Video: Nate Lavey When Janet Greenblat heard that Hurricane Sandy was heading toward New York, she wasn’t too concerned. Since 1982, Greenblat, 68, has lived in the Amalgamated Warbasse Houses in Brooklyn, a five-building co-op that runs on electricity provided by its own power plant. During citywide blackouts, when the rest of New York was…
Amid the widespread devastation on New Jersey’s Atlantic Ocean shore following Hurricane Sandy, there was a tale of two Jewish towns as they each marked the sabbath. In Deal, a borough of about 1,000 residents — most of them upper income Syrian Jews — the streets were eerily quiet as the Sabbath approached. Neither the…
Suppose we were applying biblical theology to the events of today: We might say that God listened to the two major candidates for president of the most powerful nation in the world refusing to say the words “climate change” or “global warming” in a single one of their major speeches and debates. And then God,…
They were close friends from childhood with a shared commitment to helping others. Now Jessie Streich-Kest and Jacob Vogelman are being buried just two days apart after being crushed by a falling tree in Brooklyn in the midst of Hurricane Sandy. Streich-Kest, 24, was a young teacher dedicated to social justice. Vogelman, 23, was a…
The city that never sleeps was uncharacteristically quiet as Hurricane Sandy swept through on Monday, October 29: Mass transit shut down, residents scattered to their homes, commerce halted, the usual frenetic energy on streets and byways dialed back to zero. It was as if the entire metropolitan area were taking one big Shabbat nap. But…
The massive storm system that ransacked the East Coast on October 29 brought unprecedented devastation to Jewish communities in and around New York City. Sandy pushed eight-foot-high waves through the Brooklyn neighborhood of Manhattan Beach. In Sea Gate, on the western tip of Coney Island, entire homes collapsed. An apartment building was evacuated after basement…
Video: Nate Lavey Hurricane-force winds and historic flooding from superstorm Sandy have devastated the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sea Gate, a gated community on the western tip of Coney Island that is home to several hundred Jewish families. Many homes facing the Atlantic Ocean were gutted by floodwaters. A few were absolutely flattened by the raging…
The heavily Hasidic Jewish neighborhood of Brooklyn escaped major damage from Sandy, suffering only minor flooding and downed trees from the superstorm that caused devastation elsewhere. Ultra-Orthodox schools opened as usual Tuesday and a few cafes and shops had their doors open as the neighborhood struggled to return to normalcy after the massive storm hit…
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