18 Av 5767 - August 2007..in the goyishe calender..feh... | Mordecai Plut - drektor-
Published Weakly Without Spellcheck
Shame Yisrael Toirah Nutworks
Z'NEWS BULLETIN
Psak Halochoh
ISSUED WITH MESIRAS NEFESH FROM UNDER OUR BEDS IN THE REB MEIER AL Z. HEIMERS MOSHAV ZEKANIM
BS"D, Av 5767
We were appalled and trembling to hear of the terrible breach in our camp in the form of concerts featuring singers and chazanim who sing before men and women in mixed company Rachmono litzlan and even with separate seating, mamash.
Previous gedolei Yisroel totally banned these events - even though there were none, but in their infinite wisdom they knew that there will be many - even where there is separate seating (they can't fool us - we know they sit together in the car). As such we hereby state our combined ignorant and idiot opinion, which is based on irrefutable daas Torah.
A. Attending these performances is totally prohibited, because we say so -- even though we forgot to take our pills for two years at least - could be more - we just don't remember.
B. The prohibition applies to the organizers and the audience, young and old, middle-aged, senile, people in wheelchairs, people who use cains and walkers, the hearing impaired, fagelech, men, women, children, shul candy-men and rebbeim-- regardless of their sexual preferences.
All the more so on the singers and chazanim, who are inducing the masses to sin, mamash - Rachmana litzlan.
C. Newspapers and advertising circulars should not help by advertising these forbidden events, the transgressors call performances. Even the Jewish Press should restrain itself, if at all possible.
D. The singers and chazanim who appear before a mixed audience may not be invited to sing at any wedding or divorce, chap-a-nosh at the smorgasboard, mooch a free meal, take home the flowers, switch to a newer Borsalino at the coat-check room, steal a bencher, or take home a stranger's wife; nor can any event at which they participate be advertised, including tefillos and so-called kosher events, unsupervised fress Pesach events; in order to avoid lending a hand to these transgressors who we consider to be rishaim gemurim, like nothing ever before in klal Yisroel, ever, ever, aver, erva.
May Hashem Yisborach, in His great mercy and kindness, bring them to do teshuvah before Him - and us - by supporting Kupat H'air, and may we merit the eternal Redemption (not the phony Chabad kind), immediately - before the Kolko trial - azuz yimolei sechok peanuts...., vayihee b'yemai Achasvarush....
Signing for the sake of the sanctity, holiness and purity of our people, with trembling hands, spittle dripping out of our mouths, and with soiled diapers....
Yehuda Kolko
Lipa Margulies
Ephraim Shapiro
Shea Fishman
Moshe Eisemann
Matis Weinberg
Shalom Tendler
Mordecai Tendler
Aron Tendler
Sheftel Neuberger
Grepsel Hamburger
Avrohom Mondrowitz
Ephraim Bryks
Aron Twerski
Avi Shafran
Marvin Shick
Avrohom Leizerowitz
Heshy Nussbaum
Shlomo Mandel
Yehuda Nussbaum
Simcha Kaufman
Shmuel Kaminetzky
Yaakov Perlow
Yosef Sholom Eliashiv
Gershon Tannenbaum
Moshe Heinemann
Aharon Yehuda Leib Shteinman
Yaakov Aryeh Alter Chaya
Yissochor Dov Petzel A. Kleiner
Pinchos Nisht-Arein Gegangen
Hertz Frankel
Yitzchak Kaduri
Shmuel Halevi Wosner
Yisroel Hazmana Belsky
Mendel Haganiv Epstein
Moshe Hachazir Finkel
Dovid Ha'truckdriver Cohen
Michel Yehuda Lefkowitz
Moshe Chaim Kurva Ben Gil Arayus
Leibish Flynt
Chaim H. Hefner
Lipa Geldwerth
David(Ben Shmuel)Berkowitz
Lipa Brenner
Baruch Lanner
Chaim Pinchos Sheinberg
Bernard(Berish)Law
C. Yonah Mahoney
Tuvyah Ted Bundy
Tzvi Elimelech Zona
Nissim Karelitz
Dovid Twersky
Shmuel Auerbach
Sholom Klass
Yitzchok Sheiner
Marvin Hier
Israel Singer
Philip Berg
Moshe Sherer
Shabbsai Tzvi
The Rabbis of Baltimore & Ner Israel Rabbinical College agree with above clowns
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MEGILLAS SHTUYOT FROM MONSEY CRACKPOTS!
UOJ EXCLUSIVE - THE VIDEO THAT LEIB TROPPER SENT TO THE RABBIS OF MONSEY:
287 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 287 of 28722 & a half hours from Kansas is only when taking the Penn Tpke which cheapskates like me and truckers avoid because it's an expensive toll road.
Alternate routes take much longer.
Neve Yerushalayim Girls Seminary has just named Rabbi Morris Esformes as their new President. Is this the nursing home guy from Chicago? OUJ- tell me what was the Neve board of directors thinking? Looks like an unlikely shidduch for such an institution with an over-the-top dedication to Torah ideals.
UOJ,
It looks like CZ (don't go to the authorities) Malinowitz is at it again.
How can that excuse for a human being punsh the poor?
http://tzedek-tzedek.blogspot.com/2010/02/hoax-letter-sent-to-synagogue.html#comments
Dorothy wasn't in Kansas anymore but at least she went back.
I don't know that Yudel's Mistake will ever get out of La La Land.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/nyregion/18lippman.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
Gov. David A. Paterson nominated Jonathan Lippman to head the New York Court of Appeals in January 2009, making him the chief judge of the state. The choice was a gamble: The judge, a longtime court administrator, did not have a long history of deciding cases, and there was almost no record of his political views.
Now, a year in, the parameters of the Lippman court are coming into focus. He has helped turn the Court of Appeals into a scrappier, more divided and more liberal panel, its rulings and court statistics show.
To get the rulings he wants, the decisions show, the new chief judge has built alliances case by case with each of the four judges who were nominated by the last Republican governor, George E. Pataki, cracking the conservative majority.
The changes to the culture of the court, New York’s highest — which has sometimes been one of the most influential state courts in the country — are especially striking when Chief Judge Lippman’s approach is compared with the judicial style of his predecessor, Judith S. Kaye. She had prized unanimity.
In the past year, the court has issued a series of sharply divided decisions that have been surprising from a judicial body with a clear 4-to-3 conservative majority. They have included decisions favoring criminal defendants
For years, officials at the state’s Office of Court Administration used a term to describe Judge Lippman’s ability to persuade people to do things they did not want to do. The term was coined by the court system’s communications director, David Bookstaver: The officials would say they had been “Lippmanized.”
“There is more testiness than I have seen in the past,” said Oscar G. Chase, a law professor at New York University.
Among the comments dissenters on the court have made about the majority rulings under Judge Lippman are “illogical,” “nightmarish,” “doomed to fail” and intended “to elicit editorial approval.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/health/policy/18dartmouth.html?hpw
For much of the past year, President Obama lavished praise on a few select hospitals like the Mayo Clinic for delivering high-quality care at low costs, but a pointed analysis published Wednesday in an influential medical journal suggests that the president’s praise may be unwarranted.
An article in The New Yorker magazine last year written by Dr. Atul Gawande that used the Dartmouth Atlas as its organizing principle became required reading in the White House last year.
But an analysis written in The New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. Peter B. Bach, a physician and epidemiologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, suggests that much of the Dartmouth Atlas is flawed and that it should not be used to compare the relative efficiency of hospitals.
http://www.5tjt.com/news/read.asp?Id=5831
I have previously written about the very painful topic of divorce in our community. As the number of divorces of young couples rises to unprecedented proportions, leaving devastated families and at times devastated communities in its wake, the Torah community as a whole has not stepped up adequately to address this modern plague in our community.
From a personal perspective, in my first 15 years of being blessed with the opportunity of serving as a community rav, I dealt with approximately ten divorces. In my last five years, I have dealt with approximately ten each year. I’ve often been asked something that I’ve already been asking myself for years: what is the common denominator in so many divorces today, particularly among young people.
Until recently, I’ve felt that there really is no common denominator to be found. Sometimes it’s a result of overwhelming economic pressures; sometimes it’s due to meddling parents. At times it’s due to a lack of middos, and sometimes one spouse has grown in a different direction from his or her spouse. There are even times that they are so incompatible that they never should have gotten married to begin with (though this is not too common).
Lately I have begun to detect a common thread running through most of the divorces of young couples that I have been involved with (emphasis on most, not all), and it’s something that some of my distinguished colleagues have expressed as well.
In the last 150 years, yeshivas were defined by their roshei hayeshiva. The rosh yeshiva’s style, personality, and derech defined the character of the yeshiva, and the students for the most part were defined by their connection and relationship with the rosh hayeshiva. Rav Boruch Ber’s talmidim were distinguished from the talmidim of the Alter of Slabodka in many aspects, as were the talmidim of Mir and Telz. Each rosh hayeshiva left his imprint on the students, who (again for the most part) developed a lifelong connection to their beloved rebbi. In my days, things were no different.
There were numerous times in my own married life that we had decisions to make. At times we may have even seen things differently. Often, at my wife’s suggestion, we called the rosh hayeshiva for his thoughts on such an issue. While he would never tell us what to do, he often clarified the issues for us to help us make the necessary decision.
This was not only the way of the talmidim of my yeshiva; those from Yeshiva Chaim Berlin had Rav Hutner, zt’l; Yeshiva Torah Vodaas had Rav Yaakov, zt’l, and then Rav Pam, zt’l; and so did many others from their respective yeshivos.
I’m not sure why or when this changed. Today the vogue is to send our sons to large institutional yeshivos with thousands of talmidim, whether here or in Eretz Yisrael, where the atmosphere is truly inspiring but the connection to a rebbi is non-existent. Many of our sons, within a year or two after high school, join these colossal yeshivas, where they make many friends and learn many blatt, but do not develop a connection with a rebbi whom they can turn to in the ensuing years. While we can debate the necessity of having a real rebbi to maximize one’s learning potential, the void left in one’s life without a rebbi is undeniable.
Often, after a lengthy painful session with a young couple, at times with several children, going through the divorce process, I ask them if they have a rebbi or rosh hayeshiva to consult with. Often the answer is no.
http://daattorah.blogspot.com/2010/02/for-times-they-are-changin.html
In the last two days I had conversations with two people who approached me to thank me for my blog and what I am trying to do as well as how I do it. While it was nice to be complemented - neither of them are people who I would have imagined read my blog. I never would have guessed that they shared my concerns and understanding of what is going on now in the Jewish community.
Both acknowledged that they sense a loss of direction - or even the perception that someone is in charge. That we live in very troubled times and that the scandals are not just accidents but are reflective of a deeper malaise.
One of them is a gevir who told me that he normally gives money to Toldos Aaron - even though he is Modern Orthodox - because they have many hungry families who genuinely need assistance. However because of the riots he told the Rebbe that he was canceling his support. He didn't accept the excuse that these were hooligans. He told the Rebbe it was his responsibliity to deal with the hooligans. This is the second gevir I have heard this from.
He also said that while he feels it is important to give tzedaka - but he no longer gives simply because the organization is associated with gedolim or is a major organization. He said that he now uses his tzedaka money to maximize the impact on society. If there are two ways to deal with off the derech kids - he picks the one that is most efficient and cost effective. He also supports issues that strengthen the society - not just because someone has a need.
This is probably the most important issue. All major institutions need money. In the past the donors were flattered and given kovod - but they were told that the gedolim would decide what programs were needed and where the money was spent. There is a growing revolt against this with the donors dictating what needs to be done and simply not funding programs that are bloated and unproductive. Funding goes to innovative programs which they see are producing results.
I have been told that despite the failure of the gedolim to condemn Tropper - those organizations that were associated with him have been suffering a large drop in funding. Tropper corrupted through money - the antidote seems to be that the donors have to show the way out of this mess by redirecting and rewarding healthy projects.
Wow. The supposedly open-minded readers of UOJ are attacking me for Yudels kovod, on something THAT YUDEL WAS MOIDEH he was wrong!!! What are you guys, some dues-paying members of the Aguda?
Yudel never admitted he was wrong actually. Taking down a post is lav davka being moideh. Maybe he was wrong and realized it or maybe he is probably right but absolutely can't prove it but he sometimes takes down posts for other reasons.
Did Yudel's Mistake just make a generalization that card carrying Agudah members are all brainless followers of a krum ideology?
Can UOJ look into the allegations that Tropper requested and was granted that R' Aron Schechter and R' Elya Ber be appointed to be in charge of Kol Yaakov?
This stinks of another cover up where they are still in cahoots with Tropper to make money.
And that when R' Elya Svei wanted to shut down Kol Yaakov over 20 years ago because Tropper is a menuval, he was stopped by R' Aron Schechter who protected his pet menuvol?
The bogus yeshiva called Kol Yaakov has 13 "students" and 12 staff members last time I checked.
I am fairly certain Tom Kaplan will be disassociating himself from all things Tropper.
Schechter will send his shik-yingel Fruchthandler to check out the possibility of creating a cash cow out of this crazy house, if the answer is no, Abe F. will figure out a way to screw Tropper over, and close this bais menuvel down.....Leave it to Fruchty...
There are meshulochim from Israel who refer to Avrom Fruchthandler as "dem mit der groyse payos" without realizing how hilarious it is. Some yeshivishe chevra have picked up on it and call him Groyse Payos for short.
Rabbi Smason cannot claim to have a psak to bypass beis din and go to court.
He must produce a letter that he was given a heter.
As of 1996, Ulana Zarowsky Abramson had not been converted k'halacha.
Ulana told me that "Henry's mother did not accept her because she was not Jewish".
Spaced Out BT:
Morry has been footing the bill and almost single handedly making payroll at Neve for the past 17 years.
An Honorary President title is nothing to be concerned about.
WE KEEP OUR PROMISES.
THE GEDOLIM AND AGUDAH ARE ONLY CONCERNED WITH THEIR MONEY= HIT THEM WHERE IT COUNTS.
In the last two days I had conversations with two people who approached me to thank me for my blog and what I am trying to do as well as how I do it. While it was nice to be complemented - neither of them are people who I would have imagined read my blog. I never would have guessed that they shared my concerns and understanding of what is going on now in the Jewish community.
Both acknowledged that they sense a loss of direction - or even the perception that someone is in charge. That we live in very troubled times and that the scandals are not just accidents but are reflective of a deeper malaise. We need to do something different. Orthodoxy can't continue with patching up the old system - a new direction is needed.
One of them is a gevir who told me that he normally gives money to Toldos Aaron - even though he is Modern Orthodox - because they have many hungry families who genuinely need assistance. However because of the riots he told the Rebbe that he was canceling his support. He didn't accept the excuse that these were hooligans. He told the Rebbe it was his responsiblity to deal with the hooligans. This is the second gevir I have heard this from.
He also said that while he feels it is important to give tzedaka - but he no longer gives simply because the organization is associated with gedolim or is a major organization. He said that he now uses his tzedaka money to maximize the impact on society. If there are two ways to deal with off the derech kids - he picks the one that is most efficient and cost effective. He also supports issues that strengthen the society - not just because someone has a need.
This is probably the most important issue. All major institutions need money. In the past the donors were flattered and given kavod - but they were told that the gedolim would decide what programs were needed and where the money was spent. There is a growing revolt against this with the donors dictating what needs to be done and simply not funding programs that are bloated and unproductive. Funding goes to innovative programs which they see are producing results.
I have been told that despite the failure of the gedolim to condemn tropper - those organizations that were associated with him have been suffering a large drop in funding. Tropper corrupted through money - the antidote seems to be that the donors have to show the way out of this mess by redirecting and rewarding healthy projects.
Posted by Daas Torah
UOJ,
You must help...once again the voices of reason in Ramat Bet Shemesh are being silenced by a bully with a pulpit.
Rabbi Malinowitz of Beis Tfilla has reiterated his deplorable ban on Lema'an Achai.
How can we stop this man from further damaging Lema'an Achai and its founder David Morris?
I'm on it Mike.
For those of you who would like to stop Malinowitz...hit him where it hurts..his wallet.
Call,fax and email the Mesorah Heritage Foundation and express your outrage that they employ such a menuval as editor of the gemara.
Do they want to associate with even more dubious characters?
Mesorah Heritage Foundation
4401 Second Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11232
Phone: 718 / 921-9000
Fax: 718 / 680-1875
email: heritage@mesorahheritage.org
Contact the Scottensteins as well
What makes you think that me and my pal Zlotowitz will do anything to stop Malinowitz when we do nothing about Leib Pinter, Eisemann and others?
Mr. St. Louis - I don't believe the shul should have sued in secular court, but I am 100% confident Rabbi Smason would not have let the shul do it if they didn't have a heter to do so. I trust they could get a letter if they needed to, and perhaps they already have one. Dan l'kaf zechus.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/19crash.html?hp
Does anyone know if Shmarya has "issues" with the IRS too?
http://www.observer.com/2010/media/accidental-plagiarist
Five days ago, Robert Thomson, the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, wrote a letter to The Times’ executive editor, Bill Keller, about “apparent plagiarism” on The Times’ DealBook blog, in a post by Zachery Kouwe, a 31-year-old business reporter.
The examples laid out by Mr. Thomson were pretty clear-cut: Much of the story, which was about a lawsuit involving Bernie Madoff’s family, was obviously lifted from a Journal piece published a few hours before the Times piece.
Almost immediately, they dispatched a team to a quick scrub of Mr. Kouwe’s work. Within a day, they found half a dozen examples of passages lifted from other news sources. On Sunday night, an editors’ note was published on the Times Web site admitting that Mr. Kouwe had indeed lifted lines from a variety of sources, including The Journal and Reuters.
By Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Kouwe had resigned.
“We have a zero tolerance policy for unethical journalism,” wrote Mr. Keller in an e-mail to The Observer. “Plagiarism is unethical journalism.”
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/02/18/us/politics/politics-us-toyota-subpoena.html
Documents Prove Toyota Concealed Evidence, Lawyer Says
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/nyregion/19greyhound.html
One thing to do with a stolen bus is try to make a few bucks for bail money. That’s what a 15-year-old boy did in October 2006 in Orlando, Fla. After taking a bus from the Central Florida Fairgrounds, he drove it along a conventional bus route, picking up passengers and collecting fares.
Peter Pantuso, president of the American Bus Association, the trade group for the private bus industry, said: “I remember a few years ago someone stole a bus out west, and the people operated it in charter service for a couple of weeks. So sometimes it’s a business model.”
http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100127/OPINION/1270309/-1/SITEMAP
As long as Paterson is talking about ethics reform and campaign giving and changing the culture of Albany, let's look at that little trip the governor paid to Kiryas Joel not long ago. Paterson broke bread with business and political leaders of the Hasidic village and walked away with $140,200 for his campaign. The money came in the form of checks ranging from $1,000 to $10,000 per person. Village leaders made no bones about the fact that the get-together was held to seek help for parochial schools, of which the village has several. Shortly after the event, Paterson's budget was released and it contained a provision enabling students at a rabbinical college in the village to claim annual tuition grants of $5,000 a year.
Pesach fresser hotel under OU
http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100218/NEWS/100219625
Suffocating under more than $26 million of debt, the Hudson Valley Resort & Spa has declared bankruptcy in a last-ditch effort to avoid foreclosure.
Owners of the resort filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January, just as the holder of their largest mortgage finished a foreclosure case against them. Chapter 11 could allow the owners, who operate under Everyday Logistics LLC, to reorganize debts and keep the hotel.
The 323-room resort, formerly known as the Granit Hotel, has stayed open while its owners and lenders battle in court. Eliot Spitzer, one of the Hudson Valley Resort's managing partners, said he couldn't talk about the bankruptcy when contacted at his Monsey office this week. (He is not the former governor of New York.)
“This does not affect the actual operation of the hotel,” said Spitzer, who owns the property with his partner, Michael Steinberg. “I think we'll be all right when it's all over.”
Spitzer and Steinberg owe more than $25 million on six mortgages. They purchased the hotel, its 18-hole golf course and the 400-acre property in 2006 for $18.5 million. The full-market assessed value of the property is $5.8 million.
The first signs of trouble came in September 2008, after the owners failed to make mortgage payments for four months. In court papers, Spitzer said the economic recession cut the resort's revenues.
Kennedy Funding, holder of a $9.8 million mortgage, foreclosed on the property in September 2009. A judge delayed the appointment of a receiver, or an independent party to sell the property, until Jan. 7. But Spitzer and Steinberg filed for bankruptcy that same day to stall the foreclosure.
Tom Genova, a bankruptcy lawyer in Poughkeepsie, said that bankruptcy is sometimes used to renegotiate mortgages when neither side will benefit from foreclosure.
“If the bank forecloses, what do they get? They get a hotel in the middle of winter in Kerhonkson,” Genova said.
Hudson Valley Resort & Spa is the largest private employer in this mountain town, with some 150 people on its payroll. The resort owes the Town of Rochester nearly $40,000 in unpaid taxes.
“My greatest concern is for the employees,” Rochester Supervisor Carl Chipman said. “A lot of families depend on that place for income.”
Spitzer and Steinberg had grand plans to make the resort a Marriott-branded hotel and build 300 upscale homes on the property. They contracted with PGA champion Vijay Singh to redesign the golf course. None of those plans materialized.
Henry Zabatta, who owned the hotel when it was the Granit, is familiar with the scenario that's unfolding. Zabatta went bankrupt on the hotel in 1997 with a $5 million mortgage and said the current owners paid too much for it.
“I don't know who brokered that deal, but it was highway robbery,” he said. “You can't possibly operate a hotel in this region with that much debt.”
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3847864,00.html
An indictment was filed Thursday at the Beersheba Magistrate Court against a Chabad member who is accused of assaulting and threatening two members of the Ger Hassidic group.
According to the indictment, the suspect attacked the two several days ago in a central Synagogue in the southern city of Arad. The man also threatened one of the victims and said that he will stab him to death with a knife.
http://www.riverreporter.com/issues/10-01-28/news-vei.html
SULLIVAN COUNTY, NY — Bungalows that are occupied only for a month or two out of the year are not legal residences as far as voting requirements are concerned. That was the decision of the Sullivan County Board of Elections (BOE). The commissioners, Rodney Gaebel and Faith Kaplan, announced on January 21 that 151 out of a total of 155 people who registered to vote in Bethel were not eligible to do so, primarily because they listed their local residences as seasonal bungalow colonies.
ben said...
Eddie said...
....And, from a strict Torah perspective, Elon's alelged aveirot, are much more severe than Tropper's, at least in terms of the arayot...
-------------------------------------
i am not going to evaluate who is a bigger sinner..... as for troppers preferences for the fairer sex, well, lets just say its just that, a preference.
I have the text of the Barron's article on Tom Kaplan that no one wanted to pay for.
Because it is a very lengthy feature article, I will excerpt the relevant portions.
The gist of it is that Kaplan made another billion dollars with his controlling stake in NovaGold going up ten fold on the stock market but he has got some major problems on the horizon because the SEC is investigating him for fraud for his involvement in the collapse of Apex Silver.
Guma only gets a passing mention and the Albert Friedberg quoted throughout the piece is a frum guy in Toronto.
word is that tropper is now saying the deal is off, since the kol koreh was made public.
also it seems tropper found a sympathetic ear in shlezinger from the bes din in monsey.
can anyone confirm that r' breslauer had to be hospitalized as a result of shlezingers attempted obstructionism?
(or maybe it was just the utter shock of hearing about leibs escapades and sexcapades)
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB126602914540245565.html
GOLD PRICES HAVE TREBLED IN RECENT YEARS. The big returns, however, have been in little gold stocks -- exploration outfits known as "juniors." These are the ever-hopeful speculations built upon the drill cores and inferences of a small number of hired geologists. During gold's ascent to $1,218 an ounce, for example, shares of major producers like Newmont Mining (NEM: 48.41, +1.17, +2.47%) went nowhere. But the stocks of two of the biggest juniors, NovaGold Resources (NG: 5.87, -0.12, -2.00%) and Seabridge Gold (SA: 24.66, +0.06, +0.24%), rocketed tenfold to valuations of about $1 billion apiece, as the companies' consultants expanded their estimates of the quantity of gold hidden underground.
Unburdened by gold sales or profits, the billion-dollar valuations of stocks like NovaGold and Seabridge depend mainly on how many million ounces of gold the companies think lie in their properties. And that tally comes from the technical experts who extrapolate from drilling samples to estimate the unseen gold resource and its recovery cost.
Seabridge and NovaGold have used some of the same key experts to support their estimates. When junior miners' resource and cost estimates have proven overly optimistic in the past, they've buried shareholders. That's the lesson NovaGold investors learned in November 2007, when the company lost half its share value in a day, as it retracted the experts' estimates of what could be profitably mined at a gold project called Galore Creek. Two of the lead experts in that NovaGold disaster are now consulting for Seabridge.
Bulls argue that Seabridge and NovaGold look cheap at respective share prices of 25 and 6, which represent about $14 and $49 for each ounce of gold the companies claim they've got underground. Other junior gold explorers have been acquired by gold majors at upward of $100 an ounce.
But NovaGold and Seabridge are bargains only if the gold estimates prove out. The gold industry's recent decades have featured many disappointments in ore grade, tonnage and processing cost. At Seabridge and NovaGold, the track records of important technical experts, managers and controlling shareholders raise worries about whether the mines will meet expectations.
"It is very difficult to make precise estimates," concedes Michael J. Lechner, the geologist who certified the since-revised gold-ore estimate for NovaGold's Galore Creek and who now oversees the audit of Seabridge's gold estimates.
Forecasting the costs of Seabridge's mine is James H. Gray, the consultant who signed off on NovaGold's disavowed estimates of Galore Creek gold reserves and mining costs. Gray's firm has worked for big outfits like Teck Resources and penny-stock juniors like Canarc Resource (CRCUF). In November, the British Columbia Securities Commission told Canarc that Gray's economic assessment report failed to comply with Canadian disclosure standards.
Asia's developing economies want to diversify their sovereign reserves away from U.S. Treasuries, says Albert Friedberg, a currency and commodities expert often quoted in Barron's over the years. The prospect of China and India boosting their gold reserves is what inspired the Toronto-based hedge-fund manager to take a controlling stake in Seabridge, with 23% of Seabridge shares now held by Friedberg's family-owned firms. "Sovereign buying is the one single bullish case for gold," Friedberg says. "That's the bid under the market and it's going to be there permanently."
Supply-demand imbalances and economic turbulence have created a "perfect storm" that won't soon abate, says William Natbony, the chief executive at Electrum Strategic Resources, a vehicle of investor Thomas S. Kaplan. Electrum controls NovaGold with a 28% stake and warrants for 14% more.
Since 1998, NovaGold has assembled a handful of properties in Alaska and Canada with promising deposits of copper, silver and gold. NovaGold shares were recommended by pundit Marc Faber at the recent Barron's Roundtable ("A Few Good Ideas," Jan. 25). The Vancouver, British Columbia-based company has interests in two of the world's largest undeveloped gold resources: Galore Creek, a remote mountain spot in northwest British Columbia, and Donlin Creek, in southwest Alaska.
"We are feeling very good about our future," says Chief Executive Rick Van Nieuwenhuyse. Soon after raising $165 million in a 2006 stock offering, NovaGold found itself the target of a hostile tender offer by Barrick Gold. In urging shareholders to reject Barrick's $1.5 billion bid, NovaGold released a technical report assembled by the engineering firm Hatch Ltd., which said the Galore Creek project was worth almost $14 billion -- promising 17 million ounces of gold, 19 billion pounds of copper and 270 million ounces of silver after a total capital cost of $1.9 billion. Those metal tallies were endorsed by the experts Lechner and Gray (both brought in through Hatch), with Gray also blessing the cost estimate. Shareholders rejected Barrick's $16 a share bid. Touting the forecasts, NovaGold conducted another stock offering for $194 million and secured Teck Resources as Galore Creek's partner.
Six months after Teck jumped into Galore Creek, the two companies said they were suspending work on the project. The prior year's engineering report was "not to be relied upon," according NovaGold's securities filings.
A new team of experts estimated that the project would cost $4.4 billion -- more than double what NovaGold had been advertising. The 17 million ounces of gold now looked more like 11 million, none of it recoverable at a profit. In a day, NovaGold shares fell from 20 to 9.
Ensuing class-action lawsuits alleged that Van Nieuwenhuyse and his NovaGold colleagues had concealed Galore Creek's spiraling costs in order to sell stock, fight off a Barrick takeover and hook Teck as a partner. In Manhattan's federal district court last June, Judge Denise Cote dismissed the engineering report's authors from the fraud suit, noting that experts clearly warn that their forecasts are estimates. But the judge is allowing a trial on whether NovaGold's management misled investors about Galore Creek's economics. The NovaGold defendants say they acted in good faith and made no material misstatements. Lechner and Gray were not sued. Each says his work on Galore Creek hasn't been questioned.
With the subsequent rise in gold's price, NovaGold and Teck are working on a new mining plan that they hope to complete near the end of the first quarter.
NovaGold settled its differences with Barrick and they agreed to a 50/50 partnership on Donlin Creek. NovaGold estimates its half-interest at 20 million ounces of gold.
NovaGold's fans are undeterred by the Galore Creek mishap. "Management made its errors and learned from its errors," says Natbony, who acts as a spokesman for investor Kaplan, a boldface name in New York's society pages who heads the board of the 92nd Street Y, a well-known cultural institution. "We have taken a very close look at Donlin Creek," says Natbony. "Our conclusion is that the resources are accurately described and the potential for discovering additional resources is tremendous."
Kaplan's firm acquired its controlling stake in NovaGold about a year ago. Natbony says his boss has a proven skill in natural-resource investing. Among Kaplan's big successes, says Natbony, were Apex Silver -- a miner that Kaplan promoted into a billion-dollar market cap -- and Leor Energy, a natural-gas venture that Kaplan sold to EnCana (ECA) a couple of years ago for $2.5 billion.
Apex Silver collapsed from its billion-dollar height after consuming $740 million from investors, without producing a profit. By January 2009, it was in bankruptcy court. After receiving lavish compensation as CEO from 1996 to 2002 and board chairman through 2004 -- as Apex cumulatively lost almost $100 million -- Kaplan stepped down before the implosion. The successor firm to Apex, called Golden Minerals, says the Justice Department is investigating bribes that the company admits were paid in 2003 and 2004 to government officials in South America. The SEC warned the company last year that the agency plans an antifraud suit over the matter. Barron's asked repeatedly to speak with Kaplan, without success.
Kaplan's Leor Energy bonanza is itself the subject of lawsuits in which his nephew, Guma Aguiar, alleges that Kaplan and attorney Natbony swindled Aguiar out of his half-interest in the venture; while Kaplan alleges that Aguiar committed embezzlement. Natbony says the dispute will be decided in Kaplan's favor.
Seabridge has never mined an ounce of metal; it would rather spend its cash to acquire and explore mineral claims. Fronk says he developed this philosophy after he ran a Central American miner called Greenstone Resources in the 1990s. Fronk touted Greenstone to a billion-dollar market cap and raised $300 million in financing on promises of seven million ounces in gold reserves and 600,000 ounces in annual production. Within a year and half of Fronk's announcement of a "super" mine, Greenstone collapsed. Fronk blames a hurricane, a drop in gold prices and expropriation by the Honduran government.
Friedberg, Seabridge's controlling shareholder, says his investment was a "top-down" bet on gold. "I know as much about mining as you do," the hedge-fund manager tells a reporter. "I am really a commodities person."
The folks involved with Seabridge might not have sold any gold yet, but they've sold stock. SEC filings show that Friedberg's hedge fund sold a half-million shares in the past few months, at prices averaging above 25 bucks a share. Friedberg says he did it for ethical reasons, after concluding that his hedge fund shouldn't trade a stock in which he has a large personal holding. Fronk and other Seabridge insiders also have taken $36 million off the table through stock sales in the past four years. The Seabridge chief defends these transactions by saying he regrets not having sold stock before Greenstone collapsed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/nyregion/19hedge.html
An Orthodox rabbi who runs a respected Jewish day school in Brooklyn was charged on Thursday with trying to extort $4 million from a Connecticut hedge fund.
The rabbi, Milton Balkany, the dean of the Bais Yaakov day school in Borough Park, is an influential fund-raiser and community leader known for his access to a wide circle of politicians. Mr. Balkany was accused, among other things, of trying to use his influence to extort the fund.
He was charged with wire fraud, extortion, blackmail and making false statements. The wire fraud count alone carries a sentence of up to 20 years.
In a criminal complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan, prosecutors said that Mr. Balkany, 63, had recently been serving as a “spiritual adviser” to a federal inmate who told him that a Connecticut hedge fund had used inside information to profit from a number of stock trades.
The hedge fund was not named in the complaint, but prosecutors said that Mr. Balkany went to lawyers for the fund and told them that unless they handed over $4 million — $2 million of which would go to Bais Yaakov — he would instruct the inmate to tell the authorities about the insider trades.
According to the complaint, Mr. Balkany told the lawyers that government officials were eager to speak with the inmate — something prosecutors said was a lie. But Mr. Balkany called the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan in January and encouraged officials to speak with the inmate, prosecutors said.
On Thursday, Mr. Balkany received two checks totaling $3.25 million, the complaint said, adding that the rabbi told a hedge fund representative that the inmate would not discuss the fund with the government.
He was arrested later that afternoon. His lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, said late Thursday that he could not comment on the charges because he had not seen the complaint. Mr. Balkany was released on bail, he said.
Dear Mike and Reb UOJ,
Rav Chaim Soloveichik (yougest son of Rav Ahron Soloveichik zt"l) who lives in RBS continues to try to protect kids from molesstors and promote L'man Achai. He apparently learned from his oldest boither, HaRav Moshe Soloviechik who practically single handedly has fought vociferously against molesters in Chicago and their enablers, the Agudas Yisroel and the local Lakewood Kollel.
You left one important name off the list. HoRav CZ Malinowitz, who just put the tzaddikim of Lemaan Achai in Ramat Bet Shemesh into cherem for...gasp...standing up against child abuse. See the "fatwa" at tzedek-tzedek.blogspot.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-02-19/brooklyn-school-dean-rabbi-accused-of-extorting-hedge-fund.html
Balkany told the Connecticut-based hedge fund that he was the spiritual adviser of an unidentified individual incarcerated in the federal prison in Otisville, New York, prosecutors said. He told lawyers for the hedge fund that the inmate would keep quiet about alleged illegal trading by the fund in 2004 and 2005 if they paid his school, Bais Yaakov, and another school $2 million each, prosecutors said.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1150658.html
The Brooklyn District Attorney's office is investigating accusations that a popular kabbalist in Be'er Sheva has defrauded American Jews by reportedly taking hundreds of thousands of dollars for promises that he would use kabbala to help people who wanted blessings, amulets or promises to cure the terminally ill.
The complaints relate to visits by Rabbi Elazar Abuhatzeira to Borough Park, New York, and Englewood, New Jersey. Abuhatzeira is the grandson of Rabbi Yisrael Abuhatzeira, known as the Baba Sali, whom his followers consider a sage who was able to work miracles through his prayers.
"This man is hurting people," Borough Park businessman Menachem Ellowich, 53, told the New York Post. Ellowich said he sent Elazar Abuhatzeira a check for $100,000 in exchange for a guarantee that his barren daughter would be able to conceive a child. She never did.
"He ruined my life," Ellowich told the paper. "He ruined my finances by making these promises."
The DA's office confirmed to Haaretz that the investigation is underway, but would not provide details and refused to say how many victims were involved. The Post said there were dozens of complaints from ultra-Orthodox Americans. The Abuhatzeira family refused to comment on the allegations.
This isn't the first time Abuhatzeira's integrity has been questioned. A 1997 Haaretz investigation linked several incidents of corruption to the rabbi.
"Elazar Abuhatzeira is a charlatan, con man and impostor who takes advantage of people's innocence, exploits them and brings to the verge of poverty," said Yossi Bar-Moha, who investigated the rabbi at the time and now heads the Tel Aviv Journalists Association.
Abuhatzeira's followers in Be'er Sheva defended the rabbi, whom they consider one of the greatest kabbalists in Israel.
"Our rabbi is humble and modest," one of his students said. "He would never do such a thing. It just can't be - every word he speaks is the truth."
But another Be'er Sheva resident had a different take, saying, "These rabbis make millions, live in huge houses like palaces, and then ask for donations."
part 2
The 1997 investigation found that Abuhatzeira had sold Be'er Sheva land designated for a religious girls school instead of building the school, and was not paying property tax in the Negev city.
In addition, Haaretz reported that his yeshiva of 16 students received NIS 480,000 a year from national and local government funds - enough to run the yeshiva and still have tens of thousands of shekels a year left over, Bar-Moha said. Of those 16 students, half were involved in running Abuhatzeira's affairs.
As a ploy to get donations, Abuhatzeira would overdraw his checking account by millions of shekels, then show people his account statement and ask for money, saying he was about to lose his home, Bar-Moha found. The former Haaretz reporter also said Abuhatzeira would take money to pray on others' behalf, and is now worth millions of shekels.
Thousands of people visit Abuhatzeira every week. They ask for blessings, advice and help in mending their ways. The men who visit the rabbi and the women who write him notes - he does not receive women, and has built a tunnel leading from his house to the study next door so he can go between them without confronting sexual temptation - usually leave him hundreds of shekels each for every visit or letter.
But Abuhatzeira has not been indicted for his alleged offenses.
"To my great regret, the [law] enforcement bodies [in Israel], as compared to the U.S., acted in an incompetent fashion," said Bar-Moha, adding that he believes political pressure has helped Abuhatzeira. "The income tax authorities took only NIS 20 million from him after my investigation, and the state prosecutor closed the case despite the police recommendation to put him on trial."
"The state comptroller needs to conduct a complex examination as to how the authorities reached such surprising and strange conclusions," said Bar-Moha.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/crime/adoption-lawyer-tied-to-child-sex-case-238257.html
This is a long article but it seems that this Puello putz is not even Jewish. His father is Jewish and his mother is Dominican. He was a member of a Sephardi shul in Montreal which gave him a letter saying he paid his dues. Puello altered the letter to make it say the rov checked out his yichus and his mother is Jewish. The rabbonim in the Dominican Republic say they never even heard of this guy and the kehillah Puello claims to be president of does not exist. It also seems none of the multiple women he was married to were Jewish, including the stripper from Miami who is 10 years older than him. It looks like he put on the yarmulka to fool the Baptist Church into thinking he is a frum guy so he could get $40,000 out of them to act as a lawyer (which he is not) for the missionaries in Haiti.
A few years ago someone put up a funny parody here about Applegrad contacting Balkany to see if he could get a bekishe for Margo in orange prison jumpsuit material and an uphat of orange felt.
UOJ's comment was that Balkany himself will be fitted with orange jumpsuit before he is with tachrichim.
http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/41351/indiana-jones-of-torah-scribes-now-under-scrutiny/
Irene Siegel recalls standing in the cluttered Jewish Bookstore of Greater Washington last year listening closely as her husband, Bernard, told the Wheaton, Md., shop’s co-owner, Rabbi Menachem Youlus, about his family’s roots in the Ukrainian village of Vasilkov.
“Menachem said, ‘Oh, I’ve been there,’ and mentioned some names that he’d seen on gravestones [in Vasilkov],” said Irene Siegel, 80, who lives in Silver Spring, Md.
She recalled that when the rabbi mentioned the surname Chasinsky, her husband’s maternal family’s name, “Bernie got all excited.”
“But it all happened very fast,” she said. “It seemed to me that Bernie had given him all the clues and information first. Then, [Youlus] said, ‘I’ve got a Torah from there.’ It just seemed too coincidental.”
Siegel said that after her husband, 88, committed to paying over $18,000 for the Torah, which the couple donated last October to Pikesville’s Moses Montefiore Anshe Emunah Hebrew Congregation, she privately expressed her reservations about the believability of the rabbi’s story.
“Bernie said to me, ‘You don’t trust anyone!’ ” she said. “But it just sounded too good to be true or exaggerated a bit.”
A recent Washington Post investigative article on Youlus quoted Holocaust scholars, former customers and associates questioning the veracity of some of the rabbi’s accounts of “rescuing” Torahs in Central and Eastern Europe, many of which were allegedly hidden, stolen or buried during the Holocaust.
A Baltimore resident, scribe, CPA and graduate of Ner Israel Rabbinical College, Youlus, 48, is head of the Rockville, Md.-based Save a Torah organization.
Dubbed the “Indiana Jones of Torah scribes,” he claims to have discovered and refurbished hundreds of scrolls over the past two decades and speaks frequently at synagogues and Jewish schools across the country about his efforts and exploits.
Contacted recently via e-mail by the Baltimore Jewish Times, Youlus wrote that he was unavailable for comment at that time. Someone who answered the phone at his store also said the rabbi was unavailable.
A statement on Save a Torah’s Web site reads: “We request that the public not be misled by innuendo in one published report, and reserve judgment until after Rabbi Youlus is given a fair opportunity to respond. Save a Torah is turning to independent experts in the field to verify the origin of donated Torahs.”
http://jta.org/news/article/2010/01/31/1010404/french-president-sarkozys-grandson-undergoes-bris
French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s first grandson was circumcised according to Jewish tradition.
Sarkozy’s grandson, Solal, was circumcised in a Jewish ceremony by a mohel, the president's friend Patrick Balkany told French Radio J Sunday, according to the French news agency AFP.
“It happened like all circumcisions, with a rabbi and a mohel,” said Balkany, who was present at the brit for Solal, the son of Jean Sarkozy and Jessica Sebaoun, born Jan. 13.
Sarkozy did not attend the brit, apparently because of work-related obligations, but Balkany said the president’s entire family was present, including his parents and brother.
Jessica Sebaoun is “a very observant Sephardic” Jew and the French president “sees no problem with that,” said Balkany, the mayor of Levallois-Perret, a town northwest of Paris.
Sarkozy, Balkany noted, has a “Catholic family, a Jewish grandfather and evidently, he was marked by that double culture.”
Balkany, who also has Jewish roots, said that when he met Sarkozy more than 20 years ago, one of their first conversations was about their shared “Jewish origins.”
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/people/big-fat-wideboy-liar-never-slept-with-me-brigitte-bardot-20100212-nwwe.html
Brigitte Bardot has called one of President Nicolas Sarkozy's oldest friends a "big, fat wide-boy liar" after he claimed to have slept with the film star at the height of her fame.
Patrick Balkany, the controversial and flamboyant mayor-MP of a Paris suburb in Mr Sarkozy's long-time fiefdom, has infuriated Miss Bardot, 75, by making the claim in his autobiography released last month. He has repeated it on radio and television in recent days.
In his book, Une Autre Verite, La Mienne (Another Truth, Mine), the portly 61 year-old portrays himself as a Don Juan who wooed a host of beauties. Among his conquests he cites Shirley MacLaine, the film star, and Bardot. France's 1960s sex symbol, he writes, fell for his charms at the zenith of her seductive powers.
"I must have been 18. She was a star hounded by the paparazzi. We had gone together to a soiree in Deauville [a chic Normandy seaside town]. I was proud to have her on my arm," he writes.
Bardot categorically denied the liaison. "I know with whom I have slept and it certainly was not with this fat wide-boy liar, an unusually inelegant cad," she wrote in a statement to the press.
"For a politician who claims to be credible, respected and dignified, this lowliness shows his true personality."
Mr Balkany recently recounted the incident on a television programme called We Haven't Gone To Bed. Bardot said it should have been renamed We Haven't Gone To Bed Together for the occasion. If he restated his claim once more, she promised to sue him for slander. Her lawyer said she was considering filing for a court injunction to force the book's publisher to insert a denial from Miss Bardot in the book.
Mr Balkany, who like Mr Sarkozy is of Hungarian descent, has ruled the suburb of Levallois-Perret with the help of his formidable wife, Isabelle, on and off since 1983. In that time he has transformed it from a Communist bastion into a Manhattan-type suburb to rival neighbouring Neuilly, where Mr Sarkozy became mayor in 1983.
But he and his wife have been accused of cronyism and have both been convicted for using municipal funds to pay staff at their homes.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2010/02/19/2010-02-19_rabbi_is_charged_with_4m_hedge_fund_blackmail.html
Why was Uncle Milty trying to get the other $2 million for Torah Vodaas? Who if anyone was in cahoots with him?
Extremely disturbing!
Hey brothers, I hope you're not maxed out after I shnorred from you for Rubashkin. Can you spare a little more for his shvogger?
http://www.silive.com/news/index.ssf/2010/02/prominent_brooklyn_rabbi_accus.html
Balkany was released on his own recognizance after posting $250,000 bond and about $1 million property in equity. He surrendered his passport and was ordered not to leave the state.
Was the deposit made in the bank owned by Rubashkin cousin Shaya Boymelgreen?
They got the idea to scuffle with photographers from me.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/brooklyn/rabbi_busted_in_extort_5GyJVhZzxmzo09qux9s2vK
Milton Balkany is accused of trying to blackmail the firm by saying that the feds were "thirsty" to nail its manager, but that he himself didn't want the manager hurt because they were "co-religionists."
Balkany allegedly tried to deposit the money into an account he opened yesterday in Borough Park, then desperately called the lawyer to arrange for a wire transfer when the checks wouldn't clear.
On his way out of court last night, he predicted prosecutors will again back off and called himself "an innocent man" -- as two supporters held umbrellas in front of him and scuffled with photographers taking his picture.
Yudel has a great Lakewood "court" ordering two sides to Beis Din!
http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/dailyrft/Extortion%20for%20Dummies.png
Bernie, did you see this new sefer from Artscroll? I'll send a couple of copies to you and Milty in the slammer.
Sholom in solitary confinement
Tatty Aron & brother Heshy on trial
Brother Moishe jailed again, this time for arson
Nephew Sholom jailed for covering up the arson
Nephew Shmuely arrested on a weapons charge
Sister in Florida said to be under investigation
Son in law Yaakov Weiss convicted of pedophilia in the mikva
Brother in law Milton Balkany arrested for blackmail, extortion & fraud
Cousin Shaya Boymelgreen in trouble with the FDIC
http://iowaindependent.com/28334/rubashkin-bail-appeal-denied-brother-in-law-arrested
By LYNDA WADDINGTON
2/19/10 9:57 AM
The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals declined to act on a bail release petitions from Sholom Rubashkin, former day-to-day manager at a now defunct Iowa meatpacking company who was convicted on numerous charges of financial fraud last fall.
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2010/02/brooklyn_rabbi.php
Here's Balkany, 63, telling representatives of a Connecticut hedge fund why they should pay him $4 million in exchange for using his influence to keep a federal inmate from spilling the beans in an insider trading probe:
"I think it's a very minor price for the package over here. I think if this ever got into what [the government] wants to bring, it would cost [the Hedge Fund Manager] ten million [dollars] in lawyers...It's a very inexpensive way out. You know what I mean? ...I'm not holding up anybody here."
He also offered his own experiential notion of what happens when the feds launch one of their probes:
"The government is like this. They throw a bucket of mud, that even if the guy gets out, when he gets done going through the whole publicity and the whole everything else, the guy's destroyed."
And: "If the FBI should be running after the [Hedge Fund Manager], they could destroy the man. You know what I mean? I don't care how many billions he has, these guys come and they - they're merciless."
His own motives, however, were pure: "I'm not a hold-up man. I'm not here to threaten some - God forbid, I, I'm on the other side of the fence."
He also sounded like a man badly in need of a glass of water as he told the hedge fund reps how badly the feds wanted to get the inmate to talk: The government was "very thirsty," he said on December 24. "They're very thirsty to get his cooperation," he said on January 4. "I'm gonna tell you some information about how thirsty they are to get this man," he added.
Allegedly, there was no such insider trading probe, and allegedly, Rabbi Balkany made the whole thing up on one of his many visits to Otisville federal prison, a place where white collar criminals are often sent.
The criminal complaint filed by federal investigator Robert Manchak seems to present a pretty good case for the fraud, extortion, and blackmail charges filed yesterday against Balkany. But he's been here before, and don't count him out.
http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/02/19/Balkany.pdf
According to the Federal complaint, Balkany told the hedge fund that board members of Torah Vodaas are in on the scheme and would be signing documents.
I wonder who is capable of that besides Belsky's good friend Fuchs and "Town Car" Lefkowitz.
Balkany also tried dragging his son in law into the plot. I think one son in law is a lawyer. He's lucky he wasn't a target of the sting too.
There was speculation on R' Yudel's blog if Balkany might have made Shmuely Rubashkin's criminal record disappear but according to Getzel Rubashkin posting at FM, the weapons charge was only an air rifle and was thrown out of court. Even Getzel intimated that he may have been pointing the gun in places he shouldn't have been.
Does anyone have a list of Torah Vodaath board members?
I wonder if Shlomo Dreck was sent on a mission to ensnare Balkany. I would bet that Balkany thinks he's so choshuv that he could pull this kind of stuff off all by himself and doesn't need any help.
People had trouble with Getzel's defense that an air gun is harmless and gornisht fun gornisht. An air gun can cause serious injury and can even kill at close range.
I'm against all kinds of blackmail and extortion.
I would like to nominate Malinowitz to join the herd known as the Moetzes Gidloaly Torah of Agudas Yisroel now that he has become an outspoken advocate of the molesters. It seems that he has all of the qualifications to join that exalted body.
One wonders about the irrational attitude that these people have in regards to these abominations and destruction of human life. Do they have guilt feelings because of incidents in their own lives and in the lives of members of their families which lead them to act in such an absurd way.
At least if these cases involved consenting adults, although halachically prohibited, can be explained an the basis of the influence of the promiscuous society that we live in.
but these people act in such a despicable manner, that doesn't even conform to the attitudes of our immoral society. Nevertheless, these people are the first to mussar others out for all kinds of ridiculous things. K'shot atzmicha vi'achar kach k'shot achairim.
http://www.lohud.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/201002171320/NEWS03/2170374
The Rockland Board of Health today fined the organizer of a Jewish ritual that involves live chickens $6,250 for violating the county's sanitary code.
This is the third consecutive year Moshe Lefkowitz, of Monsey, has been fined for not properly cleaning up chicken entrails, feces, carcasses, feet and blood in kapparot ceremonies in Monsey.
Lefkowitz has paid $1,400 of the $3,000 fine issued against him for the 2007 ceremony and none of the $6,500 levied against him and Congregation Birchos Yosef, owner of the property where the ceremony was held, in 2008.
The Jewish boys school was not included in this year's fine.
Neither Lefkowitz nor his representative attended the meeting.
Board members said Lefkowitz was clearly flouting county law, and David Kraushaar was outraged that two of Lefkowitz' family members, including his son, had accused the health department of "blatant anti-Semitism" in a letter following a formal hearing in early December. Lefkowitz did not attend the Dec. 3 hearing, after asking for it to be rescheduled.
R' Malinowitz is a member of the editorial board of Artscroll. He seems to have the qualifications to be the author of "Touched by a Rebbe" (or "Touched by a Rebbetzen.) This could be a guidebook for molestation and getting away with it in the orthodox community.
Being that this repeats itself generation after generation, it could be part of the MESORAH SERIES of books.
Ub=ndoubtedly, when Artscrol publishes its history books of the saga of molestations in the inthe orthodox community, they'll write over history in a fictitious manner in the same way they have written their other history books. They'll speak about how these Rabbis fought the evil molestation and they will contribute to the movement of "oseh maaseh Zimri, umivakesg s'char kiPinchas.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/obama-announces-aid-for-homeowners/?hp
President Obama will announce a modest (sic) housing initiative during an appearance in Las Vegas on Friday, according to senior administration officials who say the White House has decided to release $1.5 billion from bank bailout funds to help struggling homeowners in five states – Nevada, California, Arizona, Michigan, Florida — that are hardest hit by the housing crisis.
Mr. Obama will announce the so-called "innovation fund" at a town hall style meeting here, the officials said. The money will be redirected from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP, and made available to state housing agencies, who will be expected to design programs to help homeowners having difficulty meeting their mortgage payments, either because they are unemployed, are burdened by second mortgages or owe more than their homes are worth.
You lay with the swines in Otisville, you get dirty like the swines in Otisville.
The man cut a deal to avoid jail time in 2003 which embarrassed the Feds. The Feds are relentless, once they have you on the radar screen, IT'S TOO LATE. They will nail you sooner or later.
It was perfect timing on February 18, 2010. Two days after some frum vigilantes harassed and insinuated violence against a sitting Governor for executing a Jewish murderer, the Feds understood that Aleph Institute has an agenda. Aleph Institute and Agudah incited a virtual riot of marauding peasants yelling how Jews are above the law. Balkany is connected to both Aleph Institute AND Agudah, as well as one of the loudest voices on the blood libel sidelines, while at the same time pretends he is close with the government.
The Feds had enough of the c@^* Agudah, Aleph, and Balkany was throwing at them and knew they had a solid case this time with tapes and all.
NEVER ASSUME THAT YOU ARE SUCH A SPECIAL ASSET TO THE COMMUNITY THAT YOU WON'T GO DOWN. FEDS WATCH AND WAIT FOR THE OPPORTUNE TIME TO STRIKE.
Vehamaivin Yavin!!!
FEDS WATCH AND WAIT FOR THE OPPORTUNE TIME TO STRIKE.
http://www.businessinsider.com/everyone-thinks-sac-capital-is-the-hedge-fund-allegedly-blackmailed-by-rabi-milton-balkany-2010-2
http://blog.ctnews.com/teribuhl/2010/02/19/ct-hedge-fund-blackmailed-for-insider-trading-info/
I didn't want to say it until someone else did but blogger John Carney and the Connecticut Post confirm my suspicion that Balkany blackmailed Steve Cohen's SAC Capital which is probably being hit with criminal charges soon in any case
Balkany's boy in Otisville is probably a secular Jew who once worked for Steve Cohen. As far as I know there are no former SAC employees in jail who are frum.
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/01/another_sac_employee_accused_o.html
I don't think Jonathan Hollander has been jailed yet.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6064W420100107
And same thing with some of these troublemakers who got seed money from SAC.
http://www.slashfood.com/2010/02/16/what-happens-when-customer-complaints-are-scams/
On a recent weekend, a customer pulled what we refer to as the free lunch scam. After mostly devouring the gargantuan 20-ounce porterhouse steak ("there was the bone and literally four or five bites left on this plate," McCready says), the guest complained to the server that the meat was too tough and demanded a new one. McCready told the kitchen to fire up another porterhouse. "When I walked up to the table she and the other three customers were sharing two desserts," McCready recalls. "She admitted to me that she wasn't hungry anymore but would be taking this new porterhouse home with her to eat the next day."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/20/nyregion/20lee.html
Fran Lee, a preternaturally outspoken consumer advocate whose ardent campaign against dog waste helped bring about New York City’s pooper-scooper law in 1978, died on Feb. 13 at her home in Jerusalem. She was 99.
http://www.justice.gov/usao/nys/pressreleases/February10/balkanymiltonarrestpr.pdf
Why haven't Pinny Lipschutz and Matzav.com started shnorring yet?
The Feds are looking for 28 years in prison and at least $350,000 in fines.
http://www.fox23news.com/news/local/story/Rabbi-Charged/AXw9nYkRlkibN74YWopfrA.cspx
A local rabbi charged with unlawfully dealing with a child after police say an underage UAlbany student drank and was taken to the hospital after a party hosted at the rabbi's home.
Rabbi Mendel Rubin, the Director of UAlbany's Jewish Student Center faces a misdemeanor charge after police say he hosted a party at the center called Shabbos House and a student who attended was taken to the hospital. Police say this happened back on February 5th.
According to the police report at the scene the underage student was unconscious and blew above a .4 into a blood alcohol screening device, but the rabbi's lawyer says that number isn't accurate.
Guilderland Police Captain Curtis Cox says, "our emergency services got a call for someone sick almost unconscious on Fuller Road, so our department responded with our EMS department.
Police responded to 320 Fuller Road, Shabbos House, the Jewish Student Center at UAlbany.
Cox says, "EMS reported the person to be highly intoxicated and it appeared he had been sick. Thats when officers started their investigation."
According to the police report, Rabbi Mendel Rubin was hosting a party at the house where alcohol was provided. Police say the sick person, an underage student, had consumed alcohol at the party.
He had to be transported to St. Peter's Hospital and according to the report the student blew a .459.
Cox says, "at that BAC you are highly impaired its even life threatening."
Rabbi Rubin's lawyer Peter Gerstenzang says that BAC can't be accurate. By phone Friday night, Gerstenzang told FOX23 the student was attending the rabbi's birthday party which was only an hour long.
Alcohol was provided for the adults attending.
Gerstenzang says the student helped himself to the drinks adding the rabbi and his wife never served the minor.
Gerstenzang said by phone tonight that the Rubins are horrified by the charge. "This was a complete aberration that has shocked the Rubins and has resulted in an advisory committee being formed to supervise the issue. They have also instituted an absolute ban of alcohol at Shabbos House."
Gerstenzang says the Rubins didn't know the young man was drinking until he threw up and the ambulance was called.
He added the student was back at Shabbos House the next day.
Rabbi Rubin was issued an appearance ticket, he is due back in Guilderland Town Court at a later date.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1179512/Bob-Dylan-hid-marriage--daughter--15-years-Could-concealed-TWO-brides-FOUR-children.html
Bob Dylan a.k.a. Robert Zimmerman secretly had several Black wives and children that can only be proven through marriage records.
What was he ashamed of that he kept them secret?
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE61J0NJ20100220
Stamford, Connecticut-based SAC, which manages roughly $12 billion and is run by Steven A. Cohen, declined to comment on Friday.
The case shines fresh light on a hedge fund firm that ranks as one of Wall Street's biggest traders but works hard to stay out of sight. Its founder, Steven A. Cohen, does not give interviews and is rarely photographed.
Since government agents cracked an insider trading ring in October involving hedge fund Galleon Group's founder Raj Rajaratnam, the government has also been probing whether some current or former SAC employees might have been involved in improper trading.
This is not the first time that someone has tried to shake down Cohen and his hedge fund.
In 2006, Michael Lair, a Montana man, approached a lawyer defending SAC in a lawsuit filed against the hedge fund by Canadian drug company Biovail Corp. The man had offered to provide SAC's lawyer with allegedly incriminating information about Biovail's attorneys for a fee.
SAC's lawyer alerted the government and Lair was arrested and charged with trying to defraud SAC, Biovail and several other companies. In April 2007, Lair pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 27 months in prison. He was also ordered to forfeit some $300,000 in fees he had extracted from a dozen companies he had fleeced in the scheme.
Lair was released from federal prison in October 2008.
I don't think the Times would call NCYI for comment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/20/nyregion/20rabbi.html
“He sells access,” said an officer at a national Orthodox Jewish group who spoke on the condition of anonymity because, as he put it, he was “afraid of getting into a fight with Rabbi Balkany.”
“He plays right up to the edge and sometimes he falls over,” the officer said. “His base of power is that he’s feared, he’s respected and he’s very, very good at what he does. There are lots of people out there who take money and don’t deliver. He takes money and delivers.”
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/lawsuit-by-cohens-ex-wife-is-dropped/
Ms. Cohen, who separated from her husband in 1988, asserted that Mr. Cohen hid millions of dollars in marital assets when the two divorced. She said he lied under oath about his net worth, conducted mail and wire fraud, and concealed from her and the Supreme Court of New York millions of dollars he held in 1990, thus reducing her divorce settlement.
She also accused him of conceding to her in 1985, while they were married, that he had received inside information about the takeover of RCA by General Electric. SAC manages $13 billion.
Ms. Cohen’s lawsuit, which sought $300 million, was filed under a civil version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, that is often used against organized crime and almost never used in divorce cases. It allows plaintiffs to seek triple damages.
Lehman Brothers, which is being liquidated in bankruptcy, paid its lawyers and other advisers $641.9 million in the 16 months since it collapsed in September 2008, according to a regulatory filing late Friday, Bloomberg News reports.
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/157869/I-did-not-sleep-with-that-big-fat-wide-boy-liar-says-angry-Bardot
FORMER sex kitten Brigitte Bardot has threatened to sue a friend of French president Nicolas Sarkozy – for claiming they shared a passionate fling.
Politician Patrick Balkany, 61, boasted that he was her toy-boy lover when she was at the peak of her career in the 1960s.
Mr Balkany, a Paris mayor and senior member of France’s ruling UMP party, said he seduced her on a seaside weekend.
But Bardot, 75, said: “I know who I have slept with, and certainly not with that big ninny of a liar. I am beginning to get fed up hearing Mr Balkany boasting that he had an affair with me and have already formally denied it.”
She added: “He is a big, fat wide-boy liar. Next time I will go to court for damages and interest.”
Mr Balkany uses his autobiography, entitled A Different Truth – Mine, to detail the alleged 1967 liaison in Deauville, Normandy. Bardot would have been 32 at the time and married to German tycoon Gunter Sachs.
She is alleged to have said to the 18-year-old Balkany: “Listen, I can’t sleep with someone if I am not in love.”
M. Balkany said: “Ten minutes later, she said in a whisper ‘But you know, I can fall in love three times a day’.”
She gave up her film career in the 1970s to become an animal rights activist.
Mr Balkany’s claims represent a racy new episode in France’s sexually-charged political scene. Immigration minister Eric Besson has just confessed to having a secret lover half his age,
And President Sarkozy himself was once notorious for bed hopping. When he divorced shortly after taking office in 2007 he was linked to a number of beauties before marrying super-model Carla Bruni.
Figures there would be a Balkany in the most corrupt city in America
http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/theskyline/2010/02/chicago-starts-destroying-the-finest-postwar-building-at-michael-reese-.html
Demolition of the finest postwar building at the former Michael Reese Hospital has begun, Grahm Balkany, director of the Gropius in Chicago Coalition informs me.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUKN0254612020091204
SPECIAL REPORT - The FBI agent inside the Galleon case
Cohen is so intensely private he hates being photographed and has even bought the rights to some pictures taken by freelancers. He has generally dealt with rumors and speculation about questionable trading strategies at SAC by simply ignoring them. That appears to be the strategy he is pursuing this time around as well. A lawyer for the hedge fund declined to comment.
Former SAC employees, however, have already started to talk. Lee's cooperation was secured in part because of incriminating evidence that federal authorities had captured from a government wiretap on his cell phone while working at San Jose, California-based Spherix Capital. (Kang oversaw the tap on Lee's phone.)
In pleading guilty on Oct. 13, Lee signed a cooperation agreement that requires him not only to testify about his misdeeds at Spherix, but also provide prosecutors with any evidence of alleged insider trading over an eight-year period starting in 1999. He worked at SAC for five of them, and the rest of the time was at Stratix Capital Management.
The Wall Street Journal previously has reported that after Spherix closed its doors in February, federal authorities encouraged Lee -- who had begun cooperating with the investigation -- to try to return to SAC. But Cohen refused, the Journal reported, because he was suspicious of the reasons behind Spherix's closing.
Lee is also expected to testify about any improper trading he may have done at Stratix, a hedge fund founded by two more SAC alumni, Richard Grodin and Ian Goodman. That fund, which counted SAC among its investors, closed in 2007. Grodin launched another fund, Quadrum Capital, and it too abruptly shut down this year.
(IsraelNN.com)
Rami Shekalim, whom a Rehovot court said has posed for over thirty years has falsely posed as a rabbi and expert on Kabbalah, was sentenced to five years in prison for fraud and tax evasion. In a statement, the court said that "the defendant utilized his position as a supposed expert in Kabbalah to appear on radio and television programs, presenting himself as a rabbi – even though he never received semicha (authorization), and as a PhD, even though the foreign university which granted his degree is not accredited." Instead of taking a fee for his services, he asked clients to donate money to a non-profit organization that he headed, which turned out not to have been registered either, the court said, and taxes were never paid on that money either by the donors or by Shekalim.
The court said that the 39 counts he was charged with could have landed him in jail for 138 years.
Rav Aron Lichtenstein is wrong about Elon's sefarim. That's a cover up worthy of Artscroll.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1151218.html
Police sources told Haaretz they believe their inquiry into indecent acts allegedly committed by Rabbi Mordechai Elon will grow into an official investigation within the next week or so.
Elon meanwhile had received the implied support of Rabbi Nir Ben-Artzi, who was himself at the center of a sex-related scandal not too long ago. Ben-Artzi's pamphlet "Tair Neri" last week featured a story about a mistaken rumor spread because of followers who had gotten out of hand. The story concludes: "And the moral is - even when you're zealous for good faith, you must check very well if it is truth or the mere appearance of truth, because the distance between truth and libel is very short."
Ben-Artzi, whose followers believe he possesses supernatural powers, returned to his community in Tlamim last year, after having gone missing for a long time. According to charges filed in the case, he was forcibly held by some of his most trusted disciples, after they accused him of various sexual offenses and forced him to sign a confession.
Dozens of brochures, with circulations in the hundreds of thousands, distributed yesterday in synagogues across the country spoke openly about the Elon affair, while others ignored it altogether. One weekly brochure, "Small World," featured Rabbi Jonah Goodman praising the rabbis of Takana for showing "leadership and courage" by exposing the allegations against a senior rabbi. "No one is free from failure and life is an ongoing test," he concluded.
Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, a member of the forum committee that investigated the complaints against Elon, ruled last week that Elon's contributions to religious Zionism should not be effected by the current scandal. In a private conversation with students in his yeshiva, which was later published on the Kippa Web site, Lichtenstein said that "a certain degree of trust has been eroded, but heavens save us from losing trust in God... Do we take his books out from the libraries? I say no. He got a bit carried away, the blood had gone up to his head ... we shouldn't totally erase everything a person has done in his life. As of now, we should remember that 'an educator should be holy.'"
Tropper may have very few full time students in Kol Yaakov but there are many part time students.
Maybe Frucht will want to hijack the building for a Chaim Berlin satellite. The Mir in Israel tried to open a satellite in nearby Sloatsburg once but it didn't work out after Lakewood protested.
I believe that Steve Cohen's ex-wife who is massering on him is a shiksa.
http://www.vosizneias.com/49584
All people were created in the image of Hashem and it is a horrific thing to snuff out the life of any individual. The Meshech Chochmah writes that the punishment for murder – Jew or gentile, is death. For a gentile victim the punishment is Misa Bidei Shamayim. A gentile court should definitely enforce its laws – and it is a good and proper thing to enforce the death penalty for murders.
But even for those who disagree with this first point – there is another issue –the second point. A governor under significant political duress will never, ever commute a sentence. Once again to those who may have missed that previous sentence – a governor whose political future is in serious question will never alienate the civil service workers in his state – ever. Anyone with an ounce of political sense will know this to be true. One would have better luck selling Israeli Bonds at a Palestinian National Convention.
With this in mind, how is it that the brightest and the best minds in our orthodox Jewish organizations attempted such a campaign when they new there was zero chance of it coming to fruition? The political damage to Orthodox Judaism was enormous. The harassment to the victim’s family was so significant that they actually asked the Jews to stop calling them and harassing them. Indeed, the family of this woman were called “Nazis” in asking for the death penalty being invoked here. Is this also not an enormous Chillul Hashem? How dare any of us call them Nazis.
One phone caller to Governor Crist actually said, “By us.. the most important thing is a Jewish life.” What?? Is this person insane? Is this the message that we are giving- yes seek justice in every way, but when it comes to one of us – don’t mete out the punishment that the wheels of justice finally came up with – because this guy happens to be one of us.
And don’t the people who run these organizations and campaigns realize that there will also be people in our camp who are not the brightest candles in the box who will make Chilul Hashems constantly and consistently when we ask them to take to the phones, emails, and letter writing? Numerous people have complaints against those who have signed off on hafganot in Yerushalayim because they do not rein in the mishugayim – why then did our organizations not do the same? Especially, when there was no gain here.
A third point involves a re-examination of our role among the nations. One of the reasons for our galus is to bring the Umos haOlam to a realization of the yashrus of Darchei Hashem. When we place our interests above the public good in something so public – does that really further enhance yoisher and appreciation of the Darchei Hashem?
Have we not taken the idea of “But is it good for the Jews?” to such an extreme level of absurdity that we apply it to the detriment of society around us? The question is not wrong, but it should be tempered with, “Is it good for the Jews and is it good for society?” If a Jewish young man is dealing drugs – that is bad for society – he should be punished – because what he has done is wrong, immoral and destroys the basic fabric of society around us. Every case is different and every situation should be judged on its own merit, but here we have a case where we seemed to have lost our judgment in what was an appropriate hishtadlus or not.
True, what will be said is that we are ignoring the mitigating circumstances. The perpetrator was extremely sorry for what he had done, he was young, his IQ was low, he was either on alcohol or drugs, etc. They will point to the inherent unfairness of a situation where other people whose crimes are much worse receive much lighter sentences. This may all be true, but the fact is that an innocent young woman who dedicated her life to the betterment of the world – was brutally murdered with a bullet to her head. Crime must be punished. Vicious crimes must be punished even more. We must always do what is right – even when it hurts.
https://5tjt.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=261:the-rabbi-the-gvir-and-the-prisoner--mesirah-versus-mesirah&catid=1:local&Itemid=10
5 Towns Jewish Times did a great job not siding with the lunatics supporting Martin Grossman but do everything to cover up for the Rubashkins including this silly piece where they refuse to name Balkany.
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