Word: jewish
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Along Manhattan's Avenue of the Americas, across from Radio City Music Hall, the young men in their black hats and beards stand poised for action in the summer heat. "Are you Jewish?" they ask startled passersby. "Racially Jewish," is the inaccurate reply of one tanned, neatly barbered man. "But not religiously." "Yes," mutters another hurrying by, "but I don't have time to stop." A middle-aged woman takes the counteroffensive: "So what's all this about?" She waves in the direction of a van parked near by, emblazoned with a banner reading "Mitzvah Mobile." Inside...
Named for the Hebrew word for "commandment" or "good deed," the Mitzvah Mobiles are a summer project of a unique group of Orthodox Jews who have made it their mission to awaken fellow Jews to Jewish identity and spiritual obligation. They are the Lubavitcher Hasidim, members of an Eastern European sect that now has its international headquarters in Brooklyn.* The Lubavitch Youth Organization mans the mobiles with vacationing Yeshiva (religious school) students and young rabbis. Half a dozen vans are on the road each week in New York City and its suburbs and in the "Borscht Belt" Catskills resort area...
...Lubavitcher leader, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, the trucks are "Jewish tanks against assimilation" -a counterattack against the secularization of Jews in modern society. The immediate aim of the young men in the Mitzvah Mobiles is to persuade Jews to return to observance of five basic mitzvot that, they say, epitomize the 613 commandments of traditional Jewish...
...Unity. Two of the commandments encompass the Law itself: a duty to study the Torah-Jewish teaching -and to keep Torah books (the Pentateuch, the Psalms and the Jewish prayer book) in the home. A third commands Jews to give charity, and as a reminder the Lubavitchers pass out charity boxes to be kept and filled in the home. A fourth commandment requires a householder to keep on each doorpost (except that of the bathroom) a mezuzah -a small container holding a handwritten parchment with a scriptural passage on the unity...
Married. Marvin Mandel, 54, Governor of Maryland; and Jeanne Blackistone Dorsey, 37, descendant of one of Maryland's founding families; both for the second time; in a Jewish ceremony in Annapolis. Mandel and his first wife Barbara ("Bootsie"), 54, who for five months refused to leave the Governor's mansion following her husband's public declaration that he intended to marry Mrs. Dorsey, were divorced just half an hour before the wedding. The bride divorced former Maryland State Senator Walter B. Dorsey...