Word: rabbi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Israeli Jews like to tell an old fable of a Russian Jew who goes to his rabbi in search of a job. The rabbi instructs the man to stand at the village gate each morning and wait there to greet the Messiah when he comes. For this, the rabbi offers the man a ruble a month. "The pay is so low," the man complains. "Yes," says the rabbi, "but the job security is excellent...
...electrified signs atop Habad cars. A full-page ad announcing "The Time for Your Redemption Has Arrived" has run in the New York Times, and Habad speakers have been crisscrossing the U.S. to deliver their message. And who might the Messiah be? Easy, say Israel's Habadniks: their leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, 89, of Brooklyn...
Utter blasphemy is what many other religious Jews say. Critics of Habad, which is also known as the Lubavitch movement, after the Belarussian village of its founding, are both angry and worried. Eliezer Schach, one of Israel's leading ultra-Orthodox rabbis, has publicly called Schneerson "insane," an "infidel" and "a false Messiah." The local papers carried Schach's outrageous charge that Schneerson's followers are "eaters of trayf," food such as pork that is forbidden to Jews. Other detractors fret that Habad's Messianic passions will provoke a schism in Judaism or lead to mass disillusionment, driving believers from...
...least 100,000 worldwide, the expectation of the Messiah's coming has been building since Schneerson in the past few years began exhorting his disciples more and more to actively prepare for the day. The crumbling of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union's demise, explains Habad spokesman Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, "lead one to think that these extraordinary, shattering events are a precursor to something even more cataclysmic...
...young stand-up and the only one not on Leno's payroll, sitting in like a rookie playing with the first team. (Leno will be hiring a staff of six or seven writers for the Tonight show -- which will include some of this group as well as a rabbi from New Jersey and an ad executive from Philadelphia, both longtime contributors to the Leno joke chest...