More in ‘Deal’

After the former deputy mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey, was convicted on some corruption charges broken in part by informant Solomon Dwek but exonerated on several other, more serious charges, some are raising questions about prosecutors’ reliance upon Dwek, the Syrian-Jewish scion who turned on many in his community by cooperating with the FBI.
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• The Jewish Agency for Israel feared Russia would not permit its Board meeting to take place in St. Petersburg, and moved it to Jerusalem at the last minute. The group says Russia told it a couple weeks ago that there were issues with its “legal status.” [JTA]
• Solomon Dwek, who wore a wire to ...

Solomon Dwek speaks! The man who by wearing a wire helped reveal scandals among the Syrian Jewish elite of Deal, New Jersey—in which he had been a prominent member—as well as numerous Jersey politicians finally took the stand yesterday, in the federal corruption trial of Jersey City’s former deputy mayor. (Among other things, Dwek revealed ...

The Syrian Jewish community of Deal, New Jersey, may have been humiliated by the public-corruption investigated by then-U.S. Attorney Chris Christie—five prominent rabbis were arrested there over the summer, along with a dozens of politicians and government officials across the state—but voters there didn’t seem to hold a grudge in yesterday’s gubernatorial election. Christie, the ...

It’s no surprise that the road into Deal, New Jersey, the predominantly Syrian Jewish enclave tucked along the Jersey Shore about an hour south of New York City, was littered this morning—like most roads in the state—with campaign signs for today’s gubernatorial election, a high-profile neck-and-neck race between Republican Chris Christie and the Democratic incumbent, ...

Bomb threats that were called in earlier this week against three synagogues in New Jersey’s Syrian Jewish enclaves of Deal and Long Branch, but no one seems to know whom to blame for them. Prosecutors claim the caller, who prompted the disruption of a 300-person wedding, had a Middle Eastern accent, but in a community ...

• Since February’s Gaza incursion, Hamas has shifted its focus from actual armed struggle toward a public-relations and educational campaign aimed at cultivating a “culture of resistance.” [NYT]
• While acknowledging “real strategic issues at stake,” Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union of Reform Judaism, claimed the “vast majority” of American Jews favor of a ...

FBI agents arrested several rabbis this morning in New Jersey and New York as part of an investigation into what the U.S. Attorney’s office in Newark, N.J., described as a “high-volume, international” money-laundering conspiracy. The mayors of Hoboken and Secaucus, N.J., a state assemblyman, and the deputy mayor of Jersey City were also arrested as ...