By Philip Read for the Star-Ledger
Dan Caplan shoots during the game along side Coach Bob Wasilak who has been drilling his team of teenagers with special needs on the art of dribbling and shooting all to take to the basketball court against the mighty Jaguars of the Kushner Academy part of Chabad Friendship Circle's “Teen Scene Basketball League” in their first official game on March 16, 2009.
LIVINGSTON, NJ — Friendship Circle has had its first official game. The team, whose 14 teenage and young adult players have special needs, had practiced for seven weeks in basketball clinics that are part of the group's Teen Scene program. Its opponent was the Jaguars, a group of middle school kids from Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy.
By Ann Farmer for the New York Times
Bill Murray, left, a City Harvest driver, and Rabbi Mayer Mayerfeld, who manages City Harvest’s kosher food program.
BROOKLYN, NY — A truck from City Harvest pulled up on a recent weekday to a food pantry in a heavily Orthodox Jewish section of Midwood, Brooklyn. The driver stepped out and unloaded cabbages, bananas and Tropicana juice containers bearing labels with the letter “K” in a circle, indicating that they were kosher.
By Larry Gordon for the Five Towns Jewish Times
Levi Wolowik OBM
They are unusually inspiring people. I’m sitting with Rabbi Zalman and Mrs. Chanie Wolowik just 22 days after their nine-year-old son, Levi Yitzchok, a’h, suddenly and inexplicably passed away. This coming Monday night, the Five Towns and Far Rockaway communities, and indeed Jewish communities far and wide around the world, will be marking the sheloshim, the end of the 30-day period since Levi’s passing.
“The house feels empty without Levi,” says Chanie. “He was my sidekick and went almost everywhere and did everything with Zalman,” she said. Their older son, Mendel, is away attending Yeshiva in Detroit and the next boy is seven years old, she explains, so just when they had started to have another big boy around the house they are now once again, she feels, dealing almost exclusively with little kids.
As Chabad sh’lichim in the Five Towns, the Wolowiks are natural born leaders. Still, however, they are first and foremost parents, who are raising a beautiful family and who raised a remarkable young man who left us for reasons that are far beyond our comprehension but certainly way too soon.