More in ‘Chabad’

Today in Tablet Magazine, the Vox Tablet podcast features Daniel Estrin’s dispatch from a Tel Aviv neighborhood where the liberal denizens have not taken kindly to Chabad’s moving in. As Marjorie Ingall’s husband and children apply for German citizenship (their birthright due to Nazi disenfranchisement), she finds herself uneasy about being left behind and ever ...

The Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement is known for its outreach among non-Orthodox Jews, encouraging them to become more religious. Chabadniks are posted to about 75 countries, where their efforts are generally met with curiosity, indifference, or, at worst, irritation. But in Ramat Aviv, an upscale, liberal, and famously secular neighborhood of Tel Aviv, the sect’s arrival ...

• Special Envoy George Mitchell is in Paris, requesting French and European Union support for the new U.S. effort to bring the Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table. He is in Brussels tomorrow. [JPost]
• Manny Pacquaio, generally agreed to be the world’s best boxer, did not want to fight his fellow welterweight Yuri ...

• The Spanish foreign minister announced his country will press for Palestinian statehood when it takes over the E.U. presidency on January 1st. [JTA]
• A Chabad-sponsored menorah at an entrance to Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park has prompted a heated discussion on the legality of religious displays on city property. [NYT]
• Newsweek’s ace investigative reporter Michael ...

• Amid the latest talk of a prisoner exchange with Hamas, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that there is still “no conclusion, no decision, and no deal” for the return of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. [JPost]
• According to an unnamed Israeli TV program quoting unnamed officials, Netanyahu has proposed a 10-month settlement freeze ...

It’s been a year since the terrorist attacks in Mumbai that killed more than 170 people, including six occupants of the local Chabad House, and there has been some progress toward prosecuting one of the alleged perpetrators. David Coleman Headley, a 49-year-old Pakistani immigrant to the United States, was arrested last month in Chicago en ...

Four thousand Chabad emissaries from across the country and around the world, known as shluchim, gathered last week for the group’s annual conference in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. While the shluchim were meeting, their sons had a camp-like gathering of their own. Organizers estimated that 577 boys, separated into age groups, took part. As they arrived ...

Sholom Rubashkin, former manager of the Agriprocessors kosher slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, was convicted yesterday in federal court of 86 financial fraud charges. Rubashkin’s sentencing date has not yet been scheduled, but he will likely be sentenced to hundreds of years in prison, the AP is reporting. In addition, he still faces a second trial ...

The Chabad Men’s Annual Kinus, a conference for Chabad’s emissaries from all over the world, began yesterday in Brooklyn. Everything is staying local this year, with the enormous final banquet set for Sunday night at the Bedford Armory, at the edge of Chabad’s home neighborhood, Crown Heights. (Last year’s banquet at Chelsea Piers apparently required ...

• A blogger notes that toymaker Playmobil’s new Egyptian-themed set doesn’t include any Israelite slaves, and that the company has previously issued a line of armed Roman soldiers; she smells a conspiracy in the company’s German origin, but she might be placated to know that Playmobil sued a creative pastor for the crucifixion of one ...