The Media's Effect on Self-Image and Modesty

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On most weekdays, young boys in yarmulkes can be seen hanging out with friends in front of the new kosher Subway sandwich shop, while Orthodox women in modest dress stroll past Judaica stores and synagogues along Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles.

Dubbed the "Kosher District" by some planners, this roughly 12-block stretch near Robertson Boulevard has exploded in recent years with restaurants, shops and religious institutions aimed at serving the neighborhood's growing Jewish population.

But the project has sparked protests among Westside residents weary of increasing traffic and overcrowding in an already bustling neighborhood. Similar battles have erupted in Santa Monica and Beverly Hills as the area struggles with more growth.

Neighbors are threatening legal action against Chabad, an Orthodox Jewish outreach organization, over its proposal to construct a new girls school, condos, a ritual bathhouse and retail stores on the boulevard between Wetherly and Crest drives.

Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin, the head of Chabad of California, said his group has been battling neighborhood opposition in one form or another across the region for the last 40 years. These days that opposition includes some of its Jewish neighbors.

Los Angeles — The ultra-Orthodox Chabad movement is famous for multitasking, with its religious services, schools and museums, but a new development in Los Angeles is taking Chabad in an unexpected direction: the commercial and residential real estate business.

Chabad of California is angling to build a massive, mixed-use development that would include a girl’s high school with its own dormitories, 32 residential condominiums, and seven retail shops, in the heart of the heavily Jewish Pico-Robertson neighborhood. The proposed complex — which is raising hackles amongst some neighborhood activists — would dwarf other existing buildings that line the pedestrian-friendly stretch of Pico Boulevard.

Hasidic sects are not new to the residential real estate business. The Satmars, for example, have long managed housing complexes in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. But Chabad has gotten into the act more recently.

The most glaring difference between the Satmar community — which has spread beyond the confines of Brooklyn and established itself in the Catskill village of Kiryas Joel — and Chabad is that Chabad is staking its claim within the urban confines.

I remember taking a beginner's Hebrew class there. It was taught by the boss — Rabbi Avrohom Czapnik. He was exceedingly patient and good humored despite the many stupid interruptions he endured from some of the dimmer bulbs in the class.

When I missed a session, I found two CDs and a packet of notes in my mail box, providing everything I'd missed.

I hear: "The rabbi's really cute, so the women's section was full."

"There was little singing during the davening. They just speed through."

"They had two types of cholent and three types of salad at the kiddush."

For the past week and a half, Rabbis Sholom Laine and Mendel Levin have spent most mornings in their rented car driving to a city, town or highway they've never heard of before.

The first week it was Ocala, Beverly Hills, Lecanto, Inverness, Lake City and Live Oak.

This week it's places closer to Gainesville: Williston, Archer, Alachua, Starke and Waldo.

Laine, 22, and Levin, 23, don't know anyone in these towns. Some days they have a short list of names. Other days they open the phone book and run their fingers down the columns, looking for familiar-sounding names.

"Sometimes you just look in the phone book for the Goldbergs," Laine said. "And the Steins," Levin added.

The rabbis are staying at the Lubavitch-Chabad Jewish Student & Community Center just north of the University of Florida, as members of the "spiritual peace corps," as they call it.

They're looking for Jews in places where Jewish life is hard to find.

They go to these places to visit with Jews who may have no rabbi, no temple, no Jewish community center.

Recently ordained rabbis from Brooklyn, N.Y., Laine and Levin came to Gainesville at the invitation of Lubavitch-Chabad Rabbi Berl Goldman. Laine plans to work with Goldman through UF's fall semester.

For the spiritually and communally isolated Jews in North Central Florida, meeting with the two men, who identify with one of the most conservative branches of Judaism, can be an experience.

In Lake City on Monday, for instance, Laine and Levin met with a woman in the local public library because she wasn't comfortable inviting them to her home.

With long and unkempt beards, black skull caps, black pants and white button-up shirts, the two men stand out in a crowd, although the rabbis did catch the eye of a man with an Israeli accent, who approached with questions of his own.

FREEHOLD TOWNSHIP — Seven members of the township Zoning Board of Adjustment unanimously decided Thursday that a local rabbi is, in fact, running a house of worship out of his home.

"If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, it probably is a duck," zoning board member William Nero said before the board voted. "And without question, this is a duck."

Nero was referring to 351 Stillwells Corner Road, the home of Rabbi Avraham Bernstein.

Bernstein's neighbors have long complained that Bernstein is running religious services out of his home, which is located across the street from the township Municipal Complex.

The township does permit houses of worship in residential areas, but requires a use variance for their operation. Bernstein — a member of the Jewish organization Chabad Lubavitch — does not have a use variance to run services out of his home.

After years of mounting frustration among his neighbors, one — Paul Sweda, who lives next to Bernstein — asked the zoning board to determine whether Bernstein is operating a house of worship in violation of the township's zoning ordinances.

The board began hearing the case in January. During the hearing process, the board heard from several witnesses who described watching people visit Bernstein's home on Fridays and Saturdays, and observing what they believed to be religious celebrations at the house.

Based on that testimony and their own observations, board members said they felt assured that Bernstein's home met the definition of a house of worship.

To be a house of worship, a property must be used for traditional services, meetings or gatherings of an organized religious body or community, which are presided over by an ordained or "otherwise officially recognized" leader of the body or community.

The two black coffins, delivered to the Israeli military as part of a swap in which Israel released five Lebanese prisoners, among them a notorious terrorist, were first confirmation that both soldiers were dead.

“It is a truly black day,” said Chabad’s Rabbi Dovid Meir Drukman, who is chief rabbi of Kiryat Mozkin where the family of Eldad Regev resides. Drukman has been in close contact with the family throughout their ordeal, and was with them today. Though he acknowledged that the return of the bodies allows for the soldiers to finally receive a Jewish burial, the swap brought bitter closure to the families who’ve endured two years of campaigning for their return.

“This is a tragic ending to a very drawn out saga of great anguish,” said Rabbi Drukman. The families’s pain, he said, “is reflective of the feeling that prevails today in Israel at large.”

Rabbi Moshe Oirechman, Chabad representative to the area, visited the Goldwasser family, and lit memorial candles as is customary. Chabad representatives spent time with both families, and in the course of the day, encouraged many of the locals who turned out to express their sympathy, to do a mitzvah in memory of the soldiers.