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Jewish Journal

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February 11, 2014

Florida: It’s not just for old Jews anymore

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At the Urban Rustic Cafe in a strip mall in this city located between Miami to the south and the Palm Beach retirement communities to the north, the line for a table stretches out the door and into the parking lot.

Inside the kosher establishment, the volume is loud. An elderly Orthodox man sitting near the window leans across a table to hear what his wife is saying. At the dessert counter, a gaggle of boys with tzitzis fringes hanging from their shirts have their noses pressed against the glass.

Nearby, two stylishly dressed 30-something women chatter away in Spanish, one of them rocking a young baby. As the blond waitress trying to serve them bumps hips with a busboy, the two have a brief exchange in rapid-fire Hebrew.

Welcome to South Florida’s Jewish community, an amalgam of retirees, Latin American immigrants, Orthodox families, Holocaust survivors and plenty more.

More than half a million Jews live in three counties there — Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach — making the region America’s third-largest Jewish metro area behind only New York and Los Angeles. Add in the smaller Jewish communities elsewhere in Florida, and one of every 10 American Jews resides in the Sunshine State.

While many are retirees, Florida isn’t just a place for elderly Jews. A combination of factors — lower costs of living than in the Northeast, the lack of state income tax, Jewish institutional infrastructure, the draw of Miami to Latin American immigrants and, yes, the weather — has helped turn Florida into one of America’s largest, most diverse and most unusual Jewish communities.

“I think today we are no longer simply a retirement community,” said Jewish demographer Ira Sheskin, a professor of geography at the University of Miami.

The Jews of South Florida boast several distinctions. Palm Beach County has the oldest median Jewish age in the country, 70, according to the last Jewish community study of the area. The southern part of Palm Beach County has the highest density in the country of Jews proportionate to the total population: 49 percent, according to the same survey.

In the Miami area, a massive influx of Latin American immigrants since 2000, particularly from Venezuela, Argentina and Mexico, has reduced the Jewish community’s average age and brought far more Latin American diversity to a population whose Spanish speakers once were overwhelmingly Cuban exiles.  The last Jewish population study conducted in Miami-Dade, in 2004, found that the county had the largest percentage of foreign-born Jews of any Jewish community in America.

“We’re such an international community,” said Jacob Solomon, CEO of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation. “Clearly, the big story is the continuing Latin immigration and what that means.”

Nobody knows for certain how many Jews live in South Florida, because the most recent community studies are about a decade old. At last count, local federations’ studies found 256,000 Jews in Palm Beach County (2005); 186,500 Jews in Broward County (2008); and 113,000 Jews in Miami-Dade (2004). Miami began work on a new survey last month, but the results are not expected until fall.

Even without solid numbers, however, there are some clear signs of the changes underway in South Florida Jewry, especially growth beyond retirees.

As in many other regions across the country, there has been a significant expansion over the last decade or two in Orthodox synagogues, kosher restaurants and Jewish day schools, suggesting that the area’s Orthodox population is growing, particularly in Hollywood, Miami Beach, Aventura and Boca Raton.

“Boca has the largest density in the Miami area of Jewish people per square mile,” said Deborah Shapiro, manager of loyalty marketing at the big-box grocery retailer Winn-Dixie, which conducted extensive demographic research in the area before investing $3 million to revamp its Boca Raton supermarket last year to focus on kosher consumers.

Since completing the remodeling — the store’s kosher offerings now include a pizza shop, fresh sushi counter, bakery, and meat and deli counter — business in the store’s kosher departments has tripled, according to Shapiro. Winn-Dixie has two other stores in South Florida with in-store kosher operations and full-time kosher supervisors, in Aventura and Tamarac.

In Miami Beach, the story has been the growing number of young families,  prompting the recent construction of a new building for a JCC that for years had been housed in a 1920s-era mansion. Completed in October 2012, the  37,000-square-foot Miami Beach JCC already has 1,700 member units — about 5,000 people.

“The influx of young families and the role that the center can play for them gave momentum to the project,” Jay Roth, the JCC’s executive director, told JTA. “This is a community that is committed to culture and growth.”

A few miles to the north, the community around the Michael-Ann Russell JCC in North Miami Beach, near Aventura, also is growing, thanks to Latin American Jewish families.

Located between an Orthodox-run, 1,000-student day school on one side and a 440-student Reform Jewish day school and synagogue on the other, the JCC’s single-largest constituency is Latin American Jewish immigrants who have moved to the area since 2000 fleeing economic or political insecurity at home. At both day schools, too, the students are overwhelmingly Latin American.

[RELATED: Reform Judaism with a Latin flavor takes root in Florida school]

“In the last 15 years, especially since 2001, there’s been a gradual increase in the number of Spanish-speaking kids,” said Nancy Posner, head of the Reform day school, Jacobson Sinai Academy. “Now we have students from 17 different countries. It’s a microcosm of Miami.”

While Miami-Dade has the fewest Jews of the three counties, its population is the most stable because it has more young people and fewer retirees.

“It gives us a more normalized age period and more stable base,” said Solomon of the Miami federation. “The northern South Florida communities still have to go through that demographic adjustment.”

Farther north, in Broward County, losses due to mortality have prompted a steep decline in the Jewish population — by about 55,000 between 1997 and 2008. Far fewer new retirees are moving in.

“Over the course of the past 20 years or so, there clearly has been a drop-off as retirees have passed away or moved back North to move in with their adult children,” said Eric Stillman, CEO of the Jewish Federation of Broward County.

The story is different in Palm Beach County, which remains the No. 1 destination in America for Jewish retirees. The county’s Jewish population exploded in the 1990s and early 2000s. While growth probably has leveled off, according to Sheskin’s demographic estimates, the expected retirement of the baby boomers likely will help Palm Beach keep up its Jewish numbers in the coming years.

“I think we’re losing an older generation, but we’re getting new people to retire here all the time,” said Matthew Levin, CEO of the Jewish Federation of South Palm Beach County.

The story of Florida Jewry has not been one of unchecked growth. The Jewish community of Miami is still far below its peak, when it numbered nearly 250,000 in the late 1970s, and Broward is down from its high of nearly 300,000 in 1990.

What’s different about South Florida today is that the region increasingly is a place where second- and third-generation Jews are being born, growing up and choosing to raise families of their own.

“Increasingly, Florida is a place where people come and stay,” said the  Roth of the Miami Beach JCC.

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College bans Flying Spaghetti Monster poster as ‘religiously offensive’

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You know Michaelangelo's “>stepped into the role of Adam on “Arrested Development.”

The South Bank Atheist Society at London's South Bank University used a modified version of Michaelangelo's masterpiece. Instead of God reaching out to Adam, they substituted in a flying spaghetti monster on a poster to promote an upcoming event. And that was too much for student union officials, who removed the poster for being “religiously offensive.”

The Independent “>South Bank University is a public institution, but keep in mind that England has no First Amendment. (That was painfully clear in the wake of the Edward Snowden NSA revelations last summer.) But the move comes off as heavy-handed and not in the least bit in the spirit of a place of higher learning.

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Israel’s debt-ridden Hadassah hospital gets 3-month creditor reprieve

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Israel's top Hadassah hospitals centre won three-month court protection from creditors on Tuesday after racking up a debt of 1.3 billion shekels ($369 million) and grappling with a week-old strike by doctors and nurses.

The crisis has cast a shadow over the flagship institution of one of the world's most prominent Jewish groups, the U.S.-based Hadassah Women's Zionist Organization, and raised questions about mismanagement at the pinnacle of Israeli health care.

Health Minister Yael German blamed most of the privately-owned Jerusalem institution's financial ailments on inflated salaries, bloated staffing levels and payment to employees for phantom working hours.

The Hadassah Medical Center has struggled to pay suppliers, and personnel received just half of their salaries last month, prompting doctors, nurses and administrative staff to go on strike a week ago and handle only births and emergencies.

“This (court) decision opens the way for us to begin a rehabilitation programme,” German told Army Radio. “The alternative was the collapse of Hadassah, and this we cannot allow.”

The Hadassah hospitals, operated in collaboration with Jerusalem's Hebrew University, tended to a million patients last year and are a major draw of medical tourism to Israel.

German said the government and what she termed the “Hadassah ladies” would each transfer 50 million shekels in emergency funding to the centre to cover part of its payroll.

“We hope to reach a point where Hadassah can stand on its own two feet,” she said. If it could not, other solutions “including nationalisation” must be explored.

The Finance Ministry said it opposed state ownership of the centre and parliament's finance committee said the matter was not on the agenda.

With one hospital in Ein Kerem in hills outside Jerusalem and another on Mount Scopus in the pre-1967 “no man's land” of the then-divided city, Hadassah has treated Jews and Arabs for over a century. It employs 800 physicians and 2,200 nurses.

A spokesman for the Histadrut labour federation said hospital staff would not return to work until they studied the Jerusalem District Court's decision, which included the appointment of a trustee, and held a meeting later on Tuesday.

Earlier in the day, nurses and staff at all of Israel's hospitals joined Hadassah colleagues in a two-hour solidarity strike.

Hadassah's chief executive, Avigdor Kaplan, told Israel Radio his top priority is to start intensive negotiations with employees. He said a small number of staff would be let go.

With the strike making front-page news in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticised Hadassah's management and accused them of assuming someone else would bail them out.

“The public will end up paying the price and we must ensure the deficit does not return,” he told a meeting of his right-wing Likud party on Monday.

$1 = 3.5200 Israeli shekels

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Eden Cemetery trial begins

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The trial in the $90 million lawsuit against Eden Memorial Park, a Jewish cemetery, began Feb.11 at the Los Angeles Superior Courthouse downtown.

The class action suit, filed in September 2009 by attorney Michael Avenatti of the Newport Beach law firm Eagan O’Malley & Avenatti, alleges Eden’s management ordered its workers to disturb existing graves in order to fit new coffins in tight spaces.

That disturbance allegedly included breaking concrete coffins and then dumping some of the human remains when bones fell out.

F. Charles Sands, whose family is buried at Eden, and 30 other people are named as plaintiffs, and 25,000 more people have joined the suit.

Located at Sepulveda Boulevard and Rinaldi Street in Mission Hills, Eden Memorial Park is owned and operated by SCI California, a subsidiary of Texas-based Service Corp. International, one of the country’s largest operators of cemeteries and funeral services. About 40,000 people are buried at Eden, which spans 72 acres.

The alleged incidents date back to 1985, when SCI acquired the cemetery. The plaintiffs contend that Eden knowingly broke as many as 1,500 buried concrete vaults between February 1985 and September 2009. Avenatti argued that the cemetery had a financial incentive to do so.

“This conduct was deliberate, and purposeful, and driven by a desire to make more money,” Avenatti told the jury during the plaintiffs’ opening statement on Tuesday.

With Judge Marc Marmaro presiding, Avenatti introduced evidence including testimonies, aerial photographs and video surveillance that the 43-year-old attorney argued will show that Eden’s management deliberately mishandled the coffins and corpses that families entrusted to its care.

The case has faced a long road to trial, including court sanctions, state investigations, tampering with evidence and a dispute over whether Jewish jurors would compromise the neutrality of the jury.

In November 2009, state investigators reported that they found no evidence that Eden mishandled graves. Russ Heimerich, spokesman for the California Department of Consumer Affairs, said at the time that investigators would have found evidence if it existed. “The kinds of things that are being alleged are not easily hidden from view,” he said.

But one year later, in November 2010, Judge Anthony J. Mohr of the Los Angeles Superior Court ruled that the cemetery intentionally cleaned out the cemetery’s dump, where workers allegedly disposed of loose bones and broken concrete sections. In September 2009, the court ordered that all such evidence must be preserved.

For the last several years, both sides have collected extensive evidence, with the legal teams interviewing 110 people during deposition.

During jury selection in recent weeks, the defense has argued that, in order to ensure juror impartiality, it should be allowed to ask potential jurors whether they are Jewish. Marmaro declined that request, but did allow the defense to ask jurors for their religious affiliation and whether they are knowledgeable of Jewish burial law.

In the courtroom on Tuesday, Avenatti screened on a large television aerial photographs of the cemetery dump, located on the northern part of the cemetery, which was later cleaned out and developed in order to be used for additional burial plots.

“Additional dirt was brought in, placed over these remains, built up and plotted to be sold to other families,” the attorney said, before playing a video that alleges to show a groundskeeper placing a concrete block from a grave container into a tractor, which Avenatti said was collecting the debris for disposal.

He also showed the jury video depositions of former and current Eden groundskeepers acknowledging that they were ordered to break vaults if necessary, and to dispose of loose bones. He said that these people will testify on the stand during the trial. 

One of those depositions showed Darryl Bowden, a former superintendent, sales manager and general manager at Eden, confirming that three employees told him that a skull had been thrown in the cemetery dump.

After speaking for more than two hours, with short breaks, Avenatti gave the floor to defense attorney, Steven Gurnee, of Gurnee Mason & Forestieri.

“It’s a beautiful cemetery; it’s a well-run cemetery,” Gurnee opened. “What you’ve just heard is false; it does not tell the story.”

Breaking into a discussion of burials according to Jewish tradition, the defense attorney said that one of the witnesses will be Rabbi Elliot Dorff, a professor at American Jewish University, who will clarify for the jury how burials are done according to Jewish law.

While Jewish tradition prefers for a body to come in relatively direct contact with the earth, Eden, like most cemeteries, Gurnee said, requires that all caskets be surrounded by a concrete vault, but allows for “holes [to be] drilled in the bottom to have direct access to the earth.”

Gurnee showed photographs of tree roots that appeared to have damaged a concrete vault, which would suggest that damage could have occurred that was not caused by deliberate mistreatment. Attempting to cast further doubt on the plaintiff’s assertions, Gurnee added that, when digging rocks out of the ground, those rocks can often move and cause damage to adjacent graves.

“It’s simply an accident,” Gurnee said. “These problems that are being complained of are nonexistent.”

Outside the courtroom after court adjourned, Avenatti told the Journal that the plaintiffs will seek at least $90 million in damages. During his opening statements he said that in the 24 years spanning the suit, the 25,000 people who joined the class action paid Eden more than $99 million.

Gurnee told the Journal that the plaintiffs’ allegations are false, that “there aren’t any bones being mishandled” and that he intends to show that former Eden groundskeepers who allege disturbance of graves are trying “to get back at their manager.”

On Feb. 13, following a one-day court holiday, the defense resumed and concluded its opening statement, arguing that evidence will show that if there were any incidents, they were isolated and were responded to appropriately by management. 

Over the course of the coming weeks, Gurnee’s opening statement suggested, the defense will make the case that the plaintiffs are relying heavily on testimonies of disgruntled employees who want to hurt their former bosses.

“Despite 180 inspections by the plaintiffs and their experts,” Gurnee said, “Not a single bit of evidence of mishandling remains has been discovered.”

Speaking to the jury, Gurnee concluded: “You’ll have to decide whether there’s any evidence of any kind of wrongdoing, whether our client knew about it, whether our client was aware.”

Eden Cemetery trial begins Read More »

LAPD scopes out Israeli drones, ‘big data’ solutions

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For the first nine days of February, eight of the Los Angeles Police Department’s top brass were 7,500 miles away from home, being shuttled around Israel in a minibus.

“They complained because it was like in the army — they went from place to place to place, and they needed some rest,” joked Arie Egozi, a partner at i-HLS, the Israeli homeland-security news site that organized the LAPD tour. “You know, the Israelis want to push everything.”

LAPD Deputy Chief Jose Perez, a good-natured 30-year veteran of the department who oversees its central bureau, tweeted updates at nearly every stop. On Feb. 2, he shared a group photo of the Los Angeles delegation visiting the corporate headquarters of Nice Systems, an Israeli security and cyber intelligence company that can intercept and instantly analyze video, audio and text-based communications. (A seemingly tongue-in-cheek inspirational poster on the wall behind them reads: “Every voice deserves to be heard.”) A couple days later, Perez posed for a photo with Samuel Bashan, whom he called “Israel’s premier bomb expert,” at a fancy group dinner.

The group visited private security firms and drone manufacturers, as well as the terror-prone Ashdod Port, a museum in Sderot full of old rockets shot from nearby Gaza (the same one United States President Barack Obama visited on his 2008 campaign trip to Israel), and a “safe city” underground control center in the large suburb of Rishon LeZion, which receives live streams from more than 1,000 cameras with license plate recognition installed throughout the city.

Meanwhile, the tour attracted some skepticism back home. Max Blumenthal, a journalist and critic of Israel with a hefty online following, tweeted: “LAPD delegation heads to Israel to learn lessons in control, domination and exclusion.” Another Twitter user, @JustBadre, tweeted asking Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti: “why is #lapd in Israel on taxpayer $? Should #lapd be training with forces that have human rights violations?”

As of press time, LAPD media relations had not responded to a request for the total cost of the trip and the source of the funds. However, a previous trip to Israel by four members of the LAPD bomb squad reportedly cost $18,000.

The LAPD-Israel bond was in large part fused by former LAPD Chief William Bratton, who made official trips to Israel to learn about the country’s advanced counter-terrorism tactics during his chiefdom from 2002 to 2009. At a town hall meeting in Los Angeles near the end of his term, Bratton said of Israeli intelligence experts: “They are our allies. They are some of the best at what they do in the world, and that close relationship has been one of growing strength and importance.”

The most recent visit was organized by Deputy Chief Michael Downing, commander of the Counter-Terrorism and Special Operations Bureau, and led by Horace Frank, commander of the LAPD Information Technology (IT) Bureau. “We had this grant funding that was available for us to look at emergency technologies and best practices,” Frank explained to the Journal while in Israel. “Normally we do send people here [to Israel], but not at that level. So this was an opportunity to really bring some high-level command decision makers to take a look at what’s going on.”

Frank was joined by seven of his fellow command staff at the Big Data Intelligence Conference hosted by i-HLS in the beach town of Herzliya, Israel, on Feb. 6.

“On behalf of my chief of police, Chief Charlie Beck, and the 13,000-plus sworn and non-sworn members of the Los Angeles Police Department, a very heartfelt thanks to all of you for having me here,” Frank said in an opening statement for the conference, which brought together some of Israel’s — and the world’s — top cyber security and intelligence experts.

The LAPD’s head IT guy continued: “Now let’s be honest … This whole idea of best practices is just a euphemism for: We’re here to steal some of your great ideas. And a lot of great ideas and technology, indeed, you do have here in Israel. I would hope that you do not view this as a negative, because in this day and age of globalization, our needs are truly similar. In fact, we are much more alike than dis-alike. As civilized nations, we are all confronted with, in many cases, the same enemy: The ever-growing threat of terrorism and other major criminal elements.”
Eight members of the LAPD command staff, pictured with their tour guides, attended the “Big Data Intelligence” conference at the Israel Air Force Center on Feb. 6. Photo by Simone Wilson

At the conference’s coffee break, Frank and a few of his colleagues spoke to the Journal about the highlights of their nine-day tour.

Frank said he was especially impressed by what he saw while visiting Israeli companies Nice Systems (as tweeted by Perez) and Verint, one of the companies whose services the National Security Administration (NSA) reportedly used in the infamous United States wiretapping scandal. Both companies already count the LAPD as a client. But, Frank said, “we’re looking at some of their additional solutions … They have a lot of new technologies that we are very much interested in.”

Nice System’s  president of security, Yaron Tchwella, spoke at the conference about the company’s ability to help government agencies capture and store the billions of calls, emails, messages and social media posts that their populations generate each day, then analyze it in real time to detect potential threats. Tchwella projected an image of Albert Einstein onto the overhead, explaining that Einstein’s dream was to store data dynamically, so that it mimics the capabilities of the human brain — tying incoming information to the vast amounts already stored, thus recontextualizing the big picture. 

For example, Tchwella said, “the connection between IDF [Israel Defense Forces] databases provides us with a grasp on reality, and allows for the connectivity between things that change between time, geography … and semantics. This is what we do every day in our brains.” 

Perez said he hoped the LAPD, too, would eventually be able to “use technology to incorporate all the systems that we have. That’s the wave of the future. We’re definitely looking at the ability to get that information out to the officers on the beat with a handheld. Something happens, and you’re looking at the handheld — almost like ‘The Bourne Supremacy’ — here’s a picture of the guy you’re looking for.”

LAPD watchdog Hamid Khan expressed concern, however, that emerging technologies such as Nice’s would give new legs to questionable LAPD policies.

“For us, it’s not only about the type of technology, but how this technology further enhances the existing capacity of any of these agencies to gather more information,” Khan said.

Khan, 53, a Pakistani native and former commercial airline pilot, formed the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition two years ago. The coalition has since been campaigning against a series of federal “fusion centers” created by the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11 — including one in the Los Angeles. area utilized by the LAPD. The centers allow federal, state and local agencies to share information about civilians, in hopes of detecting potential terrorists.

Also in Khan’s crosshairs is Special Order 1, an LAPD policy that allows officers to document any otherwise lawful activity that they, or other members of the community, deem suspicious. (Including, for example, the photographing of certain government sites.) And new LAPD intel collection methods or surveillance drones, said Khan, would only be “adding more to their toolbox of being highly militarized in counterinsurgency forces” against protesters and movements such as Occupy. “Yet it is wrapped in this whole language of community policing.”

Two separate L.A. Weekly investigations in 2012 found that the LAPD uses expensive StingRay devices, which can locate cellphones (and their users) by acting like cellphone towers, and license-plate recognition cameras that track millions of drivers. Although both devices technically require a warrant to be used in a police investigation, there is little way to know whether police are always complying with the rules.

Peter Bibring, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California, said the coupling of spy technology with watered-down police guidelines “represents a step backward to the [1970s-era] collection of information about individuals and their whereabouts without reasonable suspicion that they’re involved in criminal activities.”

And that, he said, “is very troubling.”

Surveillance drones manufactured by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and Sky Sapience were also hot items on the LAPD tour. Both Frank and Perez lit up when talking about the HoverMast, a new tethered drone from Sky Sapience that was just released to the IDF late last year.

“There are several things on the wish list, but we did like Sky Sapience — that was incredible,” Perez said. “For me personally, just for my command, which is five stations, and all the special events that I have, crowd control and being able to see everything would be some technology that is needed immediately.”

However, Frank added, the HoverMast “has its challenges: from a political standpoint, convincing our political leaders, and from a community standpoint, convincing the community that it’s not Big Brother watching over you.”

Trucks with the HoverMast drone. Photo courtesy Sky Sapience

A spokeswoman for Sky Sapience said the HoverMast can intercept wireless communications, and its cameras are capable of facial recognition. A spokeswoman for IAI said that while showing LAPD officers their drones, the company “wanted to emphasize the fact that drones can be very helpful in giving intelligence in urban scenarios… you need it now, you need it quick, you need to see what’s inside a window, and what’s behind this building.”

Nimrod Kozlovski, co-founder of Tel Aviv University’s cyber security program and a leading expert in the industry, argued that the Fourth Amendment would limit police in the United States from using Israeli technology to spy without a warrant. “But if you relax these standards or create too many exemptions,” he said, “there is certainly a risk that [civilians] will be subject to ongoing monitoring and interception by law enforcement agencies, which is certainly not the proper balance between government and individual.”

Many of the companies attracting LAPD interest have one thing in common: They were formed by veterans of the IDF’s elite, top-secret 8200 Unit, better known as Israel’s version of the NSA. 

“This notion that you collect mass amounts of intelligence in order to sort and analyze it has been known and expected in Israel for years,” Kozlovski said. “It wasn’t known and well-taught in the U.S. that secret services don’t operate on probable cause, so this mass collection took them by surprise. We [Israelis] tend to give more permission to counter-terror operations to use a technology that will be able to predict a potential terrorist. It’s more socially acceptable.”

Perez emphasized that as a local police agency, the LAPD has much tighter legal constraints than federal agencies to adhere to when adopting army-born surveillance and “big data” technologies. 

But critics worry that as federal and local agencies continue to collaborate, and constitutional law races to catch up with high-tech security solutions, lines will blur. “Now people are starting to realize, now that the NSA piece is out there, that this is very local, this is everyday 24/7 policing … not a science fiction movie,” Khan said.

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Obama on Foxman: ‘Abe is irreplaceable’

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President Obama praised Abraham Foxman as “irreplaceable” after the Anti-Defamation League announced the planned retirement of its longtime leader.

“For decades, Abe Foxman has been a tireless voice against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all of its forms, always calling us to reject hatred and embrace our common humanity,” Obama said in a statement released by the White House on Tuesday.

The ADL announced Monday that Foxman would retire as its national director in July 2015. Foxman has led the ADL for 27 years.

“Michelle and I wish him well as he prepares to leave the leadership of the Anti-Defamation League — an organization that he built, and led with such passion and persistence,” Obama said in his statement. “Abe is irreplaceable, but the causes that he has dedicated his life to will continue to inspire people in the United States, Israel, and around the world.”

After he steps down, Foxman will serve as a part-time consultant to ADL and sit on the organization’s national commission and national executive committee, the organization said.

Founded in 1913, the ADL fights against anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry and on behalf of civil rights.

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New law mandates proper labeling for kosher foods going to pantries

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Kosher and halal meals going to food pantries must be tracked and labeled as such under a new federal law.

An amendment to the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act enacted last week mandates the tracking and labeling by the Department of Agriculture.

The department currently purchases kosher and halal foods but does not make a deliberate effort to label them as such, making it difficult to ensure that the meals end up in pantries and communities where they are most needed.

“We must take steps to help the neediest observant families and children get access to nutritious food during these difficult times,” U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said in a statement.

Gillibrand and U.S. Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) initiated the amendment.

Rabbi Abba Cohen, the Agudath Israel of America’s vice president for federal government affairs and the Washington director for the Orthodox group, said in a statement that the legislation is “a vital step forward for addressing the needs of the Jewish poor.”

David Frankel, CEO and executive director of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty in New York, noted, “More than one-half million Jewish New Yorkers struggle with food insecurity each and every day.”

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Police: Pittsburgh day school aide, sister were shot in head

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The Pittsburgh day school teacher’s aide and her sister who were found dead in the basement of their home were shot in the head, police said.

Susan Wolfe, 44, who worked at the Hillel Academy in Squirrel Hill, was found naked, and her sister Sarah, 36, was fully clothed, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette reported Tuesday.

Liquid was poured over at least one of the women’s bodies, perhaps in an effort to cover up evidence, police told the newspaper. There were no signs of forced entry.

Sarah Wolfe’s car was discovered about a mile away from the home on Saturday, a day after the bodies were discovered, according to the newspaper. It is suspected that the killer or killers drove the vehicle away from the house.

The house had been ransacked and robbed in December.

Police went to the Wolfes’ home on Feb. 7 after a co-worker of Susan Wolfe asked them to check when she did not show up for work. Co-workers of Dr. Sarah Wolfe, a pediatrician and psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, also had called police.

The women have six other siblings, including an Iowa state lawmaker, Mary Wolfe.

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Idina Menzel to perform ‘Let It Go’ at Oscars

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Change of plans for all parents hoping to get your kids to bed early on Oscar night: According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Frozen” star Idina Menzel will perform “Let It Go” at the ceremony Sunday, March 2.

“Let It Go” is nominated for best original song, up against “Ordinary Love” from “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom,” “The Moon Song” from “Her” and “Happy” from “Despicable Me 2.” Pharrell Williams will take the stage to perform that last one, which means your evening just got even longer.

In the meantime, enjoy this  clip of Menzel talking about her days as a Hebrew school drop out, and singing a bit of her bat mitzvah parshah.

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