Chaptzem Blog!      

A shopper at a Whole Foods in Rockville, Md. spotted something unusual in the bakery section — a sheet cake decorated to celebrate Yom Kippur.

Yom Kippur is a time for repentance, and is observed by fasting for over 24 hours, beginning Friday at 6:35 p.m. through Saturday at 7:32 p.m. So the idea of a Yom Kippur cake seems a bit odd.

The cake features an assortment of Jewish symbols, none of which are actually related to Yom Kippur, including pomegranates, apples and honey (which are linked to Rosh Hashanah), a bee, menorah, fish, and the Star of David.

“I’m sure the baker had good intentions,” wrote Jen Simon from The Forward, an American Jewish publication. “They were probably trying to help their customers celebrate what they knew was an important holiday. But, if I may, a suggestion for the next time to the baker or any other well-intentioned person bent on inclusion – don’t.”

A spokesperson for Whole Foods told HuffPost the “cake was intended as dessert for the breaking of the fast dinner and a customer purchased it yesterday afternoon for that purpose.” But they didn’t explain the reasoning behind the unrelated imagery decorating the cake.

But despite Whole Foods’ intentions, Simon isn’t amused. “Stop trying to make Yom Kippur cakes happen, Whole Foods. Cakes aren’t meant to be educational; they’re meant to be delicious. And while I bet this one is, I don’t think we’ll be eating it on Yom Kippur,” she wrote.

http://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/2017/09/29/whole-foods-selling-cake-for-yom-kippur-jewish-holiday-that-requires-fasting.html
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Remember Mindy Meyer — the young Orthodox Jewish lawyer who ran for New York State Senate with a hot-pink-themed campaign, inspired by Legally Blonde?

Well she’s back.

Alongside her partner Sara Shulevitz, Meyer, 26, stars in a Barcroft TV ten-minute reality special. The real-life lawyers have opened a criminal defense firm, the Meyer-Kessner and Shulevitz Law Group in Miami, assisted by a yarmulke-wearing private investigator named Simon Hamer.

Decked out in magenta-pink lipstick, long sheitels and coordinated outfits, the two young women call themselves “double trouble”. Their modus operandi is certainly unorthodox, but they see it as a new type of feminism. “Women had to fight so hard to have rights, and they had to go to the other extreme, no makeup, dress down, try to be like men. And now that we have persevered,” said Shulevitz. “It’s time to bring back the femininity and to bring back the pink.”

http://forward.com/fast-forward/383647/these-orthodox-lawyers-are-proud-to-be-barbie-dolls/
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Hasidic Jews were filmed cheering as they censored an in-flight movie starring Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant.

The footage was reportedly shot on a private chartered jet and it shows commotion in what appears to be the first class section of the plane.

After what looks like a blanket is hoisted up over the screen in the executive area, the passengers in economy class followed suit, covering the screens towards the back of the cabin.

When the big screen at the front of the plane is hidden behind the material, the passengers applaud.
The camera then pans around the plane to show how individual blankets have been hung over the screens that are attached to the ceiling of the plane. 

The passengers were watching Music and Lyrics, which is the only film in which the actors have starred alongside each other.

The 2007 movie received mixed reviews and ranked number four on its opening weekend in the box office behind Ghost Rider, Bridge to Terabithia and Norbit.

It is not clear where footage was shot or where the plane was flying to or from.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4924952/Hasidic-Jews-cheer-cover-screen-showing-movie.html
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Three women filed a civil suit Wednesday against a convicted sex offender rabbi and fifteen others who they claim enabled him.

The women are suing Eliezer Berland, 80, for NIS 4 million ($1.1 million) and also demanding that he be barred from leaving the country until the case is concluded, Channel 2 reported.

The suit was filed in Jerusalem District Court by the two women, who Berland admitted to and was found guilty of assaulting, along with another woman who was not involved in the criminal case against the rabbi.

Berland, who is the leader of the Shuvu Bonim Bratslav Hasidic group, was sentenced to 18 months in jail in November 2016 after being convicted on two counts of indecent acts and one case of assault.

He was released earlier this year after serving five months behind bars, in part due to suffering from cancer. He was given permission to move to a hotel next to Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center on Mount Scopus, where he was placed under house arrest. His sentence is due to end next week.

“There are not enough words to denounce the defendant,” the petition read. “There is no real way to atone for what he did, and no amount of money in the world can will fully and completely compensate for the indescribable suffering that he caused the plaintiffs (and others).”

The suit was filed against the rabbi and his wife as well as rabbis and others associated with Shuvu Bonim, the ultra-Orthodox news site Behadrei Haredim reported.

According to the court document, seen by the news site, these people knew of the crimes but covered for him. “Not only did they give the defendant a framework and platform to advance himself, but they explicitly justified and vindicated his actions,” the petition said. “They even went so far as to praise his actions as ‘lofty’ and ‘elevated’ and as ‘rectifying supernal worlds.'”

Channel 1 tweeted what it said was a recording of Berland’s wife in which she describes her husband as a “sadist” and said that others warned her to keep away from him.

Last week the rabbi was authorized to travel to Uman for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Each year tens of thousands of Jews converge on the Ukrainian city, which is the final resting place of the Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, an 18th-century luminary who founded the Bratslav Hasidic sect.

While there it was reported that his followers were involved in clashes with other Bratslav Hasidim.

Hasidic pilgrims praying near the burial site of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov in Uman, Ukraine, September 14, 2015. (Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images)
Long considered a cult-like leader to thousands of his followers from the breakaway sect Shuvu Bonim, Berland fled Israel in 2013 amid allegations that he molested two female followers, one of them a minor.

According to the criminal indictment, Berland would often receive people in his homes in Jerusalem and in Beitar Illit and held private meetings intended for spiritual guidance, counseling or benedictions. The rabbi would sometimes take advantage of the meetings and of his position in the community to engage in sexual acts with women, including minors, according to the charges against him.

The trial ended with a plea deal in which the rabbi admitted to the charges and was sentenced to jail and to pay NIS 75,000 in compensation. Berland reportedly told the judge that according to biblical law “such acts are punishable by burning and stoning. Today times have changed and there is a lot of leniency, but it does not detract from the severity of my actions.”

He was on the run from authorities until 2016, eluding several Israeli attempts to extradite him. He moved between Zimbabwe, Switzerland, the Netherlands and South Africa, accompanied by a group of devout followers numbering around 40 families.

Following a plea bargain the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court convicted and sentenced him in November 2016, though some seven months that he spent in jails in South Africa and the US were counted as time served.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/convicted-sex-offender-rabbi-sued-for-nis-4-million-in-civil-case/
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No matter where you travelled this summer, you were bound to hear Daddy Yankee and Luis Fonsi’s reggaeton hit “Despacito.” The Spanish-language chart-topper has become one of the most popular songs in history; its music video has been watched 3 billion times on YouTube, and the song was a Billboard #1 hit in 47 countries.

As the Yiddish saying goes: “Azoy vi es kristlt zikh, azoy yidlt zikh” (“whatever the Christians do, the Jews are sure to follow”). “Despacito” has already been translated into Hebrew, both in a literal translation that preserves the original’s racy lyrics and in a religious version, which set Hebrew prayers to the catchy rhythm of the reggaeton hit.

Now Yiddish-speaking Hasidic Jews can enjoy their own version of “Despacito.” Performed by Kalmy Schwartz and produced by several giants of the contemporary Hasidic music industry, the new Yiddish version sings the praises of the yearly Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage to Uman, where tens of thousands of Jews gather to pray at the grave of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (Bratslav).

Musically, the song’s new Yiddish incarnation is wonderful. The lyrics match the rhythm so well that someone who hasn’t heard Daddy Yankee and Luis Fonsi’s original could be excused for thinking the Puerto Rican singers stole it from Kalmy Schwartz.

Unlike Mordechai Ben David’s 1980s hit “Yidn”, which cribbed its tune from the German pop song “Genghis Kahn,” everyone knows the source of this Yiddish paean to Rabbi Nachman. YouTubers commenting on the video were divided as to whether the Yiddish version of “Despacito” is a chillul Hashem (a desecration of God’s name) or a kiddush Hashem (sanctification of God’s name).

Some commentators wrote that the song is inherently obscene due to its association with the Spanish original’s racy lyrics, adding that the timing of the song’s release just before Rosh Hashanah was inappropriate. Those in the kiddush Hashem camp argue that the song gives religious Jews an opportunity to think about Rabbi Nachman while listening to a popular tune they’d eventually hear anyway.

Whichever camp you may fall into, one thing is certain. Like its Spanish predecessor, the new Yiddish version of “Despacito” is sure to be a mega-hit, albeit only in the small but vibrant world of Hasidic pop.

http://forward.com/yiddish/383662/despacito-goes-yiddish/
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A Kiryas Joel man faces at least 21 months in prison for his role in an alleged plot to commission the kidnapping and murder of another Hasidic man who had refused to grant his wife a divorce.

Shimen Liebowitz, a 26-year-old, married father of one, pleaded guilty in July to a single count of conspiracy to commit extortion and is due to be sentenced by Judge Sidney Stein in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on Nov. 30.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys have agreed to ask the judge to stay within the sentencing guidelines of 33 to 41 months. That comes to a minimum of 21 months once the time he already has served is subtracted.

Liebowitz has been held without bail since his arrest a year ago.

He asked the court this month to release him on bail from the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center before his sentencing so he could celebrate the Jewish holidays at home, but his request was denied.

Liebowitz and two other men were charged in September 2016 with plotting and paying a private investigator $55,000 to coerce a Satmar Hasidic man into giving his estranged wife a religious divorce consent, known in Jewish tradition as a get.

Based on conversations the investigator recorded and gave to the FBI, authorities say the plot escalated from kidnapping and torturing the man in Pennsylvania or overseas to killing him.

Only his get or death would enable the wife to remarry.

The other two alleged conspirators in what authorities dubbed a murder-for-hire plot were Aharon Goldberg, an Israeli rabbi who is now 56; and Binyamin Gottlieb, a 34-year-old Monsey man.

Gottlieb was boarding a flight to Ukraine at John F. Kennedy Airport in Queens when authorities nabbed him last year, five days after they arrested Liebowitz and Goldberg.

In court papers opposing Liebowitz’s bail request this month, assistant U.S. attorneys for the Southern District of New York acknowledged that Liebowitz opposed the idea of killing the intended victim, but noted that he had consented to the use of force if necessary.

In the criminal complaint last year, Liebowitz was said to have met with the FBI informant at Woodbury Common Premium Outlets to plan the abduction just days before his arrest.

Gottlieb, who’s accused of recruiting the investigator who promptly exposed the plot, pleaded guilty this month to concealing his knowledge of a felony. No sentencing date has been set.

The charges against Goldberg are still pending.

http://www.recordonline.com/news/20170925/kiryas-joel-man-faces-prison-in-alleged-murder-for-hire-plot
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The administrator of the New York village of Kiryas Joel, home to members of the Satmar Hasidic group, reportedly earns $216,000 a year — more than all but three other government employees in a three-county area in suburban New York.

The village, with a population of 23,000, has ten employees who earn over $100,000 per year, which the Times Herald-Record, a local newspaper, reports is “far more than any other municipality in the region.”

The village administrator’s assistant earns $152,000 per year.

The administrator, Gedalye Szegedin, told the Herald-Record that village staff works 10 to 12 hours per day, six days per week, and that village taxes have not gone up in 11 years.

Kiryas Joel is the home of Satmar Grand Rabbi Aron Teitelbaum and thousands of his followers.

http://forward.com/fast-forward/383432/kiryas-joel-administrator-earns-216k-to-run-village-of-23-000/
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Israeli members of the ZAKA search and rescue unit operating in Mexico on Saturday recovered the body of Haim Ashkenazi from the rubble of the office building in which he was working during the time of the earthquake earlier in the week.

Ashkenazi is the father-in-law of the chief rabbi of Mexico, Rabbi Shlomo Tawil.

ZAKA stated that its volunteers in Mexico have been working continuously together with the Mexican Jewish rescue and recovery organization CADENA since Tuesday, including throughout Rosh Hashana and Shabbat.

Some 300 people were killed by the tremor – the second to hit Mexico in just two weeks. Earlier this month, a powerful quake claimed the lives of at least 90 people when it struck the country’s southern coast.

ZAKA (the Hebrew acronym for Disaster Victim Identification), an Israeli volunteer-based organization with about 1,500 members that was established in 1995, is a non-governmental lifesaving, rescue and recovery unit.

ZAKA has an international division which cooperates with law enforcement, military, and emergency services across the globe. They participated in rescue missions after the tsunami in Thailand, the Columbia shuttle crash, Hurricane Katrina, and many other such disasters. ZAKA specializes in disaster victim identification.

The IDF delegation of 70 search and rescue specialists, including 25 engineers who evaluated the damage and provided assessments and assistance in the disaster zone to some 40 buildings, have been working around the clock in an attempt to locate survivors among the rubble and collapsed buildings.

Mexico was hit with a third earthquake with a 6.2 magnitude on Saturday, halting search efforts for a few hours until engineers could determine whether it was safe to continue the rescue activities.

https://worldisraelnews.com/mexico-jewish-victim-recovered-wreckage/
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ZAKA volunteers, headed by ZAKA Mexico leader Marcus Cain, are working to find and rescue missing people in Mexico.

Among the missing are two local Jews, who are suspected to be among those trapped under the rubble.

On Wednesday, the ZAKA volunteers received instructions from Mexican Chief Rabbi Shlomo Tawil on how to proceed during the Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) holiday.

"Since Wednesday night, ZAKA...has been working in places where buildings collapsed and local Jews are unaccounted for," Cain said. "Finding missing Jews is a mission of utmost importance. We will not cease searching until we succeed in finding them."

On Saturday, an earthquake measuring 6.2 on the Richter scale hit Mexico City. No damage or injuries were reported.

Meanwhile, the number of dead from Mexico's previous earthquake reached 300. At least 157 of those killed were in Mexico City.

20 children and two adults were found dead in a neighborhood school. Another 30 children and 12 adults are still missing. 115 people were rescued from the rubble.

The earthquake measured 7.1 on the Richter scale.

An IDF delegation of approximately 70 men and women departed for Mexico on Wednesday to aid in the relief efforts following the 7.1 magnitude earthquake which hit the country.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/235815
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Wishing all of K'lal Yisroel a happy and healthy year.
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The small congregation in this northern city consists of only 110 members. Yet the Satu Mare Jewish community owns an impressive 129 cemeteries and four synagogues.

Among the heritage sites in its care is the Decebal Street Synagogue, an ornate behemoth of a building erected in 1892. It was designed in the Moorish style to accommodate 1,000 worshippers under its spired roof, and its gable boasts a 6-foot marble replica of the tablets of stone upon which the Ten Commandments were inscribed.

Before the Holocaust, prayers were led here by none other than Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, the late founder of the Satmar movement of Hasidic Judaism. The Satmars, who derive their name from this Romanian city, are today one of the largest Hasidic dynasties in the world.

But to the Jewish community in Satu Mare today, this wealth is “also a burden,” according to Paul Decsei, a businessman who is responsible for administering the dozens of communal real-estate assets. Now teetering on the brink of disappearing, his once great community doesn’t even use the stunningly beautiful synagogue it owns because it can afford neither to heat it nor provide the badly needed renovations.

Unused, overgrown with weeds and falling into disrepair, the great cultural assets of Romanian Jewry are a testament to the near annihilation of the country’s Jewish community, which numbered 800,000 prior to World War II. At the same time, what remains is evidence of the tenacity of the 7,000 Jews who still live in the country and have fought to to preserve, with meager means, what their ancestors left behind.

Nicolae Decsei, Paul’s father and the president of the Jewish community, was able to raise enough funds to renovate the Decebal Street Synagogue’s sunken floor in order to keep the structure from collapsing. But the interior walls are badly corroded from the effects of a 1970 flood that was never properly drained from the foundations, he said.

The building does not contain a Torah scroll and thus is not considered a kosher house of worship. But it is still considered structurally sound enough for the occasional concert. Still, Paul Decsei said, its future is uncertain without an extensive restoration.

Some Romanian Jewish communities rent out or sell the properties that were returned to them after the Holocaust. Buildings that once housed synagogues, yeshivas and Jewish schools throughout Romania — and across Eastern and Central Europe, in general — now accommodate businesses such as restaurants, dance clubs, garages and barbershops.

Satu Mare has that option as well, of course. But the return would be relatively meager — land outside Bucharest comes cheap — and result in a loss of a major cultural asset, Decsei said.

The community relies on a sole source of funding: the Bucharest-based Federation of the Jewish Communities in Romania. The central board allocates the income it receives from its properties, as well as the government, to Jewish communities across the country. And although the cost of building maintenance is a factor in the allocation process, congregations with larger memberships — such as Bucharest, Brasov and Timosuara —  tend to be better funded than smaller ones.

As it stands, Satu Mare cannot afford to hire a rabbi.

“In truth, this building is a drain on our resources, as are the hundreds of graves we need to preserve and fence,” Decsei said. “But on the other hand, we can’t walk away from any of it. It’s our heritage and we have a responsibility toward it.”

The Satu Mare community today is a Neolog congregation — a Central European stream of Judaism that is a mix between Orthodox and Conservative. When congregants pray, they do so in the annex of a newer, smaller synagogue adjacent to the Decebal Street Synagogue. That synagogue, built in 1921, also is showing signs of neglect in a country where the average monthly salary is less than $500. The congregation rarely has a minyan, the quorum of 10 Jewish men necessary for some Orthodox prayers.

Separating the massive Moorish synagogue from the smaller yet still ornate shul is a monument memorializing the 300,000 Holocaust victims who once lived in Transylvania, the historic region of which Satu Mare is a part.

Once intellectual and prosperous, the Jewish community in a region made famous by the legend of Count Dracula was essentially wiped out in early 1944. Now its character is evident only in the architectural sophistication of its buildings. The smaller shul in Satu Mare has a board with the names of the weekly Torah portions appearing on a rotating wheel that the rabbi would turn each week. But it has remained untouched since the deportations of April 1944 — since then, the wheel has remained at Kedoshim, Hebrew for “martyrs.”

The predicament facing the Satu Mare community is not unique in Central Europe, where the Nazis wiped out communities whose few surviving members emigrated en masse after the Holocaust. But it is particularly striking in Transylvania, whose Jews had experienced a golden age just before the genocide, according to Robert Frolich, the rabbi of the Dohany Synagogue in Budapest, in neighboring Hungary.

Nowhere is the massive scope of Jewish life in Transylvania more evident than in the Jewish cemetery of Sighet, the hometown of the author Elie Wiesel that is situated 65 miles east of Satu Mare near the Ukrainian border. Covering an area larger than five football fields, the cemetery has thousands of large headstones and several mausoleums. It is one of Central Europe’s largest Jewish cemeteries not destroyed by Nazis or communists.

Today, the Jewish community of Sighet, where 14,000 Jews lived before the Holocaust, comprises only 55 Jews, none under 60, according to the president of that community, David Lieberman. Lieberman, a 69-year-old forestry specialist, moved back to Romania after retiring in Israel. He had immigrated there in the 1960s.

“The truth is that it’s very painful,” Lieberman said when asked about how it feels to lead a community that is “a shadow of its former self,” as he put it.

“I’m trying to keep this community alive, playing the part of a rabbi, but the truth is it is fading into oblivion,” he said. “And that’s particularly painful to me because I know how wealthy, magnificent, intellectual and spectacular this community used to be.”

Still, in recent years, Sighet, a city of 35,000, is seeing an increase in Jewish presence thanks to tourists from Israel and beyond who want to see the birthplace of Wiesel, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died last year at 87.

Since the 2002 opening of a museum in his childhood home commemorating the deportation of 14,000 Sighet Jews, including Wiesel, hundreds of Jewish tourists began visiting there each year. Today, more than half of all tourists to the town are Jewish, according to radio journalist Johnny Popescu. Popescu, who is not Jewish, published last year the English-language translation of what Lieberman and others said was the first major historical study of Sighet’s Jewish community.

“Wiesel put us on the map internationally,” Popescu said.

Last week, the Limmud FSU group, which organizes Jewish learning conferences for Russian-speaking Jews, organized a memorial march for Wiesel through Sighet.

But can interest in Wiesel boost Jewish life in Sighet — or greater Transylvania — in any significant way?

Unfortunately, Lieberman doesn’t think so.

“It’s just another monument, you see,” he said. “It doesn’t change the reality of a community that is about to disappear before our very eyes.”

http://forward.com/news/breaking-news/382834/jewish-community-dying-in-home-of-satmar-hasidic-dynasty/
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By selling coffee to Jewish tourists, 18-year-old Yuri Breskov can earn in a week more than his teachers from high school make annually in this provincial city.

His revenues peak at $3,000 on the week of Rosh Hashanah, when some 30,000 Israelis and other Jews visit the gravesite of Rabbi Nachman. an 18th-century luminary and founder of the Breslov Hasidic movement.

The annual pilgrimage has been taking place for decades. But what began as a trickle of observant Jews has grown in recent years and diversified to include many secular pilgrims. It’s a change that is creating new and lucrative opportunities for dozens of entrepreneurs like Breskov. But locals say it has also increased the presence of organized criminals feeding off their success.

“The mafia runs this place,” Breskov told JTA last week in a matter-of-fact tone. “The only reason that I can sell on Pushkin Street is that I have connections.”

Some 500 Jews live year-round in this city 130 miles south of Kiev. Most live and work in the area around Pushkin Street, the main artery leading to the gravesite.

Since 2012, that area went from being a collection of ramshackle houses with a single, overpriced kosher pancake stand and a Judaica shop to a vibrant neighborhood with a newly built high-rise apartment building. Some 20 kosher restaurants have opened — among them branches of Israeli franchises such as Maafeh Neeman, a cafe chain — as well as 25 hotels, many operating within apartment buildings in a practice that passes as legal in Uman.

Signs in Hebrew, including electronic ones, dominate the streets, touting everything from electricians to lawyers, medical specialists to Jacuzzi bath operators to real estate agents. On Saturdays, the Jewish Sabbath, one of the signs reads “Shabbat Shalom.”

The transformation reflects the explosion of Jewish pilgrims to Uman. Whereas in the past the visitors were mostly Hasidic men, they now include “everyone you can imagine, from female teenagers to post-army guys,” said Shimon Buskila, a former leader of the Jewish community here. They are also coming by the thousands outside of the High Holidays period.

“It was sudden, it was unexpected and it has been a very profound change,” he said. “From a phenomenon connected to the Breslov stream, the pilgrimage has grown to become an all-Israeli phenomenon, an international one even.”

Even so, Buskila said, Rosh Hashanah in Uman remains a “deeply spiritual event.”

On the first evening of the holiday men, many of them wearing a festive all-white version of the knee-length kapote robe favored by Hasidim, greet each other with hugs on the street, sometimes walking with their arms wrapped around a friend’s shoulder to join a mass of people who pray in relative silence around the gravesite. Children scamper about everywhere, even on rooftops.

Nachman, who lived in the late 18th century in Podolia and Ukraine, was a charismatic mystic whose sayings and parables were transmitted by devoted disciples. Unlike most other Hasidim, his followers never accepted a successor to the man they consider their “true tzaddik,” or holy man.

But the reverent crowd of followers of the Breslov stream – a movement that emphasizes pious joie de vivre and in Israel does outreach in prisons – has been joined increasingly in recent years by visitors who can be seen smoking and drinking on the street on Shabbat, barbecuing on the porches of rented apartments and hotel rooms, frequenting hookers and getting into brawls.

This behavior has led several hotels in Ukraine to stop renting rooms to Jews. And it also requires the Israel Police to dispatch 20 officers each year to Uman to better maintain the peace.

The commercial growth is due in large part to the secular visitors, who will buy products and services shunned by observant Hasidim. As a rule, the Hasidim refrain even from drinking water from glasses that have not undergone the koshering process.

Some of the new businesses are owned by Israelis who settled in Uman, like Shlomo Aboutbul, who opened a restaurant here in 2015. Others are owned by Ukrainians or are joint Israeli-Ukrainian ventures. The settling of Israeli businesspeople has led to the doubling of the local Jewish population, which numbered 200 just three years ago.

The community’s growth is a mixed blessing, according to Buskila.

“We now have a wide selection of kosher products, kosher meat, we have a Jewish kindergarten for our daughter, we have an emergency clinic,” he said. “But there are negative aspects and some parents feel the change compromises our efforts to bring up our children in a moral environment.”

The popularization of the Uman pilgrimage is taking its toll on relations with the non-Jewish population, Buskila added. In December, in the most notorious example yet of strain, unidentified vandals desecrated a synagogue with a pig’s head and anti-Semitic graffiti.

“I find it difficult to believe that this incident isn’t connected to misbehavior, abuse and violence by a certain fringe within the pilgrim community,” Buskila said. “Unfortunately, their actions can eclipse a record of coexistence which is mostly very positive.”

Displays of anti-pilgrim hostility have been occurring for years in Uman, sometimes in demonstrations featuring anti-Semitic rhetoric. But the desecration was an escalation that provoked a retaliation: In January, Ukrainian prosecutors charged an Israeli who vandalized a crucifix with a hate crime, allegedly as payback for the anti-Semitic attack.

Many locals, including Luba Dankov, a retired teacher who rents out her apartment on Pushkin Street, are grateful for the pilgrimage.

“I don’t know about mafia, but thanks to the pilgrims I can live a halfway decent life because I get no state pension,” she said. “There are good and bad people in each group.”

But the interest apparently taken by the mafia in the Uman pilgrimage is nonetheless a friction point. Eduard Leonov, a member of the nationalist Svoboda Party, launched a campaign in 2011 for a “Hasid-free Uman.” He complained that because of the pilgrims, “Uman is suddenly a crime capital.”

“Mafia” here refers to Ukrainian mobsters with regional franchises who employ a mix of intimidation, violence and bribes to advance their goals, according to the U.S. State Department.

While organized crime is a major force everywhere here — the State Department’s 2016 report on Ukraine spoke of how its “endemic corruption” has turned the former Soviet republic “into a transit country” for international money laundering — it seems to be particularly present in Uman, where locals report that gangsters are able to operate with impunity.

Mafia connections are a necessity for many of the dozens of businesses that have sprung up in Uman over the past five years, according to Buskila. Breskov, the coffee seller, says he has to give its enforcers a 20 percent cut from his earnings.

Israeli and Ukrainian businessmen alike all have “to get along with the mafia,” said Aboutbul, the restaurant owner. And Buskila added that many business owners pay “protection” fees to the mafia instead of paying taxes, “which are very easy to avoid here – you just have to throw the auditors a bone.”

Another business that reportedly enjoys connections to organized crime is Saga, a strip club and restaurant that for the duration of Rosh Hashanah functions as a brothel under the auspices of organized crime bosses, according to Vika Tsegurna, a local tour guide. Three taxi drivers confirmed this to JTA. The restaurant’s owners declined to be interviewed, as did a spokesman for the mayor’s office.

Prostitution has long shadowed the Uman pilgrimage. Five years ago, taxi drivers would take interested parties to a group of deserted buildings outside Uman, where dozens of prostitutes who came to the city especially for the pilgrimage would ply their trade.

Transportation services offer another glimpse into mafia involvement. Pushkin Street once was serviced by dozens of independent taxi drivers, but they are now banned from the Jewish area. Their place has been taken by employees of large taxi firms who have “come to an arrangement” with organized crime bosses, according to Anatoly, a cabbie who used to work near the Jewish area before he was “forced to leave by thugs,” as he put it.

Buskila and Aboutbul insist that organized crime in Uman is essentially “white collar” in its treatment of Israelis, involving the threat of damage to property at worst but zero violence against actual people. To Buskila, the criminals “occupied a vacuum left by authorities” following a period of chaos during the revolution in Ukraine in 2014.

The revolution — in part a response to allegations of corruption and subservience to Russia by the previous regime — unleashed a wave of nationalist sentiment. It also resulted in major damage to the local economy and a free fall in the value of the local currency, the hryvnia, against the dollar. This last development made Ukraine especially attractive to Western businessmen and tourists, Buskila said.

Still, violent incidents involving the pilgrims do occur, including the brief hijacking last year of a bus with female tourists from Israel by criminals as part of their dispute with the bus company’s operators. And in 2011, thugs abducted a haredi Orthodox man they said had stolen from a local hotel and confiscated his passport. His passport was returned for ransom, according to the news site Behadrei Haredim.

For all the challenges it brings, the growth in Jewish presence in Uman is something Buskila and other community members generally welcome.

“It feels good to be part of something that started out small and has grown into something pretty big,” he said.

http://www.jta.org/2017/09/14/news-opinion/world/in-the-ukrainian-city-of-uman-businesses-and-mobsters-follow-the-jewish-pilgrims
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Gaby and Dan Rosehill wouldn’t let anything get in the way of their wedding day. Even if that thing was a bomb threat that forced all 218 guests to evacuate the hotel where the wedding was taking place.

“I was just about to be named husband and wife when the alarm went off. We had to evacuate,” Gaby Rosehill told The Jewish Chronicle about the incident on Sunday in Brighton, England.

“I had to ask the rabbi ‘Is this divine intervention? Does God not want me to get married?’” she recounted. “But he told me it was ‘just a test’ and we would get through it.”

As the bridal party gathered in a nearby hotel, the couple’s wedding planners managed to put together an on-spot wedding, chuppah and all. That turned out to be a good decision, since it took five hours for the police to clear the original venue.

The couple got married in the new location, though the bomb threat changed the order of events a bit, including police questioning the couple about anyone who may have been angry at them — in the yichud room where couples retreat for a little privacy. But the pair managed to keep up their spirits.

“Dan managed to laugh off the situation the whole way through,” Rosehill told The Chronicle.

After police deemed the incident a hoax, the couple and guests were able to return to the original venue — just in time for dessert.

“It just goes to show all you really need is love,” Rosehill said of her special day.

http://forward.com/fast-forward/382383/even-a-bomb-threat-couldn-t-stop-this-jewish-couple-from-getting-married/
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