Features
NEW YORK — It was the poor construction.
There had been many earthquakes more powerful than the one that hit Haiti nearly three years ago, and there have been many more since. But few have been deadlier.
When the tremor registering 7.0 on the Richter scale struck on Jan. 12, 2010, it flattened countless rows of ramshackle houses in the impoverished capital of Port-au-Prince, burying their inhabitants beneath a pile of smoking rubble.
The death toll is still uncertain; estimates vary from 46,000 to the Haitian government’s official tally of more than 300,000.
But if an earthquake does strike again, which is likely given that the country sits atop a tectonic hotspot, Jewish NGOs can claim some credit for potentially reducing future casualties.
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WHAT happens to a peace dialogue when peace is shattered?
David Lehrer — a big believer in dialogue between Middle East antagonists — provides a stark if unsurprising answer.
“If you bring people together just around the concept of peace, then when something happens like what happened two weeks ago between Gaza and Israel, your program disintegrates because you have nothing to discuss.”
Lehrer, the executive director of the Arava Institute, thinks a...
CHANUKAH EDITIONSECTION B PAGE 6
YOKNE’AM ILIT, Israel — Radi Kaiuf was serving in Lebanon in 1988 with the Israel Defense Forces’ Golani Brigade when, in the middle of an operation, he took two bullets to the stomach and one to the back.
He was lucky to be alive, doctors said, but he would never walk again.
Now, Kaiuf meets co-workers at eye level, standing with them in the hallway of his workplace, Argo Medical Technologies. It’s on the sixth floor of an office building, and if he...
JERSEY CITY, NJ — A flooded warehouse, decomposed wall beams, sodden sheetrock, crumbling brick walls, a fried electrical system and about $2 million worth of rotten cheese waiting to be chucked: That’s only a glimpse of the woes facing Brigitte Mizrahi.
Mizrahi owns Anderson International Foods (AIF), a small kosher cheese company she founded in 1995, and her warehouse is located in an industrial area of Jersey City about a mile from the Hudson River waterfront.
Although the facility isn...
LOS ANGELES — It was the “Night of Broken Glass” in Germany, Kristallnacht — a national pogrom of death and destruction of Jewish property and the rounding up of Jews — and Dietrich (David) Hamburger was in hiding.
Hamburger was the leader of a small congregation that met in his home in Fuerstenau, a countryside village in what now is the province of Niedersachsen.
Someone had warned him about the coming onslaught, and on Nov. 9, 1938 he went into hiding in the local Catholic hospita...