Tag: federal

WASHINGTON - Even before the debt deal was signed Tuesday in Washington, U.S. Jewish groups and recipients of government largesse were asking the same question: Who's going to get cut?

Congress has never seen a better friend of the observant Jewish community than Stephen Solarz, who died of esophageal cancer on the 22nd of Kislev. Yonoson Rosenblum's recently published biography of Rabbi Moshe Sherer describes Solarz as an "invaluable ally" for many Agudath Israel projects and there are 20 references to Solarz in the book's index.

e Jewish world was rocked last week by still another scandal, one so twisted and nefarious that it simply defies belief.

The federal government just announced that the nation's unemployment rate is still hovering around 10 percent. Voters have seized on this news by demanding that their leaders find a way to drive that number down.

A front-page story in The New York Timesof July 10 reported that federal immigration authorities in the Obama administration have adopted a "new strategy" to replace the military-style raids that were conducted in the Bush years to find and arrest illegal aliens.

Almost a quarter of a century ago Raymond Donovan, secretary of labor in the Reagan administration, was acquitted by a jury of larceny and fraud charges. His reaction, as quoted in the next day's news stories, was, "Where do I go now to get my reputation back?"

After Palestine, conditions in the Middle East would be markedly less favorable to both Israel and the United States. The only credible way for Israel to deter large-scale conventional attacks following Palestinian statehood would be by maintaining visible and increasingly large-scale conventional capabilities. Naturally, enemy states contemplating first-strike attacks upon Israel using chemical and/or biological weapons would be apt to take more seriously Israel's nuclear deterrent. Whether or not this nuclear deterrent had remained undisclosed (the so-called "bomb in the basement") could also affect Israel's deterrent credibility and, thereby, U.S. security.

On March 27, before a huge crowd in Boston's historic Faneuil Hall, the mock trial team of Boston's Maimonides School won the championship for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and became eligible to compete in the national competition scheduled for Atlanta on May 8 and 9.

A well-known kosher caterer who has a commissary in Florida that prepares kosher meals for federal prison inmates, and who has also been hosting a kosher-for-Passover holiday program for a number of years, told me a humorous story.

We have often been somewhat critical of some of the war reparations class-action lawsuits filed against Germany and other European countries.

The Supreme Court's recent decisions concerning gay rights and affirmative action, overshadowed its refusal to accept for review a federal appeals court decision that had required the township of Tenafly, New Jersey to allow the erecting of an eruv using telephone poles.

The world hardly needs a Jewish Press commentary on the affirmative action and gay rights rulings handed down by the United States Supreme Court last week.

We are disappointed to report that because of the last minute intransigence of New York's Governor George Pataki, the state Senate failed to pass the two bills important to the Jewishcommunity which we wrote about last week, and which had been passed earlier by the Assembly.

We welcome the call of US Congressman Jerrold Nadler for a new federal probe into the circumstances of the death of Gidone Busch at the hands of 6 police officers several years ago.

As we report on page 3, New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer have teamed up to produce legislation that protects kosher consumers by requiring those selling food as kosher, to disclose the basis for that representation.

Liya Kochavi/AP/IDF Israeli soldiers train for urban combat at a military base in southern Israel with mock structures in background

In a speech Monday, Democratic presidential hopeful Joseph Lieberman vowed to work for congressional passage of a bill that would guarantee a range of benefits to partners of gay federal employees, and declared his staunch support for affirmative action and abortion rights ? including the partial birth procedure opposed by many Democrats.

Lieberman?s statements, made at the biannual conference of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, seemed to cement his move away from the centrist image he had crafted for himself in earlier years.

In recent years the American Jewish community has been the target of a campaign that tries to argue that Jews are theologically obligated to support each and every green fad to come along. Several organizations have arisen in the name of "eco-Judaism," which is nothing more than the endorsement of the environmentalist political agenda in the name of Judaism.

We are appalled at the possibility that two leaders of the Jewish Defense League may have been involved in a plot to bomb a mosque and the office of a Congressman of Lebanese descent. Yet such are the charges against JDL Chairman Irv Rubin and member Earl Krugel. They are accused in a federal complaint of planning to bomb the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City, California and the office of freshman California Rep. Darrell Issa.

In a brief filed with the United States Court of Appeals in the crucial case involving an eruv in Tenafly, New Jersey, Nathan Lewin, Orthodox Jewry's foremost constitutional litigation lawyer, presented an important argument that will, if successful, insulate all eruvim in the United States against similar constitutional attack. The Tenafly Council ordered Cablevision to remove 183 plastic strips that the Eruv Association had attached to utility poles to be used as "lechis," which are necessary to complete an eruv. Many reportedly had reason to believe, from the debate that had preceded the order of removal, that Tenafly was simply trying to keep Orthodox Jews out of the town. But all the Council members swore that they had no anti-Orthodox bias ? which would have meant that their action against the eruv was a violation of the Constitution ? and the federal judge believed them.

Last week we addressed the widespread feeling that a monumental failure of the American intelligence apparatus contributed to the World Trade Center disaster. Indeed, tragically, every day brings new revelations of clues all around us of the impending onslaught, from the hijackers signing on for flight training limited to flying but not taking off and landing, to a total collapse of our illegal immigrant tracking system. Perhaps the most remarkable is what apparently was making the rounds of the Internet. In Friday's Washington Times' "Inside the Beltway" column, the following appeared:

A Sabbath-observant Orthodox Associate Professor of Education at William Paterson College, a state-run university in New Jersey, won a resounding landmark victory from a federal court of appeals in her religious-discrimination lawsuit. A unanimous Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued a 38-page opinion sending the claims of Dr. Gertrude Abramson back to trial court for a full jury trial on her allegations that she had been subjected to a ''hostile work environment'' because of harassment relating to her observance of the Sabbath and Jewish religious holidays. The Court also upheld her claims that her employment had been terminated because she observed religious holidays, and that the College retaliated against her because she maintained her religious observance.