Tagged Hurricane Sandy

NEW YORK (JTA) — Nine months ago, Natalia Demidova crouched on the second floor of her Staten Island home and watched her neighbor’s SUV race a 10-foot wave down the street. The wave crashed through Demidova’s quiet residential block in the South Beach neighborhood and flooded her home with… Read more »

At Mazel Academy in Brooklyn, Torah scrolls were unrolled to dry after being damaged by the floodwaters from superstorm Sandy, Oct. 31, 2012. (Ben Harris/JTA)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — How essential is a house of worship to a neighborhood? That’s the crux of a question now exercising Congress as a bill advances that would provide direct relief to synagogues and churches damaged by superstorm Sandy last October. The bill, which passed the U.S. House of… Read more »

WASHINGTON (JTA) — It has become something of a White House Chanukah tradition. For the second time, the Obama White House used a menorah from a hurricane-hit region to mark the holiday. This Chanukah, Rabbi David Bauman brought to the White House one of two 90-year-old menorahs that survived… Read more »

Pinny Dembutzer of the Seagate Association, standing on the Brooklyn community’s shore, notes the long road of cleanup that lies ahead for the community, Nov. 18, 2012. (Chavie Lieber)

Kenny Vance’s multimillion-dollar beach house has stood proudly on the Long Island shore and weathered all manner of storms since 1916. Then came Sandy. Vance, a 68-year-old musician who has lived in Belle Harbor, N.Y., for most of his life, was preparing to perform on a cruise ship when… Read more »

NEW YORK (JTA) — A week after Sandy swept into the New York area with fierce winds, driving rain and a high tide for the history books, the nation’s largest Jewish community was still picking up the pieces. JTA gathered stories from around the storm zone about Sandy’s destruction,… Read more »

Erica Fishbein volunteered with JDC's Entwine group in south Brooklyn following Hurricane Sandy. (Courtesy Cheryl Fishbein)

NEW YORK—Hurricane Sandy stormed into New York and New Jersey with unmitigated force, carrying death and destruction, disrupting lives, and devastating neighborhoods in America’s most densely populated regions—which happen to be home to some of the country’s largest Jewish populations. In response, the Jewish community banded together to meet… Read more »

At Mazel Academy in Brooklyn, Torah scrolls were unrolled to dry after being damaged by the floodwaters from Hurricane Sandy, Oct. 31, 2012. (Ben Harris)

NEW YORK (JTA) — When Rabbi Avremel Okonov arrived Tuesday morning at the school he co-founded 10 years ago in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, the water in the basement had already receded from the high water mark. It only came up to his knees. Everywhere he looked… Read more »

Jacob Vogelman and Jessie Streich-Kest, pictured together in this 2007 photo. The young Jewish couple from Brooklyn was killed when a tree felled by Hurricane Sandy struck them while they walked their dog on Oct. 29, 2012. (Facebook)

(JTA) — Two young Jews were killed in Brooklyn by a falling tree during superstorm Sandy. The pair were out walking a dog Monday night in the storm’s high winds. The dead were identified by The New York Observer as Jessie Streich-Kest, 24, who worked as a high school… Read more »

Damage to New York City infrastructure, like this one inside a New York subway station, was extensively documented online as Hurricane Sandy washed ashore. (@HeyVeronica via Twitter)

NEW YORK (JTA) – At 10 p.m. on Monday, as the full brunt of Hurricane Sandy was bearing down on the northeastern United States, filmmaker Sandi Dubowski posted an urgent online message. DuBowski’s elderly parents had declined to leave their home in Manhattan Beach, a neighborhood of southern Brooklyn… Read more »