Your daily spiel for Thursday, Jan. 19

Your Daily Spiel is The CJN’s daily roundup of trending stories in the Jewish world.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Here’s some Jewish news:

On the proverbial eve of both the reading of parshat Shmot and the inauguration of Donald Trump, CJN contributors and Toronto lawyers Adam Hummel and Zack Silverberg remind Diaspora Jews to ensure that we’re “known” to the new U.S. president as Joseph was to the new pharaoh.

Chabad billboard
Chabad has put up 75 billboards around Toronto since December.

If you live in the GTA and have noticed billboards around town bearing the image of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe and a call to “welcome Moshiach with ONE additional act of goodness and kindness,” well, good eye. As Sheri Shefa reported, Chabad has erected 75 of these in the hopes that the invocation will hasten the coming of the Mashiach (yeah, we spell it differently).

 

Windsor men's lunch
Jewish men in Windsor meet for deli lunch.

Boys will eat brisket. In Windsor, Ont. yesterday, a group of over 100 Jewish men met to do what, arguably, Jewish men do best: eat (kosher) hot corned beef and pastrami and, according to organizer Bill Mechanic, to “fress, kibbitz and kvetch.” The six-brisket affair,  was also a fundraiser to rehabilitate the local Jewish day school.

 

A 61-year-old Alberta man took his own life last month, after losing his savings and money he borrowed – over $300,000 (US) in total – to several binary options trading websites. He lost roughly two-thirds of the amount on the Israeli-run binary options firm 23Traders.com.

After roughly 25 Jewish institutions across the United States received bomb threats – the second wave of threats the American Jewish community has seen in two weeks – the head of the Anti-Defamation League issued a statement yesterday noting that the threats don’t appear credible but advising Jewish community institutions to review their security procedures.

Despite last week’s Israeli Supreme Court ruling allowing women to read from the Torah in the women’s section of the Kotel and declaring that women shouldn’t be subjected to body searches before entering the Western Wall plaza, women going to a Women of the Wall prayer service at the site today were reportedly ordered to remove their coats and submit to a search.