“Yes We Can!” Welcome Back “the Messiah” (The One From Brooklyn)
Monday April 6, 2009
For those collecting examples of amusing or interesting uses of the Obama-esque rhetoric, here’s one we saw in Manhattan this Sunday. This is a picture of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the Lubavitch leader who, according to some of his followers, is the Messiah. This signs suggests improving the world to welcome him back.
Obviously, if he is coming back it is on wheels….perhaps on Obamamotor
HYNES HIT FOR ‘LIP SERVICE’
By ALEX GINSBERG
TODAY’S HOT TOPICS
New York Post
April 2, 2009
Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes announced a new initiative yesterday to combat sexual abuse in the Orthodox Jewish community — even as a new book hit the market trashing his handling of those cases.
“Sexual abuse is not only a horrific nightmare for the victims, but an agonizing experience for their parents,” he said.
The DA cited an increased flow of sexual-abuse cases out of the Orthodox community in recent years. The office currently has 19 pending cases.
But Amy Neustein, an academic and editor of the forthcoming “Tempest in the Temple: Jewish Communities and Child Sex Scandals,” called the initiative “lip service.”
“There’s two decades of seriously mishandled cases,” she said. “Why is case after case subverted rather than prosecuted?”
The DA’s office declined comment on the book, saying officials had not seen it.
If you live in Brooklyn and hate this situation please don’t hesitate to call the DA’s office and voice your opinion or don’t vote for anyone that will take money and votes from the Jewish lobbies and thus they don’t prosecute. 718-250-3820.
Racial tensions heat up in a Brooklyn neighborhood
NEW YORK (AP) — Seventeen years after race riots left the streets of one New York City neighborhood bloodied, tensions are rising again there between Orthodox Jews and blacks. First, a black man was badly beaten. Weeks later, a Jewish teenager said he was attacked by two young blacks while riding his bicycle, and angry Jewish residents took to the streets with signs saying “Jewish blood is not cheap!” and “Every Jew a .22.” And along the way, the district attorney accused an Orthodox Jewish street patrol of vigilantism and compared the group to street gangs like the Bloods and Crips. The strife has revived painful memories of the 1991 riots in the Brooklyn neighborhood called Crown Heights, which is home to about 15,000 Orthodox Jews and more than 130,000 blacks. As summer approaches, leaders from both sides are braced for trouble. “One small incident could escalate into something beyond our grasp,” warned Richard Green, head of the Crown Heights Youth Collective, a group he said inspires the races “to interact instead of react.”The group was started after the 1991 riots that exploded after a black child was accidentally struck by a station wagon in the motorcade of a Jewish spiritual leader. The 7-year-old boy, who was pinned under the vehicle, later died of his injuries. In the ensuing unrest, which lasted three days, a rabbinical student was mortally stabbed by a black mob.To quell fears of new unrest, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly visited Crown Heights earlier this month and stepped up police patrols. Officers also are perched atop a tower, keeping 24-hour watch over the world headquarters of the ultra-Orthodox Lubavitch movement.”It’s a very delicate situation in Crown Heights, a bubble of tension,” said Geoffrey Davis, a longtime black resident. District Attorney Charles Hynes has convened a grand jury to probe the April 14 assault on Andrew Charles, a 20-year-old son of a police detective. He told police that a man on a bicycle sprayed him with mace while another man stepped out of an SUV, struck him with a wooden object and drove off. SOURCE:AP
Keepingitreal – http://keepingitreal.typepad.com/keepingitreal/
Law & Order
A Jewish patrol group says it protects Crown Heights. Others call its members vigilantes.
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A Shmira volunteer with the group’s patrol car.
(Photo: Toby Shaw)
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On the evening of April 14, a 20-year-old black man named Andrew Charles was attacked with pepper spray and then beaten by a pair of Hasidic assailants in his Crown Heights neighborhood. The attackers escaped in a GMC Envoy, and although Charles didn’t catch the plate number, a witness did. Police traced its registration to another neighborhood resident, Menachem Ezagui, who police say is a member of a local volunteer security-patrol group called the Crown Heights Shmira. He was picked up by police, but when the victim couldn’t identify him in a lineup, he was released. The investigation remains open, and the Shmira isn’t helping.
The Shmira—the name means “to watch” or “to protect” in Hebrew—has a contentious history in the neighborhood. Founded in 1968, its original membership was conspicuously multiethnic. Today the Shmira’s 100 or so members are all Jewish. They monitor the neighborhood from a police-style patrol car. “We’ve had more than a dozen Jewish men in their twenties and thirties beaten and attacked viciously in the last year,” claims Yossi Stern, the group’s longtime leader, who says the police are more concerned about keeping crime stats down than responding. But some see the Shmira as a problem, not a solution. “They’re not supervised or properly trained,” says City Councilwoman Letitia James, who represents the area. Brooklyn D.A. Charles Hynes has called the organization “renegade.” The anonymous blog Who Is Shmira?, which was launched after the attack, has mocked the organization’s leaders and says the group victimizes Crown Heights. “Community patrols usually cooperate with their local precinct,” says NYPD assistant chief Michael Collins. “But unfortunately this group has chosen not to.”
Stern says his members are simply protecting their community. “We’re talking cracked skulls, broken arms, missing teeth,” he says. “Not one time was there a strong, faithful effort [to find the perpetrators] like the police are doing now with this black kid.” Stern gives an example from earlier this year. “A Jewish boy walking in the neighborhood got his head ripped wide open,” he says. “The black guy was pointed out, and I walked up to him and said, ‘My name is Yossi Stern, and I’m with the Crown Heights Shmira.’ He was bigger than me, and intimidating. He said, ‘Get out of my face.’ I said, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ The cops came and put him in handcuffs.” The Police Department, however, lost the report, Stern claims—just one of dozens of complaints that he charges have been misplaced as part of a citywide effort to bury crime stats. (The NYPD wouldn’t address this charge.)
“We don’t carry guns,” Stern says. “No bats, no sticks, no pepper spray. We’re husbands, we’re brothers. We’re a passive patrol, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” Authorities and locals still suspect Shmira members were involved with the Charles beating, and Hynes convened a grand jury late last month. “The police and Hynes don’t have all the facts,” says Stern. “If they have all the facts, why aren’t they bringing them forward?”
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Brooklyn, Eliyahu Ezagui, Lubavitch, NY Daily News
| Category: News & Opinion (Specific) Topic: Warfare and Conflict: Israel-Palestine | |
| Synopsis: | |
| Source: New York Daily News | |
| Published: April 28, 2008 Author: WILLIAM SHERMAN | |
| For Education and Discussion Only. Not for Commercial Use. |
New York Daily News
Builder flees & 40 Hasidic families face eviction in Brooklyn swindle
BY WILLIAM SHERMAN
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Sunday, April 27th 2008, 4:00 AM
‘Where can we go?’ asks Jakov Osdoba. He and wife, Miriam – along with their
seven kids – are facing eviction from 770 Lefferts Ave. (below)
Theodorakis/News
‘Where can we go?’ asks Jakov Osdoba. He and wife, Miriam – along with their
seven kids – are facing eviction from 770 Lefferts Ave. (below)
Theodorakis/News
More than 40 Brooklyn families face eviction and foreclosure on condos they
bought from a developer who pulled off a massive swindle and then fled the
country.
The families, all Hasidim from Crown Heights, paid developer Eliyahu Ezagui
– one of their own – for the apartments before they were built at two sites:
770 Lefferts Ave. and 613 East New York Ave.
“We trusted him, we thought we knew him, he told us he had the blessing of
the grand rabbi. We had contracts, so we gave him the money,” said Jeff
Minsky, who lives at 613 with his wife and six children.
Ezagui, 47, did not give the buyers deeds when construction was completed in
what is the single biggest local case of subprime mortgage fraud on record.
Instead, Ezagui deeded 64 apartments to himself, his father, his mother, his
wife and two business associates.
The Ezagui group then used the deeds to take out more than $15 million in
owner-occupied mortgages from 15 lenders, including Ameriquest Mortgage Co.,
Olympia Funding and Chase.
Mortgage payments have not been made and the real apartment owners have
received foreclosure notices.
“I had every intention of transferring the deeds to the investors, but the
project didn’t work out,” said Ezagui, now living in Jerusalem with his
wife, Reina, and four children.
In a telephone interview, Ezagui said he obtained the mortgages, including
13 in his mother’s name, to pay off more than $3.3million in loans he took
out to finance construction of the two buildings.
When he couldn’t sell all theapartments immediately, he said, he took out
more loans and mortgages to continue financing the project.
“I hurt my parents, my family and I destroyed everything,” said Ezagui. “I
was stuck and it hurts and I feel sorry for those people.”
Ezagui said he was a trusted man in the close-knit Crown Heights community.
Apartment buyers interviewed agreed and said because of that trust, they had
no lawyers when they signed their purchase agreements.
“We were stupid. We should have had lawyers. We know that now, but we
believed him,” Minsky said.
Ezagui portrayed himself as a devout man and played on the religious
sensitivities of the apartment purchasers, all members of the Lubavitcher
Hasidim.
For example, the late Lubavitcher leader, Grand Rebbe Menachem Schneerson,
is thought by many followers to be the Messiah. Ezagui named his building’s
corporation Chaisom Inc. Chaisom, which means “live here,” is also Mosiach –
Hebrew for Messiah – spelled backward.
And the addresses he chose, 770 and 613, have religious significance: 770
Eastern Parkway is Lubavitcher world headquarters; 613 is the number of laws
God gave Moses.
Over the years, the apartment buyers learned Ezagui had a life outside Crown
Heights. He owned a house in Miami, where his wife and children lived, and
was chief executive of 12 corporations, records show.
“He was living the Hollywood life down there when he wasn’t here – big car,
fancy clothes, the works,” Minsky said.
Apartment owners began moving into the buildings in 2000. The foreclosure
notices started to show up in 2007.
Jakov Osdoba, a teacher and rabbi who lives at 770 Lefferts with his wife
and seven children, said he paid Ezagui $100,000 about 10 years ago “because
he said he would help me so I could have a home and raise a family.”
“Then we moved in and when I asked Ezagui for the deed, he was evasive. He
said, ‘Give me time, I have to work things out,'” Osdoba said.
On Jan. 18, Osdoba received a foreclosure letter stating that Ezagui’s
mother, Freha, had defaulted on a $277,824 mortgage taken on his apartment.
“I was shocked. I never met Freha Ezagui,” Osdoba said. “I haven’t told my
children what’s going on. I don’t have the money to pay this mortgage. Where
can we go?”
Schneur Hertzel, married with five children, paid $100,000 for his
three-bedroom condo at 770 Lefferts. Somehow Freha Ezagui obtained a
$370,000 mortgage on the premises.
“No appraiser ever came here, nobody rang the bell,” said Hertzel, a
teacher.
As word of the pending foreclosures heated up in the community last summer,
Ezagui abruptly left for Israel.
“I’m bankrupt,” said Ezagui. “I would come back [to the U.S] if I could
straighten this out.”
David Frankel, Ezagui’s lawyer and a vice president of Chaisom, denied all
liability for himself. He said he was at the mortgage closings, but claimed
he did not draw up the original purchase contracts.
Ezagui said Frankel did draw up the contracts, knew of the multiple
mortgages and handled the closings.
Last year, more than 20 apartment owners hired lawyer Robert Tolchin to
fight foreclosure and press claims against the lenders and the Ezaguis.
“Ezagui was running a Ponzi scheme,” Tolchin said. “The real apartment
owners are left holding the bag.”
As was true nationally, the swirl of easy mortgage cash found in the Ezagui
case occurred with little government oversight.
Fourteen months ago, lawyer Marshall Schiff detailed the scheme in a
three-page letter to Kenneth DeMario, head of the state attorney general’s
Real Estate Financing Bureau. Schiff asked the state to intervene.
There was no investigation. According to Tolchin, DeMario said his bureau
had no investigators to do the work.
Last week, a spokesman for the state attorney general told the Daily News
that prosecutors are looking into the matter.
“Adding it all up, the banks, brokers, the lack of regulation, and trusting
buyers – it was the perfect storm for a swindle,” Tolchin said.
The problems with the Lubavitch 
