financial terror goes viral

prisoner No. 46835-112

prisoner No. 46835-112 http://www.thejewishweek.com/spinka This week, an undisclosed federal prison will become the new address of prisoner No. 46835-112, Naftali Tzvi Weisz, known to his thousands of followers as the Grand Rabbi of Spinka of Borough Park. Last December, Weisz, 61, was sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to heading up a decade-long, $10 million money-laundering scheme in which donors to Spinka charitable institutions secretly received kickbacks of up to 95 percent of their donations. The rabbi’s gabbai, or assistant, Moshe Zigelman, also received a two-year sentence. Last December, Weisz, 61, was sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to heading up a decade-long, $10 million money-laundering scheme in which donors to Spinka charitable institutions secretly received kickbacks of up to 95 percent of their donations. The rabbi’s gabbai, or assistant, Moshe Zigelman, also received a two-year sentence. Five others involved in the scheme received lesser sentences. Rabbi Weisz is not the only Orthodox rabbi to recently find himself on the wrong side of the law. Last summer, three rabbis of the Syrian Orthodox community, including its chief rabbi, Saul Kassin, were arrested in New Jersey and New York on charges of money laundering. But the Spinka Rebbe of Borough Park is perhaps the first leader of a chasidic dynasty to become a jailbird. It has gone unnoticed, however, that his name carries a historic distinction invoking a singular artifact of the Holocaust known as the Auschwitz Album. Found by chance in an abandoned German barrack by a young Auschwitz survivor in April 1945, as the Third Reich was in its death throes, the 56-page album contains the only known photos of Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau other than two photos taken secretly within a crematorium enclosure and smuggled out of the camp. Photography, except for “mug shots” of incoming non-Jewish prisoners, was normally forbidden even to the S.S., at the largest Nazi killing center. This tattered brown album, bound by a tasseled cord, was most likely ordered up as a private souvenir by a high SS camp official. In a deception that even the victims hoped to be true, it carries the hand-lettered title, “Umsiedlung der Juden aus Ungarn” (“Resettlement of Jews from Hungary”). The album’s nearly 200 clear snapshots, organized as a pictorial narrative, first show the newly arrived victims in all their exhaustion, confusion and stoic dignity as they tumble out of the boxcars. It follows them as they line up before jack-booted SS inspectors for the infamous selection while their belongings are pillaged. Family members can be seen anxiously looking for one another as a minority is split off to be slave laborers while all others are led to the gas. No actual violence is seen, although in one photo, a group of older women and children are shown gazing calmly at the camera against a backdrop of what appears to be a red-brick administrative building. It is actually one of the four Birkenau crematoria, then working overtime. Beneath it are the undressing rooms and capacious gas chamber. On the first page of the album is a photo of three chasidic men. The dominant figure, his gaze steady from under a soft-contoured, wide-brimmed black hat, is the 52-year-old grand rabbi of Bilke, a town nestled in a valley of the Carpathian mountains. His name is Naftali Tzvi Weisz, and he is the namesake and great-uncle of the current Spinka grand rabbi of Borough Park. Along with nearly half a million other Hungarian Jews, his community of about 1,500 Jews from Bilke was deported to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944. Naftali was a son of Rabbi Isaac Weisz, whose own grandfather, Joseph Meir Weisz (1838-1909), founded the Spinka dynasty in the Romanian town of that name. His son, Isaac, moved the Spinka court to the chasidic stronghold of Mukachevo. Isaac’s piercing glance, it was said, was enough to send his dallying pupils scurrying back to study. In 1929, one of Isaac’s sons, Naftali, accepted a call from Bilke’s Jews to become their grand rabbi. In the town’s memory book, Isidore Reisman recalled how he was among a crowd of students who trooped to the edge of town to welcome the charter bus bringing the new rabbi’s entourage. As the bus approached, Reisman saw “the bearded faces at the windows who were singing from the Psalms: ‘In joy they go forth and in peace they arrive.’” The first to step out was the aged Spinka Rebbe himself. His son, Naftali, a man with dark, aquiline features and piercing eyes like his father, was escorted to Bilke’s main synagogue in a festively decorated horse-drawn carriage. “The arrival of the new rabbi marked a turning point in the history of our small town,” wrote Reisman in a two-volume memorial book to Jewish life in Bilke. “During his first year, dozens of students from many outlying villages in Carpathia and beyond flocked to join the Bilker Rabbi’s yeshiva.” On Thursday nights, Rabbi Weisz personally conducted gas-lit oral examinations, Reisman told me in a 1980 interview in Cleveland. On other nights, except for the Sabbath, the rabbi studied alone deep into the night. A disciple remembers once coming into his study and finding the rabbi engrossed in a text, his feet in a pail of ice water to keep himself awake. As the Nazi shadow spread over Europe, Rabbi Weisz was invited by an American congregation to become its rabbi. He refused to forsake his own flock. On the last day of Passover in April 1944, Bilke’s Jews, excepting a few men like Reisman who had been drafted into Hungarian forced labor brigades, were ghettoized in a nearby city. From there, they were packed into boxcars with only a single pail of water for the two-day passage to Auschwitz. Near the journey’s end, one of Weisz’s congregants asked, “Rabbi, what will happen to us?” At that moment, the train curved off the main line onto the Birkenau spur. “Listen to the sound of the wheels screaming,” was the rabbi’s only answer, Reisman remembered. On that train was 18-year-old, Bilke-born Lilly Jacob, who would survive. The end of the war found her enslaved at Dora, a small concentration camp near Nordhausen. As the Germans fled, Lilly, emaciated and typhus-ridden, entered an abandoned barrack and fell asleep on a cot. Upon awakening, she looked into a bedside cabinet and found the Auschwitz Album. At least a million Jews had been deported to Auschwitz, only a handful of whom were from Bilke. Yet when Lilly opened the album to its first page, she recognized her rabbi, Naftali Tzvi Weisz. He’d been murdered, probably, on the same day his photo was taken. Amazingly, Lilly also spotted herself in a photo of women selected for work, all them shorn of hair and wearing ill-fitting dresses taken from earlier deportees. Another photo, she believed, showed two of her younger brothers as they debarked from a boxcar. Considering it a family album, Lilly would not give it up after the war, even when the Jewish Museum in Prague offered to buy it in 1946. But she did allow the photos to be copied onto glass plates for a payment of 10,000 crowns, she told me in an interview. That was enough to pay for passage to America for Lilly, her husband, Max Zelmonovic, and their infant daughter, in 1948. They settled in Miami, where Lilly worked as a waitress. In 1964, Lilly brought her album to Germany — at the request of the prosecutor — to testify at the trial of 22 former SS men who had been Auschwitz guards, some of whom could be identified in the photographs. Then Lilly took her album home to Miami and kept it in the bottom drawer of her bedroom dresser until a morning in July 1980, when Serge Klarsfeld, the historian of the French Holocaust, arrived unannounced at her doorstep. He convinced her to donate the Auschwitz Album to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, even though she had promised the album to her grandchildren. Before the ceremony, Lilly was received by Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who looked long and hard at the photos. The Auschwitz Album has been called the single most important document preserved in Yad Vashem’s underground vault because, while many survivors have given testimony, only its pages preserve a photographic record of Jews at Auschwitz in the days when the death factory was working at maximum capacity. The images add up to a heart-rending human panorama. Naftali Tsvi Weisz’s dignified gaze, on the first page of the album, will be preserved long after the criminal ignominy of his great-nephew from Borough Park is forgotten. Peter Hellman wrote the text for the Random House edition (1981) of “The Auschwitz Album.”

organ trafficking money laundering

Does it matter that so many of the men arrested today in New Jersey and New York on charges that include money laundering and organ trafficking are Jewish? And not just Jewish but rabbis and community leaders? Of course it matters to Jews. This is big news from New York to LA, with all the attendant hand-wringing and oy-gvalting that goes along with the revelation of a prominent crook who, as my mother would say, happens to be Jewish (see Madoff, Bernard). But you’ll notice a lot of those arrested have Italian surnames. Is the Italian press full of oy veys (in Italian, of course)? No. But Jews see a Goldstein in handcuffs, and feel viscerally the shame, the guilt, the fear of backlash… Some resent it. Rabbi Brad Hirschfield of CLAL, who made his resentment at the press’s emphasis on the “Jewish” angle clear in this email: When New Jersey Mayors, politicians and rabbis get arrested for money laundering, it’s news that should be reported. It’s especially important for Jews to hear this news and address the discomfort created by religious leaders behaving badly. Isn’t that what we ask of other groups when their leaders do the same? But the coverage, which initially began in the New Jersey Star-Ledger, suggests that the motivation for the coverage may be less than appropriate. In fact, it may be nothing less than an excuse to vent deep resentment at a particular portion of the Jewish community. When a headline reads, “NJ officials, NY rabbis caught in federal money laundering, corruption sweep”, one expects a story which describes that event. In this case however, no mention is made of any rabbis actually getting arrested. Despite plenty of details about various politicos being taken into custody, there is nothing about rabbis. This may be a big deal, but the headline and the story don’t match - where is the info on the rabbis? This kind of coverage actually borders on Jew-baiting, and it potentially says something at least as ugly about the author/editors as it does about those who committed any crime. Consider the following quote found on the paper’s website and carried on CNN: The arrests…“began with an investigation of money transfers by members of the Syrian enclaves in New York and New Jersey,” the newspaper said on its Web site, NJ.com. Those arrested Thursday “include key religious leaders in the tight-knit, wealthy communities,” the report said. “Enclaves”? “Tight-knit, wealthy communities”? Could it be that the paper harbors deep resentment against Jews who they see as over-privileged, stand-offish people who operate as a law unto themselves? Is this the moment to celebrate how “those people” will now get their comeuppance? If not, why describe the community in classically anti-Semitic ways instead of calling out the specific leaders who broke the law, violated the religious rules of their own community and should be punished to the full extent of the law for any wrongdoing they committed? This story needs to be told, but it needs to be told better than this. It needs to be about justice, not just desserts. By the way, when all this calms down, the Syrian-Jewish community should also take a good look at itself to see what they do which contributes to their being perceived of this way by their neighbors. While victims of bias should never be blamed for the bias against them, in most cases for a stereotype to take hold it must be rooted in some partial truth. Ironically, coverage like that in the Star Ledger will make that ever less likely to happen, confirming the kind of hostility which is used by any community looking for a reason to turn inward. But J.J. Goldberg, the editorial director of The Forward, had perhaps the most insightful take on the Jewish reaction in a post Madoff interview with New Voices magazine. He said our reaction is shock not because we’re afraid of anti-semitism but because we naively hold our religion inviolate: It’s because we hold Judaism so dear, we don’t want to think it’s capable of creating problems. In 1993, there was a wave of Pell Grant fraud cases where people were setting up phony schools to apply for Pell Grants and then keeping the money. [The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations] had two days of hearings. [Anti-Defamation League National Director] Abe Foxman wrote a letter [to John McCain] complaining that all of the witnesses that had been called up represented yeshivas. He said, the way this has been set up it could create the unfortunate impression that this is some particularly Jewish pattern of crime. And McCain wrote back and said, it is. Yeshivas were this huge network of institutions where people study full time. They had been mainly supported by the billionaire Reichman family from Toronto. [The Reichman family] went bust, and all of a sudden there are all of these cases of fraud and money laundering. Anything to support this impossible system. But you can’t talk about Judaism leading to wrongdoing. It can’t be. Judaism is only good. The less involved you are in daily Jewish life, the more inviolate it has to be. Think of Superman and [the city of Kandor] in the little bottle in his Fortress of Solitude. It has to be preserved because there’s nothing you can do with it. Flowers that you press into a Bible. The less you can do with it the more you need it to be perfect. Goldberg traces the problem of corruption in the Jewish community to the rise in wealth (well, one could argue, it is kind of hard to be tempted to money-launder when you have no money). He says: Before the modern age, Jews lived in ghettoes. They could tax themselves. Tzedakah was not voluntary. Shabbes wasn’t voluntary. The first synagogue in America, Shearith Israel in New York, adopted a rule saying that if you violated Shabbes you got fined. It didn’t work. People just resigned from the synagogue. [The community] had lost enforcement power. And once you’ve lost enforcement power, you’ve got to ask for it. And once you’ve got to ask for money, you become dependent on the wealthy. Rabbis now depend on the goodwill of a few rich people. And so the balance of power between the moralists and the hedonists shifts. There used to be a check. The moral authority of the Jewish community had enforcement power. Now it’s around for entertainment. Instead of scolding Jews, now they scold goyim. They have no authority to scold the Jews. None. Rabbis lose their jobs for being moral scolds. So there is no more moral authority. I don’t know if the people arrested are guilty, but if they are, Goldberg’s harsh last statement—“There is no more moral authority”—will be just a bit harder to disprove.

о том как я "попал"

о том как я "попал"

о том как я попал
Яков Янкловиц и риалтор показали мне ко-оп на продажу. В квартире было всё отремотировано, может только не хватало хорошего холодильника и прочих домашних машин которые при покупке квартиры можно себе позволить не скупиться на торги с владельцем. Тот строил из себя етакого приличного еврея, лоялиста и даже дружелюбного добряка.

риалтор, Милая дама

Для тех кто хочет купить квартиру в Маленькая Одесса Бруклин Нью-Йорка или
Для точной информации непоятных терминов я даю бам ссилки. Пожалуйста посвтятите время этомт вопросу так как квартирный вопрос ето вопрос жизни и здоровья.
Наивность в этом вопросе непростительна. Я сам стал жертвой аферистов не понимая что принципы честного бизнесса не применимы к такому месту как Нью-Йорк, Бруклин и Маленькая Одесса в частности. Но по здешним нравам обывателей делиться своими неудачами глупость, наоборот свои ошибки  обыватель выходец с территорий СССР выдаёт за удачи и на я закончу отвлечённую тему о том что марксисты бы коротко озаглавили как мелко-буржуазное декаденство и мораль анти-социального неприятия всего того что не касается личных интересов и совственной семьи, критики более современного плана называют такую культуру - низкой

Я купил кооперативную квартирув доме 3250 на Кони Айланд авеню в Бруклине в 2000-х. Как и всех меня манило близкое рассположение к океану, пляжам и магазинам, просто на первый взгляд Ницца в Нью-Йорке где такие места стоят миллионов а тут квартира кооператив какие-то смешные пару сотен тысяч.
Я с праздником на душе вьехал в квартиру ожидая как летом я буду балдеть на океане и в собственной квартире а не на пляже смывать океанскую соль. Как я стану моржом, и как я смогу оздоровиться от моей работы связанной с компьютерным анализированием, а значит многими часами у монитора со всеми вытекающими последствиями.
Милая дама, риалтор, показала мне варианты из которых самым выгодным казался вариант в доме 3250 на Кони Айланд авеню в Бруклине.
Я повидал виды у знакомых на Брайтоне и казалось бы понимал насколько неправдоподобно было то что милая дама мне "нашла" - жемчужину у моря в на вид ровно-стоящем доме довоенной постройки. Как я слышал строили тут дома тогда американские немцы и по особой системе привязывая дома (обьясню ниже) к дому. И поетому такой дом стоял бы до скончания века если бы не....
О даме скажу что за свои % комиссионных она видимо обманет и дочь родную тем более какого-то там програмиста, но ей видимо в прок не пошло, не видно её как в "старое доброе время" в собственном офисе на Брайтоне, давно тот дом где она имела офис снесли после пожара. Надеюсь без человеческих жертв как и обычно когда горят дома по схеме страховых афер. Но я не об том. То дело не столь личное и болезненное как аферы с квартирами.

Для тех кто хочет купить квартиру в Маленькой Одессе Нью-Йорка

Для тех кто хочет купить квартиру в Маленькой Одессе Нью-Йорка или BUYER BEWARE

Для точной информации непоятных терминов я даю вам ссилки. Пожалуйста, посвтятите время  этому  вопросу, так как квартирный вопрос ето вопрос жизни и здоровья.