Union-Tribune Staff Writer
2:00 a.m. January 28, 2009
SAN DIEGO —
The San Diego City Council cleared the way yesterday for an expansion of the Chabad Educational Campus in Scripps Miramar Ranch.
Plans for the campus, at 10785 Pomerado Road, include a high school and college that will require new buildings, sports facilities and 280 housing units for students and faculty.
Chabad's permit allows an enrollment of up to 800 students.
More than 100 people appeared before the council to support the project; no one spoke in opposition. Academy officials worked with the local planning group for five years to come up with a plan that the community could accept.
Showing posts with label Chabad Day School. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chabad Day School. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Sunday, January 11, 2009
A 770 Miracle: Rocket Hit Courtyard of Empty Chabad School
IsraelNN.com
A Grad rocket exploded in the courtyard of a Chabad school in Be'er Sheva Sunday morning. "It was a revealed miracle that classes had not been renewed," Chabad principal Simcha Weitzman said.
The long-range missile hit around 7:30 a.m., when dozens of students usually are milling around in the educational facility in the 'Capital of the Negev.' "There usually are boys and girls arriving at school with their parents, or on buses at this hour," she added. "I have no doubt that the merits of the Rebbe protected us," the principal said, referring to the late Chabad-Lubavitch spiritual leader Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
Many schools in Be'er Sheva, particularly those with sheltered areas and whose students are preparing for matriculation exams, re-opened Sunday morning with the permission of the Home Front Command. Many others, including Chabad, remained closed.
By Sunday night, Hamas and allied terrorists had fired 24 rockets at southern Israel in the 16th day of the war. One long-range rocket hit an empty kindergarten in Ashdod, causing damage to the building.
Another school, located in Sderot, nearly sustained a direct hit from a Kassam rocket.
A Grad rocket exploded in the courtyard of a Chabad school in Be'er Sheva Sunday morning. "It was a revealed miracle that classes had not been renewed," Chabad principal Simcha Weitzman said.
The long-range missile hit around 7:30 a.m., when dozens of students usually are milling around in the educational facility in the 'Capital of the Negev.' "There usually are boys and girls arriving at school with their parents, or on buses at this hour," she added. "I have no doubt that the merits of the Rebbe protected us," the principal said, referring to the late Chabad-Lubavitch spiritual leader Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
Many schools in Be'er Sheva, particularly those with sheltered areas and whose students are preparing for matriculation exams, re-opened Sunday morning with the permission of the Home Front Command. Many others, including Chabad, remained closed.
By Sunday night, Hamas and allied terrorists had fired 24 rockets at southern Israel in the 16th day of the war. One long-range rocket hit an empty kindergarten in Ashdod, causing damage to the building.
Another school, located in Sderot, nearly sustained a direct hit from a Kassam rocket.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Jewish life flourishes where Kazakh gulag once stood
KARAGANDA, Kazakhstan (JTA) -- Liza Luchanskiy was born to a poor, Yiddish-speaking family in Berdichev, the historic, heavily Jewish city deep in the Pale of Settlement. Lured by Soviet promises of equality, she became a communist true believer, working her way up to serve on a committee in Siberia that targeted so-called enemies of the revolution.
But her zeal wasn’t enough to save her or her similarly devoted husband, Josef.
They were swept up during the frenzy of Stalin’s Great Terror, from 1937 to 1939. Josef was shot by a firing squad in 1938, and Liza was exiled by cattle car to Karaganda.
Luchanskiy was sentenced to eight years in the vast network of forced-labor camps here, on the southern edge of Stalin’s fearsome gulag. Enduring extreme cold, hunger and exhaustion, which afflicted her health ever after, Luchanskiy never let go of her faith in communism, her grandson says.
“She never blamed the system, only Stalin,” says Vilen Molotov-Luchanskiy, an internist who today heads the Jewish Cultural Center in Karaganda.
As many as 1.2 million Soviet citizens -- spanning practically all the myriad ethnic groups nationwide -- were worked to death or near death in the 75 camps that comprised Karaganda. Among them were many Jews, including many rabbis.
“There is no separate story of Jews here in Stalin’s gulag,” offers Mikhail Kreichman, who teaches Jewish history and tradition in Astana. “Many, many other nations suffered in there.”
The heart of the Karaganda slave labor machine was the railroad hub of Karaganda city, in central Kazakhstan. Once the camps were closed and emptied, it became a virtual “city of ex-convicts.”
Visiting the city today, remnants of that era can be felt still in the collective psyche and in the identity of the Jews that remain, making the Karagandan community among the more unique in the Diaspora. It may be the least assimilated Jewish community in Kazakhstan, which has some 15,000 to 20,000 Jews, because so many of the Jews here are children or grandchildren of rabbis and other traditional Jews sent to the Karaganda labor camps.
The purges of the late 1930s injected large numbers of Jews to Kazakhstan. Before that, the few Jews here either were descendants of Russian Jewish soldiers who settled in the area in the 19th century or fragments of Silk Road Bukharan Jews.
Jewish life pulsates today in Karaganda, which has 1,500 registered Jews. Chabad-Lubavitch opened its second day school in Kazakhstan here. There is a rabbi in town. The community hosts an annual festival for Jewish youth that draws some 200 participants from around the region. Last Purim, some Jews from Karaganda took a four-hour bus ride to the Kazakh capital Astana to celebrate the holiday at a synagogue there.
But the Jews here are best known for the painful history of Karaganda. When local Jews travel to other ex-Soviet republics, the mere mention of their hometown -- now Kazakhstan’s third-largest city -- typically elicits the same reaction.
“ ‘Your family was in this camp?’ That’s what they know about Karaganda,” says Bela Kamenetskaya, the head of the local Hesed welfare office. “If they come here, they expect it to look like Auschwitz. They’re surprised to see we have streets, city squares and an airport.”
Jews here say they share a special bond with their Karaganda neighbors because they all suffered together.
“The pain that every family suffered unites us even today,” says David Bitsadze, a taxi driver.
Karaganda has a lone monument to its victims nestled within a modest park. Among the trees is a striking wooden memorial, part of it carved with a cross, an Islamic crescent and a Star of David. Another part reveals tormented faces covered in barbed wire. A marble slab reads, “This soil is soaked with blood, covered by bones of the dead.”
The gulag kicked into high gear after World War II, as Moscow exploited its bottomless slave labor to rebuild a ravaged country. The region was home to four special camps renowned for brutality, as highlighted in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s landmark expose “The Gulag Archipelago.”
Stalin’s prisoners, convicted as “enemies of the people,” were shipped to the hinterlands, typically for eight to 10 years, to toil in mines, factories or farming. In Karaganda, they extracted coal and copper, with some agriculture. Most died of starvation, disease or the cold.
One camp here was designated for the Wives of Traitors of the Motherland, housing women and their children after the husbands were shot. Still others were deported here as “internal exiles,” restricted to living in certain villages.
In a rare sign of resistance, rebellions erupted in late 1952, and again shortly after Stalin’s death in 1953. The next year the camps were shuttered.
Free to go, those who had family waiting for them back home left. Those who didn’t stayed. In some cases their laid-off jailers lived nearby.
Meanwhile, with the camps abolished, Karaganda turned boomtown. The 1960s saw a new wave of Jews: young professionals or recent graduates either ordered to the Soviet empire’s outer reaches to fill a need, or seeking work opportunities in the “virgin soil” of Kazakhstan.
Jewish professors were instrumental in creating Karaganda’s medical school, which became one of the Soviet Union’s finest, says local Jewish activist Alexander Abramovich.
“They knew they wouldn’t be deported from here,” Abramovich says with a smile.
Today, little commemorates Karaganda’s notorious past beyond the sleepy village of Dolinka, the administrative center of the camp network, 30 miles southwest of the city.
On one side of the road to Dolinka is a former labor camp, recognizable by its watchtower -- conveniently it’s been converted into a prison for garden-variety criminals. On the other side is a village of yellow sandstone homes built exclusively for officers who ruled the gulag.
In Dolinka itself, abandoned barracks that once housed women are crumbling from age and neglect. The commander’s villa is inhabited, though, with two satellite dishes planted in the front yard. A memorial museum sees a trickle of somber visitors, many of whom have come to learn about the fate of loved ones.
Moscow continues to withhold many files, says museum director Marina Klyshnikova, perhaps because of sensitivity over the perpetrators.
“Some of them are still alive,” she says.
Molotov-Luchanskiy says his grandmother spoke daily about her earlier life until she died in 1980 at age 81. Speaking Yiddish, she would tell him tales of the camp and of his grandfather.
“She wanted me to know that life wasn’t so simple, or so easy,” Molotov-Luchanskiy says.
“Hers was actually a story of a happy woman," he adds. "In life she had a great purpose, a great love and great suffering. She thought it was everything an ordinary Jewish girl could want.”
But her zeal wasn’t enough to save her or her similarly devoted husband, Josef.
They were swept up during the frenzy of Stalin’s Great Terror, from 1937 to 1939. Josef was shot by a firing squad in 1938, and Liza was exiled by cattle car to Karaganda.
Luchanskiy was sentenced to eight years in the vast network of forced-labor camps here, on the southern edge of Stalin’s fearsome gulag. Enduring extreme cold, hunger and exhaustion, which afflicted her health ever after, Luchanskiy never let go of her faith in communism, her grandson says.
“She never blamed the system, only Stalin,” says Vilen Molotov-Luchanskiy, an internist who today heads the Jewish Cultural Center in Karaganda.
As many as 1.2 million Soviet citizens -- spanning practically all the myriad ethnic groups nationwide -- were worked to death or near death in the 75 camps that comprised Karaganda. Among them were many Jews, including many rabbis.
“There is no separate story of Jews here in Stalin’s gulag,” offers Mikhail Kreichman, who teaches Jewish history and tradition in Astana. “Many, many other nations suffered in there.”
The heart of the Karaganda slave labor machine was the railroad hub of Karaganda city, in central Kazakhstan. Once the camps were closed and emptied, it became a virtual “city of ex-convicts.”
Visiting the city today, remnants of that era can be felt still in the collective psyche and in the identity of the Jews that remain, making the Karagandan community among the more unique in the Diaspora. It may be the least assimilated Jewish community in Kazakhstan, which has some 15,000 to 20,000 Jews, because so many of the Jews here are children or grandchildren of rabbis and other traditional Jews sent to the Karaganda labor camps.
The purges of the late 1930s injected large numbers of Jews to Kazakhstan. Before that, the few Jews here either were descendants of Russian Jewish soldiers who settled in the area in the 19th century or fragments of Silk Road Bukharan Jews.
Jewish life pulsates today in Karaganda, which has 1,500 registered Jews. Chabad-Lubavitch opened its second day school in Kazakhstan here. There is a rabbi in town. The community hosts an annual festival for Jewish youth that draws some 200 participants from around the region. Last Purim, some Jews from Karaganda took a four-hour bus ride to the Kazakh capital Astana to celebrate the holiday at a synagogue there.
But the Jews here are best known for the painful history of Karaganda. When local Jews travel to other ex-Soviet republics, the mere mention of their hometown -- now Kazakhstan’s third-largest city -- typically elicits the same reaction.
“ ‘Your family was in this camp?’ That’s what they know about Karaganda,” says Bela Kamenetskaya, the head of the local Hesed welfare office. “If they come here, they expect it to look like Auschwitz. They’re surprised to see we have streets, city squares and an airport.”
Jews here say they share a special bond with their Karaganda neighbors because they all suffered together.
“The pain that every family suffered unites us even today,” says David Bitsadze, a taxi driver.
Karaganda has a lone monument to its victims nestled within a modest park. Among the trees is a striking wooden memorial, part of it carved with a cross, an Islamic crescent and a Star of David. Another part reveals tormented faces covered in barbed wire. A marble slab reads, “This soil is soaked with blood, covered by bones of the dead.”
The gulag kicked into high gear after World War II, as Moscow exploited its bottomless slave labor to rebuild a ravaged country. The region was home to four special camps renowned for brutality, as highlighted in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s landmark expose “The Gulag Archipelago.”
Stalin’s prisoners, convicted as “enemies of the people,” were shipped to the hinterlands, typically for eight to 10 years, to toil in mines, factories or farming. In Karaganda, they extracted coal and copper, with some agriculture. Most died of starvation, disease or the cold.
One camp here was designated for the Wives of Traitors of the Motherland, housing women and their children after the husbands were shot. Still others were deported here as “internal exiles,” restricted to living in certain villages.
In a rare sign of resistance, rebellions erupted in late 1952, and again shortly after Stalin’s death in 1953. The next year the camps were shuttered.
Free to go, those who had family waiting for them back home left. Those who didn’t stayed. In some cases their laid-off jailers lived nearby.
Meanwhile, with the camps abolished, Karaganda turned boomtown. The 1960s saw a new wave of Jews: young professionals or recent graduates either ordered to the Soviet empire’s outer reaches to fill a need, or seeking work opportunities in the “virgin soil” of Kazakhstan.
Jewish professors were instrumental in creating Karaganda’s medical school, which became one of the Soviet Union’s finest, says local Jewish activist Alexander Abramovich.
“They knew they wouldn’t be deported from here,” Abramovich says with a smile.
Today, little commemorates Karaganda’s notorious past beyond the sleepy village of Dolinka, the administrative center of the camp network, 30 miles southwest of the city.
On one side of the road to Dolinka is a former labor camp, recognizable by its watchtower -- conveniently it’s been converted into a prison for garden-variety criminals. On the other side is a village of yellow sandstone homes built exclusively for officers who ruled the gulag.
In Dolinka itself, abandoned barracks that once housed women are crumbling from age and neglect. The commander’s villa is inhabited, though, with two satellite dishes planted in the front yard. A memorial museum sees a trickle of somber visitors, many of whom have come to learn about the fate of loved ones.
Moscow continues to withhold many files, says museum director Marina Klyshnikova, perhaps because of sensitivity over the perpetrators.
“Some of them are still alive,” she says.
Molotov-Luchanskiy says his grandmother spoke daily about her earlier life until she died in 1980 at age 81. Speaking Yiddish, she would tell him tales of the camp and of his grandfather.
“She wanted me to know that life wasn’t so simple, or so easy,” Molotov-Luchanskiy says.
“Hers was actually a story of a happy woman," he adds. "In life she had a great purpose, a great love and great suffering. She thought it was everything an ordinary Jewish girl could want.”
Monday, December 08, 2008
Chabad finds NIMBY resistance to new schools, even in 'Kosher District'
A plan by the Chabad group to build a new school, condos, bathhouse and stores is one of several Westside and Valley projects meeting increasing resistance from neighbors, many of them fellow Jews.
By Tami Abdollah
December 7, 2008
On most weekdays, young boys in yarmulkes can be seen hanging out with friends in front of the new kosher Subway sandwich shop, while Orthodox women in modest dress stroll past Judaica stores and synagogues along Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles.
Dubbed the "Kosher District" by some planners, this roughly 12-block stretch near Robertson Boulevard has exploded in recent years with restaurants, shops and religious institutions aimed at serving the neighborhood's growing Jewish population.
But growth has also spurred tensions within the community.
Neighbors are threatening legal action against Chabad, an Orthodox Jewish outreach organization whose Hebrew acronym stands for wisdom, understanding and knowledge, over its proposal to construct a new girls school, condos, a ritual bathhouse and retail stores between Wetherly and Crest drives.
Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin, the head of Chabad of California, said his group has been battling neighborhood opposition in one form or another across the region for the last 40 years. But these days much of the opposition comes from its own Jewish neighbors.
"Oy vey, oy vey, is what they say," said Cunin, describing neighborhood concerns with a common Yiddish expression. "That's the song."
Earlier this year, a Chabad preschool in Pacific Palisades was forced to move from its location at Temescal Gateway Park after complaints from neighbors and the Santa Monica Mountain Conservancy.
In Brentwood, a Chabad house is being constructed on Bundy Drive off San Vicente Boulevard despite concerns in the residential neighborhood that it will ultimately be used as a house of worship, violating zoning regulations and inviting a constant stream of visitors.
A development project in Valley Village north of Studio City has met with stiff opposition from neighbors over the height of the project and inadequate parking. And on Pico Boulevardin West Los Angeles, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, another Jewish organization, has become embroiled in a dispute with its mostly Jewish neighbors over its expansion plans for the Museum of Tolerance, a Holocaust memorial.
All of the projects are in Westside or San Fernando Valley neighborhoods prone to overdevelopment, traffic and parking problems.
But Lorrie Stone, a Pico Boulevard neighborhood spokeswoman who lives near the latest proposed Chabad project, thinks enough is enough.
"It's like, give us a break, there's no public transportation here, there's no parking here, and now you just keep making it worse," Stone said. "None of us are opposed to Chabad . . . Chabad is a wonderful organization; they do unbelievable things. They just can't do it all right here."
For Cunin, plans for a massive residential and retail project on Pico Boulevard between Wetherly and Crest Drives represent a major part of his grand vision of Chabad facilities in West Los Angeles. The new development, which would include a new girls high school, would be built directly across the street from a recently completed elementary and middle school for girls.
The existing building is an imposing neo-Gothic brick structure and one reason why the design for its proposed sister building is more sleek and colorful. But Stone said the area is already overbuilt and that residents worry about inadequate parking for another large structure.
"It's too tall, it's too dense, and there aren't enough parking spots," she said. "They have to park somewhere, and we know they'll end up on our block, just like the other building."
City planners are reviewing the project. But Stone and other neighborhood representatives have voiced strong opposition to the development, which they say would threaten their quality of life.
"Maybe all of us who live on the Westside are feeling the same thing," Stone said. "We don't want just uncontrolled growth. We understand it has to grow; we understand things have to be developed but just not completely uncontrolled. And that's exactly what every single one of these fights is about."
On a recent weekday, dressed in a long black coat, white shirt and black skullcap, Cunin stood in a conference room in the Bais Chaya Mushka School, completed about four years ago, and spoke proudly of Chabad's accomplishments.
"We're not dreamers, we're doers," he said. "Look what we've done." He gestured at the new school building he stood in: three stories of sparkling hallways, airy classrooms, computer rooms with sleek flat-screens and a large gymnasium.
"You should have seen what . . . this building looked like before," Cunin said. "They were studying in closets . . . like broken down shanties."
The project site across the street is currently occupied by four nondescript buildings that once held a jewelry manufacturer, a Jewish boys high school and apartment buildings. One of the aging structures now provides classroom space for Chabad's girls school.
"We've tried very hard to keep up the building," said Rabbi Danny Yiftach, a school administrator. "It's like an old person. If you fix one thing, the next thing is wrong; if you fix another thing, another thing is wrong."
Plans for the new girls high school call for a 108,000-square-foot building on a parcel nearly one-fourth that size. The structure would stand 80 feet high -- almost twice the maximum 45-foot height allowed under current zoning -- with two levels of underground parking, with space for 71 vehicles instead of the required 168.
"There is no zoning in this city to accommodate an institution," said Ben Reznik, an attorney for Chabad who has worked many land-use cases on the Westside. "The zone does not allow enough building height. If we had to build this school within limits of what the zoning was, you would not have any art classes, computer classes; you'd be literally squishing kids into small rooms. It would be a qualitative disaster."
But Daniel Fink, a member of the neighborhood council's board, said the new building would push the neighborhood over the edge.
"It would just damage beyond repair the residential neighborhood immediately to the north," Fink said. "The law is very specific, and they want an exemption . . . My personal goal is to preserve the quality of residential life . . . because if we don't have nice places to live, the rest of it isn't worth it."
The South Robertson Neighborhoods Council has held several meetings on the proposed development. In an August meeting its board members voted unanimously against the project, but the city will make the final decision.
For now city planners are working on a draft environmental impact report. Once they finish, the public will have a 45-day comment period.
"We are just going to lie the process out," Cunin said. "It's America. There's hearings. There's this, there's that. We'll just go with the flow. We've hired the best engineers, the best traffic people; we've done everything the right way."
Abdollah is a Times staff writer.
By Tami Abdollah
December 7, 2008
On most weekdays, young boys in yarmulkes can be seen hanging out with friends in front of the new kosher Subway sandwich shop, while Orthodox women in modest dress stroll past Judaica stores and synagogues along Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles.
Dubbed the "Kosher District" by some planners, this roughly 12-block stretch near Robertson Boulevard has exploded in recent years with restaurants, shops and religious institutions aimed at serving the neighborhood's growing Jewish population.
But growth has also spurred tensions within the community.
Neighbors are threatening legal action against Chabad, an Orthodox Jewish outreach organization whose Hebrew acronym stands for wisdom, understanding and knowledge, over its proposal to construct a new girls school, condos, a ritual bathhouse and retail stores between Wetherly and Crest drives.
Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin, the head of Chabad of California, said his group has been battling neighborhood opposition in one form or another across the region for the last 40 years. But these days much of the opposition comes from its own Jewish neighbors.
"Oy vey, oy vey, is what they say," said Cunin, describing neighborhood concerns with a common Yiddish expression. "That's the song."
Earlier this year, a Chabad preschool in Pacific Palisades was forced to move from its location at Temescal Gateway Park after complaints from neighbors and the Santa Monica Mountain Conservancy.
In Brentwood, a Chabad house is being constructed on Bundy Drive off San Vicente Boulevard despite concerns in the residential neighborhood that it will ultimately be used as a house of worship, violating zoning regulations and inviting a constant stream of visitors.
A development project in Valley Village north of Studio City has met with stiff opposition from neighbors over the height of the project and inadequate parking. And on Pico Boulevardin West Los Angeles, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, another Jewish organization, has become embroiled in a dispute with its mostly Jewish neighbors over its expansion plans for the Museum of Tolerance, a Holocaust memorial.
All of the projects are in Westside or San Fernando Valley neighborhoods prone to overdevelopment, traffic and parking problems.
But Lorrie Stone, a Pico Boulevard neighborhood spokeswoman who lives near the latest proposed Chabad project, thinks enough is enough.
"It's like, give us a break, there's no public transportation here, there's no parking here, and now you just keep making it worse," Stone said. "None of us are opposed to Chabad . . . Chabad is a wonderful organization; they do unbelievable things. They just can't do it all right here."
For Cunin, plans for a massive residential and retail project on Pico Boulevard between Wetherly and Crest Drives represent a major part of his grand vision of Chabad facilities in West Los Angeles. The new development, which would include a new girls high school, would be built directly across the street from a recently completed elementary and middle school for girls.
The existing building is an imposing neo-Gothic brick structure and one reason why the design for its proposed sister building is more sleek and colorful. But Stone said the area is already overbuilt and that residents worry about inadequate parking for another large structure.
"It's too tall, it's too dense, and there aren't enough parking spots," she said. "They have to park somewhere, and we know they'll end up on our block, just like the other building."
City planners are reviewing the project. But Stone and other neighborhood representatives have voiced strong opposition to the development, which they say would threaten their quality of life.
"Maybe all of us who live on the Westside are feeling the same thing," Stone said. "We don't want just uncontrolled growth. We understand it has to grow; we understand things have to be developed but just not completely uncontrolled. And that's exactly what every single one of these fights is about."
On a recent weekday, dressed in a long black coat, white shirt and black skullcap, Cunin stood in a conference room in the Bais Chaya Mushka School, completed about four years ago, and spoke proudly of Chabad's accomplishments.
"We're not dreamers, we're doers," he said. "Look what we've done." He gestured at the new school building he stood in: three stories of sparkling hallways, airy classrooms, computer rooms with sleek flat-screens and a large gymnasium.
"You should have seen what . . . this building looked like before," Cunin said. "They were studying in closets . . . like broken down shanties."
The project site across the street is currently occupied by four nondescript buildings that once held a jewelry manufacturer, a Jewish boys high school and apartment buildings. One of the aging structures now provides classroom space for Chabad's girls school.
"We've tried very hard to keep up the building," said Rabbi Danny Yiftach, a school administrator. "It's like an old person. If you fix one thing, the next thing is wrong; if you fix another thing, another thing is wrong."
Plans for the new girls high school call for a 108,000-square-foot building on a parcel nearly one-fourth that size. The structure would stand 80 feet high -- almost twice the maximum 45-foot height allowed under current zoning -- with two levels of underground parking, with space for 71 vehicles instead of the required 168.
"There is no zoning in this city to accommodate an institution," said Ben Reznik, an attorney for Chabad who has worked many land-use cases on the Westside. "The zone does not allow enough building height. If we had to build this school within limits of what the zoning was, you would not have any art classes, computer classes; you'd be literally squishing kids into small rooms. It would be a qualitative disaster."
But Daniel Fink, a member of the neighborhood council's board, said the new building would push the neighborhood over the edge.
"It would just damage beyond repair the residential neighborhood immediately to the north," Fink said. "The law is very specific, and they want an exemption . . . My personal goal is to preserve the quality of residential life . . . because if we don't have nice places to live, the rest of it isn't worth it."
The South Robertson Neighborhoods Council has held several meetings on the proposed development. In an August meeting its board members voted unanimously against the project, but the city will make the final decision.
For now city planners are working on a draft environmental impact report. Once they finish, the public will have a 45-day comment period.
"We are just going to lie the process out," Cunin said. "It's America. There's hearings. There's this, there's that. We'll just go with the flow. We've hired the best engineers, the best traffic people; we've done everything the right way."
Abdollah is a Times staff writer.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Israel sends aid to China
Alison Klayman
Israel is sending dozens of tons of aid supplies to China to provide relief for the earthquake there that killed tens of thousands. Two Israelis injured in the quake said they were touched by Chinese rescue efforts.
Published: 05/26/2008
BEIJING (JTA) – In a gesture of support, one of the world’s smallest countries is sending aid to the world’s most populous nation in the form of $1.5 million worth of equipment for earthquake relief.
The first three tons of Israeli supplies to earthquake-ravaged China included sleeping bags, blankets and personal water purification units. The supplies arrived in China May 22 on an El Al flight to Beijing.
Israel will send the remaining 70-90 tons of equipment on a cargo plane directly to the city of Chengdu in the coming days. The Israeli government is working from a list of needs drawn up by the Chinese government.
Israelis and Jews in China are also helping with the relief effort in Sichuan province.
Dini's kosher restaurant in Beijing is donating 10 percent of this month's sales toward the earthquake relief effort.
The children of the Chabad-run day school in Beijing, Ganeinu, assembled 180 relief kits with supplies such as toothbrushes as well as handmade drawings and notes.
The president of Chabad's Shanghai Jewish community, Maurice Ohana, is working on plans to have a Jewish-sponsored rebuilding of a devastated school in Sichuan.
Dani Yaacobi, an Israeli living in Chengdu, says the city's Israelis are collecting and buying supplies, and delivering them to areas where newly homeless people are arriving from outside the city. They also are helping build shelters.
The death toll from the May 12 earthquake, which registered 7.8 on the Richter scale, is more than 65,000. It is expected to rise above 80,000.
Besides the larger gift of supplies, the Israeli government also will give an additional $10,000 directly to the Hongkou area.
Some of those involved in the relief effort said they were touched by the story of the two Israeli students injured near the quake’s epicenter and rescued through grass-roots efforts by Israelis and Chinese after a two-day search.
Anat Bilu and Maayan Segev, both in their mid-20s, were on a backpacking vacation. Both were studying Chinese medicine in Chengdu through an exchange program with Israel's Reidman College of Complementary Medicine.
Just before the earthquake hit, they were relaxing over lunch in a small cafe inside the Hongkou nature reserve in Dujiangyan. When the ground began shaking, the two women ran outside. Just as they reached a low wall barrier around the cafe, the cafe collapsed. They were struck by the falling rubble and their bodies smashed into the barrier.
Segev took the impact on her jaw, while Bilu suffered severe damage to fingers on her left hand.
Helped by several Chinese people along the way, the women found temporary shelter in the mountain village of Hongkou. Like many Chinese in this remote location, the two Israelis did not realize the full scale of the disaster.
Some of the Chinese translating for and helping the women had just lost their own homes and families.
Spearheaded by a friend of the students, Yael Arnon, Israelis in Chengdu formed a search party headquartered in an apartment. Arnon told Israel Army Radio that because the missing students were on the phone moments before the earthquake struck, she knew approximately where to find them. She assumed that communication difficulties were the only reason they had not called.
The Israeli Embassy in Beijing shared the same assumption. Consul General Alon Shoham, a press officer and a Chinese staffer boarded one of the first flights to Chengdu two days after the earthquake.
A Chinese construction magnate named Zhang was leading the rescue efforts in Sichuan. When the Israelis arrived in Chengdu, Zhang offered them three of his cars and two drivers – Zhang himself drove the third car -- for the search effort.
By then, Segev and Bilu had decided to leave Hongkou and spent more than six hours descending to the main road. Eventually they crossed paths with two Israelis from the rescue party. That evening, the students reached the embassy staff and boarded an ambulance, arriving that night at an inundated Chengdu hospital.
"In Israel we know about crisis events with lots of casualties," said the Israeli Embassy spokesman who traveled with Shoham, Guy Kivetz. "The medical teams were really angels. They acted bravely, quietly and professionally."
Segev was operated on immediately in Chengdu to repair multiple fractures to her jaw. Bilu underwent surgery in Israel to repair nerve damage to her fingers.
"It was very Israeli to independently organize their own search party," Kivetz told JTA. "But from the story of the girls' rescue we learn that we are the same, that as much as Israelis do for each other, so do the Chinese."
Israel is sending dozens of tons of aid supplies to China to provide relief for the earthquake there that killed tens of thousands. Two Israelis injured in the quake said they were touched by Chinese rescue efforts.
Published: 05/26/2008
BEIJING (JTA) – In a gesture of support, one of the world’s smallest countries is sending aid to the world’s most populous nation in the form of $1.5 million worth of equipment for earthquake relief.
The first three tons of Israeli supplies to earthquake-ravaged China included sleeping bags, blankets and personal water purification units. The supplies arrived in China May 22 on an El Al flight to Beijing.
Israel will send the remaining 70-90 tons of equipment on a cargo plane directly to the city of Chengdu in the coming days. The Israeli government is working from a list of needs drawn up by the Chinese government.
Israelis and Jews in China are also helping with the relief effort in Sichuan province.
Dini's kosher restaurant in Beijing is donating 10 percent of this month's sales toward the earthquake relief effort.
The children of the Chabad-run day school in Beijing, Ganeinu, assembled 180 relief kits with supplies such as toothbrushes as well as handmade drawings and notes.
The president of Chabad's Shanghai Jewish community, Maurice Ohana, is working on plans to have a Jewish-sponsored rebuilding of a devastated school in Sichuan.
Dani Yaacobi, an Israeli living in Chengdu, says the city's Israelis are collecting and buying supplies, and delivering them to areas where newly homeless people are arriving from outside the city. They also are helping build shelters.
The death toll from the May 12 earthquake, which registered 7.8 on the Richter scale, is more than 65,000. It is expected to rise above 80,000.
Besides the larger gift of supplies, the Israeli government also will give an additional $10,000 directly to the Hongkou area.
Some of those involved in the relief effort said they were touched by the story of the two Israeli students injured near the quake’s epicenter and rescued through grass-roots efforts by Israelis and Chinese after a two-day search.
Anat Bilu and Maayan Segev, both in their mid-20s, were on a backpacking vacation. Both were studying Chinese medicine in Chengdu through an exchange program with Israel's Reidman College of Complementary Medicine.
Just before the earthquake hit, they were relaxing over lunch in a small cafe inside the Hongkou nature reserve in Dujiangyan. When the ground began shaking, the two women ran outside. Just as they reached a low wall barrier around the cafe, the cafe collapsed. They were struck by the falling rubble and their bodies smashed into the barrier.
Segev took the impact on her jaw, while Bilu suffered severe damage to fingers on her left hand.
Helped by several Chinese people along the way, the women found temporary shelter in the mountain village of Hongkou. Like many Chinese in this remote location, the two Israelis did not realize the full scale of the disaster.
Some of the Chinese translating for and helping the women had just lost their own homes and families.
Spearheaded by a friend of the students, Yael Arnon, Israelis in Chengdu formed a search party headquartered in an apartment. Arnon told Israel Army Radio that because the missing students were on the phone moments before the earthquake struck, she knew approximately where to find them. She assumed that communication difficulties were the only reason they had not called.
The Israeli Embassy in Beijing shared the same assumption. Consul General Alon Shoham, a press officer and a Chinese staffer boarded one of the first flights to Chengdu two days after the earthquake.
A Chinese construction magnate named Zhang was leading the rescue efforts in Sichuan. When the Israelis arrived in Chengdu, Zhang offered them three of his cars and two drivers – Zhang himself drove the third car -- for the search effort.
By then, Segev and Bilu had decided to leave Hongkou and spent more than six hours descending to the main road. Eventually they crossed paths with two Israelis from the rescue party. That evening, the students reached the embassy staff and boarded an ambulance, arriving that night at an inundated Chengdu hospital.
"In Israel we know about crisis events with lots of casualties," said the Israeli Embassy spokesman who traveled with Shoham, Guy Kivetz. "The medical teams were really angels. They acted bravely, quietly and professionally."
Segev was operated on immediately in Chengdu to repair multiple fractures to her jaw. Bilu underwent surgery in Israel to repair nerve damage to her fingers.
"It was very Israeli to independently organize their own search party," Kivetz told JTA. "But from the story of the girls' rescue we learn that we are the same, that as much as Israelis do for each other, so do the Chinese."
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