Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Not your typical Crown Heights family

Yosef Abrahamson, 16, right, with his mother, Dinah, and his sister, Sarah,
near their home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn (Bess Greenberg/The New York Times)

An interesting and unusual story in the New York Times - especially for us Down Under where most Jews are white and even the Sefardim look relatively pale.

This is certainly not the type of story one expects to come out of Crown Heights. This young man looks quite well rounded thanks to his mother. Hopefully he will spend some quality time in Yeshivah before he goes off to college.

One paragraph I liked:
Yosef was obviously sheltered from too much scrutiny from the outside world, but the surprising combination of his race and his particular form of religious observance fazed no one in Omaha — for all the average person knew in Omaha, all Hasidic Jews were of African descent, his mother said. When friends from Nebraska first visited New York, they were fascinated to meet some white Hasids for the first time.


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