NEW YORK (AP) - A 150-year-old Torah, hidden for a half-century in the former Soviet Union, was paraded through New York's streets Sunday on its way to its new home at a Brooklyn synagogue.
Many in the procession of hundreds of former Soviet Jews sang English, Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian songs as the foot-high scroll, covered by a Jewish bridal canopy, was taken to the Friends of Refugees of Eastern Europe Synagogue.
"We kept it in a closet, behind the clothes. And every week, my father carried it to the Sabbath service, then back home to hide it," said Senya Dovidov, 68, a one-time shoe factory worker in Latvia who gave the Torah to the synagogue.
Dovidov said his father, Abraham, was a leader of the Jewish community in the Latvian capital of Riga during the 1930s, and fled to Russia with the scroll when the Nazis invaded during World War II.
He returned to live under a Soviet regime "that made it dangerous to show that you were a practicing Jew," said Hershel Okunov, a Ukrainian-born rabbi at the synagogue.
Dovidov, who speaks only Russian, Latvian and Yiddish, brought the scroll with him when he came to the United States in 1995. He worships at the FREE Synagogue, where a plaque hangs in honor of his father.
"Our Torah has found its home," he said, speaking in Russian. "We can walk in the streets here with the Torah, and we don't have to be afraid of anybody."
The scroll, worth about $15,000, is one of two Torahs the synagogue has acquired in recent years from former Soviet Jewish immigrants. The other scroll, originally from Ukraine, was also rededicated Sunday for use at its services.
The synagogue has had both scrolls completely restored.
BALTIMORE (AP) -- A former nursing home employee has been charged with neglect in the asphyxiation of an 89-year-old woman whose feeding tube was left running overnight.
Augustine Okafor is accused of not providing necessary assistance for Bertha Small, who died at the nursing home in November 2002.
David Baxter, Small's grandson, said he learned of the indictment in a telephone call Thursday from a state prosecutor.
"It's so wrong for older people (who are) sick and can't do for themselves to be taken advantage of like that," Baxter told The (Baltimore) Sun. "No one deserves to die like that."
In a statement, Villa St. Michael Nursing and Retirement Center said it cooperated with the attorney general's office and was cleared by the investigation.
Okafor could not be reached for comment; he had no phone listing.
He faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine if convicted of the top count of first-degree neglect of a vulnerable adult.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) -- A pack of stray dogs entered the Kansas City Zoo and attacked a herd of gazelles, killing six of the animals.
Two of the four strays were shot to death and a third was caught with a net before the zoo opened Thursday. The fourth dog ran into nearby woods. Zoo officials feared the dogs would attack more animals.
"It's an unfortunate thing," zoo director Randy Wisthoff said. "We have done a walk of the entire zoo, and we still haven't been able to figure out where the dogs came in."
The zoo's eight living gazelles will be housed indoors until zoo staff can guarantee their habitat is secure. Gazelles include several species of small antelopes that are mostly native to Africa.
The attack will be reported to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which regulates animal exhibits. The USDA ordered the zoo to improve its fencing after stray dogs killed sheep there two years ago.
Packs of stray dogs have entered other zoos and attacked animals. More than a dozen wallabies were killed at a zoo in South Bend, Ind., in 2002.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- A state appeals court says a man who was duped into believing he fathered his girlfriend's child cannot sue her for damages.
The 1st District Court of Appeal says the California man cannot recoup money he spent raising the child for her first two years when he lived with the girl.
Allowing such a lawsuit would give priority to the duped man's "desire to be made financially whole, to the potential detriment of the child's ongoing needs," an unanimous three-judge appeals panel ruled Thursday.
After the man and mother split up, he sought custody of the child but dropped the bid when a paternity test showed he wasn't the father. He sought restitution from his former lover to cover costs associated with raising the child.
The appeals court, in upholding a lower court ruling, added that forbidding him to sue also "serves an important public policy by sending the message to unmarried … fathers that they should verify their paternity at an early stage if there is any doubt in the matter."
The court said it would be virtually impossible to determine how much restitution was owed if the case went to trial.
The case is McBride v. Boughton, A103456.
CHIHUAHUA, Mexico (AP) - A group of girls discovered the body of a young woman who had been raped, beaten to death and dumped near the intersection of two mountain roads outside this state capital, authorities said.
The discovery came Saturday afternoon in Chihuahua city, 250 miles (400 kilometers) south of Ciudad Juarez, infamous in much of the world for an 11-year string of killings of women.
The body was uncovered less than 24 hours after President Vicente Fox and Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha had visited Juarez, a city of 1.3 million across the border from El Paso, Texas. It also came two days before a special prosecutor the president appointed to solve the killings of the women of Juarez was scheduled to give her second progress report.
The about 20-year-old victim was not identified by police, who said she was found with her pants pulled down to her knees and her blouse lifted up. Nearby, investigators located blood-soaked rocks and hypothesized that they were the blunt objects used to kill her, said Rene Medrano, a spokesman for the state attorney general's office in Juarez.
Since 1993, federal authorities estimate that about 340 women have been killed in various ways in Juarez. About 100 of those killings were similar, with victims who were young, slender, dark-haired and had been sexually abused and strangled to death, their partially-clothed bodies dumped in sparsely populated areas west of the city.
Police are also investigating a rash of similar killings in other locales across the state, including here in Chihuahua city.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Lloyd Washington was a member of the legendary Ink Spots from 1945 into the late 1960s, but when he died in June his family couldn't afford to bury him. For months, his ashes were kept in a box at the Ernie K-Doe Mother-in-Law Lounge.
Thanks to another family of musicians, Washington now has a clearly marked tomb - and so will other musicians, rich or poor.
Descendants of jazz pioneer Isidore Barbarin, who died in 1960, granted the Friends of New Orleans Cemeteries, a preservation group, the right to use six of the 18 vaults in the family mausoleum. Each vault can hold multiple urns or boxes of ashes.
The new resting place is called the New Orleans Musicians Tomb.
After a brief ceremony Saturday, two porcelain angels and a silver and black urn housing Washington's remains were placed in the tomb, which also holds the remains of drummer Lucien Barker and trumpeter Charles Barker - both descendants of Barbarin.
"This is the beginning of something big," said Paul Barbarin, 73, who with his sister, Marie Barbarin Baptiste, granted use of the tomb.
"People are going to start doing what we're doing. Believe me, they're going to start doing it because there are so many (musical) greats coming out of New Orleans and they need a place to rest," Barbarin said.
LAS VEGAS (AP) - The Clark County Health District is investigating a mysterious illness that struck dozens of people at a Las Vegas Strip hotel-casino.
Guests and employees at the Flamingo Las Vegas reported suffering from flu-like symptoms, including nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and headaches.
Brian Labus of the Clark County Health District told KLAS-TV that his agency is trying to figure out what caused the outbreak, which was reported Wednesday.
"We're trying to determine what common thread goes through all the different cases," Labus said. "Did they eat at all the same place? Did they all attend the same event? … We're trying to determine all that right now."
KLAS reported about 60 people had come down with the illness.
Two hundred rooms were closed so they could be heavily cleaned with chemicals, said Michael Coldwell, a spokesman with Caesars Entertainment, which owns the Flamingo.
Coldwell said he expected the rooms to reopen Monday.
The hotel-casino is also cleaning public areas, banquet rooms, restrooms, public telephones, the front desk, and guest and employee elevators. Guest rooms are being stocked with disposable ice buckets and cups.
GOLDEN, Texas (AP) - Volunteers fanned across Texas farm fields to pick up sweet potatoes missed by mechanical harvesters, joining a national network to feed the poor with produce that might otherwise go to waste, from California oranges to Indiana beans and Florida squash.
In this rural community about 75 miles east of Dallas, the weekend effort is called the Texas Yam Jam.
"It's rewarding, it's a good gig, just to come out here and glean for the people who might not be able to eat if we hadn't actually done this," said Jay Wilbur, 43, from Panola, near the Louisiana state line.
The work is overseen by the Big Island, Va.-based Society of St. Andrew, an ecumenical organization with strong United Methodist ties. The ministry, in its 25th year, is named after the disciple who figured in the New Testament story of how Jesus Christ fed 5,000 with a few loaves and fishes.
The society estimates that over the past quarter-century, 250,000 volunteers have gleaned 461.5 million pounds of food that would have been dumped, plowed under or left to rot - but instead became 1.4 billion servings of food donated to the hungry.
"In the Old Testament, it talks about leaving the corners of your field for the ailing and the poor. We've just kind of taken that ancient biblical practice and modernized it," said Carol Breitinger, the society's spokeswoman.
This month, for example, Boy Scouts and other volunteers collected green beans from a northern Indiana field that a cannery had rejected because of frost. In Lake Park, Fla., along the Florida-Georgia line, a church group picked up bushels of leftover cucumbers and squash.
"Our food banks are screaming for fresh produce and this is actually about the least expensive way we can get fresh produce," said Randy Groce, 54, president of the Texas advisory board for the Society of St. Andrew.
Groce brought 900 orange mesh bags - each able to fit 50 pounds of sweet potatoes. Volunteers stuffed them with tens of thousands of roots as small as a thumb and as large as a submarine sandwich.
"Mom, what does a sweet potato look like?" inquired Eliza Allen, a 5-year-old in pigtails whose older sister, Jade, 8, skipped a soccer game for the Yam Jam.
"It's like a big potato that's orange," replied her mother, Andrea Allen, 35, a member of the First United Methodist Church of Celina.
Wilbur, a video game company executive, welcomes the annual effort. "I'm either on a plane or riding a desk," he joked. "It's good to get your hands dirty."
CONFLUENCE, Pa. (AP) -- A man missed a mouse he was trying to shoot and wounded his girlfriend instead, state police said.
Donald Rugg, 43, was trying to kill the rodent with a .22-caliber handgun when his girlfriend, Cathy Jo Harris, 38, apparently went into the line of fire and was hit in the arm early Tuesday, state police said.
Harris was in stable condition at Somerset Hospital on Thursday, a hospital spokeswoman said.
State police said they won't charge Rugg, but advised against people shooting firearms inside.
SEA RANCH LAKES, Fla. (AP) -- What two words are 12 letters long and mean precocious puzzlemaker? The answer is Kyle Mahowald, who at 17 is the youngest person to publish a Sunday crossword in The New York Times.
The teen began constructing crosswords for his school newspaper last year. That's after he was completing weekday Times puzzles in less than four minutes. By February, major newspapers were picking up his submissions for up to $350 a puzzle.
He's had puzzles in the Times on weekdays, but his first Sunday one appeared Sept. 19. His work also was in The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times this year.
"His puzzles are ambitious and well-crafted," said Will Shortz, puzzle editor for The New York Times. "He uses interesting, long, colorful answers with no obscurity at all. They're all familiar words and phrases, but they are challenging."
The high school senior from the Fort Lauderdale area was considering careers in law or journalism, but was waiting to hear whether he was accepted into one of the top-tier colleges to which he applied. He got a perfect 1,600 score on the SAT.
"It's hard to make it professionally as a puzzle creator," Kyle said. "But I'll keep doing it as a hobby for as long as I can. It's just really fun."
ATLANTA (AP) -- You may not be able to fool Mother Nature, but she's fooling the magnolias.
This fall's changing climate has magnolia trees and other plants blooming at what is considered the wrong time of the year.
"It's not unusual to have some of our spring flowers, shrubs and trees come into bloom," said Jim Midcap, a horticulturist with the University of Georgia Extension Service.
"Almost always, whenever we have a late-summer drought, things get stressed, and then you get wet conditions, dogwoods and magnolias come into bloom," Midcap said. "They get revitalized. They think spring has hit us again."
That happened when a dry spell was snapped by a series of tropical storms that brought torrents of rain to much of the region within the past six weeks. That was followed by a warm beginning to the fall.
"Plants just don't know what to think," said Rick Moler, assistant manager at the Tucker, Ga., Pikes Family Nurseries. "Plants get a false sense of what time of year it is."
In Georgia, for example, Japanese magnolias are suddenly in bloom, well ahead of their normal, late-winter, early spring schedule.
Despite blooming at the "wrong" time this fall, Moler said it doesn't make much difference in his sales of magnolia trees.
"Magnolias don't fly out of the store," he said. "People do look for them from time to time and want them, but usually it's on a design plan because they get so big and grow so slow."
Posted in Backpage on Monday, October 25, 2004 12:00 am Updated: 11:07 pm.
© Copyright 2009, North County Times - Californian, Escondido, CA | Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
