Watch a chasidic band perform Lady Gaga, via Jessica Elgot at the JC.

Let My People … Tweet

Screenshot from last year’s Tweder, featuring a matzah background on Dan Berkal’s Twitter page.

Welcome to the Tweder. Can Twitter and the Passover seder coexist?

Last Passover, Dan Berkal spent the first seder dining with family and friends at the James Hotel in Chicago — chanting the prayers and songs of the Haggadah, sipping the four requisite glasses of wine … and updating his Twitter status.

“Suddenly four children enter the room,” he tweeted at 4:53 p.m. “Nobody seems to like the wise child,” he added a minute later, followed by the 4:55 p.m. announcement: “We tell the wise son, ‘No dessert for you!’”

And at 3:57 p.m. the following seder night, Berkal followed up, “This year we are slaves to Twitter: next year may we be free people.”

Clearly, that wasn’t the case. This year, loyal seder-goers are tweeting back for more.

Berkal, a 31-year-old marketing research consultant, will host his second annual Passover Twitter Seder — dubbed the “Tweder” — next week and hopes to attract many more followers than the approximately 1,500 he says attended last year. In 140 characters or less — the maximum character count on social networking site Twitter — Berkal tweeted each step of the Tweder, targeting an audience of 20- and 30-something diaspora Jews who are unable to attend a seder, regardless of location, age and mobility. During last year’s Tweder, Berkal said he constantly received messages about different elements of the seder, paraphrased them and re-tweeted them to his Twitter followers.

“I was tweeting [during] my seder from a laptop on the table. Everyone at my family was knowledgeable about what was going on,” Berkal told The Jewish Week. “[The Tweder allows us] to add a social element to Judaism to make it more relevant and more positive. It also allows those who can’t go to a seder to have a feeling of being part of a community.”

Berkal’s Tweder is just one of many new innovative approaches to the holiday, where Internet tools aim to connect households around the world through Twitter, video seders and Passover-friendly smartphone applications (see sidebar).

Bradley Dworkin, a 25-year-old film director from Toronto, followed Berkal’s Tweder for the novelty of it. “I chose to follow the Tweder initially out of general curiosity,” said Dworkin, who used to work with Berkal. “I’d seen it appear on some of my friends’ Twitter feeds, and I decided it made sense since I’d be missing my family seder.”  Continue reading…

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Snapshot of the front page feature on our NEW WEB SITE:

There’s An App (Or Two) For Pesach

Parents can use smartphone apps like iMah Nishtanah to help refresh their kids before the seders.

Sharon Udasin, staff writer

For Jews who already intend to partake in Passover festivities, there are several iPhone applications released within the past year that can serve as teaching tools, before and during the seder.

Before the holiday begins, families can prepare their houses properly by downloading the simplistically designed but informative black-and-white “apps” called “At Our Rebbes’ Seder Table” and “Pesach Guide,” both free and published respectively by Sichos in English in Crown Heights and JewishContent.org.

Parents trying to teach their children how to chant the Four Questions can purchase iMah Nishtanah ($0.99), a Behrman House Publishing app that sings the questions aloud while allowing the user to follow along, word-by-word. Meanwhile, virtual flashcards and an image match game give kids the chance to learn the meaning of each Hebrew word they chant.

“Already religious school teachers are telling kids to download it to their iPod Touches,” said Jeremy Poisson, the app’s developer, who sees iMah Nishtanah best used as an at-home “crash course” in preparation for seders. Poisson is also spearheading the release of Behrman’s customizable Family Haggadah ($19 for one, $11 each for 20 or more), where families can order personalized books according to their needs and interests.  Continue reading…

The Curse That Rocked Great Neck

Rabbi Mordechai Aderet: Party crasher frightens guests.

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Like biblical plagues raining down on them from an angry God, the white-bearded, black-hatted rabbi laid a string of curses upon the unsuspecting suburban partygoers. Banging a siddur on a table and screaming “Shema Yisrael,” the rabbi, accompanied by a four-man entourage — all of whom had burst into a Great Neck home — lit into those gathered for an evening of celebration, mixed dancing and traditional Iranian fare in honor of a little girl’s first birthday.

After “shrieking Hebrew oaths,” the “uninvited” rabbi launched into a “lengthy diatribe” during which he told those who chose to remain at the party that they would be cursed with “illness, bankruptcy and tragedy for eternity,” according to a petition signed by some of those in attendance.

“They just came right in like a storm, inside the middle of the party,” said a woman who attended the December party but, like many others contacted by The Jewish Week, asked to remain anonymous because she fears for her safety. “They started to curse everybody, saying — ‘You’re going to have tragedies, everyone who stays here.’”

Guests and their children were allegedly so frightened by the rabbi’s intrusion that many left, while others stood shaking and crying, according to those in attendance.

After the rabbi left, rumors began circulating around the community about the presence of naked women at the party. Those in attendance suspect the rabbi and his men of spreading the reports.

The actions of Rabbi Mordechai Aderet — and the sheer incongruity of medieval-like curses being hurled at well-off Persian Jews in Great Neck, of all places — have sent shockwaves through the local Jewish community.

Other rabbis in the community seem stunned by Rabbi Aderet’s alleged behavior. Those at the party drafted an emotional memo to a Great Neck bet din detailing their “deep distress, sadness and anger” over the rabbi’s actions. It urged the rabbis making up the religious court to “use your influence to prevail upon your colleague to cease and desist from his unauthorized, illegal and unethical harassment of members of our community.”

And the bet din, run by Rabbi Eliyahu Ben-Haim, in turn circulated a letter among Great Neck rabbis that referenced the incident, but without mentioning Rabbi Aderet’s name, according to those who saw it. Only one rabbi is believed to have signed the letter.

“No one else wanted to even get near it,” said the one signatory, Rabbi Yamin Levy, who is vice president of yeshiva affairs at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School and serves as a part-time rabbi at a Great Neck congregation, Beth Hadassah. “Rabbis don’t want to go on record as appearing like they’re against a colleague.”

Reached by phone, Rabbi Ben-Haim said he would not comment on Rabbi Aderet, then hung up. Rabbi Aderet refused to speak with The Jewish Week himself but asked that the paper call one of his main supporters who would speak on the rabbi’s behalf.

In an indication of how controversial Rabbi Aderet has become in Great Neck, the congregant tapped to speak for him would not agree to use his name, saying that his business might suffer from the association.

“They [the partygoers] exaggerated the event in order to take revenge against Rabbi Aderet and the Orthodox Jewish community because they don’t want Great Neck to become Orthodox,” Rabbi Aderet’s supporter said. “They don’t want another Five Towns.”

The supporter, who accompanied Rabbi Aderet to the party, claims he was invited, though he could not produce an invitation. Partygoers say Rabbi Aderet was not invited and that invitations were sent out to all of those on the guest list.

Rabbi Aderet’s supporter suggested The Jewish Week call Rabbi Avraham Cohen of Torah Va Danesh, an Orthodox synagogue in Great Neck, for comment. When reached, the rabbi said through a secretary that he “doesn’t want to get involved.”   Continue reading…

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Reposted on Jewlicious.com. Also reposted on FailedMessiah.com with a lot of comments, as well as on Vos Iz Neais.

**We apologize for the shakiness of this video, especially since we had been doing so much better lately. This time, we unfortunately misplaced the tripod, so we had to rely on my hand. That being said, I think we did a pretty good job.**

The Rebbe’s Rosé

The city’s first kosher wine bar is coming to the corner of Kingston Avenue and Lincoln Place, in Crown Heights.

by Sharon Udasin

A Crown Heights thoroughfare known for baby carriages, yeshiva bochers and the occasional Mitzvah Tank is about to be home to a trendy pizzeria and wine bar, the first exclusively kosher wine bar in the city.

Basil Pizza & Wine Bar, located at the corner of Kingston Avenue and Lincoln Place, is scheduled to open at the end of next week and will serve a variety of kosher wines, gourmet pizzas and Mediterranean-inspired dishes under the supervision of OK Kosher Certification.

The bistro will join an increasing number of Jewish businesses that are expanding north of Eastern Parkway, a section of Crown Heights also home to a large West Indian community as well as a growing population of trendy young professionals — those “spilling over from Park Slope,” according to the restaurant’s owner.

“I felt that there’s a real void for real quality food along with some ambiance that happens to be kosher,” said the owner, Danny Branover, who comes from a background in Israeli high-tech. “Typically the owners use line cooks. There’s no real creativity there.”

So Branover figured he’d take it upon himself to reverse this trend and meanwhile jump on the wine-bar bandwagon that has been overtaking the city.

“It’s much easier to teach a restaurateur about kosher code, versus taking an ultra-Orthodox, religious Jew and teaching him how to cook,” he added, laughing.  Continue reading…

Grape Expectations

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Swirl. Sniff. Swish. Spit.

Repeat 170 times. In four hours and change.

Welcome to the life of a time-stressed kosher wine taster.

In the basement of City Winery on a recent Thursday afternoon, five young wine connoisseurs made their way through 170 bottles of kosher wine — first aerating the wine with a gentle swirl, then swishing it around the palate, and ultimately spitting the liquid into silver wine-chilling buckets scattered across a table where they were seated.

The five men had gathered for an expedited wine tasting, where in 4 ½ hours, they’d plow through the daunting number of bottles and give each a ranking between 1 and 100. The point of the blind tasting — the labels were wrapped in white paper to conceal their provenance — was to determine which wines were the top 18 for The Jewish Week’s Kosher Wine Guide. Companies that planned to showcase their wines at an upcoming March 14 Grand Wine Tasting had sent over complimentary bottles to the group of judges.

“We’re going to try to do it fairly, quickly and give each wine a number — we’ll arrive at the top 18,” said Michael Dorf, owner of City Winery, who chaired the tasting group. “All we’re doing is getting a taste and spitting it out.”

Dorf instructed the others to refrain from jotting down notes and to try their best to stay within 50 and 100 points in their ratings, unless the wine was completely undrinkable. And then they embarked on a turbo-speed process essentially “emulating what the biggies do,” according to Dorf, a reference to high-toned wine tasters.

First up were the white wines, then the rosés, followed by the reds and finally, the sweet dessert wines. The reds claimed the majority of the table space, as reds are much more popular among consumers and get a much higher profit margin for producers, the tasters told The Jewish Week.

“Well, l’chaim, everyone,” Dorf said, officially kicking off the tasting, and sampling his first white wine.   Continue reading…

(this blog post was originally written for Jewlicious.com)

This weekend, while visiting a friend in D.C., I ventured for the first time to the Newseum, a 250,000-square-foot colossus that offers a window into hundreds of years of news headlines, news history and of course, the people behind the news. For a journalist, visiting this place is like unleashing a wide-eyed child in Disney World. Among other exhibits was a floor-to-ceiling wall of front pages following 9/11, a transplanted memorial version of Tim Russert’s office and the News Corporation News History Gallery — which features front pages from major events that occurred anywhere from 1455 to the present day.

Front page of The Westerly Sun, 1948. I apologize for the poor quality of the image. The room was dark, the newspaper was behind glass, using flash was prohibited and I only had my point and shoot camera.

As far as Jewish things go — because this is a Jewish blog of course — I was particularly impressed by one choice made my museum curators. In that News Corp New History exhibit, the front page chosen for 1948 was thankfully a commemoration of Israel’s statehood. However, the page chosen wasn’t from The New York Times, or The Washington Post or any other major world news outlet. Rather, it was from The Westerly Sun, a regional daily based in the southern tip of Rhode Island.

Being the Zionist I am, I was of course instantly filled with pride the moment I saw that headline, “New Jewish State Proclaimed in Tel Aviv.” But after giving the yellowing newsprint a second glance, what was even more meaningful to me was the choice of that specific Rhode Island paper. Selecting a small paper from a town in the smallest state of America shows just how omnipresent Israel’s independence was in 1948. At that moment, people everywhere, from major cities to rural towns, were recognizing the sovereignty of that tiny democratic Middle Eastern Nation — that Jewish nation. Jews throughout the Diaspora, from those in Tel Aviv to those in Rhode Island, had reason to celebrate.

And hey, Rhode Island is home to Touro Synagogue, the oldest American synagogue still standing (erected 1763), so the choice might be that much more significant.