Jewish tennis players served up a strong presence at this summer\’s Los Angeles-based pro tournaments, with Israelis Harel Levy, Noam Okun and Anna Smashnova participating in recent Southland competitions.
Last Aug. 26, on a soundstage off Sunset Boulevard, Chabad of the West Coast\’s 21st annual telethon was about to begin.
The stage lights dimmed to blue, Camera One wheeled in, and a spotlight trained on a young boy wearing payes (sidecurls) and knickers — Anatevka, circa 1905. The boy raised a fiddle to his chin and began a klezmer tune. A second young man, also in stylized Chasidic garb, emerged from the wings and began a slow-motion dance. The music got louder, the pace quickened, the dancer\’s pirouettes followed closer upon each other and then the stage exploded in a shower of lights and electric guitars as a dozen Lubavitch yeshiva students leapt forward, twisting, turning, doing handstands and cartwheels in a frenzied circle. Cymbals clashed and a booming voice rang out: \”To Life! L\’Chaim!\”
Maurice R. Commanday, an innovative engineer in the aircraft industry, a veteran of World War II and Israel\’s War of Independence, and an active supporter of the Freedom of Religion movement in Israel, died July 23 at the age of 84.
Rabbi Marvin L. Labinger executive director of the Pacific Southwest Region of United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism from 1990-2000, died July 25, 2002 at the age of 66.
\”Attempts to find in the youngster \’the warped person within the murderous dictator\’ have proved unpersuasive. If we exclude our knowledge of what was to come, his family circumstances invoke, for the most part, sympathy for the child exposed to them.\”
— Ian Kershaw,
\”Hitler: l889-l936 Hubris.\”
Rabbis Steven Jacobs and Leonard Beerman from Los Angeles, along with six other clergy members traveling with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, had just left a meeting with Yasser Arafat and were on the way to see Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the head of Hamas, when they heard about the bombing at Hebrew University.
Miriam Cunin walks past the wall of books and the plastic-covered sofas in her living room toward a narrow table packed with photographs.
My beloved son, Arik, my own flesh and blood, was murdered by Palestinians.
It takes Jay Sanderson about 10 minutes to put me to work. It\’s 8:55 a.m. on a Sunday, five minutes till broadcast of KLAC talk radio\’s "The Jay Sanderson Show" and he\’s having trouble getting his scheduled guest, screenwriter/producer Lionel Chetwynd, on the phone.
A small museum opened its doors in Pasadena last month and naturally enough made local headlines.
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