**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…

YouTube Orthodoxy

Allison Josephs: Trying to “re-brand” Orthodox Judaism.

by Sharon Udasin

Allison Josephs sits in her bathroom in a green facial mask, relaxing in dark blue towel-turban and peeling cucumber slices off her eyes.

“Dear Jew in the City,” she recites. “My friend just told me that Orthodox people consider women dirty when it’s their time of the month. And that’s just so horrible — I mean, it’s a natural bodily occurrence. How could they make it into something so negative?”

Josephs, 30, is single-handedly trying to “re-brand” Orthodox Judaism, and in doing so has just finished broadcasting her first season of “Jew in the City,” a Web series (JewintheCity.com) that attempts to dispel negative myths often associated with religious Jewry and give it a hipper, more modern cast.

Many of these myths Josephs herself firmly believed as an adolescent, before she made the gradual switch from Conservative Judaism to Modern Orthodoxy during high school and her college years at Columbia. Among other questions, her series of two-minute Webisodes explores whether or not Jewish women are considered dirty during menstruation, whether woman in Orthodox Judaism are treated as inferior and the idea that Orthodox couples are never sexually intimate. The infamous “hole in the sheet” is one of her favorite topics.

“I’ve gotten asked that question by so many people,” said Josephs, who wears a trendily highlighted sheitel, chandelier earrings and a perfect manicure in most of the videos. “I wanted to handle the question in a modest way, but not dealing with the question doesn’t help either.”

In that particular episode, Josephs makes clear that Orthodox Jews are certainly not sexually “oppressed” and explains that “knowing someone in the biblical sense” is actually one of the holiest mitzvahs in Judaism. She surmises that the “hole” myth probably arose from a pair of tzitzit hanging on a clothesline, because tzitzit resemble a sheet with, well, a hole in the middle for the head.   Continue reading…

Orthodox Compulsive Disorder?

“You see a lot of compulsive behaviors with the intention of undoing something that has been done wrong,” said Dr. Jeff Szymanski, the executive director of the International OCD Foundation. “I have to repeat it until it’s done perfectly.”

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

‘Mr. A” is a 43-year-old chasidic man who is so afraid to make mistakes in his daily prayers that he cannot bring himself to get out of bed until noon or 1 p.m. The reason? Obsessions he’s faced since his days in yeshiva, when he was consistently the last person to finish praying each morning.

“He thought he was just more religious than everyone in the class,” said Dr. Steven Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry at SUNY Downstate, who was addressing a group of fellow therapists. “Patients who have religious obsessions often don’t recognize or admit that they have symptoms.”

Friedman was speaking to a group of 30 therapists — at least 20 of them Orthodox Jews — who had gathered for a three-day conference this week at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn sponsored by the Behavior Therapy Training Institute of the International Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Foundation. While the Institute holds about three of these meetings annually, this was the first conference tailored specifically to the needs of Orthodox Jewish therapists, who had been unable to attend regular Saturday programming.

Sessions last weekend were largely the same as any other Behavior Therapy Training curriculum, aside from Friedman’s Sunday afternoon lecture about “Religious Scrupulosity,” which targeted obsessions and compulsions rooted in Jewish ritual. In addition to discussing these specific behaviors and treatment techniques, the doctors focused on the unwillingness of many Orthodox Jews to even seek treatment, in a community where mental health issues are somewhat taboo.

“You can speak Yiddish like I do and you’ll still find that that won’t get you access to certain populations,” Friedman said. “Since the community is so small, most of them you know and it’s one degree of separation. If you give me the name of an Orthodox person in the United States, I can find someone who knows something all about them.”

“This is problematic when you do therapy,” he added.

OCD is a genetic disorder that equally affects men, women and children of all backgrounds, typically appearing between the ages of 10 to 12 or in late adolescence or early adulthood, according to the Foundation. On average, OCD inflicts 1 in 100 adults and 1 in 200 kids and teens, amounting to about 2 to 3 million adult cases and 500,000 childhood cases in the United States alone. Because OCD runs in families, there is a 15 percent chance that a patient’s child will also exhibit OCD, though not necessarily in exactly the same form, Friedman explained. For example, he said, a parent might be an incessant hand-washer, while the child might become a compulsive checker.   Continue reading…

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This article was also reposted on the blog FailedMessiah, and has many interesting comments below it.

Also reprinted on VosIzNeias, with additional comments.

Mumps Spreads To New Communities

by Sharon Udasin

A mumps outbreak in the Orthodox community, which began last summer, has spread beyond Williamsburg and Borough Park to include scattered incidents in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Far Rockaway, Queens, city Health Department officials say.

Far Rockaway pediatrician Dr. Hylton Lightman told The Jewish Week that he has seen about 20 mumps patients, most of them men between 17 and 23, as well as four or five girls and two mothers. Among his patients is a staff member at the Bnot Shulamith Elementary School in Woodmere, L.I.

Of particular concern to some doctors is that the age range of patients — who remain 80 percent male — now includes an older population of young adults, many of whom misplaced their immunization records after graduating high school, according to Dr. Jane Zucker, assistant commissioner for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. In the affected communities, 70 percent of children under 18 have received their two immunization dosages, but for young adults statistics remain unclear.

“People who are not vaccinated have a higher rate of complications,” Zucker said. “We want people who don’t know their status to go and get vaccinated.” This week, the Department of Health will host free vaccination clinics in Borough Park and Williamsburg with Jewish organizations.

The total of New York City cases has risen to 909 as of Feb. 8. Outside the city, the state now accounts for a total of 928 cases, with 317 occurring in Rockland County and 611 in Orange County as of Feb. 10, according to State Department of Health Spokesman Tom Allocco.

The most common symptoms of the mumps are fever, muscle aches and parotitis, the signature inflammation of the salivary glands below the ear. Rarer side effects can include meningoencephalitis (inflammation of the brain) and pancreatitis, which can cause abdominal pain and vomiting.

Original version here.

Hurling Curses Amid The Whitefish

A tense meeting Sunday at the Sixth Street Community Synagogue revealed sharp divisions at the shul.

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

There is nothing remotely community minded about the war that is gripping the Sixth Street Community Synagogue.

Tensions at the East Village Orthodox shul, which have been building between old-timers and newly recruited younger members for six months, erupted last Sunday morning at a meeting to elect new board members

The two sides hurled curses at one another in the shul basement, where a spread of whitefish salad and bagels had been laid out. At one point, someone suggested that the police be called in to restore calm. And when new member Spencer Schneider rushed into the hall urging members to vote on his yellow ballots, which touted a slate of new board members rather than the white ballots made up of more longstanding board members, he got an education in shul politics, East Village style.

“Who are you?” Schneider said when approached by a longtime member of the shul. The man replied, “I didn’t see you in shul yesterday.”

The battle for the soul of the 70-year-old Sixth Street Community illustrates just how dicey it can be to try to revitalize flagging synagogues. Longtime members feel the shul — which has seen its membership double since last spring — is being stolen out from under them by carpetbaggers, new members who don’t even live in the neighborhood and who rarely attend services. The new members say they have revived a shul that was on its last legs, and that the old-timers want to strip them of their voting rights.
“We hoped that maybe someone who lived in the community would join,” Schoenfeld said. “I’d take a lie detector test — there’s not one new member that has been here on Friday night or Saturday. Not even their leaders.”

At the center of the struggle stands Rabbi Simon Jacobson and his Meaningful Life Center. A popular and charismatic Lubavitch-born rabbi and author, Rabbi Jacobson moved the center’s headquarters to the Sixth Street Synagogue two years ago. In lieu of paying rent to the shul, he agreed to renovate the entire basement floor and pay the synagogue 30 percent of the proceeds from his programs.

Rabbi Jacobson told The Jewish Week that last spring he was approached by then-Board Chairman Matthew Pace, asking if he would encourage some of his participants to become shul members. The rest of the board was aware and in favor of a membership drive, part of which would solicit Rabbi Jacobson’s crowd as new members, according to board meeting minutes obtained by The Jewish Week.

“I said to them, ‘Are you sure that’s what you want? Because if people start becoming members, members are shareholders,’ ” Rabbi Jacobson said. “They said ‘We’re sure that’s what we want.’”

Within a few months of the initial membership drive, the synagogue population grew significantly. But for the old-timers, the effort seems to have backfired.  Continue reading…

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Lots of comments also on my article via Failed Messiah, but I have a bit of a problem with how they presented the story.

Frozen Out Of Olympics

Last-minute Israeli ruling keeping figure skater Tamar Katz out of the Vancouver Olympics.

by Sharon Udasin

She could already see herself on the ice in Vancouver.

When New York-based, Israeli-raised ice skater Tamar Katz arrived in Israel last week for a 24-hour, whirlwind visit, Israeli Olympic Committee officials gave her the Olympic outfit and bag she would carry with her to British Columbia to represent Israel in the Winter Games.

But later that day, like a toe loop gone bad, those same officials yanked Katz’s Olympic dream away from her, ruling that she would not be going to Vancouver.

“It was the worst trip to Israel,” she told The Jewish Week Monday.

Katz, 20, who was born in Dallas and trains in upstate Monsey, moved with her family as a child to Metullah, the home of Israel’s only ice skating rink. She had qualified for the 2010 Olympics according to International Skating Union standards.

But Israeli Olympic officials required that she finish in the top 14 at the European Figure Skating Championships last month, where, weak from a virus, she placed 21st.

Katz unsuccessfully called each member individually to plead her case.
“Some of them were willing to listen to what I had to say, but the most important people I had to appeal to were not even willing to listen to anything I said. Some of them even hung up the phone on me,” Katz said.  Continue reading…

Cross-training The Body

by Sharon Udasin

For Caroline Kohles, cardiovascular fitness is a vital part of both her career and her personal life. Kohles, 48, has been the Health and Wellness fitness director at the JCC in Manhattan since it opened in 2002. Both an athlete (she has participated in triathlons) and a dancer, she is known for her combined emphasis on mind and body in every workout, a trademark that specifically comes to life in her work as a Nia martial arts trainer and black belt teacher. In April, she says, the JCC will be hosting a free multi-sport triathlon symposium.

What stands out for you when training fellow Jews at the JCC?

“Jewish people tend to want their workout to make sense – there is an intellectual component to working out. They don’t want to just do it for the sake of doing it – they want to do it because it makes sense to their livelihood and their spirit and their intellect, knowing that by taking care of their bodies they’ll be able to do other things in their life.”

Does cardiovascular training at the gym translate well to outdoor settings?

“The trick with training is what are you training for? … If it’s heart health, then you want to have a component of cardiovascular fitness. The great thing about cardiovascular fitness via triathlon training is that you cross-train the body…Triathlon training appeals to such a wide variety of body types that we find people who are all ages, shapes, sizes and genders doing triathlon training.”

How do you help JCCers to prepare for the New York City Marathon?

“For the Marathon we ran a program where we showed a film, and we had a running coach, a chiropractor that specialized in sports and running injuries, a nutritionist that specialized in running and triathlons and a massage therapist that specialized in training. … When we’re talking about heart rate and cardiovascular training specifically, there’s an opportunity for education to happen. There’s an opportunity for people to understand, ‘Wow, my heart rate is different everyday — and why wouldn’t I pay attention to that and adjust my workout accordingly?’”  Continue reading…

Adam Dickter interviews the Weprin brothers, Mark and David. Mark Weprin just assumed David’s old position in the City Council, while David is running for Mark’s old position in the State Assembly in a special election on Feb. 9. Produced and edited by Sharon Udasin.