Robert Reesh said he has even seen cars parked in the median.

Rabbi Nochum Kurinsky, director of Chabad, said in an interview Tuesday that reports of out-of-control parking are exaggerated.

"We're very sympathetic with our neighbors," said Kurinsky, who lives in the home with wife Leah and son Avi.

"We've done everything we could in the past. . . to assist them and to try to keep everybody happy."

Kurinsky said he plans on moving the congregation of 50 to 60 families to a private facility soon, but the congregation cannot yet afford property in Ponte Vedra.

Kurinsky said he is looking for a lot big enough for a small synagogue and perhaps a few small homes.

Regular services are held Saturday mornings, and dinners for the congregation are held every Friday night. Kurinsky said he believes they are within their rights to hold services and allow visitors to park.

But Trustee Rob Becker said the problem lies in allowing special events and activities out of a private home.

Although Chabad is not considered a business, Becker said they sometimes hold special events and charge each person who attends - an activity that he considers fund-raising.

"You don't see the Episcopal Church and you don't see the Catholic Church running fund-raisers out of homes," Becker said.

"I think it's frankly uncalled for, and it's going to set a precedent."

Flowers said local governments must be very careful when dealing with religious groups because arguments for discrimination are easy to make.

"There are so many shades of gray between what is and what isn't religious activity," Flowers said.

St. Johns County Commissioner Bruce Maguire, who attended the MSD meeting, said the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) has the only authority over parking regulations on state roads such as A1A.

Maguire said he would check to see what can be done with the county's legal department and with Joe Stephenson, public works director for St. Johns County, who used to work for the FDOT.

Stephenson said in a telephone interview Tuesday that parking on grassy shoulders of state roads is permissible as long as it doesn't create a safety hazard or a maintenance problem.

Drivers pulling out onto the road must have a "clear sight view" of oncoming traffic, Stephenson said.

He also said parking on a regular basis along the shoulder can kill vegetation, exposing dirt. The dirt is then washed away by rain, which creates not only a maintenance problem, but also a safety hazard, he said.

FDOT standards dictate that a shoulder can be no more than 3 inches below the surface of the pavement, according to Stephenson.

Anything more than 3 inches is considered a "shoulder drop-off" and a safety hazard, he said.

Stephenson said drivers tend to "jerk" their cars back onto the road when they drift off the pavement, and shoulder drop-offs can cause drivers to lose control of the car or even flip a vehicle.

If FDOT officials are called to examine a parking problem in that area, they will most likely look for shoulder drop-offs, Stephenson said.

If they find a problem, they will post "no parking signs," he said.

Aside from the occasional car or two, Kurinsky said members of his congregation have not parked along the road in about four weeks.

He said the problem can be solved by simply encouraging people to carpool and park along the neighborhood streets to the east.

Move against Russian rabbi blasted

Russian Jewish leaders criticized a lawmaker's motion to check how one of Russia's chief rabbis received Russian citizenship.

The development concerns Berel Lazar, chief Lubavitch emissary in the former Soviet Union and head of the Chabad-led Federation of Jewish Communities, the region's largest Jewish group. Last Friday, the Duma, Russia's lower house of Parliament, authorized a committee to file an inquiry with the authorities to clarify why Lazar, an Italian-born U.S. citizen, was made a Russian citizen without undergoing required naturalization procedures.

The motion was proposed by Boris Vinogradov, a member of the nationalist Motherland Party.

On Monday, the party disassociated itself from the development by saying it never authorized Vinogradov to raise the issue in the Duma.

In a statement Monday, the Congress of Jewish Religious Organizations and Communities, often at odds with the federation, criticized what it called the "anti-Semitic motivation" behind the motion.

matzohs - made the same way for 3,000 years

It had to be done in 18 minutes flat.

In a Brooklyn bakery, each fresh batch of Passover matzoh was timed from the moment the flour touched water till the unleavened bread left the oven _ dough worked fast to keep it from rising.

It must stay flat "to remind us of when the Jews went out of Egypt and they didn't have time to let the bread rise," said Chana Drizin, a 10-year-old bakery volunteer perched atop a woodpile that helped fueled the oven's roaring flames.

With Passover arriving on Wednesday at sundown, producing enough matzoh for the holiday meal without breaking tradition is a deadline met with religious fervor at this Brooklyn business.

Behind a windowless front, the boisterous, crowded bakery has churned out more than 80 tons of matzoh in the seven months leading to Passover. At $15 a pound, the matzoh is shipped or hand-delivered to about 70 countries, from France, England and Greece to Congo, Vietnam and India.

On a recent visit during the last week of production, one room in the bakery was alive with the chatter of women sitting around a long table, rolling out dough and announcing "Matzoh!" in Hebrew as they handed off the matzoh rounds ready for the oven.

Their voices, in Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian and English, mixed with the sound of clattering rolling pins in the frenzy to get as many matzohs out as possible in 18 minutes, when the dough starts to rise.

Eating leavened bread during Passover is forbidden by Jewish law, which is strictly followed in an Orthodox Jewish movement called Chabad Lubavitch that started in 18th-century Russia and spread worldwide.

Under the late Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, their leader in Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood, the Lubavitchers became the most outward-looking of ultrareligious Jews, displaying giant menorahs in public places and building Chabad centers from Sao Paulo to Bangkok. The more than 200,000 faithful use satellite and Internet technology to communicate their beliefs; even the matzoh can be ordered via the Chabad Web site, with recipes included.

But when it comes to actually baking matzoh, "it's been done the same way for 3,000 years," said Rabbi Mendel Feller, who was bringing the matzohs back to St. Paul, Minn.

This "bread of affliction" plays a key role in the ritual meal celebrating the Jews' freedom from slavery under the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. It's a "mitzvah" _ a sacred command _ to eat matzoh.

The handmade Lubavitch bread is among dozens on the market _ many of them mass-produced by food industry giants like Manischewitz and Streit's.

This Brooklyn matzoh is made at the Shmurah Matzoh Bakery in Crown Heights, owned by the Dubrowsky and Tenenbaum families _ a business started in the last century on Manhattan's Lower East Side by Russian Jews.

"Shmurah" means "guarded" in Hebrew: Someone must always watch the flour so no water comes in contact with it until the bread is made. The vigilance started in August, when the wheat was harvested from fields in upstate New York, ground and put into bags stored in the bakery's basement.

At the bakery, a digital timer was taped to a wall above the big steel bowl where flour finally met water, and was kneaded into dough by lightning-fast hands.

"It's a six-second loaf! I have good arm muscles," said a beaming Yanko Klein, an Israeli-born rabbinical student in Crown Heights.

After eight-hour days of kneading, for months, he's exhausted. "But it's a very holy thing to do this."

Klein was handed the flour through a small window cut into the wall of a cubicle where another man scooped it out of cardboard boxes into a pot that goes on a scale.

"I'm here to find a wife!" announced the flour-sifter, Michoel Natanilov, in Russian. Born in Tajikistan, he came to Brooklyn looking for a Lubavitcher bride.

From another cutout window appeared a hand offering Klein the water for the dough.

"It's fun," said Dovid Kupfer, 15, who earns $7 an hour carefully measuring water all day under a bare lightbulb.

The bakery may also be reserved to custom-make matzoh _ as Chana, the 10-year-old, and her extended family did one day.

"Helping bake our own bread brings it all together for us _ it adds an extra touch to Passover," said her uncle, Zev Drizin.

This bakery would have fit well in an old Russian village, but the 21st century had definitely arrived: A cell phone wire dangled from the ear of a youth as he hung matzohs on a long wooden rod, six at a time.

The matzohs were then passed to the official baker, who was sweating as he slid the matzohs into the oven for about 20 seconds, to bake at a temperature as high as 2,000 degrees.

After the steaming, slightly burned rounds were quickly pulled out, each was inspected by a man wearing gloves to make sure they were thoroughly baked, then lined up in freshly papered boxes that go to the front of the bakery.

Then, said Drizin's brother-in-law, Mendel Schneerson, "like fine cigars, they have to be packed so they don't crack."

Russia to probe chief rabbi's ctizenship status

A Russian parliamentary committee is to initiate a review of why the country's chief rabbi received his Russian citizenship through a simplified procedure.

Rabbi Berel Lazar, who became a Russian citizen in 2000, was born in Milan and, according to the Interfax news agency, is a citizen of three countries in addition to Russia - Israel, Italy and the United States.

The Russian State Duma has instructed the parliamentary committee to request information from the country's Interior Ministry and the Federal Migration Service on "legal grounds for granting Russian citizenship to U.S. citizen Berel Lazar in a simplified procedure," according to Interfax.

The motion to launch the investigation was initiated by Boris Vinogradov, a Rodina faction member in the State Duma. Vinogradov is thought to have close ties with officials in Russian President Vladimir Putin's circle. Last year, 20 members of the Rodina faction signed a petition calling for Jewish religious rituals to be made illegal.

Lazar went to Russia in the 1980s as an emissary of the Lubavitch Hasidic movement, and is considered the most prominent Jewish figure in the country.

Thousands Participate in Chabad Convention in Yad Eliyahu

Thousands Participate in Chabad Convention in Yad Eliyahu

  Some 8,000 Jews from all walks of life participated in a Chabad convention on Sunday evening at Heichal Nokia in Yad Eliyahu.

The event celebrated the 104th birthday of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, zt"l who passed away in 1990.

Refugees from the expulsion of Jewish communities of Gush Katif and northern Shomron were invited free of charge to the celebration.

Chabad Rabbi Gedalia Axelrod, head of the Haifa Beit Din, called upon the hareidi parties not to participate in any government coalition which intends to carry out Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's unilateral withdrawal plan.

Birthday of the Rebbe

Yud-Alef Nissan is the Lubavitcher Rebbe's birthday. A birthday is more than a day for songs and celebrations. Instead, a birthday is a day when mazalo gover, the spiritual source of a person's soul shines with power. When we say "the spiritual source of a person's soul," we mean something more than our conscious thought powers. We have our thoughts and our feelings. And then we possess an inner spiritual core from which those thoughts and feelings spring forth. This spiritual core is the mazal that shines powerfully on a person's birthday.

Since a person's mazal shines powerfully on that day, he should use its influence to focus on his individual mission and align all the particular elements of his life with it. As the Previous Rebbe taught, on a birthday a person should spend time in solitude, thinking over the purpose of his life, correcting those matters that need to be amended, and making resolutions with regard to his conduct in the future.

The Rebbe's birthday is not merely a personal event, affecting him alone. On the contrary, the very name Rebbe is an acronym for the Hebrew words rosh bnei Yisrael, "head of the Jewish people." The head contains the nerve center for the entire body, allowing all its diverse organs and limbs to function together as a single whole. Similarly, a Rebbe is a comprehensive soul whose life is lived in consciousness of others and whose efforts are devoted to tightening the connection between them. As such, the Rebbe's birthday is a day which impacts us all.

What is the Rebbe's mazal and where is it directed? In one of his letters, he writes: "From the days I began going to cheder (school) and perhaps even before then, I had a vision of the ultimate Redemption." From his earliest childhood, and in every successive phase of life, the Rebbe devoted his efforts to creating a spiritual climate that will make Moshiach's coming a reality.

On a day when "the spiritual source of his soul shines powerfully," each one of us should think of the way he can help shoulder and advance this mission. The breakthroughs in sciences and communication of our era have created the backdrop for the Redemption. Its is our responsibility to create the conceptual foreground and make the values and principles that will characterize the Redemption factors that influence our lives at present. Anticipating the Redemption in this manner will precipitate its unfolding as actual reality.