Because Beach Hillel is a co-sponsor of the Festival, which takes place right here in Long Beach, Beach Hillel students are still able to purchase tickets for the pre-sale price of $36! This ticket includes food during shabbat and Sunday morning, concert admission, and programming for all three days. It’s a spectacular deal. Lodging options include a great hotel rate or camping at the JCC – details are on www.jewliciousfestival.com.

If you are a full-time undergraduate at Long Beach City College or CSULB and still need to purchase your ticket, email ebanarie@gmail.com for the promotional code. Then click here to join the CSULB Goes Jewlicious Facebook group, and discuss how pumped you are! It’s going to be a phenomenal weekend.

And, as always, more pictures are available at www.flickr.com/beachhillel

“Blue Moon” by Ryan Pessah

“Rustic Chanukah” by Alon Mahller

and “Hope for the World” by Kiva Hewett

The winner, chosen by popular vote by passing students, was “Rustic Chanukah”! Alon Mahller will receive $250.

All 3 menorahs will be displayed in the Alpert JCC (3801 E. Willow St., Long Beach) beginning on Monday. Be sure to come by and check them out!

This event attracted attention of local media: Articles by CSULB’s Daily 49er and the Long Beach Press-Telegram have already been posted, with the Grunion Gazette expected to come out with its article early next week.

Congratulations to all of our entrants – you’re all winners!

After they have had a few days to adjust and get to know their way around town a bit, Rachel and Rabbi Drew will be on campus and at the office in the JCC. They are looking forward to meeting you and picking up where Rachel Bookstein and Rabbi Yonah have left off. Keep an eye out for all four of them–the Booksteins are helping the Kaplans get established here in LB and have been speaking and planning together for the last month.

Rachel has been a teacher in NY for the past five years. Prior to that, she was recognized at the NY Region Advisor of the Year for NCSY. Rabbi Drew was ordained by Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School and has a very active online presence.

Mark your calendars for Friday night November 20th. Rachel and Rabbi Drew will be hosting their first Shabbat dinner here in Long Beach. Plan to be there!

The bris will take place tomorrow morning, 11/4, with shacharit at 7:15am followed by the ceremony at 8:00am, at the following location:
Upstairs @ Bais Bezalel
8850 W. Pico Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90035

The Beach Hillel family will be there celebrating, and we hope you will be too! MAZEL TOV!

Below is the article from the Jewish Daily Forward.

By Josh Nathan-Kazis,

Mostly, they’re Lubavitchers. Or so it seemed, when the Jewish Federations of North America — the organization that until recently was called United Jewish Communities — announced the semifinalists of its online competition to select the winner of the inaugural Jewish Community Hero Award.  

JFNA, the federation umbrella group, had invited Web surfers to nominate and vote for their favorite Jewish activists and organizers. The winner will be named Jewish Community Hero of the Year at the JFNA’s General Assembly in November and will receive $25,000 in funding for his or her project. 

And it’s clear from the results that some constituencies followed the old admonition to “vote early and often.” This was an election for the Web savvy. The top vote- getter was Rabbi Yonah Bookstein, organizer of the annual Jewlicious Festival in Long Beach, Calif., and executive rabbi of JConnectLA, an outreach and networking organization for young Jewish professionals. Bookstein received 91,450 votes, nearly twice the number of the second-place vote- getter and more than 10 times the number of the 20th-place vote-getter.

Bookstein attributes his impressive showing to his grass-roots following…. “We definitely had people Tweeting, Facebooking,” he said.

But Chabad voters proved they are no slouches in the world of the Internet, either. Although its numbers in the United States have been estimated at about 30,000, Chabad-Lubavitch is among the most visi- ble ultra-Orthodox denomination as a result of its practice of sending members to run outreach programs in nonobservant communities and on college campuses.

Andy Neusner, the JFNA’s Web content manager and an administrator of the Jewish Heroes program, says that Chabad’s disproportionately successful showing is a tribute to the movement’s Internet savvy, noting, “There’s no question that they did amazingly well in getting organized and getting votes.”

Richard Wexler, a Chicago lawyer who helped create UJC in 1999 and has since become a public critic of the organization, says that the results point to a flawed, if well-intentioned, competition. While one goal of the campaign was to collect names and e-mail addresses for use by the federations, Wexler says that it had the unintended result of providing Chabad with a “showcase for their ability of their members to motivate people that may be heroic to them and to the Chabad movement, but may not be heroic in the communal sense.”

Representatives of Chabad’s outreach organization say that their success in dominating the vote was not the result of a concentrated effort on the part of their movement’s sophisticated Web operation.

“This just happened, and I want to tell you, it astonished me,” said Rabbi Dovid Eliezrie, who is a Chabad emissary in Yorba Linda, Calif., and a liaison between Chabad and the federation system. “It’s something that developed on the grass-roots. I was really surprised.”

Among the Chabad-affiliated semifinalists is Rabbi Manis Friedman, the Minnesota shaliach, or emissary, who ignited a mini-firestorm in June when comments he made to Moment magazine were interpreted as calling for the indiscriminate killing of Arabs.

“We could have sent an e-mail to every shaliach in the world and tell them to please vote, but we didn’t,” Eliezrie said. “This was not organized or orchestrated in any way, shape or form.”

But that doesn’t mean Chabad adherents weren’t campaigning on behalf of Lubavitch candidates.

Shmais.com, an independent news site serving the Lubavitch community, ran at least a dozen posts asking readers to vote for Lubavitch candidates, according to the site’s founder and editor, Levi Hodakov. One September post exhorted readers to “make sure to vote at least once a day.”

“I think that we drove a lot of votes,” Hodakov said. “I pushed it a lot to my readers.”

Besides Chabad’s dominance, the other big surprise was Bookstein’s showing. David Abitbol, founder of the Jewlicious blog, wrote in an e-mail that Bookstein’s friends and followers had promoted his candidacy heavily via e-mail and social-networking sites: “What I saw was a ton of decentralized grassroots activity done by young adults/students who attended or worked on our Festival (as well as others) on behalf of a man who is beloved by the people he serves.”

Kosha Dillz, a Jewish rapper, recorded a song in support of Bookstein’s candidacy. A sample verse: “If we show each other mad love/we will all get together up above.”

Neusner points to the support that the popular Jewish blog Jewlicious gave to Bookstein’s candidacy as a key reason for the impressive tally. The blog, which co-sponsors Bookstein’s annual festival, published posts about the competition and posted an advertisement that linked directly to the button that voters clicked to vote for Bookstein. Visitors to Jewlicious.com who clicked on the ad were taken to a page that informed them they had just submitted their vote.

Abitbol provided screenshots of the site’s online backend that appeared to show that only 259 people had clicked on the ad during the time it was online.

“It was a bit more of a shortcut than we would have preferred,” Neusner said of the ad, noting that, during next year’s competition, JFNA would institute safeguards against such a strategy.

The popular vote-getters aside, the Jewish Heroes campaign, as a concept, received harsh criticism in some corners of the Jewish community. On the progressive Jewish blog Jewschool.com, contributor David Levy wrote: “This strikes me as so contrary to the idea behind federation, I just don’t know what to do with it.… The idea that federations distribute money based on a strategic plan for maximizing the impact of that money becomes a laughingstock.”

Neusner rejected that criticism. “The larger goals are not about that $25,000,” he said, noting that the effort brought in 40,000 e-mail addresses for use by local Jewish federations. “That’s one of the carrots.”

An eclectic panel of judges, which includes Orthodox boxer Dmitriy Salita and Eli Winkelman, founder of the fundraising group Challah for Hunger, will pick one winner from the 20 top vote getters.

Contact Josh Nathan-Kazis at nathankazis@forward.com

Beach Bonfire and Havdallah

Join Beach Hillel student for a fantastic evening of s’mores, snacks and music at the beach.

Bring Instruments and a sweater… it gets windy! 

Rides are available form the turnournd circle at Brotman hall.

The text reads: “Members of Beach Hillel break their 25-hour fast during Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, in the University Student Union on Monday. During Yom Kippur, Jews repent for their sins between the self, friends, and God, said Jordan Aharoni (right), a Beach Hillel member. Jews fast to repent to God, Aharoni said, because ‘he’s not as relenting as your friends.’”

Click the above picture to be taken to the virtual edition on the newspaper’s website.