For Olga Weiss, the order to stay at home is about much more than simply locking her door to the coronavirus. It has awakened fears from decades ago when she and her parents hid inside for two years from Nazis hunting down Jews in Belgium. “It is almost an echo of when we were young, when we were children, the same feeling of not knowing what will happen next,” said Weiss, 83. “We aren’t thinking about the virus; we are thinking of what happened to us” back then. Close to 400,000 survivors of the Holocaust are believed to be alive worldwide, and for many elderly Jews the coronavirus pandemic has dredged up feelings of fear, uncertainty and helplesness not felt since they were children during that dark period.

The day before Pesach began, R’ Shlomo Rechnitz of Los Angeles enabled the simchas Yom Tov of thousands of avreichim of the Mir Yeshivah in Israel, who before the most expensive Yom Tov of the year, haven’t been paid their monthly Kollel stipends for Shevat and Adar. Thanks to a generous $3 million donation by R’ Rechnitz, one of our generations’s biggest supporters of the Torah world, the avreichim received their stipends and a special Yom Tov bonus right before Pesach began. This is the second time this year that R’ Rechnitz contributed to the Mir right before Yom Tov when the yeshiva found itself unable to finance the monthly stipends of the avreichim.

We regret to inform you of the passing of Rav Binyomin Tzvi Wolmark Z”L. Rav Binyomin Tzvi was born in pre-war Lithuania where is father, Rav Yitzchok, served as Rav of the city of Yod. Rav Binyomin was a young boy when the situation in Europe began to deteriorate. As things intensified, Rav Yitzchok was advised by the Gedolim to rejoin the Mirrer Yeshiva, which had fled to Vilna. When the Yeshiva received transit visas to Japan, the Wolmarks were among those who made the perilous journey to the Far East and ultimately Shanghai, where they spent five and half years. Young Binyomin’s bar mitzah took place on one of the family’s first few shabbosos in China. Although just a teen, Binyomin spent his days with the Mirrer talmidim in the bais medrash.

The coronavirus pandemic that has crippled big-box retailers and mom and pop shops worldwide may be making a dent in illicit business, too. In Chicago, one of America’s most violent cities, drug arrests have plummeted 42% in the weeks since the city shut down, compared with the same period last year. Part of that decrease, some criminal lawyers say, is that drug dealers have no choice but to wait out the economic slump. “The feedback I’m getting is that they aren’t able to move, to sell anything anywhere,” said Joseph Lopez, a criminal lawyer in Chicago who represents reputed drug dealers.

They let trains that look too crowded pass by. If they decide to board, they search for emptier cars to ride in. Then they size up fellow passengers before picking the safest spot they can find to sit or stand for commutes sometimes lasting an hour or more. This quiet calculus is being performed daily by people who must keep working during the coronavirus pandemic and say the social distancing required is nearly impossible to practice in the enclosed spaces of New York City’s public transit system. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that people should stay 6 feet (2 meters) apart. But even though ridership has plummeted in the city, making jam-packed trains and buses the exception rather than the rule, passengers aren’t always guaranteed even 6 inches (15 centimeters).

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson expressed his gratitude to the staff of the National Health Service for saving his life when his treatment for the coronavirus could have “gone either way” as the U.K. on Sunday became the fourth European country to surpass 10,000 virus-related deaths. Dressed in a suit, and looking and sounding relatively assured, Johnson said in a video posted on Twitter after his discharge from St. Thomas’ Hospital in London that it was “hard to find the words” to express his debt of gratitude to the NHS for saving his life “no question.” He listed a number of the frontline staff members who cared for him during his week-long stay at St.

Amid some signs of hope that the coronavirus infection rate is plateauing, New York is still wrapping up its worst week in deaths so far since the outbreak began. Officials announced Sunday that the daily death toll for the state topped 700 in the state for the sixth straight day. Meantime, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo remained at odds over the mayor’s plan to close city schools for the rest of the academic year, with Cuomo calling it too early to make that call. THE NUMBERS At the end of the day Saturday, there were 18,707 people hospitalized with the virus in the state. That was up only 73 since the previous day. The bad news has been that large numbers of people are still dying every day, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Sunday.

HELSINKI, Finland — He called himself “Commander” online. He was a leader of an international neo-Nazi group linked to plots to attack a Las Vegas synagogue and detonate a car bomb at a major U.S. news network. He was 13 years old. The boy who led Feuerkrieg Division lived in Estonia and apparently cut ties with the group after authorities in that tiny Baltic state confronted him earlier this year, according to police and an Estonian newspaper report. Harrys Puusepp, spokesman for the Estonian Internal Security Service, told The Associated Press on Thursday that the police agency “intervened in early January because of a suspicion of danger” and “suspended this person’s activities in” Feuerkrieg Division.

Some nurses at a New York hospital who had just been lauded for their work during the coronavirus pandemic ended their stress-filled overnight shifts to find their tires had been slashed while they worked. New York state police reported that the tires of 22 vehicles were found slashed Friday morning outside New York-Presbyterian Hudson Valley Hospital in Cortlandt. Daniel R. Hall, 29, was arrested on charges including criminal mischief and possession of a controlled substance. Police said he had a small amount of PCP when he was arrested. Hall is due in court May 18. It’s not clear whether he has an attorney who can speak for him. Hospital officials said they would pay for the damage.

President Donald Trump’s Virginia vineyard could be eligible for a federal bailout under the $2.2 trillion coronavirus stimulus he signed into law last month, despite provisions in the bill that Democrats said were intended to prevent him and his family from personally benefiting. Deep in the fine print of the law passed by Congress to try to arrest an economic free fall is language that would the make the vineyard eligible for aid extended to growers and producers of “specialty crops,” among them grapes used to make wine. There is no indication that any of Trump’s companies, which are currently being operated by his sons, will apply for the aid, and a company representative said Friday there were no plans to do so.