Then, the life jackets ran out, and the chaplains made a brave choice: They handed over their own vests and stayed aboard the sinking ship.

Rabbi Alexander Goode, 32, of the District was among the chaplains who gave up their lives that day. On Monday, he and 13 other rabbis who have died while serving in the U.S. military got their due in a monument in Arlington National Cemetery.

The monument honoring Jewish chaplains corrects an oversight on Chaplains Hill, where the first monument honoring clergy members was erected in 1926. A separate monument for 134 Protestant chaplains was built in 1981, and another one, to honor 83 Catholics, eight years later.

“I think it was purely an oversight, but once they realized it, the House and the Senate moved quickly,” said Jerry Silverman, president and chief executive of the Jewish Federation of North America.

The two-hour service in the cemetery’s amphitheater brought together Jewish veterans from across the country, as well as family members of the rabbis, members of Congress and military officials.

“It only took 20 minutes for the ship to go down,” Army Staff Sgt. Ernie Heaton, one of the few remaining survivors, said of the panic after the USS Dorchester was struck.

The ship was sailing off the coast of Greenland. Soldiers grabbed all of the life jackets available, but there were not enough. Heaton said he never forgot the image of the four chaplains locking arms, singing a hymn as the ship sank.

“Men were screaming, and I saw the chaplains. They were together, and they didn’t have their life preservers on,” said Heaton, who spent nine hours in the water before he was rescued.

The four chaplains who died aboard the USS Dorchester, known as the Immortal Chaplains, were Goode, a graduate of Eastern High School who never got the chance to return to the Washington Hebrew Congregation; George Fox, who was Methodist; Clark V. Poling, of the Reformed Church in America; and John P. Washington, a Catholic.

Maj. Gen. Cecil Richardson said those who serve as military chaplains are much more than clergy in military uniforms. “They lived the life of warriors,” he said.

Jewish leaders who spoke fought back tears. Members of the West Point Jewish cadet choir sang in Hebrew and English. “This was a very special day for the country and my family,” said Paul Fried, Goode’s son-in-law.

The 13 other rabbis who have died in uniform are: Nachman S. Arnoff, in an Army truck accident in 1946 at Camp Kilmer, N.J.; Meir Engel, of heart disease in 1964 in a Saigon hospital; Frank Goldberg, in a Jeep accident in 1946 in Austria; Henry Goody, after being hit by a streetcar at 14th and Upshur streets NW in 1943; Joseph I. Hoenig, of cerebral hemorrhage in 1966; Samuel Hurwitz, in 1943 in a military hospital in Temple, Tex.; Herman L. Rosen, who drowned just before reporting to chaplain school; Samuel Rosen, in a plane crash in 1955; Solomon Rosen, in 1948 after his plane exploded over Oklahoma; Morton Singer, in a plane crash in 1968; David Sobel, in an accident in Thailand in 1974; Irving Tepper, in action in France in 1945; and Louis Werfel, in 1943 after his plane crashed in the North Algerian mountains.

Coney Island Bialys and Bagels has been around since 1920 when it was founded by Morris Rosenzweig, a Jewish immigrant from Poland. But, in recent years, the business has fallen off as many Jewish residents have moved out of the area.

Just when it looked like the shop would close, the two cabbies — Zafaryab Ali and Peerzadab Shah — who had their first bagels at the shop when they immigrated to the United States, bought the place.

Harold Weinberg says he’s been a customer for 41 years and could not be happier.

“It’s just great. I love this place,” Weinberg told PIX11 News. “I always come here, my sister picks up bagels for her office everyday. It’s wonderful.”

Weinberg says he doesn’t have a problem with Muslims owning his favorite Kosher bakery.

Owner Zafaryab Ali says he worked 12-hour shifts driving a yellow cab seven days a week from 5 p.m. until 5 a.m. until he and his partner pooled their cash and bought the shop.

Ali says with a broad smile, “I am happy, this is good!”

“This movement is not serious,” Milk Street Cafe owner Marc Epstein tells DNAinfo.com. “If it was, they would not want small businesses going out of business.”

The restaurateur made the comments after dismissing 21 workers, and told the website the entire business could go under if the protests don’t end within three weeks. Police barricades have diverted a large amount of foot traffic away from Wall Street since the demonstrations began six weeks ago, and the restaurant has also faced diminished business — a 30% drop, reportedly — due to marches, closed subway entrances and checkpoints.

The restaurant, which is set up as a food court with both milk and meat stations, is one of the largest kosher restaurants in Lower Manhattan and was a welcome option for both kosher and non-kosher keeping diners in the Financial District. Epstein launched the restaurant in June as a second branch of the original Milk Street Cafe, which he’s successfully run in Boston for 30 years.

The restaurant required a $4 million investment to get off the ground, and had seen its customer base grow before the start of the protests. “Now, Wall Street is deserted,” Epstein said. “The only people who walk down Wall Street are people who have to walk down Wall Street. It’s transformed from a beautiful pedestrian mall to a police siege.”

As with everything else connected to the protests, the cafe’s financial plight is the source of dispute. One reader suggested “deliberate NYPD overreaction” was to blame, rather than the demonstrators themselves.

For his part, Epstein says he doesn’t have anything against political activism, recalling his participation in a 1987 Washington, D.C., rally to free Soviet Jewry.

Sadly for his business, the current protestors haven’t needed his kosher offerings — for its first few weeks, at least, Occupy Wall Street demonstrators received sufficient food supplies from elsewhere, including sandwiches from Katz’s Deli. The New York Times described the spread as “not unlike the Occupy Wall Street movement itself: free-form, eclectic, improvisatory and contradictory.”

Wall Street banks have formed the inspiration for the protests, but food fights have snuck into the proceedings in other ways. The banks’ accumulation of an ever-higher share of the nation’s money was likened by Mother Jones to changes in the food industry, which it described, in a eating-minded analogy, as a “big fat monopoly.”

Rich Iott, who ran as a Republican for Ohio’s 9th Congressional District seat last year against incumbent Democrat Marcy Kaptur, donated $2,400 to Boehner’s campaign, reported Washington Jewish Week

“Clearly Boehner is so desperate for campaign cash or so removed from reality that he is accepting money from a Nazi enthusiast who insults the memory of six million Jews who died during the Holocaust and our nations’ veterans who sacrificed to defend our freedom,” said Jesse Ferguson of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The National Jewish Democratic Council, a left-leaning group, said Boehner has a “responsibility to repudiate Iott’s behavior by returning the money or, better yet, donating it to a Holocaust charity.”

“Boehner-the most powerful Republican in America and the third person in the presidential succession line-owes American Jews and WWII veterans an explanation as to how he can continue to associate himself with Iott, given his widely-known disturbing behavior,” said NJDC President and CEO David A. Harris.

At the time, Iott said his appearance in a Nazi uniform was as a “re-enactor” and that it helped him “bond with his son” who also was a World War II “re-enactor enthusiast.”

FOX News has reached out to Speaker Boehner’s office for details on this story, and although they do not deny the contribution, Boehner’s communications team has declined to comment

“It’s really cruel and unusual,” Councilman David Greenfield, a champion of the anti-sticker movement, said, according to an account of the hearing sent out by his office.

“Even with our worst criminals, we don’t ask them to wear stickers on their heads saying: ‘Caught! Courtesy of the NYPD.’ Why are people who accidentally park their cars on the wrong side of the street worse than convicted criminals?” (Greenfield was said to have ‘exclaimed’ that last bit.)

Also weighing in: Councilman James Vacca, who’s quoted as saying, “People have gotten the message, and the message is ‘get going or get fined.’ I don’t agree with the premise that the sticker is needed…”

Councilwoman Letitia James, Chairwoman of the Sanitation and Solid Waste Management Committee, concurred: “I don’t believe that government should be in the business of publicly humiliating its citizens,” she said

The proposed eruv would turn the area contained within into a “private dwelling” in the eyes of Orthodox Jews. The Torah forbids the carrying of objects outside of a private dwelling on the Sabbath.

Barnet Synagogue’s Rabbi Barry Lerer said that without an eruv in the area, the Sabbath, which falls between Friday and Saturday evening, was an awkward time for many Jewish residents.

“An eruv will allow people in our community to push prams to synagogue on the Sabbath, bring their prayer books and their shawls,” he said.

The eruv will be created using existing local features, such as the Northern Line fences, and walls. Where the links are broken “gateways” are created using poles linked by pieces of wire.

“Unless you know it’s there you’re not going to notice it,” Rabbi Lerer said.
It is hoped that the New Barnet eruv will link up with another one proposed in Woodside Park.

This in turn would link with one in Golders Green, meaning that, should they wish, an Orthodox Jew could push a pram from New Barnet down to Cricklewood.

People will be able to check the eruv boundaries on the synagogue’s website. There will also be news if an eruv has been broken.

“I hope it will encourage Orthodox families to move into the area. I think the future of the Orthodox Jewish community depends on these,” he added.

The Hampstead Garden Suburb eruv was the first to be erected in the UK in 2002, and was met with opponents, who claimed the enclave would upset the balance of a multicultural area. Many of the objectors were secular Jews.

Rabbi Lerer said no opposition was raised during the synagogue’s consultation with residents, although Barnet Council’s planning site has registered 49 responses against the plans.

“Some people’s concern is that all of a sudden the area they are living in will turn into a Jewish ghetto, but that’s not going to happen,” he said.

A decision on the planning permission is expected in November.

Since arriving in US some 100 years ago, Jews have become richest religious group in American society. They make up only 2% of US population, but 25% of 400 wealthiest Americans. How did it happen, and how crucial is their aid to Israel?
Tani Goldstein

World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder sparked a row recently by calling on Israel to launch immediate peace negotiations with the Palestinians. The statement was perceived as criticism against Lauder’s personal friend, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Later, Lauder reiterated his “unequivocal” support for Netanyahu and “policies that seek to create a lasting peace in the Middle East”.

Lauder’s remarks made headlines and sparked both enthusiastic and angry responses not just because of his important role, but also – and mainly – because he is a very rich man.

Wall Street: Many Jews

Forbes magazine estimates his wealth at $2.7 billion. His family owns the Estée Lauder cosmetics giant, he is one of the biggest art collectors in the world, and owns dozens of television channels and media outlets in the United States and worldwide, including 25% of Israel’s Channel 10 TV. He is a heavy donor to countless Jewish and Israeli organizations, bodies and officials – including Netanyahu.

Jews in all centers of power

Lauder is definitely not the only American Jew funneling money to Israel while influencing the country. Many Israeli adults used to receive a parcel from “the rich uncle in America” during their childhood. Thousands of organizations, including hospitals and universities, receive billions of shekels in donations from the US. A Hebrew University study found that they make up about two-third of all donations in Israel.

Each new immigrant receives aid from the Jewish Agency, whose budget is mostly made up of donations from the US. Many of us live on lands the Jewish National Fund bought from Arabs for Jewish-American money. A haredi yeshiva student gets NIS 1,000 ($295) a month from the Israeli government, and another NIS 3,000 ($885) from haredi American donors. This does not include the federal aid, a significant part of which comes from taxes paid by Jews.

The online Jewish Encyclopedia says some 5.6 million Jews live in the United States (not including half a million Israelis) – about 1.8% of the population. Most of them reside in rich cities: Miami, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Boston, and mainly New York.

A study of the Pew Forum institute from 2008 found that Jews are the richest religious group in the US: Forty-six of Jews earn more than $100,000 a year, compared to 19% among all Americans. Another Gallup poll conducted this year found that 70% of American Jews enjoy “a high standard of living” compared to 60% of the population and more than any other religious group.

Hollywood: Many Jews

More than 100 of the 400 billionaires on Forbes’ list of the wealthiest people in America are Jews. Six of the 20 leading venture capital funds in the US belong to Jews, according to Forbes.

Google founder Sergey Brin has a Jewish father, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is Jewish, as is his deputy, David Fischer, the son of Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer. The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Shalom Bernanke, is Jewish too, as is he predecessor, Alan Greenspan, and the Fed founder, Paul Warburg.

Jews are well represented in Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the US Congress and Administration, Hollywood, TV networks and the American press – way beyond their percentage in the population.

From town to Brooklyn alleys

The United States is among the richest countries in the world, making American Jews one of the wealthiest ethnic groups in the universe. Their success story is even more phenomenal considering the speed in which they became rich.

Only several thousand Jews lived in the US upon its establishment on July 4, 1776, most of them Marrano and people who were exiled or escaped from Spain in favor of colonies in North America.

In the mid 19th century, some 200,000 Jews immigrated to the US, mostly from Germany and central Europe. Most of them were Reform Jews, well-established, who saw themselves as Germans and Americans more than as Jews. They scattered across the continent and set up businesses, from small stores and factories to financial giants like Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs.

The great wave of immigration began in 1882. Czarist Russia, which was home to about half of the world’s Jews, went through a failed industrial revolution and was on the verge of collapse, while the Jews living in small towns became impoverished and suffered from cruel pogroms.

Within 42 years, some two million Jews immigrated to the US from Ukraine, western Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Romania. They made up 25% of the Jewish population in those countries, about 15% of the world’s Jews, and 10 times the number of Jews who immigrated to the Land of Israel during that period.

The US became the world’s biggest Jewish concentration. The mass immigration to Israel began in 1924, when the US enacted tough laws which halted the immigration.

The immigrants arrived in the US on crowded boats, and most of them were as poor as church mice. Dr. Robert Rockaway, who studied that period, wrote that 80% of US Jews were employed in manual work before World War I, most of them in textile factories.

Many workplaces were blocked to the Jews due to an anti-Semitic campaign led by industrialist Henry Ford. Most of them lived in crowded and filthy slums in New York – Brooklyn and the Lower East Side.

Many films and books describe the world established in those neighborhoods: Vibrant, but tough and brutal. There was a lively culture of cabarets and small Yiddish theaters, alongside a Jewish mafia with famous crime bosses such as Meyer Lansky, Abner “Longie” Zwillman, and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, who grew up in the filthy alleys.

Many of the Jews, who were socialists in Europe, became active in labor unions and in workers’ strikes and protests. Many trade unions were established by Jews.

The Jewish immigrants, however, emerged from poverty and made faster progress than any other group of immigrants. According to Rockaway, in the 1930s, about 20% of the Jewish men had free professions, double the rate in the entire American population.

Anti-Semitism weakened after World War II and the restrictions on hiring Jews were reduced and later canceled as part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, thanks to the struggle of liberal activists, many of whom were Jews.

In 1957, 75% of US Jews were white-collar workers, compared to 35% of all white people in the US; in 1970, 87% of Jewish men worked in clerical jobs, compared to 42% of all white people, and the Jews earned 72% more than the general average. The only remnant of their poverty is that most of them still support a welfare policy and the Democratic Party.

As they became richer, Jews integrated into society. They moved from the slums to the suburbs, abandoned Yiddish and adopted the clothes, culture, slang and dating and shopping habits of the non-Jewish elite.

Most Jews left religion when they immigrated to the US, but returned to it later on and joined Reform and Conservative communities, becoming more alike the Americans, most of whom are religious Christians.

‘Jews always studied more’

Alongside the Jews, millions of immigrants arrived in the US from Ireland, Italy, China and dozens of other countries. They too have settled down since then, but the Jews succeeded more than everyone. Why? All the experts we asked said the reason was Jewish education. Jewish American student organization Hillel found that 9 to 33% of students in leading universities in the US are Jewish.

“The Jewish tradition always sanctified studying, and the Jews made an effort to study from the moment they arrived in American,” says Danny Halperin, Israel’s former economic attaché in Washington. “In addition, the Jews have a strong tradition of business entrepreneurship. The Irish, for example, came from families of land workers with a different mentality, studies less and initiated less.

“The Jews progressed because many areas were blocked to them,” says Halperin. “Many Irish were integrated into the police force, for example, and only few Jews. The Jews entered new fields in which there was need for people with initiative. They didn’t integrate into traditional banking, so they established the investment banking.”

“The cinema industry was created from scratch in the 1930s, and the Jews basically took over it. To this day there are many Jewish names in the top echelon of Hollywood and the television networks. Later on, they took high-tech by storm too – another new industry requiring learning abilities.”

‘Grandpa arrived with $2, dad completed PhD’

“The Jews were the first people to undergo globalization,” says Rebecca Caspi, senior vice president of the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA). “They had a network of global connections way before other nations, and a strong and supportive community.

“The Jewish communal organization is considered a role model for all other ethnic groups. It helped the Jews everywhere and especially in the US, which was always more open than other countries and provided equal opportunities, while on the other hand –wasn’t supportive of the individual.”

How do community institutions help people succeed in business?

“The mutual help allowed poor Jews to study. My family is an example of what happened to millions. My grandfather arrived in New York with two dollars in his pocket. He sold pencils, and then pants and then other things, and in the meantime studied English, German and Spanish and established ties.

“He had five children, and the family had a small store in Brooklyn. They got help from the HIAS Jewish organization, which allowed them to study. They were so poor that they didn’t have money for textbooks, so the siblings helped each other. My father was the youngest, and until he started university the four older siblings had already managed to settle down, so they all helped him complete his medical studies.”

“The Jews had to excel in order to survive,” says Avia Spivak, a professor of economic and former Bank of Israel deputy governor. “I once had a student of Russian descent, who told me that his parents said to him, ‘You must be the best, because then you might get a small role.’

“That was the situation of the Jews abroad, and in America too until the 1960s. The most prestigious universities didn’t take in Jewish students, so they studied in colleges and got the best grades. When the discrimination disappeared, the Jews reached the top.”

Is that why they succeeded in the US more than in other places?

The discrimination lessened in most countries. I think Jews succeeded in America in particular because capitalism is good for the Jews. Jews have a tendency for entrepreneurship, they study more and have quick perception, know how to seize opportunities and have networking skills. A competitive environment gives Jews an advantage.”

Is that the reason Israelis are not as rich as American Jews?

“I think the ‘Jewish genius’ – which is not a genetic issue but a cultural issue – is expressed in Israel in other areas. The Jews in America arrived in a country with existing, stable and strong infrastructure. Here they had to build the entire infrastructure from scratch, under harsh conditions.”

‘Government hurting aid, but it’ll continue’

There is no doubt that American Jews’ huge success helped Jews survive in Israel.

“The help is beyond the actual donations,” says Caspi. “The federal aid arrives largely thanks to the Jewish pressure. Israeli businesspeople use their connections in America to open markets and raise funds, especially for the venture capital industry.”

The American aid strengthens the connection between the two communities – which together make up about 80% of the Jewish people – but also creates discomfort on both sides: The Americans view Israel as a “shelter for a rainy day” and feel committed to help the State, but some feel their money is being wasted due to wrong moves; the Israelis live in fear of what will happen if and when the aid stops. The fear is increasing, with one-third of US Jews marrying non-Jews and stating that they feel less connected to Israel.

“Israel would have been established and would have survived even without the American aid, but it would have been poorer,” says Halperin. “There are areas, like higher education, in which the aid is critical – and if it suddenly disappears, things will be difficult.”

Every time there are arguments between the Israeli government and Jews in America, Israeli and American public figures warn that “one day they’ll have enough and stop donating.” Can that happen?

“The scope of donations is decreasing in the past few years,” says Halperin. “The Jews have a sense of belonging to the American society and give their donations to American organizations. They want to see their names at a New York museum rather than at Jerusalem museum.

“As the Holocaust becomes more distant, the fear for Israel’s existence drops. In addition, Israel is no longer perceived as a poor country. And the Americans have their own problems: The financial crisis and education in the US, which is becoming more and more expensive. The donations will gradually drop, and may eventually disappear.

“But it’s hard for me to believe that the donations will disappear at once because of a political crisis. It looks like our government is trying to make it happen with all its might, but fortunately, it can’t even do that.”