A water main break flooded streets on Manhattan’s Upper West Side near Lincoln Center and hampered subway service during the Monday morning rush hour. The Fire Department of New York responded to the flooding around 5 a.m. near Broadway and West 62nd Street. The water spread for blocks and was several inches deep in places. “It’s crazy, you need a boat or something to get through. I didn’t end wear boots today and now we got all this,” commuter Michael Romero, 27, of the Bronx told the New York Post. Abigail Marie, 33, of Manhattan, said city workers and firefighters responded quickly after the streets started “flooding a lot and from all directions.” “You have to be careful, there’s big puddles around and they’re deeper than they seem,” she told the Post.

The Labor-Gesher and Meretz parties announced on Monday that their two parties are merging and will run jointly for the upcoming March 2 elections. Labor chairman Amir Peretz will head the party, followed by Gesher chairman Orly Levy-Abekasis as number two and Meretz chairman Nitzan Horowitz as number three, followed by Tamar Zandberg of Meretz and Itzik Shmuli and Merav Michaeli of Labor. Former IDF deputy chief of staff Yair Golan, who merged with Meretz as part of Ehud Barak’s Democratic Israel party before the previous elections will be placed seventh on the list.

In the last decade alone, the number of non-profits in the US increased at a rapid pace of 29%. There are now, according to the NCSS a total of 1.5 million non-profits in just the US and 10,000+ are Jewish organizations. To say the least, we definitely find ourselves in a very charitable and idealistic era, change-makers across the globe are building problem solving organizations to make our world a better place. Some organizations seem to be making a huge impact, they’re getting the right attention resulting in successful campaigns and a great overall donation income. Others are struggling to get the spotlight they deserve and fail to engage an audience.

There has been another anti-semitic attack in NYC. This one was in Queens. It happened at 176th Street near 76 Avenue, in the Fresh Meadows section of Queens, when swastikas were found inside a car on Monday morning. The NYPD 107 Precinct says they are investigating the incident. Assemblymember Daniel Rosenthal told YWN “With the dramatic rise in antisemitism in New York State, the Queens Jewish community has been extremely concerned; this morning our fears were realized. The targeted attacks on Jews is escalating at an alarming rate and has reared its ugly head in our own backyard overnight.

At a recent event in Jerusalem, beloved speaker Yemima Mizrachi told a heartwrenching story of an off-the-Derech man who was tragically killed at a young age. The man’s mother, comforted by Mizrachi at the shiva, recalled an event early in life when the boy was humiliated by a teacher: “That was the day my son was murdered.” The Rabbanit’s painful words rung out through the hall. “Today’s generation is being murdered by shame.”  If there is any individual who might be expected to experience shame, it is Dini Rottenberg, a young woman living in Kiryat Sefer. Dini was one of ten children abandoned by her parents at a young age. One by one her siblings scattered across the country. Many of them left the path of Judaism entirely.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Yeshivas Bircas HaTorah Set to Open New Building in Memory of Hidden Tzaddik and Former Executive Director Gershon Burd zt”l   Jerusalem, Israel (1/10/20) — Six years after the tragic death of its executive director Gershon Burd zt”l, Yeshivas Bircas HaTorah is proud to announce the brand-new Gershon Burd Building will open in his honor in the heart of Jerusalem’s Old City next month.  Located at the former site of Rabbi Meir Schuster’s Heritage House, the Gershon Burd Building will be the first portal to the Jewish Quarter that will be seen by millions of visitors to the Holy City every year.

The idea for the song began with the bell at the beginning of the morning at the cheder right opposite Yonatan Razel’s home. “Every time I kept hearing this song, until it became a part of our Shabbos zemiros. I said to my brothers, ‘Let’s record it and it will give us closure.’” Yonatan Razel, together with his father, Reb Micha, and brothers Reb Aharon and Rav Yehuda present a unique song “Achas Shoalti”. The song is a musical expression of the spiritual experience which accompanied the whole family during the previous cycle of learning Shas, and even more so during the current cycle in the kollel for learning Daf Hayomi b’iyun which the family operates and participates in.

A Sefer Torah that went missing after the Pearl Hotel in Yerushalayim closed was found and returned to its owners. The Draiman Family who owned the Sefer Torah worked tirelessly to find the Torah that had been missing for years. Rabbi Yehuda Draiman said shortly after the Torah went missing: “One year before we finished building the Hotel, my father decided that he wanted to write a Sefer Torah for the Shul in the hotel. The Shul had an additional two Sifrei Torah that belonged to different people who at some point took their Torahs back when the hotel closed. However, when we came to take ours it had gone missing.” Rabbi Draiman added that the family had gone to court in order to ascertain how they could find the missing Torah.

A strange man entered the Kehilas Chassidim shul on Shazar Street in Tiveria on Sunday night, and after getting angry at those in the Shul lit the Amud on fire. According to reports in the Israeli media, the man walked in and asked one of the Avreichim for money to travel to Yerushalayim. The Avreich gave him a shekel. When the man asked for more, the Avreich showed him that he didn’t have any more money on him. In response, the stranger attacked the Avreich and broke his glasses. The Avreich succeeded in fleeing the Shul after being beaten. When he returned, he found that the stranger had lit a fire on the Amud and burned it and the Talleisim underneath it.

The U.S. Supreme Court decided a citizenship question won’t be on this spring’s census form, but that doesn’t mean the fight over it has ended in courtrooms across the country. In Maryland, civil rights groups are trying to block an order from President Donald Trump to gather citizenship data through administrative records. In New York, other civil rights groups are seeking sanctions against Trump administration attorneys for not turning over documents related to the citizenship question’s origins. Democratic lawmakers in the District of Columbia are fighting for similar documents, and Alabama officials are suing the Census Bureau to keep immigrants living in the country illegally from being counted during the process that determines the number of congressional seats each state gets.