News Roundup – Fri. 1/22

“The three muckracketeers.” So Isaac Schonfeld, the organizer—or disorganizer, as he calls himself—of the weekly Chulent gathering in Midtown Manhattan, referred to the panel of journalists who came to talk about local media coverage of Orthodox matters. The panel consisted of Simone Weichselbaum, 28, staffer with the NY Daily News; Reuven Fenton, former Hamodia editor and general assignment reporter for the Post; and Reuven Blau, a Telshe and Chaim Berlin graduate who has been working at the NY Post on the Sunday staff for the past year.

The panel fielded questions on all the hot button issues they’ve been reporting on: Leib Tropper, the Chasidic cop’s scuffle with a yuppy with a puppy, and the tragic events surrounding Motty Borger. Unpious.com’s representative was there to cajole the panel into writing about this very site, touting it as a new and unique phenomenon, but everyone was too busy eating chulent to listen or care. Except for the Daily News’s Simone Weichselbaum, who had this to say: “I hate blogs.”

But she said it with a smile. And she wore a really cute yellow coat.

Can’t a girl from Satmar get a gun around here anymore? Apparently she can, but can’t hold onto it. Baile Glauber, who was raised in Monsey’s Satmar community, resigned from her position as the first Orthodox policewoman in the Ramapo police force. After threatening to sue the force for religious discrimination, Glauber settled for a hefty $190,000 payout and $285,000 in legal fees. And here I thought this former Hasidic woman in a policewoman’s cap was the hottest thing since before Eve ate her apple (after which, of course, God came up with the idea of “leaving more to the imagination.”)

We all know that KJ businessmen are savvy investors. But who knew that the place to do it was in Governor Patterson’s campaign coffers? After pumping a total of $140,200 into the Governor’s pockets, the provision they wanted appeared buried in the Governor’s new budget plan for the coming fiscal year: students at UTA Mesivta of Kiryas Joel will now be able to claim annual tuition grants of up to $5,000. The provision spells it out as aid for institutions that “train members of the clergy.” And now the taxpayers shoulder the burden of engaing in havayos d’Abaya v’Rava.

Living in a summer bungalow in the Catskills for the months of July and August does not a resident make. So determined the Sullivan County Board of Elections, which removed 151 people from the voter rolls in the town of Bethel. The removed voters had registered to vote after a dispute with town officials over the construction of a shul. What is it with Sullivan county residents that they just can’t stand the garbage-strewn bungalow colonies and inadequate sewage handling?

Yiddish poetry nowadays means cutesy rhymes sent to a kallah with flowers, wishing her fiel simchas atzinder, in nachas fin die kinder, in brayngen mushiach geshvinder. But Yiddish once had real poets, and the last of the great ones just died. Avrom Sutzkever, founder and editor of the leading Yiddish literary journal Di Goldene Keyt died this week at the age of 96. Excerpted by the Forward (in English trans.) from “There is no God, no World Creator”:

Ever since my pious mother ate earth on Yom Kippur
Ate on Yom Kippur black earth mixed up with fire,
I, alive, must eat black earth on Yom Kippur,
I am myself a yortsayt candle kindled from her fire

Well, at least we still have badchunim. (Pinky Weber, anyone?)

I’m not very schooled in legalese, and frankly, don’t have much interest in learning. But in between all the “inter alias,” “et als,” and “status quos” this court ruling seems to have something of relevance to the Aron vs. Zalmen Leib feud, for those who have any interest in the matter. Which this writer doesn’t.