Chabad of Bay Ridge in the News

Over 50 people arrived to celebrate the holiday, which honors the story of King Ahasuerus and the Jewish Queen Esther who defeat the evil Haman’s plot to kill the Jews of ancient Persia. In this legend, the lack of an open miracle is balanced by the circumstances made available to the heroes, as told in a Hebrew scroll known as the Megillah.

The Chabad of Bay Ridge used a cartoon reenactment to tell the tale of Purim at its annual bash on March 12. The celebration traditionally commemorates the Jewish people’s deliverance from the power-hungry Haman with a reading from the Book of Esther, but this year the Chabad mixed things up by projecting an animated retelling of the story to help congregants follow along with the Hebrew reading, said the center’s rabbi...

A squad of 10 drivers cruised through Bay Ridge with menorahs strapped to their cars’ hoods as part of the Chabad of Bay Ridge’s annual observance for the holiday, which commemorates the biblical miracle in which a candelabru, burned for eight days on one day’s oil. The annual parade is a symbolic gesture of illuminating the neighborhood with spiritual light, and it really worked, said one participant.

For the third time Chabad of Bay Ridge will take to the streets with innovative traveling Sukkah huts in order to enable Jewish people to celebrate the holiday. With one Sukkah constructed and placed on a flatbed trailer and a smaller Pedi-Sukkah constructed on a modified Pedi-cab, they help bring the holiday right to people’s doorstep.

Children and adults danced and marched down Bay Ridge Avenue from the Chabad of Bay Ridge to Owl’s Head Park to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Lag B’Omer on May 26.
The parade and picnic at the park was a warm welcome to the neighborhood for one family who recently moved from across the Atlantic.

Children recently got a lesson in how to make matzoh, the traditional unleavened bread served at Passover, the Jewish holiday that marks the flight of the Jews from slavery in ancient Egypt. Dennis Lynch of Brooklyn Daily reports on the youthful matzoh-makers.

Budding young bakers got a taste of the Jewish matzoh-making tradition ahead of the Passover holiday at the Chabad of Bay Ridge on April 10. Kids learned every step to make the traditional flat-bread memorialized in the story of the Jews’ flight from Egypt. The synagogue’s rabbi called the day a living religious lesson.
“It’s an opportunity to learn the reason behind the matzoh,” Rabbi Tzvi Stroh said. “Not just how the matzoh itself is made — but what’s behind it.”

The Chabad of Bay Ridge celebrated Purim with a festive traditional celebration and a spellbinding science show by Mad Science’s Johnny Argon on March 24. Purim celebrates when two brave and resourceful Jews — Queen Esther and her cousin Mordecai — saved the Jewish people from genocide more than 2,000 years ago. It is traditional to celebrate “natural” forces like science during the holiday as recognition that God worked through “ordinary” events — as opposed to supernatural intervention such as in the story of Passover, the Chabad’s rabbi said. But the party was so out-of-the-ordinary it drew folks who don’t even live in the neighborhood, one reveller said.

Three days after someone knocked down (but not out) the Chabad of Bay Ridge’s menorah on 65th Street and Seventh Avenue, members of Brooklyn’s Jewish community celebrated the last day of Hanukkah by illuminating Bay Ridge with a parade of cars sporting menorahs on Dec. 13. Organizers decided to start their parade at the site of the apparent vandalism in an act of perseverance, the Chabad’s rabbi said.“It’s a symbolic gesture that we are here and the light will continue to shine and more light will go forth from there,” said Rabbi Tzvi Stroh. “Instead of being lessened, the light will go forth through the whole neighborho­od.”

The Chabad of Bay Ridge’s 9-foot menorah shone through the night after Hanukkah goblins trashed the festive candelabrum early Dec. 10. The holiday celebrates the biblical Jews’ rededication of the Temple and their miraculously keeping a lamp therein lit for eight days using only one day’s worth of oil — so congregants naturally saw deep meaning in the toppled-but-still-illuminated electric menorah, the synagogue’s rabbi said.