Fest aims to take sting out of Hanukkah party crash
BY JENNIFER BARRIOS AND MICHAEL FRAZIER
December 30, 2008
At first, Dan Smith wasn't sure he wanted to bring his toddler, Judah, to another Hanukkah party.
Smith, 31, of Far Rockaway, said he, his wife, and their two children had been at Chabad's Chanukah Wonderland party in Woodmere on Thursday when a BMW sport utility vehicle crashed into the building. The SUV drove over the spot where, seconds before, Smith's son had stood.
But Smith and his family decided to venture out to another Hanukkah party yesterday, held just blocks away at the Chabad Center of the Five Towns in Cedarhurst.
"I definitely think it's a good idea," Smith said, as Judah, 2, played happily nearby. "Pick up and carry on - it's a good idea to host an ending party."
The mood was joyous amid the dreidel-making, face-painting and two tables filled with toys reserved for children who had witnessed the accident.
Children molded chanukiot - nine-branched Hanukkah menorahs - out of clay, while others danced to traditional Hanukkah music performed by live musicians.
This celebration was a distinctly different experience for Smith, who said he was among the men who had lifted the BMW after it came to a halt inside the Chanukah Wonderland building. Smith said he pulled two men out from under the car, one able to crawl, but the other limp and bloodied. Fourteen adults and children ended up in the hospital.
Smith remains shaken but said, "You have to be strong for the kids."
Yesterday created happy memories to counteract last week's, said Rabbi Zalman Wolowik, director of the Chabad center. "We decided to hold it so that children should have positive memories of Hanukkah," he said.
Police have determined that Thursday's crash was caused when a floor mat interfered with the gas and brake pedals in Theodore Saretsky's vehicle. Saretsky, 76, of Atlantic Beach, has not responded to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, officials at the Town of Hempstead said that the Chanukah Wonderland gathering violated the town's public assembly law, and that fines could be levied against the owners of the building. Tax records show the owners to be Philip and Norma Baker.
Ray Schwarz, Hempstead inspections supervisor, said the building is zoned for general retail, not public assembly, and a special permit is required for more than 13 seats associated with dining. More than 100 people were at the party at the time of the crash.
A notice of violation was posted on the building Friday. A second notice was posted yesterday, requiring the building's owner to comply with the law.
Schwarz said the building did not have the required amount of parking to safely accommodate the event. The violation could result in a $350 fine against the Bakers, who could not be located last night.
Showing posts with label Police. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Police. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Friday, December 26, 2008
From the Archives: NYPD CHOSEN GUNS
Didja hear the one about the cop who walked into a doughnut shop and asked for a bagel and a shmear?
You will soon. The NYPD is adding 10 Orthodox Jews, including one woman, to their ranks. That's the largest Orthodox contingent ever in the department's latest cadet class.
When Ari Husarsky told his parents he wanted to be a cop, they were all verklempt.
"My mom flipped," the 24-year-old recalled as he stood outside the Police Academy on East 20th Street near Gramercy Park.
When the shock wore off and he had promised he would still keep kosher on meal breaks and, yes, in doughnut shops, his parents gave him their blessing.
"My mother was also against it for the obvious reasons," added Brighton Beach resident Max Silva, 28, a former caterer at Meisner's in Brooklyn. He said they thought it was just too dangerous.
"It was just one of those childhood dreams I never grew out of. Everybody was against it because nobody thinks of Jewish people as police officers," he said.
"I always wanted to be a cop, but my wife, Sharona, was against it," Silva added. "But I convinced her. It took her two years. She thinks it's a dangerous job. I was sick of my other job because there was no room to grow. I wanted a future."
The Police Department has welcomed the new recruits, who are excused from working after dusk on Fridays and on Saturdays and Jewish holidays.
"This class is going to be the ice breaker," cadet Shmuel Tenenbaum said proudly. "The next class is going to have 30 or 40."
He said he'd prefer not to work in an Orthodox area, especially his own Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights, where his dad owns a matzo factory.
"If you give a Jewish guy a ticket, it's very hard," he said, noting that he might be pressured to give preferential treatment. "And then people talk. They could make your life miserable."
Tenenbaum is fulfilling his childhood dream of becoming one of New York's Finest. He finally took the plunge after serving as an auxiliary cop for the Highway 2 unit.
And he doesn't think that wearing a yarmulke under his police cap will mean he's different from the others. "I just feel like a regular person. I don't stop and think my yarmulke is on."
Luckily, he's now got plenty of support from the Jewish community, especially his rabbi.
Single and 25, David Attali is hoping that being a cop will make him a babe magnet, or at least help him find a wife. "I think girls actually like it. Because how many Jewish cops are there?" he said.
But he worries that the low starting salary will make it tough keeping kosher.
"A burger at McDonald's costs two or three bucks, but at a kosher place it's $8," he lamented.
The Orthodox recruits graduate from the Police Academy in December along with 1,218 classmates.
Police recruit Jesse Cohen, 34, said his parents were convinced he was meshugana, but eventually they relented. "It's what's in your heart," he said.
Born in Uzbekistan, Amnum Pirov, 32, was a barber in Queens. He believes he's the first Bukharian Jewish officer. He's married, has three kids, attends yeshiva, and despite the dangers intrinsic to being a cop, wife Elana is proud of his new career.
While working as a manager at a kosher grocery store on Long Island, Chaim Goldgrab, 25, would often daydream about a new career. Since he couldn't decide whether he wanted to be a mortician or a cop, he decided to do both, and is also training as a funeral director.
His preference is saving lives rather than dealing with the dead. "I never fit the mold," he said.
Eleena Zazon, 23, who lives in suburban Monsey, is one of a handful of female Orthodox Jews on the force. She's looking forward to making her mark on the shooting range: "I've always been very adventurous and looking for excitement."
She said her friends "are a bit surprised" by her chutzpah and she's bucking strict tradition by wearing pants instead of long dresses, an Orthodox symbol of modesty. But her gear is manufactured specifically for women - so it's not in violation of Orthodox law.
The kosher cops have had to deal with a few wardrobe issues during training.
"Even today in the gym my yarmulke fell off when I was doing push-ups," said Eliezer Zinstein, 24, who signed up after working as a Talmud teacher for five years in Canarsie, Brooklyn.
The by-the-book cadet said that only once he had to seek a rabbinical resolution.
"I used to wear wool tzizit," he said, referring to the tassels worn by observant Jews at the corners of an undershirt-like garment.
His wise rabbi told him that he could wear lighter cotton during strenuous workouts. The tassels also are tucked into his pants.
Kalman Witriol, 23, was destined for the job. He's following in the footsteps of his brother, Joel Witriol, who was featured on The Post's front page in 2006 when he became the NYPD's first Hasidic cop.
"The NYPD is the most diverse city agency and the most diverse police department in America," said Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. "It's one of our great strengths."
rblau@nypost.com
You will soon. The NYPD is adding 10 Orthodox Jews, including one woman, to their ranks. That's the largest Orthodox contingent ever in the department's latest cadet class.
When Ari Husarsky told his parents he wanted to be a cop, they were all verklempt.
"My mom flipped," the 24-year-old recalled as he stood outside the Police Academy on East 20th Street near Gramercy Park.
When the shock wore off and he had promised he would still keep kosher on meal breaks and, yes, in doughnut shops, his parents gave him their blessing.
"My mother was also against it for the obvious reasons," added Brighton Beach resident Max Silva, 28, a former caterer at Meisner's in Brooklyn. He said they thought it was just too dangerous.
"It was just one of those childhood dreams I never grew out of. Everybody was against it because nobody thinks of Jewish people as police officers," he said.
"I always wanted to be a cop, but my wife, Sharona, was against it," Silva added. "But I convinced her. It took her two years. She thinks it's a dangerous job. I was sick of my other job because there was no room to grow. I wanted a future."
The Police Department has welcomed the new recruits, who are excused from working after dusk on Fridays and on Saturdays and Jewish holidays.
"This class is going to be the ice breaker," cadet Shmuel Tenenbaum said proudly. "The next class is going to have 30 or 40."
He said he'd prefer not to work in an Orthodox area, especially his own Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights, where his dad owns a matzo factory.
"If you give a Jewish guy a ticket, it's very hard," he said, noting that he might be pressured to give preferential treatment. "And then people talk. They could make your life miserable."
Tenenbaum is fulfilling his childhood dream of becoming one of New York's Finest. He finally took the plunge after serving as an auxiliary cop for the Highway 2 unit.
And he doesn't think that wearing a yarmulke under his police cap will mean he's different from the others. "I just feel like a regular person. I don't stop and think my yarmulke is on."
Luckily, he's now got plenty of support from the Jewish community, especially his rabbi.
Single and 25, David Attali is hoping that being a cop will make him a babe magnet, or at least help him find a wife. "I think girls actually like it. Because how many Jewish cops are there?" he said.
But he worries that the low starting salary will make it tough keeping kosher.
"A burger at McDonald's costs two or three bucks, but at a kosher place it's $8," he lamented.
The Orthodox recruits graduate from the Police Academy in December along with 1,218 classmates.
Police recruit Jesse Cohen, 34, said his parents were convinced he was meshugana, but eventually they relented. "It's what's in your heart," he said.
Born in Uzbekistan, Amnum Pirov, 32, was a barber in Queens. He believes he's the first Bukharian Jewish officer. He's married, has three kids, attends yeshiva, and despite the dangers intrinsic to being a cop, wife Elana is proud of his new career.
While working as a manager at a kosher grocery store on Long Island, Chaim Goldgrab, 25, would often daydream about a new career. Since he couldn't decide whether he wanted to be a mortician or a cop, he decided to do both, and is also training as a funeral director.
His preference is saving lives rather than dealing with the dead. "I never fit the mold," he said.
Eleena Zazon, 23, who lives in suburban Monsey, is one of a handful of female Orthodox Jews on the force. She's looking forward to making her mark on the shooting range: "I've always been very adventurous and looking for excitement."
She said her friends "are a bit surprised" by her chutzpah and she's bucking strict tradition by wearing pants instead of long dresses, an Orthodox symbol of modesty. But her gear is manufactured specifically for women - so it's not in violation of Orthodox law.
The kosher cops have had to deal with a few wardrobe issues during training.
"Even today in the gym my yarmulke fell off when I was doing push-ups," said Eliezer Zinstein, 24, who signed up after working as a Talmud teacher for five years in Canarsie, Brooklyn.
The by-the-book cadet said that only once he had to seek a rabbinical resolution.
"I used to wear wool tzizit," he said, referring to the tassels worn by observant Jews at the corners of an undershirt-like garment.
His wise rabbi told him that he could wear lighter cotton during strenuous workouts. The tassels also are tucked into his pants.
Kalman Witriol, 23, was destined for the job. He's following in the footsteps of his brother, Joel Witriol, who was featured on The Post's front page in 2006 when he became the NYPD's first Hasidic cop.
"The NYPD is the most diverse city agency and the most diverse police department in America," said Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. "It's one of our great strengths."
rblau@nypost.com
Monday, June 16, 2008
A Young Man From Omaha, Who May Perfectly Represent Brooklyn
Moments before Yosef Abrahamson, 16, accepted an award for the essay he’d written in a competition sponsored by the Police Athletic League, an officer approached him to complain about his fedora. The hat, an essential wardrobe item for Hasidic men, was gaudy, the policeman told him, and what’s with all these kids today and their nose rings and their attitudes. A second police officer, overhearing the conversation, came over to steer away the first one, who reappeared a few minutes later to apologize. He’d never seen a Hasidic Jew, he told Yosef.
A policeman working in New York who’d never seen a Hasidic Jew? What he probably meant, Yosef theorized, was “that he’d never seen a Hasidic Jew of color. I think he was probably making some assumptions there.”
Thanks to his Egyptian father, who left the family when Yosef was young, and his maternal grandfather, who was of African descent by way of Panama, Yosef looks African-American (though his family prefers to describe themselves as Jews of color, believing their culture to be exclusively Jewish). Yosef moved to Crown Heights only a year ago, until then having lived in Omaha, where his mother’s maternal family, German Jewish merchants, had settled several generations earlier.
If Yosef, who attends the yeshiva Darchai Menachem in Crown Heights, ever finds himself writing a college application essay, his advisers would have a hard time choosing which of his compelling story lines would most dazzle those college admissions officers: The story of growing up in the only Hasidic family in Omaha? Or the story of being the only student of color in his yeshiva? Or maybe the story of being the only Hasidic person of color in Omaha’s competitive ice skating circuit?
Despite the friendships he made while ice skating, a hobby his mother encouraged to round him out, life in Omaha was “a bit lonely,” Yosef admitted last week while eating a Kosher hamburger on Albany Avenue with his mother and his older sister, Sarah, 22. His mother, Dinah, who joined the Chabad-Lubavitch movement after seeing videos of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson several years ago, home-schooled both of her children.
Yosef was obviously sheltered from too much scrutiny from the outside world, but the surprising combination of his race and his particular form of religious observance fazed no one in Omaha — for all the average person knew in Omaha, all Hasidic Jews were of African descent, his mother said. When friends from Nebraska first visited New York, they were fascinated to meet some white Hasids for the first time.
It was easier for Ms. Abrahamson to raise her children in Omaha than it would have been in Crown Heights, she said.
“People are laid-back in Omaha,” she said. “It’s different there.”
Omaha is not, for example, a place where race relations between Jews and blacks have exploded into days of riots, as they did in Crown Heights in 1991; nor have the police in Omaha ever deemed it necessary to set up mobile command centers to monitor simmering tensions between Jews and blacks, as the New York police did last month in the Brooklyn neighborhood in response to two unrelated physical altercations.
A young man like Yosef could easily start to feel like a powerful symbol, rather than just a kid, the human embodiment of that famously controversial Art Spiegelman New Yorker cover depicting a Hasidic man embracing an African-American woman.
But life in Crown Heights is somehow less complicated than that for Yosef, a tall, athletic young man who seems to have internalized Omaha’s easygoing ways (and its broad Midwestern accent). Beyond the misunderstanding at the awards ceremony — of which Yosef said, “It was a bit strange, but really, I understand” — he says he has felt comfortable in Crown Heights from the moment he came there to advance his education.
Through summer camps and occasional trips to New York, the Abrahamsons were already familiar to the Jewish community in Crown Heights when he arrived last fall (the community has only a handful of other black families). The response from the African-American community has been, if anything, amazement. “Now I’ve seen everything,” an African-American man said three or four times as he passed Yosef and his mother and his sister walking home from synagogue.
Some black neighbors recently asked Ms. Abrahamson questions about the meaning of some Lubavitch fliers they had received in the mail. The family sensed that the neighbors had long been harboring those questions but had felt a certain comfort level with the Abrahamsons because of their shared skin color.
If there have been resentful or disapproving responses from either side, they have apparently gone as far over Yosef’s head as the references his ice skating friends used to make to movies or television shows he’d never seen.
The ease with which both communities have received Yosef seems a little unlikely, but appropriate in the year of what some call the country’s first post-racial presidential campaign. Except that the Abrahamsons consider themselves “post-racial, for real,” said Ms. Abrahamson, a Republican delegate in Nebraska who is not a fan of Mr. Obama. To the contrary, the whole family strongly supports John McCain, and Yosef will be a page at the Republican National Convention in the Twin Cities in September.
One more item to add to that list of possible essay topics.
E-mail: susan.dominus
@nytimes.com
A policeman working in New York who’d never seen a Hasidic Jew? What he probably meant, Yosef theorized, was “that he’d never seen a Hasidic Jew of color. I think he was probably making some assumptions there.”
Thanks to his Egyptian father, who left the family when Yosef was young, and his maternal grandfather, who was of African descent by way of Panama, Yosef looks African-American (though his family prefers to describe themselves as Jews of color, believing their culture to be exclusively Jewish). Yosef moved to Crown Heights only a year ago, until then having lived in Omaha, where his mother’s maternal family, German Jewish merchants, had settled several generations earlier.
If Yosef, who attends the yeshiva Darchai Menachem in Crown Heights, ever finds himself writing a college application essay, his advisers would have a hard time choosing which of his compelling story lines would most dazzle those college admissions officers: The story of growing up in the only Hasidic family in Omaha? Or the story of being the only student of color in his yeshiva? Or maybe the story of being the only Hasidic person of color in Omaha’s competitive ice skating circuit?
Despite the friendships he made while ice skating, a hobby his mother encouraged to round him out, life in Omaha was “a bit lonely,” Yosef admitted last week while eating a Kosher hamburger on Albany Avenue with his mother and his older sister, Sarah, 22. His mother, Dinah, who joined the Chabad-Lubavitch movement after seeing videos of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson several years ago, home-schooled both of her children.
Yosef was obviously sheltered from too much scrutiny from the outside world, but the surprising combination of his race and his particular form of religious observance fazed no one in Omaha — for all the average person knew in Omaha, all Hasidic Jews were of African descent, his mother said. When friends from Nebraska first visited New York, they were fascinated to meet some white Hasids for the first time.
It was easier for Ms. Abrahamson to raise her children in Omaha than it would have been in Crown Heights, she said.
“People are laid-back in Omaha,” she said. “It’s different there.”
Omaha is not, for example, a place where race relations between Jews and blacks have exploded into days of riots, as they did in Crown Heights in 1991; nor have the police in Omaha ever deemed it necessary to set up mobile command centers to monitor simmering tensions between Jews and blacks, as the New York police did last month in the Brooklyn neighborhood in response to two unrelated physical altercations.
A young man like Yosef could easily start to feel like a powerful symbol, rather than just a kid, the human embodiment of that famously controversial Art Spiegelman New Yorker cover depicting a Hasidic man embracing an African-American woman.
But life in Crown Heights is somehow less complicated than that for Yosef, a tall, athletic young man who seems to have internalized Omaha’s easygoing ways (and its broad Midwestern accent). Beyond the misunderstanding at the awards ceremony — of which Yosef said, “It was a bit strange, but really, I understand” — he says he has felt comfortable in Crown Heights from the moment he came there to advance his education.
Through summer camps and occasional trips to New York, the Abrahamsons were already familiar to the Jewish community in Crown Heights when he arrived last fall (the community has only a handful of other black families). The response from the African-American community has been, if anything, amazement. “Now I’ve seen everything,” an African-American man said three or four times as he passed Yosef and his mother and his sister walking home from synagogue.
Some black neighbors recently asked Ms. Abrahamson questions about the meaning of some Lubavitch fliers they had received in the mail. The family sensed that the neighbors had long been harboring those questions but had felt a certain comfort level with the Abrahamsons because of their shared skin color.
If there have been resentful or disapproving responses from either side, they have apparently gone as far over Yosef’s head as the references his ice skating friends used to make to movies or television shows he’d never seen.
The ease with which both communities have received Yosef seems a little unlikely, but appropriate in the year of what some call the country’s first post-racial presidential campaign. Except that the Abrahamsons consider themselves “post-racial, for real,” said Ms. Abrahamson, a Republican delegate in Nebraska who is not a fan of Mr. Obama. To the contrary, the whole family strongly supports John McCain, and Yosef will be a page at the Republican National Convention in the Twin Cities in September.
One more item to add to that list of possible essay topics.
E-mail: susan.dominus
@nytimes.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)