UK News

With a population of less than 30,000 people and a prime location in the heart of South Lakeland District of Cumbria, England, the market town of Kendal has a quaint charm buoyed by its distance from the United Kingdom’s large cities.

Were it not for the work of Jewish organizations 80 miles to the south in Manchester, the few Jewish residents who call Kendal home would likely find their peaceful paradise devoid of such seemingly ubiquitous items as Passover matzah and Chanukah menorahs. Rabbi Yisrael Cohen, director of L’Chaim Outreach, a program of the Chabad-Lubavitch yeshiva in Manchester, remembers one Passover when he visited a Jewish couple living in a farm house in a remote part of the countryside around Kendal....

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British Ambassador Tom Phillips welcomed 13 boys from Ohr Simcha, a Chabad-Lubavitch run orphanage and boarding school in central Israel, to his official residence last week for a mass Bar Mitzvah celebration with Minister of Welfare and Social Services Yitzhak Herzog in attendance.

Phillips first visited the Kfar Chabad school in 2006, meeting two brothers there who had arrived from the United Kingdom. Touched by the visit, he hosted the older brother’s Bar Mitzvah, and resolved to host the younger brother’s as well, this time with all of his classmates.

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Some 80 students and staff gathered at Imperial College, London, this week to hear Professor Lord Robert Winston speak about the ideas behind his latest book, Bad Ideas, which traces the fascinating history of our attempts at self-improvement while also questioning their value.

Through regular TV appearances and now as politician in the House of Lords, Lord Winston has become a household name in the Britain as one of country’s best-known scientists.

“Every human achievement has a downside that we don’t expect to see,” he told the audience. With all new technologies and scientific developments, “real advances which will change our lives are probably not fully understood, and perhaps could not be understood.”

“These problems are nothing new,” said Lord Winston. Taking examples from pre-history and examining them against the backdrop of science as well as Jewish history and philosophy, he demonstrated how the growth of such things as agriculture, the city and writing has radically changed the face of human civilisation.

“If we are really to control our technology,” says Lord Winston, “we must improve communication of science and technology. To some extent there has to be a democratisation of science.”

He sees this as a “Jewish theme” that has a Biblical origin. “The first commandment in the Torah is ‘to be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth and have dominion over it.’ This means we must be using discretion, wisdom and discernment in what we are doing. Jewish philosophers, like Maimonides, had the strongest views on how we handle our environment.”

"The talk was thought-provoking and well received," said Rabbi Mendy Loewenthal, director of Chabad of South Kensington, established in 2008 to work with students at Imperial College and other colleges in the surrounding area.

The subject matter was of relevance to scientists and non-scientists alike.

"He brought scientific concepts to a level that make them universally understandable,” commented  Adam Szerenyi, an undergraduate in Finance at Budapest University who is currently visiting the London.

Observing the powerfully built man wearing the starched white Gi he dons when fighting, one gains an immediate respect and understanding why Ronnie Colwell is an internationally renowned martial arts expert. But behind the brawn one sees a gentle giant with placid eyes and a smile that professes a child-like innocence.

Learning martial arts on Liverpool’s rough streets in the 1940s, Colwell, in a career spanning seven decades, has served his country in the armed forces, has worked as a professional bodyguard, martial arts instructor to royalty and as a Special Forces instructor.

But last Thursday afternoon at Liverpool’s Chabad House, the 9th Dan in the arts of Karate-do and Jujutsu laid tefillin and was called up to the Torah for his first ever aliyah. Today was Ronnie Colwell’s bar mitzvah. In the presence of family and friends, Ronnie Colwell came back into the fold as Ron ben Abraham.

As many Jewish men and women are celebrating bar and bas mitzvahs later in life for a number of reasons, Ronnie’s simcha was possible thanks to his friends and Rabbi Avremi Kievman, who helped Ronnie complete his journey back home. As Mr Colwell said so poignantly during the celebratory meal following his laying tefillin, "Unless you've been lost for 150 years, you'll never understand how I feel today".

To see more photos, CLICK HERE.

[From theJC.com]

For the first time in recent memory, a Beijing dairy is distributing strictly kosher, or chalav yisrael, cow’s milk throughout China.

The first ton of milk – produced under the supervision of British-born Rabbi Shimon Freundlich, director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Beijing – hit the market last week. Completely organic, the milk meets European and American health standards in addition to satisfying the strictures of Jewish dietary laws.

Rabbi Akiva Osher Padwa from the London rabbinical court assisted in the supervision. Future production will take place on a monthly basis, said Freundlich, and the milk will be available in Guangzhou, Pudong, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Kowloon and Yi Wu in addition to Beijing. He estimated that some 10,000 Jews live in China.

"Until now, families like ours have been living off powdered milk shipped from Israel," said Beijing resident Rivkie Lipsker. "Now, we can have cereal and fresh milk for breakfast."

Hundreds of Scotland’s Jews filled a hall in the Glasgow suburb of Giffnock for an exhibition extolling the variety of kosher foodstuffs in today’s marketplace.

The Lubavitch Kosher Food and Wine Expo, the fifth of its kind in the country, included demonstrations from local kosher chefs, children’s activities, and a class on baking the traditional Shabbat bread known as challah. Rabbi Chaim and Sora Jacobs, who opened the first Chabad-Lubavitch center in Scotland some 40 years ago, presided over the event.

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Denis Avey, the 91-year-old British prisoner of war who smuggled himself into Auschwitz and managed to save two Jewish prisoners from death at the hands of the Nazis, riveted a crowd of more than 150 Oxford University students with a personal tale that only last year became public.

Speaking at the Chabad-Lubavitch Society’s David Slager Jewish Student Centre to mark 65 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, Avey described the location’s complex of concentration and extermination camps where more than 1 million people, most of them Jewish, lost their lives during the Holocaust. While he was there – originally at a camp for foreign P.O.W.s – some 200,000 people were worked to death, he said.

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