Emunah Magazine

JERUSALEM — Israel's Army Radio on Sunday played parts of an interview given by Israel's most famous spy, marking 45 years since his capture and execution.

In the 1962 interview on Damascus Radio, Eli Cohen is in character as businessman Kamal Amin Thabit. He comments on Arabic music and society, but the sound quality of some of the excerpts heard Sunday was unclear.

The broadcast came as tensions between Israel and Syria have been on the rise, as each side charges that the other is preparing for war.

Cohen is revered in Israel as a highly talented agent who worked his way into the upper echelons of Syrian government and society, feeding Israel with valuable political and military intelligence, which he transmitted back to Israeli via clandestine radio broadcasts.

Cultivating his contacts by throwing lavish parties, Cohen befriended senior Syrian intelligence officers, arranging a rare tour of the Golan Heights overlooking northern Israel. He supplied Israel with details of the Syrian fortifications in the Golan, which proved crucial to the Jewish state's capture of the strategic territory in the 1967 Mideast war.

Syria demands the Golan back as a condition for a peace accord.

Cohen also relayed detailed Syrian plans to divert the waters of the Jordan River away from Israel, leading to an Israeli air force attack in 1964 that foiled the project.

He arrived in Damascus in 1962 and spied for Israel until his capture. He was hanged in a public square in Damascus on May 18, 1965.

Cohen was born in Egypt to Syrian Jewish parents. Since his execution, Israel has been trying unsuccessfully to persuade Syria to return his remains to Israel.

In the interview, Cohen — who was posing as a Syrian business man who had lived as an expatriate in Argentina — was asked why he returned to Syria from South America. He explained that he did not know enough about Syria.

"I have been asked to talk about my country and did not know what to say," he said. "Then I told myself, let's go see my land, see how it has developed."

His widow, Nadia, told Israel TV Sunday that she could not clearly identify Cohen's voice because of the accent and the poor sound quality. Even so, she said that hearing it affected here deeply.

"The only comfort was in the pills I take. Without them I cannot deal with this kind of stress," she said.

Syria and Israel have been bitter enemies since Israel was created in 1948, and tensions still run high. Israel accuses Syria of arming the Lebanese Hezbollah with rockets and other weapons to be aimed at Israel. Damascus charged that last week's large-scale Israeli civil defense drill was evidence that Israel was plotting an attack on Syria.

Hezbollah and Israel fought a fierce monthlong war in 2006.

Israel has said it has sent messages to Syria assuring Damascus that Israel has no intention of attacking. At the same time, Israeli leaders routinely ask world leaders to put pressure on Syria to stop supplying weapons to Hezbollah.

Margaret Lambert was a 22-year-old star athlete when the Nazis ended her dream of Olympic glory. But recognition has finally come Lambert's way, 74 years after being kicked off the German Olympic team because she is Jewish.

A New York City high school honored Lambert on Tuesday by naming its athletic field after the longtime New Yorker, who held a German high jump record in 1936 when she was known as Gretel Bergmann.

"I didn't know I was such a big shot," Lambert, now 96, said Tuesday at the ceremony, which she attended with her 99-year-old husband.

"You can fight injustice in many different ways, even if it means high-jumping higher than anyone else."

The honor comes six months after Germany's track and field association restored her record, which had been expunged.

The body also requested that Lambert be included in Germany's sports hall of fame.

"I feel quite honored," Lambert said in a telephone interview Monday. "But if it hadn't happened I would live on."

Lambert has resided in New York since fleeing Nazi Germany in 1937. She became an American champion in women's high jump in 1937 and 1938, and in women's shot put in 1937, but she stopped competing when war broke out in 1939.

Lambert married, worked as a cleaning woman and then as a physical therapist, and raised two sons.

She has lived long enough to be feted by the country that once spurned her. In 1995, a gymnasium in Berlin was named after Lambert and in 1999, her hometown of Laupheim, Germany named its athletic center after her.

Stephan Grabherr, deputy consul general for Germany, said Lambert's story "stands as a reminder that we are all equal players on the playing field, but this is not enough. We must all be equal as human beings, on and off the field."

On Tuesday, students, school officials and local politicians crowded into the library at Francis Lewis High School in Queens to celebrate Lambert's legacy. After the speeches, students lined up to have Lambert sign their programs.

Sophomore runner Valencia Clement said having the track named after Lambert would motivate students. "Now we're running with more of a purpose," she said.

Lambert said the accolades made her feel kind of silly. "It never occurred to me that this was such a big deal," she said after the ceremony. "I just did it. Sports to me was a lot of fun."

Asked earlier what message she would pass on to the young athletes who will compete at the Margaret Lambert Track and Field in New York, she said, "I hope they keep it honest and stay away from steroids."

There were no performance-enhancing drugs – nor any endorsement contracts – for track stars in the 1930s. "We never got a cent," Lambert said. "It was all for the honor of it."

Brittany Murphy's husband, Simon Monjack, was laid to rest beside his late wife yesterday.

Some 75 family members and friends were present during the photographer's private Orthodox Jewish service in the Chapel of the Hills at Los Angeles' Forest Lawn Memorial Park on Thursday. It is the very same place where, just last December, Brittany was buried following her sudden death due to pneumonia, an iron deficiency and multiple drug intoxication at the young age of 32.

A photograph of 39-year-old Simon with Brittany was displayed at the ceremony and a song they recorded together, "Smile," was played.

Brittany's mother Sharon Murphy — who had lived with the couple in their Los Angeles mansion — spoke at the ceremony, saying: "'I'll miss you my babies.'"

It was poor Sharon who discovered Simon's body on Sunday — just like she had for her own daughter six months ago. Sharon was distraught when she called 911 to get help for Simon, crying: "My son-in-law, he stopped breathing." At times during the 11-minute 911 call, she was hysterical and the phone operator had to tell her: "Stop talking and start listening so I can use you to help me.”

Although Simon's preliminary cause of the death is natural causes, his rep said he was delaying having heart bypass surgery until after a gala benefit he was planning for the Brittany Murphy Foundation that he was setting up to help inner city kids learn about the arts. He suffered a heart attack in the fall.

BP's CEO said Sunday he's sorry for the largest oil spill in U.S. history and the "massive disruption" it has caused the Gulf Coast, telling reporters the company hopes to corral most of the crude offshore.

"The first thing to say is I'm sorry," Tony Hayward said when asked what he would tell people in Louisiana, where heavy oil has already reached parts of the state's southeastern marshes.

"We're sorry for the massive disruption it's caused their lives. There's no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back."

Hayward said the company is doing "everything we can to contain the oil offshore," but, "as far as I'm concerned, a cup of oil on the beach is a failure."

He said the company now has about 30 aircraft searching for signs of oil and has moved more than 300 people of offshore "floatels" to speed up its response time.

"What we're not faced with is a complete line of oil coming at us. It's more like guerilla insurgency, if I can use military jargon," he said. "And what we need to do is have a rapid response capability to get it as we identify it, rather than have it come onto the shore or onto the marsh."

In other developments late Sunday, a fisherman who was hospitalized after becoming ill while cleaning up oil in the Gulf has filed a temporary restraining order in federal court, asking BP to give the workers masks and not harass workers who publicly voice their health concerns.

BP said it will strengthen its efforts to stop the flow of oil and protect the coastline after the most recent attempt to stop the Gulf oil spill failed.

The company will circulate warm water around the area to prevent the freezing that hindered a previous dome-cap effort, Dudley said."We're disappointed the oil is going to flow for a while and we're going to redouble our efforts to keep it off the beaches," BP Managing Director Robert Dudley said on CNN's "State of the Union."

The most recent setback was the failure of the so-called "top kill" method of pumping mud to plug the leak.

"There was just too much flow," Dudley said.

Dudley gave some details about the new option: A custom-built cap will be fitted over a piece of equipment called the "lower marine riser package."

The process will involve a clean cut of the lower marine riser package, where a cap will then be lowered.

BP does not expect to see a large increase, if any, in the volume of oil from cutting the equipment to create a clean surface to cap, he said, though the result will not be a pressure-tight seal.

The long-term solution is the drilling of a relief well that will be in place by August.

"If we can contain the flow of the well between now and August and keep it out of the ocean, that's also a good outcome," Dudley said. "And then, if we can shut it off completely with a relief well, that's not a bad outcome compared to where we are today."

On Sunday, the Obama administration questioned BP's oil spill numbers.

On NBC's "Meet the Press," Carol Browner, Obama's assistant on energy and climate change, said BP may have had an ulterior motive for underestimating the amount of oil leaking.

"BP has a financial interest in these numbers. They will pay a penalty based on the number of barrels per day," she said.

BP had originally said about 5,000 barrels of oil per day were leaking. The latest estimate, Browner said, is between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels per day.

"This is probably the biggest environmental disaster we've ever faced in this country," she said.

More oil is leaking into the Gulf of Mexico than any other time in U.S. history, including the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.

A lot of systems are in place to manage and decrease the amount of oil coming on shore, Browner said.

Controlled burns of oil effective so far, though they have been limited because of weather conditions, she said.

As a consequence of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, all deepwater operations in the Gulf have been shut down for now, including operating wells, Browner said.

"At the end of the day we will make the right decisions ensuring that our environment is protected," she said.

Rescuers plan to release a group of birds Sunday that workers washed and rehabilitated after finding them covered with crude, officials said. A northern gannet and brown pelicans rescued in Louisiana will be transported to a refuge at the mouth of Tampa Bay, Florida, and released Sunday, a statement from the oil spill cleanup command said.

But officials say more wildlife are at risk as up to 19,000 barrels (798,000 gallons) of oil daily continue gushing from an underwater well that engineers have been unable to cap for more than a month.

Top BP executives said Saturday that engineers and scientists had decided to try a new technique of stopping the flow after three attempts to pump mud and 16 tries to stuff solid material into the well failed.

That option: placing a custom-built cap to fit over the "lower marine riser package," BP chief operation officer Doug Suttles said. BP crews were already at work Saturday to ready the materials for that method, he said.

"We have not been able to stop the flow," a somber Suttles told reporters. "Repeated pumping, we don't believe, will achieve success, so we will move on to the next option."

Suttles and other officials said that the "top kill" attempt to stop the flow did so — but only as long as they were pumping. When the pumping stopped, the oil resumed its escape.

Suttles said the lower marine riser package cap, which will be ready in four to seven days, "should be able to capture most of the oil" that has fed what is now the largest oil spill in U.S. history. But, he cautioned, the new cap will not provide a "tight mechanical seal."

"We're confident the job will work, but obviously we cannot guarantee success at this time," he said.

Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said that BP would resume using undersea dispersants for the new attempt to trap the oil.

Landry said officials were disappointed by Saturday's announcement, but noted that the immediate efforts to stop the flow were never intended to be permanent.

"The real solution, the end state, is a relief well," she said.

BP currently is working on two relief wells, but they are not expected to be ready until August, Suttles said.

Earlier, Suttles said that BP engineers would try to place a second blowout preventer — the piece of equipment that failed when the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20 — should the lower marine riser package fail. The failed blowout preventer is a 48-foot-tall, 450-ton apparatus that sits atop the well 5,000 feet underwater.

Suttles and Landry praised the clean-up efforts, however, in light of the failure of the "top kill" attempt to stop the flow.

"It's a tribute to everybody that we only have 107 miles of shoreline oiled and only 32 acres of marsh," Landry said.

Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser told CNN Saturday night that BP needed to "step up to the plate tonight to save our wetlands" by using its might to create sand barriers to prevent the oil from moving into the marshes.

"BP needs to say it will pay to move those dredges and pump that sand berm," he said. "We are gonna die a slow death if we don't get that berm. We've got to have that barrier island."

Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Democrat from Louisiana, echoed the call to bolster barrier islands in a statement Saturday night.

She said BP should immediately invest $1 billion to protect marshes, wetlands and estuaries — giving half the money to short-term projects protecting the Louisiana coast and half to other Gulf Coast states "based on the immediate threat posed by oil spewing from the well."

President Obama, who toured the area Friday, said federal officials were prepared to authorize moving forward with "a portion of" an idea proposed by local officials, who want the Army Corps of Engineers to build a "sand boom" offshore to keep the water from getting into the fragile marshlands.

But Nungesser said the marshes couldn't wait and that the effort needed to start immediately to save the Louisiana wetlands.

A team of oil spill experts were on standby in the United Arab Emirates, ready to help in the Gulf of Mexico cleanup efforts if called to do so, officials in the Middle Eastern country told CNN Sunday.

The United Arab Emirates originally made the offer two weeks ago. "Basically, it's an offer made on behalf of the government in recognition of this environmental issue. It is an offer of support," said Craig Buckingham of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. 

Turn right at the next intersection and continue for 3 miles. Oh, and watch out for any oncoming traffic.

Google Maps warns users about walking directions on its version for computers, saying that "Walking directions are in beta. Use caution — This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths." However, the mobile version of Google Maps does not come with the warning.

Source: NY Daily News

AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) – A cover illustration from an old “Saturday Evening Post” shows a shopkeeper and woman standing on each side of a butcher-shop scale that holds a chicken. His finger pushes down on one end to add a bit of weight, while she pokes a finger up on the other side. “It’s still true today,” says Dan Newcombe, whose job is to make sure all the weights and measures in Maine are true. At least $24 billion in annual sales in Maine alone are weighed or measured in some way. Weighing devices that are even slightly off can have an impact of millions of dollars, either for or against the consumer, in Maine. The stakes are greater in larger states, and nationally they could add up to a staggering $7 trillion. Earlier this year, more than a dozen states uncovered a pattern of fish packers adding the weight of glaze ice to the labeled weight of fish, meaning consumers ended up paying several dollars more per pound of fish. There’s no proof such scams are related to the recession but authorities say unscrupulous businesses are more likely to cheat when states cut back on enforcement. Correct weights affect the formulations of medicines, baby formulas, the chemicals in toothpaste, foods and liquids people eat and drink. Americans depend on accurate measurements when they fill their gas- or heating-oil tanks, buy meat at the butcher counter, pay taxi fares or purchase a gallon of milk. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a non-regulatory federal agency and lead standards-setting organization for the country, says its work to advance an accurate measuring system underpins about half the U.S. economy, or about $7 trillion of the U.S. gross domestic product. “As dollars become tight, it’s more important than ever,” said Carol Hockert, chief of NIST’s Weights and Measures Division. It’s important not just to consumers, who assume they are getting what they pay for, but also to businesses that need to know they’re competing on a fair basis and aren’t giving customers more than they paid for. Ensuring the accuracy of weighing and measuring devices all comes down to obscure shops like Newcombe’s, a flat, brick building that houses precisely scaled weights starting at 1 milligram – roughly the size of the tip of a ball point pen – to huge 1,000-pound blocks that are used to make sure roadside truck scales are exactly right. A small team of five inspectors from the Maine Agriculture Department’s weight and measures program fan out across the state with their precision testing devices to ensure the accuracy of scales, pumps and containers that measure out goods sold at wholesale and retail levels. Their work takes them from bakeries and butcher counters to fuel-storage facilities and paper mills. They check milk tanks at dairy farms and package scales and scanners from supermarkets and department stores to make sure prices are correct, said Newcombe. Questionable firewood measurements trigger many of the complaints in Maine, said Steve Giguere, deputy state sealer of weights and measures. In the fall of 2008, inspectors found more than 90 percent of the complaints to be valid, a much larger percentage than the 8-10 percent of the gas pumps and small retail scales that fail. With a limited field staff, the Maine inspectors end up spending half their time responding to complaints. That’s the trend across the country, as cash-strapped states find less and less money for inspections. “States are more reactive, not proactive,” said Steve Dishon of the International Society of Weighing and Measurement, the trade association for weighing and measurement industry professionals. “They react to whoever squawks the loudest.” In the case of the frozen fish scams, The U.S. Food and Drug Administration sent letters to two Illinois companies in October and February, threatening action over labeling issues. Wisconsin and New York have said they may take enforcement action. In Fairfield County, Ohio, two local retailers found to be selling fish at the wrong weight were assessed $500 per store. Dishon, who’s been in the business for 32 years, said the biggest causes of discrepancies are flaws in electronic transferal of data in modern-day devices. And hospitals, which are full of scales and other measuring devices, have the most discrepancies, he said. Hospitals often hire private companies for periodic checks of devices. Plenty of errors turn up elsewhere. A surprise inspection in 2008 at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport found that 28 of Southwest Airlines’ 72 baggage scales were slightly out of calibration, while three others had more serious problems and were shut down until they were fixed. At US Airways, 25 of 46 scales had minor problems. Accurate weights are important now with airlines charging extra fees for bags weighing over 50 pounds. The good news – for consumers, anyway – is that scales found to be out of compliance generally were off in the passengers’ favor. But sometimes consumers lose. Office Depot Inc. agreed in 2007 to pay $2.3 million to settle a lawsuit claiming that California customers were overcharged by faulty scanners at the checkout line. Office Depot did not admit any wrongdoing in the settlement. Also in 2007, the Texas Agriculture Department published on its website a list of 100 gas stations whose inaccurate fuel pumps were shortchanging drivers in the state. The same year, inspections in Minnesota turned up a gas station where customers were getting about 4 gallons of gas for every 5 gallons they paid for. While it’s only a guess how much money consumers and businesses win or lose because of skewed scales, Newcombe’s calculations give a hint. Advanced technology that enabled Maine to change the way it measures liquid density revealed a 0.024 percent error. When you add up the difference it made in sales of motor and heating fuels, the total impact was $4.8 million – to the benefit of consumers in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts. In 2007, Wisconsin inspections over the previous two years showed a gas pump failure rate of about 3 percent. But they also turned up a bad pump that gave drivers four gallons of extra gas for every 15 they bought, and one showing customers lost about a half gallon for every 15 gallons purchased. ___ Online: National Conference of Weights and Measures: www.ncwm.net National Institute of Standards and Technology: www.nist.gov International Society of Weighing and Measurement: www.iswm.org

Source: AP

Why can’t any movie get payes — the long, curly sidelocks on Hasidic men — right?

It’s not like there aren’t any Jews working in the film industry. Granted, they’re probably Reform/Reconstructionist/atheist/High Holy Days or Buddhist Jews, but from “A Price Above Rubies” to “A Stranger Among Us,” films that purportedly give a glimpse into the closed world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism come off as phony to those in the know.

Consider “Holy Rollers,” the new film about Brooklyn Hasidim serving as drug mules to transport Ecstasy from Europe to New York. The payes on actor Jesse Eisenberg are like costume pasties emanating awkwardly from his curly, too-long-for-a-Hasid hair. That didn’t stop the stark, sentimental and somewhat contrived indie from being nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Of course it was! What do non-Jews know? Or to paraphrase the “Holy Rollers” bad boy Yosef, played by Justin Bartha: One goy! Forget about him. God does.

Perhaps my demand for authenticity is silly or naive. After all, this is an era of reality television (the ultimate oxymoron). But “Holy Rollers,” filmed a block away from my father’s house in Flatbush, Brooklyn, has the arrogance to say it’s offering insight into a secret universe when it’s overstuffed with mistakes like a hot pastrami from Katz’s (non-kosher) deli.

The Gold family (can you get any more generic?) hectically toss around random Yiddish words — bubbeleh (darling), gelt (money), and baruch (blessed is God) when they mean “kineh hore” (ward off the evil eye). Interestingly, Adam Goldberg’s Jewsploitation satire, “The Hebrew Hammer,” used the same words correctly, and it’s part of what made the film a cult classic. It doesn’t help “Holy Rollers” that many of the actors, like Eisenberg, speak English perfectly rather than using the mishmash of English and Yiddish that most yeshiva boys speak, having grown up in Yiddish-only homes so that their sentences come out mangled: “You vant I should make something for you for dinner to eat?” It’s a cadence captured perfectly by Philip Roth in “Portnoy’s Complaint.”

There are other inconsistencies: The men and women are on the same floor in the synagogue (whereas in reality there’s usually a curtain an inch thick or women are housed in a separate floor); the film calls a “Kollel” (where men study for life) a “holel.” I could keep going, like one of those eggheads who thrills in nitpicking every film. But I’m not showing off, I’m just flummoxed: How could an “insider’s” movie get so sloppy?

“Holy Rollers” was created by 37-year-old Danny A. Abeckaser, or Danny A., as he likes to be called. When this actor/club owner saw a BBC news report that mentioned the role Hasidim played in the Ecstasy trade, he hired writer Antonio Macia (Jew? I think not) to pen the fictional story of one 20-year-old naif (Eisenberg) who unwittingly gets drawn to the dark side. As the film epilogue says, “Holy Rollers” is based on reports of one Israeli drug ring in 1988-89 that used Hasidim to carry more than 1 million pills from Amsterdam. In truth, the Israeli Ecstasy cartel using Hasidim and other mules continued for many more years, and was responsible for nearly the entire Ecstasy trade in New York.

“I grew up in that community, and I thought it was fascinating that people don’t know what it’s like,” he told me. But Abeckaser, who also appears in the film as a sleazy Israeli-American drug lord, didn’t grow up in that community; he grew up near that community, the son of Moroccan-Israeli parents.

I didn’t grow up Hasidic either. Like Abeckaser, I grew up near the Hasidim, but much closer proximity-wise and religiously. I grew up Modern Orthodox, with relatives in the black hat world. (There’s a whole galaxy of difference between those men who wear black hats and the ones who wear the long coats and the side curls.) There are some gaffes even I didn’t catch. At a movie screening after-party, one former Hasid who still dresses the part expressed concern with what kind of Hasidim the guys in the film were. Were they from Crown Heights? From Williamsburg? From Boro Park? 

I don’t want to be unfair: “Holy Rollers” gets many things right: the boring rabbi’s speeches that are supposed to be poignant, the bleak Brooklyn Hungarian split-level houses where neighbors have no boundaries, impossible blind dates where a young woman who can’t even look Eisenberg in the eye asks him how many children he wants and what school they are going to go to.

The most realistic character in the movie is Justin Bartha, best known as the bland groom in “The Hangover.” In “Holy Rollers,” Bartha plays Yosef, the first Hasid to run drugs. The movie starts off with him blatantly smoking on the Sabbath and watching porn, and he ends up not only carousing with girls but popping the very pills he schlepped across the country. Bartha gets the tone right for the true hocker, which is yeshiva slang for religious hustler types, those guys you might see hanging out in a swirl of cigarette smoke outside the pizza store, wearing their suit jackets arrogantly on their shoulders, twirling their tzitzis fringes seductively, no longer caring much for community mores or the Holy One, Blessed Be He.

It’s these gems that make the mistakes stand out more. But what “Holy Rollers,” like most of its Hasidic predecessors, really misses is the motivation behind the desire to live in this community. It misses the warmth and the safety. It doesn’t really show why anyone would want to belong to an ultra-Orthodox community, why anyone would be sad to leave there, why everyone wouldn’t become a drug-running mule to make money and sleep with hot girls like Ari Graynor. I don’t think Abeckaser gets what it means to belong to this community. What does come across is a bleak, wintry, poor, boundariless prison, and it doesn’t make sense why anyone would want to go back to that once he had tasted the other side.

I know this, because even though I am no longer religious, I have had many long years of struggling with leaving my modern Orthodox community, with missing all the good in it even as I recognized the bad: the conformity, the racism, the focus on money, all portrayed in the film. As I went through my separation process, I had a terrible time explaining it to others, especially secular Jews.

That’s why I wish films like “Holy Rollers” were better. Our world is divided into religion haters and true believers, and accurately rendered fiction could bridge the gap between the atheists and fundamentalists, to show them there is beauty in both.

Source: Amy Klein For Salon.com

Brooklyn NY — A new Coney Island amusement park harkens a slice of New York history.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg was among dignitaries attending a launch Friday for Luna Park in Brooklyn. It opens this weekend, and will phase in 19 rides designed by an Italian company, Zamperla S.p.A.

Bloomberg said it heralds a turnaround following “decades of disinvestment and neglect” that shrank Coney Island’s “storied” amusement district to “a shell of its former glory.”

“This will galvanize the whole area,” Bloomberg said earlier Friday on his weekly radio show. The park currently employs about 200 people, more than half of them from the neighborhood, and more jobs are on the horizon.

“The Bloomberg administration’s Coney Island revitalization plan calls for many long-term developments beyond amusements — new infrastructure, new affordable housing and, with them, new jobs,” said Robert C. Lieber, deputy mayor for economic development. “But at its heart is an expanded amusement district that will help Coney Island retake its former glory.”

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz noted that the original Luna Park was known as an “Electric Eden.”

It opened on May 16, 1903. In its heyday, it attracted 90,000 visitors a day.

The first Luna Park featured hundreds of thousands of lights — such a spectacle that people started using the phrase, “It’s lit up like Luna Park.”

Some 1,211 towers, minarets and domes distinguished the Brooklyn skyline.

By 1907, visitors were mailing more than a million postcards a week out of the Coney Island post office.

Luna Park was destroyed in a 1944 electrical fire. An estimated 750,000 people stood watching the 10-alarm blaze from the Coney Island beach.

The arrival of its namesake, declared City Planning Commissioner Amanda M. Burden, is “a great day for Coney Island fans all over the globe.”

Source: Daily Record

At least four Torah books were stolen Friday night from the largest synagogue in Belgium. 

Jewish worshippers who arrived at the main synagogue in Antwerp were shocked to find that it had been broken into.

The burglars apparently broke into the synagogue’s seminary through a door that connects it to a hall. They proceeded to open the Holy Ark and steal the books.

Pinchas Kornfeld, head of the city’s Jewish community, told Ynet on Sunday that it remains unclear how the burglars knew they could enter the seminary through the side hall. “Perhaps they had inside information,” he said.

 “The last people to leave the synagogue closed the seminary, and the first ones to arrive in the morning noticed that the Holy Ark had been broken into with special tools,” he said.

Kornfeld said the burglars took between four and six Torah books. “These books are worth a lot of money, and this is why they were apparently stolen. The investigation has just begun, and so far we don’t know anything,” he said.

Source: YNet News

The rich and famous tenants of 15 Central Park West — home to Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Sting, A-Rod and Bob Costas — are up in arms over a plan to open a late-night bar on their street.

The luxurious co-op, where former Citigroup exec Sandy Weill owns a $42 million penthouse, has hired the lobbying firm Geto & de Milly to kill a plan to open the wine bar at 25 Central Park West.

Residents of 25 CPW have enlisted their own lobbyist to get officials to reject the liquor-license application for the Century Café.

The well-heeled residents fear bar owner Greg Hunt will transform their block of landmark buildings, such as the Dakota and the Beresford, into a new Meatpacking District.

“To have people and crowds coming in and out until 3 a.m. is more than a residential building should have to accommodate,” said Roberta Brandes-Gratz of 25 CPW.

Hunt, whose liquor-license bid will be reviewed by the community board on June 9, said his plans are for a high-end, cozy wine bar and nothing else.

“I’m not some outsider invading the neighborhood,” said the New York native. “I’d be the first person in line to oppose a nightclub.”

Elected officials said they are wary of the plan. “It’s a problem to serve alcohol in a residential neighborhood,” said City Councilwoman Gale Brewer.

Source: NY Post

The United States is sending a succession of envoys to engage with Hamas but lacks the bravery to talk to the Islamist movement openly, its leader, Khaled Meshal, said in an interview with the Guardian.

Meshal praised President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia for meeting him in Damascus and the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, for hosting the discussion 10 days ago. He told Medvedev that the US was also talking to him. “I thanked him for that meeting and told him the Americans contact us, but are not brave enough to do so openly,” said Meshal. “I am confident that in the very near future, everyone will realise that they will have to deal with Hamas.”

The claim that the US is engaging with a group it lists as a terrorist organisation will upset the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, whose security forces have locked up and allegedly tortured leading Hamas members in the West Bank..

But four years into Israel’s blockade of Gaza, the revelation could be seen as a sign that cracks are opening up in the western consensus that Hamas should remain isolated. Russia is a member of the Middle East Quartet, which demands recognition of the state of Israel as a precondition to a seat at the negotiating table.

Hamas says that recognising Israel was one of the Fatah leadership’s biggest mistakes, and resulted in 17 years of fruitless negotiation. Meshal predicted that the conditions, which he called a trap for the Quartet itself, would change.

The Hamas leader claimed many western officials recognised that the blockade of Gaza had failed and the time had come to end it. This, he said, was the significance of efforts by a flotilla of eight ships, including four cargo vessels carrying construction and medical supplies and a Turkish passenger ferry carrying 600 people, heading for a confrontation with the Israeli navy off Gaza tomorrow.

Meshal said the tectonic plates in the Middle East were shifting, with Iran, Turkey and Syria emerging as regional powers. Egypt was in the throes of a battle for succession that would paralyse it as a regional player. As a result, Israel was losing its power to impose conditions on a weakened Palestinian leadership in Ramallah.

As it felt its power ebbing, Israel needed a new war but was crippled by self-doubt, Meshal said. He claimed the attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006, and against Hamas in Gaza in 2009, left both organisations stronger politically and militarily.

“Israel is conducting exercises threatening Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria. It needs a war, but choosing the front to fight on will not be a picnic and this reflects the crisis in Israel. It does not want peace, but the option of war is not easy for it,” he said.

The Hamas leader added that Israel might be tempted to strike Gaza again. “A war in Gaza might appear the easy option. But that would be an illusion, not because we have adequate weapons, but because Israel this time would be fighting against a people with nothing to lose. Gaza is small in size but it has become a large symbol for the rest of the world. This has become very clear in the last week.”

Senior Hamas officials said they had conducted a study of their military tactics in Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2009 and were now working with rockets that could hit tanks effectively at longer range.

Meshal said Barack Obama had made a brave speech in Cairo, but within months had retreated, with administration officials actively vetoing efforts to seek agreement between Fatah and Hamas on a national unity government. Citing senior Fatah sources, he claimed George Mitchell, the US negotiator, told the Palestinian Authority and Egypt that the US would cut off aid to the PA if it formed a national unity government with Hamas and the other militant Palestinian factions.

“Palestinian reconciliation is not on the table at the moment, because the priority for America is to resume the proximity talks. Mahmoud Abbas is better for America’s purpose without reconciliation, because he is weak and a deal with Hamas would strengthen the Palestinian position in the negotiation. America prefers a weak Palestinian negotiating party, because it believes this is the best chance for a deal with an intransigent [Israeli prime minister Binyamin] Netanyahu.”

Hamas claims that nine or 10 of the 22-member Arab League now either publicly or tacitly back its formula for a unity government, not least Saudi Arabia, a country still thought to be furious with Hamas about its takeover of Gaza in 2007, which tore up an agreement with Fatah.

Meshal said that four days before the last Arab League summit in Sirte, Libya, the Saudi foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, took a one-page Hamas document to Egypt, containing its latest proposal.

The document called for the creation of a Palestinian leadership representative of all factions, a high security council to reform the security forces of Gaza, and a committee to organise new elections. Palestinians outside the occupied territories would also take part in the vote.

The Egyptians came back with three additions: that the new Palestinian unity government would recognise a two-state solution, the borders of 1967 and the Arab Peace Initiative. Meshal said that these demands were tantamount to a recognition of Israel.

“What Mahmoud Abbas is seeking is to restore his authority over Gaza and to draw Hamas into an electoral process in conditions in which it would lose. Egypt’s position is a real obstacle, too. It raises the question what is reconciliation for, to exclude Hamas, or to bring it into the process to participate?”

Nonetheless, Meshal said he would pursue negotiations, now being brokered by Libya. He rejected the claim that Hamas was on the sidelines of efforts to find peace in the Middle East, refusing to lay out its vision of solution. He said the Palestinians and Arabs were ready to accept a state within 1967 borders, with its capital in Jerusalem, and the return of its refugees, but that Israel was not prepared to pay the price.

“After 17 years of negotiations, it has given nothing to those Palestinians who recognise it. It just demands more concessions like security co-operation. It is only when Israel is forced to make concessions that peace will come, but that will only happen when it is faced with a strong Palestinian partner. So Hamas will continue to reserve the right to resistance until Israel returns to the ‘67 borders.”

Source: The Guardian

Bangladesh has joined Pakistan in blocking access to social-networking site Facebook, citing a page on the site that called on people to draw images of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, the Associated Press reported.

Bangladesh’s chief telecommunications regulator, Zia Ahmed, told the news agency the government had asked local Internet service providers to temporarily block Facebook pending removal of a page publicizing “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.”

The page was created after the producers of the animated TV series South Park said the Comedy Central network had censored an episode of the show that satirized religious prohibition of images of Muhammad.

On May 19 Pakistan similarly cut off access to Facebook on religious grounds, following a court order. The court is set to review that block on Monday, the AP reported.

Some followers of Islam consider depictions of Muhammad to be blasphemous, and that’s led to widely publicized storms of protest over the years. In 2006, a Danish newspaper prompted cries of outrage from some after it published a series of editorial cartoons depicting the prophet, including one that showed him with a bomb tucked in to his turban.

New Zealand has become the fifth country to ban kosher slaughtering methods, leaving the local Jewish community outraged. Agriculture Minister David Carter rejected his own advisers’ recommendation that Jewish ritual slaughter be exempted from a ruling that requires animals to be stunned before slaughtering.

The new regulation takes effect immediately, and New Zealand follows Switzerland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden as countries that prohibit Jews from performing ritual slaughter.

Rabbi Moshe Gutnick, who administers the kosher authority for Australia and New Zealand, contradicted Agriculture Ministry claims that “commercial shechita [Jewish ritual slaughter] of poultry has not taken place in New Zealand for some years due to a lack of interest.”

He told J-Wire of New Zealand and Australia, “We send shochtim [ritual slaughterers] from Sydney on a regular basis, and I can assure you that chickens were slaughtered as well as meat-producing animals. This decision by the New Zealand government, one which has a Jewish prime minister, is outrageous. We will be doing everything possible to get this decision reversed…one of the last countries I would have expected to bring in this blatantly discriminatory action would have been New Zealand.”

Carter rejected the National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee’s warning that although it prefers that all animals be stunned before slaughtering, banning Jewish ritual slaughter decision may violate the country’s Bill of Rights. Jewish leaders may raise the issue with Prime Minister John Key (pictured), who is Jewish.

The new ban shows no balance, Rabbi Jeremy Lawrence of Sydney, Australia’s Great Synagogue and former spiritual head of the Auckland Hebrew Congregation, told J-wire . “A deliberate decision has made to override the Jewish community’s acknowledged rights. This is a case of misplaced values, bad science and bad legislation.

“There is a strong body of veterinary and animal welfare research which continues to confirm shechita [Jewish slaughter] as a humane method of slaughter of the highest standard.

The ban effectively will keep Jews from eating fresh chicken. Importing kosher beef is permitted, but the law now bars importing unprocessed chicken.

In the United States, the Humane Slaughter Act (7 U.S.C. section 1901), which has been upheld as constitutional, specifically exempts ritual slaughter.

Source: Arutz Sheva

Nearly 200 nations, signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), backed plans for the meeting in 2012.

In a document agreed at the talks, Israel was singled out for criticism.

Israel, which has not signed the NPT, dismissed the document as “deeply flawed” and “hypocritical”.

“It ignores the realities of the Middle East and the real threats facing the region and the entire world,” the Israeli government said in a statement quoted by the AFP news agency.

“Given the distorted nature of this resolution, Israel will not be able to take part in its implementation.”

The statement was issued in Canada, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is visiting.

In the past, the Israeli government has refused to comment on rumours that Israel has a stockpile of nuclear weapons.

In April, Mr Netanyahu pulled out of a US summit on nuclear arms after learning that Egypt and Turkey intended to raise the issue.

‘Insignificant’ document

Some 189 nations agreed to the 28-page document following a month-long conference on strengthening the NPT, the cornerstone of global disarmament efforts.

The document urged Israel to sign the NPT, but did not mention Iran, a nation widely suspected of having a nuclear-weapons programme.

Analysts say this was a diplomatic victory for Iran, which denies seeking a nuclear weapon.

The US was among the nations who agreed the document, but President Barack Obama warned that he did not agree with Israel’s treatment.

“We strongly oppose efforts to single out Israel, and will oppose actions that jeopardise Israel’s national security,” he said.

Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon promised that his country’s co-operation with the US would remain unchanged, but he condemned the document as “insignificant”.

“Iran has signed [the treaty], Iraq has signed it… Syria has signed it, and we see that it hasn’t stopped them from seriously breaking the treaty and from trying to bypass it,” he said.

Israel also questioned why India and Pakistan – declared nuclear states who have not signed the treaty – were not singled out for mention.

Source: BBC

Washington DC – The White House has a long history of inviting a truly diverse group of people for special functions and fancy dinners. But when one specific group of people are invited , in this case it was Jewish people. We thought it may be hard to find diverse amongst one community of people. Perhaps an African American female Rabbi from North Carolina will do the trick.

Borehamwood, UK – Flags have been attached to the top of poles, erected just last week for a religious boundary in Borehamwood.

At least five St George flags have been spotted in Stapleton Road, Gateshead Road and Hertford Road, flying from the tip of the 15ft metal poles, which will form part of the Borehamwood and Elstree eruv.

The construction of the religious boundary, which comprises 34 sets of poles and connecting wires, is due to be completed by July and is used by Orthodox Jews to carry out tasks which are usually prohibited on the Sabbath, such as carrying or pushing.

The eruv was approved in November by Hertsmere Borough Council, but concerns have since been raised by a small group of residents about the proximity of some of the poles to their homes.

Mystery surrounds exactly who is behind the stunt or how the flags were tied to the eruv poles, which have been funded and installed by the Ebor Eruv Charitable Trust.

Earlier this month, the trust said the erection of the eruv “was a major milestone” for the Jewish community in the area.

Source: Borehamwood News

Did you hear the one about the African-American president and Jewish-American baseball legend who were in the East Room of the White House for a reception?

The president tells the audience that he and Sandy Koufax have something in common.

“We are both lefties. He can’t pitch on Yom Kippur. I can’t pitch.”

Oy. Where’s Jackie Mason when you need him?

It was a bit of Jewish humor from President Barack Obama in welcoming remarks at what he said was the first-ever White House reception observing Jewish American Heritage Month.

“This is a pretty fancy … pretty distinguished group,” he said of the invited guests, which included members of the House and Senate, two justices of the Supreme Court, Olympic athletes, entrepreneurs, Rabbinical scholars, “and Sandy Koufax.” The mention of his name brought the biggest cheer at the event.

The president spoke of “the diversity of talents and accomplishments” that reflect the Jewish-American heritage dating back to pre-Revolutionary times.

“Even before we were a nation, we were a sanctuary for Jews seeking to live without the specter of violence or exile,” said Mr. Obama citing “a band of 23 Jewish refugees to a place called New Amsterdam more than 350 years ago.”

And in the 21st century, the president hailed the U.S. relationship with the Jewish State.

L-R David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg Just 3 of the many in attendance

“Our bond with Israel is unbreakable,” he told the reception, five days before he is to have a fence-mending round of talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu.

Mr. Obama likened the U.S. pursuit of a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians to the Hebrew principle of Tikkun Olam, the obligation to repair the world.

There were no other stabs at or tributes to Jewish humor by Mr. Obama. Although his Congressional guest list at the event did include former Saturday Night Live comic – and now Senator, Al Franken.

Obama Makes Speech At Dinner

To dial up the best cellphone service in New York, try the Lincoln Tunnel.

Seriously. It's wired, and there are fewer dropped calls in the tunnel than on other routes into or out of Manhattan. Across other parts of the city, service is hit and miss.

Among the worst places to make a call: the Cross Bronx Expressway, along the river on the West Side Highway, Long Island City and Sunnyside in Queens, towns on the north shore of Long Island such as Oyster Bay, western parts of Newark and a chunk of the Upper East Side between 87th and 94th streets.

For the 20 million people living in the greater New York area, spotty cellular service is a constant source of frustration. To document the extent of the problem, The Wall Street Journal examined data on dropped and unsuccessful calls compiled by the Nielsen Co., which sends out equipment-filled vans to make 140,000 test calls a year across the five boroughs, Long Island, northern New Jersey and southern Connecticut.

The results raise a pressing question: Why is the most populous metropolitan area in the U.S. plagued with dead zones?

Network quality in New York pales in comparison to that in other big U.S. cities. While Chicago, Dallas and Seattle have call-success rates well north of 98%, New York stands at 97.27%, according to Nielsen data. Those may look like slim margins, but phone calls aren't graded on a curve. Customers expect them to work all the time.

"It can be so horrible here," says Stephanie Taylor, a 34-year-old insurance agent in Manhattan. "I have to pick my cab routes so my calls don't drop. How ridiculous is that?"

Carriers deserve only part of the blame. The city is one of their highest-profile markets, and even as they cut capital spending nationwide during the recession, they kept budgets high in New York, even if that spending didn't always keep up with the pace of smartphone sales.

"Typically, they've overinvested in New York," says Nielsen analyst Roger Entner. "It's the media and investment banks they want to keep happy."

Ask the people who build and maintain the city's networks, and they'll give you a dozen alternative excuses. Too many people. Too many buildings. Too much reflective glass. Too much water. Each plays a role. It all adds up to wireless dead zones dotting the city and its surrounding suburbs, making phone calls impossible in some unlucky neighborhoods, across stretches of highways and at crucial junctures on rail lines.

Take the West Side Highway, a notorious trouble spot where Nielsen recorded eight failed calls up and down Manhattan. There, phones get a signal only on one side of the road, from cell towers high atop office buildings. (The Hudson River is on the other side.) So when there's a hiccup with a connection to the cell tower on the Manhattan side of the river, there's no other tower to back it up, and the call drops.

It's still hard for consumers to understand. "How do you drop four calls in a one-mile stretch of the West Side Highway?" comedian Jon Stewart said on his "Daily Show" last month.

Dropped calls also happen because of quirks in the way carriers have set up their networks. For example, AT&T Inc. routes calls south of 59th Street in Manhattan to a switch downtown. North of 59th, calls go to a facility in Westchester. So when an AT&T customer crosses 59th, calls can get dropped as the network reshuffles from one switch to the other. Nielsen recorded three fails on or near that dividing line. AT&T declined to discuss coverage at 59th in further detail.

Sometimes, there just aren't enough cell sites to handle the load. That's usually the reason when a neighborhood has a cluster of failed calls, says Mike Greenwald, a Nielsen executive responsible for evaluating telecom service. A chunk of the Upper East Side between 87th and 94th streets and western Newark are good examples.

In these areas, putting up new cell sites often means dealing with zoning regulations, pushy landlords or community resistance. In the seven years that Chris Hillabrant has been T-Mobile's vice president for engineering in the New York region, he's seen community resistance to new cell towers get "better funded and much better organized."

"Now, they'll bring in their own experts to prove that T-Mobile already has sufficient service or enough cell sites," Mr. Hillabrant says.

Nielsen's data might under-reflect users' annoyance with the city's networks. The company tests whether calls are successful, not their quality. So even calls no human ear could comprehend get marked as green as long as they go through and aren't dropped.

City landlords are a particularly sharp thorn in the carriers' side. AT&T has roughly 650 cell sites in Manhattan. Every time the carrier wants to modify one of them, it has to negotiate with a different landlord. "Outside Manhattan, you can have one landlord for a few hundred sites, but that's just not the case here," says Mike Maus, who oversees AT&T's network in New York and northern New Jersey.

Carriers say they're burning through billions of dollars in the effort to make their networks faster and more durable. They constantly monitor their networks and send field agents out to check cell sites when customers call in to complain.

In a room in its northern New Jersey offices, Verizon Wireless stocks samples of every phone the company has ever sold. They're warehoused for Verizon agents tasked with figuring out why customers can't make calls. When someone complains about dropped calls, the agents simulate the problem by pairing the customer's phone model with the cell tower that dropped the call.

Yet much of the work carriers are rushing to do now, like laying down high-speed, fiber-optic connections to cell sites, could have been done earlier had carriers better planned for their capacity needs, analysts say. Carriers respond that it was impossible to predict how heavily people would be using wireless networks.

Network quality also depends on who's running it. Nielsen wouldn't break out its data by carrier, but a Consumer Reports opinion survey published in December ranked Verizon Wireless first, followed by Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T. A separate PC World-Novarum Inc. ranking of download speeds in February found AT&T to have the fastest and most reliable network for data, followed by Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint.

AT&T, which has taken a pounding over dropped iPhone calls, argues that the Consumer Reports survey is out of date and less rigorous than judgments based on actual measurements. The carrier said in April that its service in the New York metro area has improved, but acknowledged it hasn't yet met its own quality target. It expects to hit that target this summer.

MEULABOH, Indonesia – Authorities in a devoutly Islamic district of Indonesia's Aceh province have distributed 20,000 long skirts and prohibited shops from selling tight dresses as a regulation banning Muslim women from wearing revealing clothing took effect Thursday.

The long skirts are to be given to Muslim women caught violating the dress code during a two-month campaign to enforce the regulation, said Ramli Mansur, head of West Aceh district.

Islamic police will determine whether a woman's clothing violates the dress code, he said.

During raids Thursday, Islamic police caught 18 women traveling on motorbikes who were wearing traditional headscarves but were also dressed in jeans. Each woman was given a long skirt and her pants were confiscated. They were released from police custody after giving their identities and receiving advice from Islamic preachers.

"I am not wearing sexy outfits, but they caught me like a terrorist only because of my jeans," said Imma, a 40-year-old housewife who uses only one name. She argued that wearing jeans is more comfortable when she travels by motorbike.

Motorbikes are commonly used by both men and women in Indonesia.

"The rule applies only to Muslim residents in West Aceh," Mansur told The Associated Press. "We don't enforce it for non-Muslims, but are asking them to respect us."

He said any shopkeepers caught violating restrictions on selling short skirts and jeans would face a revocation of their business licenses.

No merchants have been seen displaying jeans or tight clothing in stores in West Aceh district in recent weeks.

The regulation is the latest effort to promote strict moral values in the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation, where most of the roughly 200 million Muslims practice a moderate form of the faith.

It does not set out a specific punishment for violators, but says "moral sanctions" will be imposed by local leaders.

Mansur said women caught violating the ban more than three times could face two weeks in detention.

Rights groups say the regulation violates international treaties and the Indonesian constitution.

Aceh, a semiautonomous region, made news last year when its provincial parliament passed an Islamic, or Shariah, law making adultery punishable by stoning to death. It also has imposed prison sentences and public lashings for homosexuals and pedophiles.

Islamic law is not enforced across the vast island nation. But bans on drinking alcohol, gambling and kissing in public, among other activities, have been enforced by some more conservative local governments in recent years.

Opinion polls show that a majority of Indonesians oppose the restrictions on dress and behavior, which are being pushed by hard-liners in the secular democracy.

Were the Marines ever to need an ambassador to Brooklyn's Orthodox Jewish community, they could do worse than Lt. Col. Dave Rosner. Two of its female members were on a Fleet Week tour of the USS Iwo Jima, an 844-foot amphibious assault ship, when a reporter wanted to ask a few questions about their visit. Lt. Col. Rosner tried to reassure them.

"I told them, 'It's all tsnies," he said, using what he said was the Yiddish word for modest. And he drew a laugh about the photos the reporter's photographer wanted to take of them. "I said, 'We'll put them behind a mechitza,' " the partition used to separate men and women at Orthodox services.

Lt. Col. Rosner is funny—seriously. Indeed, it's a pretty safe bet he's the Marine Corps' only stand-up Jewish comic. The lieutenant colonel's shtick, which he's performed at clubs such as Catch a Rising Star, includes bits like trying to persuade his general to take a nicer, safer hill, and selling his fellow grunts life insurance in the heat of battle.

He also throws around punch lines such as "Mazal tov Cocktail" and "Full-Metal Foreskin," though what the build-ups are I can't say for sure. At the time he was telling me the accompanying jokes I was trying to avoid breaking my neck as we were clambering down a ramp on the Iwo Jima's massive, hangar-like waterline "well deck" to board a Riverine Assault Boat.

I first met Lt. Col. Rosner at Fleet Week a few years back when my nephew, a military buff, persuaded me to try to use my press pass to cut the lines onto the USS Kearsage, another huge amphibious assault ship bristling with troops, jets, helicopters and all manner of futuristic technology.

So I did my best to puff out my chest, hide my liberal-arts background and appear the sort of fellow you'd want to share a foxhole with. It came as something of a shock, as it undoubtedly did to those Orthodox Jewish ladies, when the soldier assigned to lead my nephew and me on the tour was A) Jewish and B) a stand-up comic.

Lt. Col. Rosner reported that his career has taken off since we last met—at least his military stand-up career. He is acting as emcee at Marine Corps events. "It took 20 years," he said, "but I've been able to combine the two without getting into trouble."

He's brought in to break the tension at "musters" where reservists—who fear they may be about to be "involuntarily mobilized" to Iraq or Afghanistan, with wives and mothers weeping outside—are ordered to report. "I took a right turn on the 501," he recently told just such a meeting in Raleigh-Durham, "and ended up at a Klan meeting."

Maybe you had to be there. He recently returned to Iraq, where he served during Operation Desert Storm/Desert Shield, to entertain the troops at a forward operating base on the Iranian border shortly after the Iranians attacked it. He said the base commander told him, "The guys are a little shaken up. We really could use some jokes here," so Lt. Col. Rosner complied.

Passing a row of Port o' Potties on our visit brought back memories of Desert Storm and his sensitive Jewish nose. The desert heat and demands on the latrines made the experience so off-putting, he said, that "before I went in there I'd put on a gas mask." Only problem: He was the camp's assistant commandant and was tasked with sounding the alarm if they were about to be attacked. His men—and women—feared he knew something they didn't.

The glory of the U.S. Armed Forces is that they can display overwhelming military might and at the same time make an excellent chocolate-chip cookie—examples of which were both on display during our tour. Our final stop was an invitation-only buffet lunch aboard the Iwo Jima for United Nations ambassadors and military personnel, addressed by U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice.

There was a swan ice sculpture and also shrimp, egg rolls, chicken wings and perhaps the largest prime rib I've ever seen—all of it made on board by Navy chefs.

Lt. Col. Rosner was more than willing to pose with the behemoth cut of beef. But he wouldn't have touched it with your knife and fork. "It's not kosher," he explained.