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For more than four decades Rebbetzin Doris Feinstein had the honor to hear fascinating stories of self-discovery, most of which will never be known to the public. As a mentor to Jewish converts, she helps them navigate relationships with their family members, finding a Jewish community where they can feel at home, while maintaining the faith that brought them into the covenant of Avraham Avinu.

On Monday evening, August 12, following the Tish’ah B’Av fast, more than a thousand men are expected to sit in traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway, heading towards Kennedy Airport. They will pass by sign after sign listing one airline after another. Theirs has been defunct since 2001, but the internationally renowned TWA Terminal reopened last year as an event venue with a hotel, rooftop pool, and an airplane from 1958 serving as a cocktail lounge. This is where Queens Hatzolah will be holding this year’s Premier Men’s Event, headlined by superstar singer Avraham Fried and the Zemiros Choir.

The closely watched race for Queens District Attorney still does not have a winner, with Board of Elections staffers conducting a manual recount of all the votes this week to determine the results. On the evening of Tuesday, June 25, leftist Tiffany Cabán claimed victory in the Primary Election over mainstream candidate Melinda Katz, with over 1,000 votes in the unofficial results that were announced before midnight on that day.

 Despite Urgency, Our Community’s Voter Turnout Was Abysmal

  The first competitive primary election for Queens District Attorney in the first open-seat race in a generation may have made history on Tuesday – but we may not know the final results for a few days. Tiffany Cabán, a Latina woman who does not have any experience as a prosecutor, ran on the platform of closing the Rikers Island prison, decriminalizing prostitution, and refusing to prosecute charges such as fare evasion, recreational drug use, and loitering. As of this writing Tuesday night, she leads Queens Borough President Melinda Katz by about 1,000 votes, and although Cabán has declared victory, there are still thousands of mailed-in ballots to be counted, so no official winner has been named.

The Chazaq outreach organization is famous for its variety of programs, often headlined by its energetic director Yaniv Meirov. At last Sunday’s event, featuring two highly experienced business leaders, he also delivered introductory remarks but first introduced this writer to Moshe Rafailov, who came up with the event and was then entrusted to organize and promote it in the Queens community. “I had the privilege of meeting the speakers at an Olami Shabbaton. They are funders of kiruv all over the world,” said Rafailov, a third-year student at Long Island University majoring in the pharmacy program. The event, titled Building Connections in the Workplace, was hosted by the Yeshiva of Central Queens, with a dozen co-sponsoring organizations, including the Queens Jewish Link.

The outspoken support for Israel by evangelical churches is well-known in the Jewish community, but among the older “mainline” denominations, the struggle on the Israeli-Arab conflict has also been in the news with contentious debates on whether the Lutherans, Methodists, and Episcopalians should stand with the Palestinians as part of their commitment towards “social teachings.”