Khan Younis, Gaza – Unidentified gunmen dragged a judge from the Hamas Islamist movement out of a taxi and shot him dead in front of his courthouse in Gaza increasing fears of a Palestinian civil war.
Join our WhatsApp groupSubscribe to our Daily Roundup Email
Officials from the governing Hamas faction said Bassam al-Fara, 28, was a judge in a civil court but also a member of the group’s armed wing.
Witnesses at the scene said that the gunmen had eaten breakfast in a nearby restaurant in the town of Khan Younis while waiting for Fara to arrive. They shot him at point blank range after pulling him from the car.
Ich vinsh bayde zaten hatzlocha rabba
Maybe we should give these arab/palestine animals tons of Hungarian homemade Kneidlach to taste. As Boruch Goldstein did.
Anon 10:54- Shmaltz can kill.
whats this article have to do with the killing of hamas?
From Hungary, for Hanukkah, From Long Ago
Randy Harris for The New York Times
LIVING TRADITIONS Recipes for dishes like chicken stuffed under the skin have been passed down by generations.
Published: December 13, 2006
KIRYAS JOEL, N.Y.
Randy Harris for The New York Times
HUNGARIAN MEMORIES Challah bread is made in Lillian Brach’s home in Kiryas Joel, N.Y.
AS Mindel Appel showed me the contents of her freezer, my pulse began to race.
Out came her homemade kokosh cake, similar to babka. Next were shlishkes, little potato dumplings that can be tossed in sugar, breadcrumbs and butter, or stuffed with lekvar, a kind of prune preserve. Finally, she brought out a Hanukkah delicacy, the cheese Danish called delkelekh.
As a writer concentrating on Jewish food, I always get letters and e-mail asking for old recipes from Hungary. Most of what I know about these foods I have read in books. Some are still made in Hungary, and I’ve come across Americans who make noodles and cabbage with poppy seeds or who remember shlishkes. But with assimilation, shortcuts, the passage of time and the passing of old cooks, many of these recipes may soon be lost.
So I was thrilled to find these famous dishes in this village about 45 miles north of the George Washington Bridge. The women of the Satmar Hasidic community here have preserved delkelekh and shlishkes, and many other staples of the Hungarian Jewish kitchen.
One of the world’s largest groups of Hasidic Jews, the Satmar originated in Szatmarnemeti, Hungary (now Satu Mare, Romania). There are communities in Williamsburg and Borough Park, Brooklyn; Monsey in Rockland County; and here in Orange County.
The founder of the Satmar Hasidim, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, was saved when more than 12,000 Jews from Szatmarnemeti were deported to Auschwitz. With the remnants of his sect, he settled in Williamsburg in 1946.
Concerned about assimilation, Rabbi Teitelbaum wanted a modern shtetl in America. In 1977 he bought a tract here and settled 14 families. Now there are 3,000 families, most of Hungarian descent, in Kiryas Joel.
“Oftentimes what we think of as an old-world shtetl is in fact a community where Jews and non-Jews lived alongside,” said David N. Myers, a professor of Jewish history at U.C.L.A., who is co-writing a book about the Satmar Hasids here. “That is what is so interesting about Kiryas Joel. Ironically, in America, it turns out to be possible to create a shtetl that is exclusively Jewish.”
A typical marriage may produce 10 children or more, giving the village the fastest growth rate in the state. The large families, I was told, are to help “replace the 6 million” lost in the Holocaust. Partly because most households have so many children, 62 percent of the villagers live below the poverty level, according to the 2000 census. Because of its rapid expansion and insular way of life, Kiryas Joel has come into conflict with neighboring towns over schooling, sewage, water use, taxation and voting.
Like nearly all residents, Mrs. Appel and her husband, Chaim, a special education teacher, live in a development of attached wooden houses with three stories, one family per story. Their apartment has three bedrooms, with multiple beds and cribs in each. They have 11 children and 15 grandchildren, who often visit. The apartment has only one bathroom. A separate Passover kitchen is sealed off the rest of the year. Like neighbors I visited, the Appels have no television, radio or magazines.
“These things are not an option for us,” said Mrs. Appel, who was born in the United States, but, like almost everyone here, speaks Yiddish as her first language. “We want to spend time with our kids. Family time comes with good cooking.”
When I visited, Mrs. Appel was cooking for an engagement party for a family that could not afford a caterer — shlishkes, potato kugel, gefilte fish and tiny meatballs in tomato sauce. Later, for Shabbat, she made chicken soup with peppers and paprika in an 18-quart pot and eight pounds of “stuffed-under-the-skin” chicken quarters.
Mrs. Appel’s everyday cooking includes dishes like sautéed cabbage and noodles, chicken paprikash with nocklern, stuffed cabbage and cholent with lima beans. Peppers, tomatoes and onions sat out on her counter, waiting to be turned into letcho, the ubiquitous Hungarian sauce, and a salad for a simple supper. Every once in a while, if she has been cooking all day for Shabbat meals or for other people, Mrs. Appel will serve her family frozen pizza.
One of the few cookbooks I saw around town was the spiral-bound “The Haimishe Kitchen,” from the Ladies Auxiliary of Nitra, the yeshiva in Mount Kisco. Most women rely on a small box of recipes on 3-by-5 cards, handed down from their mothers or learned in cooking class at the Bais Rochel, the girls’ religious school, which most girls here attend. Although Mrs. Appel makes her mother’s recipes, some modern ingredients have crept into her cooking.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Randy Harris for The New York Times
YOUNG AND HUNGRY Satmar Hasidic boys in the lunchroom at the United Talmudical Academy in Kiryas Joel, N.Y.
Related
Recipe: Cheese Danish Pastries (Delkelekh) Adapted from Mindel Appel (December 13, 2006)
Recipe: Hungarian Stuffed-Under-the-Skin Chicken Adapted from Mindel Appel (December 13, 2006)
Recipe: Hungarian Eggs with Tomatoes, Peppers and Onions (Letcho) Adapted from Rebekka and Jacob Freund (December 13, 2006)
Questions for Joan Nathan: Hanukkah Q&A (December 12, 2006)
Readers’ Opinions
Forum: Cooking and Recipes
“My mother never used commercial spices like the paprika and garlic powder we use today,” Mrs. Appel said. “We’ve modernized by using canned sauce and juice and vegetable oil.”
One or two restaurants opened, and failed, in Kiryas Joel. Taking a dozen children out to dinner is a financial hardship and a logistical nightmare. Besides, the Satmar believe that events outside the home are not healthy for young people. Engagements, weddings, bar mitzvahs and similar celebrations are the only social events.
Weddings are mammoth events, with at least 300 guests. Men and women sit, eat and dance separately. Parents arrange all marriages (subject to approval by the couple), choosing mates from Satmar communities.
At home, the Satmar speak Yiddish, with Hebrew the language of prayer and English taught in school. Education generally stops after high school. But the Satmar do not shun technology. Homes are wired for electricity, men use computers at work, and everyone seems to carry cellphones.
Men drive but women do not; it is seen as immodest. To shop, women walk to the strip mall, children in tow, or get deliveries.
After I left Mrs. Appel’s apartment, I visited Lillian Brach’s home. In her basement, Mrs. Brach has a bakery, where women were preparing food for a wedding, twisting hundreds of six-braided challahs as if it were the easiest thing in the world.
“When I taste the challahs that these women give me, I can feel their hands in the dough,” said Dr. Steven Benardo, superintendent of the Kiryas Joel Union Free School District. “While we are racing forward, they are running backward, successfully retaining their traditions.”
Besides the supermarket, with its huge selection of kosher goods, several businesses feed the village. Kiryas Joel Poultry, owned by the United Talmudic Academy, the yeshiva most boys here attend, uses kosher slaughtering rules to process 17,000 chickens each day, with some residents working next to Mexican laborers on the assembly line.
Each afternoon from early November through Passover, volunteers from the girls’ school roll out the round handmade matzo for the holiday at a matzo bakery.
One of the girls, Dina Freund, 17, showed me how to make cheese latkes, a Hanukkah specialty, at her home. When she had finished, her father, Rabbi Jacob Freund, demonstrated his version of letcho. A burly man who is proud of his position as a village trustee, he sat down at the counter, carefully cutting peppers and tomatoes.
“Besides today, I have made letcho only 11 times in my life,” he said. “Each time after my wife had a baby.”
kayn yirbu
B”H THIS S THE BEST THING LET THEM KILL THEMSELF