Pumping Iron For The Payes Set

David Lowey hits the elliptical and studies the Talmud at Green Fitness. Sharon Udasin

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Sharon Udasin, Staff Writer

Taking a mid-afternoon break from running his busy Williamsburg restaurant, David Lowey hustled over to a new Bushwick gym and hopped on an elliptical machine, pedaling vigorously in his full Satmar regalia.

Tzitzit dangling from his black pants and payes swinging over his ears, the 290-pound 26-year-old breathed heavily, as he scrolled through the day’s Daf Yomi Talmud page online, from a touch-screen computer panel in front of him.

When he began working out three months ago, Lowey was the lone Satmar member of Green Fitness Studio, an eco-friendly gym that opened in December and serves a primarily hipster clientele.

But with Lowey, who has already lost 60 pounds, leading the way, more than 100 members of his community now work out at Green Fitness, some in their three-piece formal wear, others sampling the gym’s complimentary sweats.

“I pushed them a lot because I feel there’s a need in the chasidic community for [exercise] — the obesity problem is overwhelming,” Lowey said.

Green Fitness Studio is not the only Williamsburg-area gym where chasidic Jews now exercise alongside hipsters. Soma in Williamsburg also has a chasidic clientele. And fitness-minded Satmars and hipsters also interact over a shared interest in cycling, at Baruch Herzfeld’s Treif Bike Gesheft bike shop in Williamsburg.

With hipsters and chasidim living within blocks of each other, “there’s a much greater intermingling of cultures and interests than we’ve been trained to expect,” Herzfeld said. “There are chasidim who do triathlons. There are many chasidim who have outside interests that would surprise us.”

While Green Fitness Studio’s owners Allan Lewis and Barry Borgen are both Jewish, outreach to the chasidic community was not part of the initial business plan. Instead, the focus for the new venture, which joins just a few other trendy new locales a couple blocks from the Morgan Avenue L-train

Allan Lewis, Lowey's personal trainer and co-owner of Green Fitness.

stop, was on eco-friendliness.

Aside from its regular LifeFitness treadmills — which are actually refurbished secondhand units — Lewis said that Green Fitness’ other equipment is entirely self-powered, and the spinning studio features flooring made of bamboo, which grows much faster than most wood and is considered a more renewable resource.

While chasidic Jews were initially below the owners’ radar, when Lowey rented the gym’s outdoor atrium to host a benefit and his fascinated party guests ventured into the empty gym, shedding their fedoras and testing out the bodybuilding equipment for themselves, Lewis and Borgen had an idea — why not invite these guys to join the gym?

There were a few stumbling blocks, however.

“Men and women don’t like to work out together,” Lewis told The Jewish Week last Thursday, sporting a tank top over his multitude of tattoos.  Continue reading…

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For Chabad Girl Scouts Troop, No Cookies But Plenty Of Fun

The girls of Troop 3131 marching in the Crown Heights Lag B’Omer parade.

At Sixth Street, Jew vs. Jew

State Supreme Court judge rules in favor of new members, for now, in their battle against old-timers at East Village shul.

In the fight for control at the Sixth Street Community Synagogue, Round One has gone to new members who say they’re trying to rejuvenate the Orthodox East Village shul.

Nearly three months after longtime congregants said they prevailed in an election of new board members, New York Civil Supreme Court Justice Carol Edmead ruled at an April 20 preliminary hearing for a Temporary Restraining Order against the old-timers. The ruling reinstates the previous synagogue board — a mix of old-timers and those who sided with the new members — pending further review in a hearing later this month.

The battle at Sixth Street first  surfaced three months ago when longtime members tried to strip the new ones of their voting rights — claiming that they neither attended services nor lived in the neighborhood. The new members — some of them recruited by Rabbi Simon Jacobson, whose Meaningful Life Center is housed at the shul — shot back that they were reviving a shul on its last legs.

At the end of the Feb. 7 election, a board comprised entirely of old members — led by 2nd Avenue Deli owner Jack Lebewohl — claimed victory.

fter the election,  “the new members … went to a judge and said these guys basically violated their own constitution,” said Matthew Pace, the former and now reinstated chairman of the board, who sides with the new members. “They ran a sham election and it should be overturned.”

“Jack [Lebewohl] has created an ‘us against them [situation],’” Pace continued. “Whereas, the other side just wanted to be involved.”  Continue reading…

Cuts Could Hit Autism Programs

Shining A Light On Older Teens With Autism

Dr. Fred Volkmar discussed the challenges in working with young adults with autism at recent conference here. Michael Fine/UJA-F

In the last 10 or so years, autism has exploded into the national consciousness. For parents with young children, the terms “autism spectrum disorder” and Asperger’s syndrome have become part of a new vocabulary to describe children who seem withdrawn, uncommunicative, anti-social or slow to pick up on social cues.

While the vast majority of the attention given to autism has focused on very young children, teenagers with the condition who have to navigate the difficult transition into adulthood seem to have received short shrift. For them, the passage can be a particularly trying time, as they struggle to achieve academically, adapt socially and excel in new careers — independent from the arms of the local school districts that oversee their care until age 21.

To shine a light on this underserved population, UJA-Federation of New York convened an autism symposium on April 22 that focused on adolescents emerging into young adulthood with a wide range of spectrum disorders, and how the community can better respond to meet their growing needs. The diagnosis rate of autism has surged in the past couple of years, rising from approximately 1 in 150 in 2007 to 1 in 110 in 2009, according to a Center for Disease Control journal publication presented at the conference by Marshalyn Yeargin-Allsopp, medical epidemiologist and chief of developmental disabilities at the CDC.

But research on the disorder has thus far focused primarily on children, leaving those who are striving to become independent young adults largely out of the picture.

“Sometimes in adolescence kids take off for the better; sometimes kids take off for the worse,” said Dr. Fred Volkmar, director of the Yale Child Study Center and a speaker at the conference. He laments the lack of resources that focus on autistic young adults. “This is unfortunate because this is often the group of people that want help the most.”

The conference stemmed from the UJA-Federation’s ongoing effort to promote research and community action for people with mental disabilities. In recent years the charity has poured about $7 million into the effort, channeling money from its Caring Commission to agencies such as the Jewish Childcare Association, the JCCs of the Greater Five Towns, Manhattan and Mid-Westchester, the Riverdale Y, the Samuel Field Y, the Sid Jacobson JCC and Westchester Jewish Community Services, among others. The money began flowing after a federation-sponsored study in 2006 analyzed the recent increase in autism cases and the impact of the disorder on the Jewish community. Agencies were then asked to develop programs to meet the growing need.

“A lot of our work has been focused on those young adults with autism who are not eligible and for whom there is no special funding,” said Anita Altman, deputy managing director of government and external affairs at UJA-Federation, who works with city and state governing bodies to bring public funds to the programs. “There’s very little money that goes into these kinds of services.”   Continue reading…

The Jewish Picasso Of Tremont

Herbert Lagin stands before his 9/11 memorial. Inset: Abstract painting suggests the Holocaust. Sharon Udasin

Hidden behind rows of shoddy warehouses, auto-repair junkyards and single-room-occupancy tenements, the Museum of the People of the World is largely invisible to the sporadic passersby in its gritty Bronx location, just east of the Grand Concourse and down the hill from the jagged bedrock of Tremont’s Echo Park.

The museum of what, you say? Where?

In a city of museums — from one on sex to one on biblical art — you won’t find this one in any museum index or listing, in print or online.

The quirky, intensely personal museum, which carries the New Age-y subtitle “A Sanctuary for All Who Enter” and only recently opened to the public, is a testament to one man’s creativity, vision and, perhaps, obsession. It houses hundreds of works, in a dizzying array of media, all made by the hands of 91-year-old Herbert Lagin — a tinkerer, inventor and self-taught “outsider” artist. In a huge storage space adjacent to the lamp-manufacturing facility Lagin has owned and operated for the past 60 years, the works memorialize the Holocaust, 9/11 and religious refugees.

A nondescript door marked “4269” leads inside the facility, which occupies the rear of the bright-orange Western Beef factory outlet. Once inside, past the pastel blue corridor, its paint peeling, a sun-filled and brightly lamp-lit section of the warehouse contains tri-fold screens filled with abstract paintings, chain links dangling from the ceiling and original glasswork scattered here and there. Admission is free, and any donations go to various causes around the world, most recently Haiti.

“He actually redesigned the space with all sorts of machinery and everything — it’s really amazing he did this on his own,” says Lagin’s daughter, Robin Langsam, who is one of five children and is a teacher in Armonk. “He created the vision of it and really followed through.”

A widower, Lagin lives in Great Neck, L.I., but drives in to Tremont several days a week to work in his factory-turned-museum. He says he conceptualized this museum just in the past few years, has been creating artwork since the third grade, when he’d reproduce pictures from classroom textbooks. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Lagin graduated from Long Island University while working in a lamp factory and was poised to head to medical school when the Great Depression struck. Foregoing medical school in an effort to support his parents, Lagin continued working at the lamp-manufacturing facility and eventually opened his own factory in the 1950s and purchased other Tremont properties. In addition to his artwork, Lagin has been something of an inventor, acquiring patents for a lamp-mounting tool, a recovery pillow for open-heart surgery patients and forge-proof traveler’s checks, among other items, although never actually marketing these products.

“He’s always been ingenious and creative, even doing something as simple as taking out his little pocketknife and making handles on boxes,” Langsam says. She then maps her father’s artistic trajectory from mixed media to watercolors to copper to etched glass and today, to markers, Cray-Pas and collages.

“You find people who late in their life, when they finish what they’ve had to do for a living, really take on this amazing outburst of original and quite extraordinary artistic expression,” says Selig Sacks, a trustee of the American Folk Art Museum who in 2009 was named one of the top 250 collectors in Art & Antiques Magazine. Sacks examined 40 photos of Lagin’s work, at the request of The Jewish Week.

Near the entrance to the museum, a panel of photographs features twilight snapshots from Lagin’s Great Neck, L.I., backyard of what appears to be the Star of Bethlehem, the star that revealed the birth of Jesus to the magi in Christian tradition. Nearby is a wall spread of framed black-and-white photographs from the U.S. government’s Holocaust archives, to which Lagin has added color and replaced some of the victims’ heads with those of figures like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Islamic terrorists. “That’s [Ahmadinejad] — him as a Jew,” said Lagin, who may well be the only Jewish regular in the largely Hispanic and African-American Tremont neighborhood. “Everybody’s a Jew based on history.”

Around the space hang black chain links symbolic of wartime bondage, and behind the photographs mixed colors of paint trickle down the wall like blood. In a corner hangs a wooden cutout of a man, dangling from the ceiling on a hangman’s noose.  Continue reading…

**Also re-posted on Jewlicious.com

Snapshot from The Jewish Week’s homepage:

Unkosher Wheels, Friendly Faces

Baruch Herzfeld, the self-proclaimed “new rebbe” of Williamsburg.

Beneath the canopy, passersby can visit a large black vending machine labeled “Bike Shop,” whose rotating carousel features $55 U-locks, $5 handlebar grips and $2 tire patch kits, among other life necessities like a $33 used BlackBerry.

“I’m trying to take a lot of what’s good about the chasidim, which is how they help each other out as a community, and bring it across multiple communities – not just shared solely amongst the Jews but also reach out into the greater community of Williamsburg hipsters,” said proprietor Baruch Herzfeld, 38, an Orthodox Jew from Staten Island who runs a cell phone business in the neighborhood. “People can socialize around their bicycles.”

Behind the vending machine is the larger Traif Bike Gesheft storefront, decorated with a Magen David shaped out of adjoining rubber chickens, artistic graffiti and a Yiddish message reminding Satmar residents to come borrow bicycles. Next to the vending device is Herzfeld’s “slot machine” ATM, which doles out cash in $10 increments but sporadically dispenses a random $20 to lucky withdrawers.

The shop proper is home to the Time’s Up! cycling club, where neighborhood residents – both hipster and Satmar – come on Sundays and Wednesdays to take free bike repair classes with volunteer instructors.

“The bike shop I envisioned wasn’t even a shop, it’s more of a community building operation,” Herzfeld said.

The Time’s Up! organization was actually at the center of a December 2008 clash between clown-cloaked cyclists and angry Satmar residents, who objected to new city bike lanes that began routing scantily clad cyclists through their parking spaces and school bus paths. Even more recently – December 2009 – cyclists decided to repaint 14 blocks worth of bike lanes that the city had removed from Bedford Avenue, in response to Satmar complaints. Yet Herzfeld stresses that his bike shop has only brought residents closer together, and he sees no division between the two populations.  Continue reading…

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Also posted on Jewlicious.

On Jewcy now as well.

I know it’s over a month past the Olympics, but I have just recently become obsessed with Matisyahu’s song “One Day,” which was apparently an official NBC Olympic theme song and appeared in many TV spots and commercials. Wish I knew this during the fact so I could’ve written an article about it. Don’t know how I missed the boat on this one.

Sometimes I lay / under the moon / and thank God I’m breathing.
Then I pray / don’t take me soon / cause I am here for a reason.
Sometimes in my tears I drown / but I never let it get me down
So when negativity surrounds, / I know some day it’ll all turn around
-because-
All my life I’ve been waiting for / I’ve been praying for
For the people to say / that we don’t wanna fight no more
There’ll be no more wars / and our children will play
One day…

**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…