Victor Cohen 

On May 14th, residents in Deal, New Jersey, will vote to determine who will govern for the next four years. 

How Deal Governance Works  

Deal is governed by a non-partisan commission, as prescribed by the Walsh Act. The Walsh Act, signed into law in 1911 by then Governor of New Jersey Woodrow Wilson, permits municipalities to adopt a non-partisan commission form of government. The commissions in Walsh Act municipalities are composed of either three or five members, elected for four-year terms. The commissioners themselves elect one commissioner as mayor, who serves as the chair of the commission. Most towns or cities conduct highly political mayoral elections. In Deal, this is not the case. 

In In the upcoming Deal elections,  three commissioners are running for election, one of whom will become mayor, as mentioned above. A two-thirds majority of the commissioners is required to pass any ordinance or bill. All significant resolutions are decided in this manner. 

I was privileged to interview two candidates in this year’s election, newly appointed Commissioner Jack Kassin, and Mayor Sam Cohen. They are both part of the Simhon-Cohen-Kassin team, which is seeking reelection. Let’s hear what they had to say. 

Commissioner Jack Kassin’s Vision for Deal 

Mr. Kassin stated, “My vision is to make Deal into a very nice neighborhood, to keep the idyllic small-town feeling.” One of Kassin’s goals is to improve and beautify Norwood Avenue. He proposes  more consistent signage and making Norwood Avenue more pedestrian-friendly. Mr. Kassin also discussed possible renovations for the Deal Casino. 

Mr. Kassin has a proud legacy of working with local community institutions, such as the Lawrence Avenue Synagogue. He has been involved with the synagogue and has been part of its committee since its dedication in 1984. He said, “I am devoted to that synagogue, to the rabbis, the committee, and the members of that congregation.” 

Mr. Kassin said,  “DSN is one of the biggest blessings and accomplishments in our community in a long, long time, and we’ve had many, thank Gd.” 

All faucets of DSN are active in the winter, including the sports leagues, the restaurants, and the use of the buildings themselves. Mr. Kassin noted that Deal’s population  is growing year-by-year. “I pray that this growth continues and we build from strength.” 

Summertime in Deal 

During the summer Deal changes quite a bit. “When the summer comes around,” Mr. Kassin said, “of course it becomes very exciting, filled with events, fundraisers, weddings, engagements, brit milot, you name it! 

“In the summer, thank Hashem, every single synagogue in the area is booming. It’s a beautiful thing to see, a beautiful thing to have going on, and it involves men, women, and children.” 

Strong Commitment to Deal 

Mr. Kassin’s involvement comes from a desire to do his part to help in all aspects of the town. He is proud to be a member of his team. He concluded, “Our team, starting with Mayor Cohen and Commissioner David Simhon, has a proven track record – caring deeply for the benefit of the community. They are honorable men, with great integrity, they love and care for everybody within Deal. The motivation strictly concerns what is good for the town, what’s good for the year-round and summer-only residents, and what is good for the overall benefit of the community.” 

Mayor Sam Cohen Weighs In 

One might ask why Mayor Cohen made the move from Brooklyn (he lived in the 70s between O and P) to Deal. He said that when he got to Deal, “I noticed immediately how much better life was there.” Between the tranquility of the town, the less aggressive drivers, and the ease of parking, Mayor Cohen decided to make the move to Deal and he has never looked back. 

Thirteen years ago, Mayor Harry Franco, a”h, told Sam Cohen that there was an opening for one of the commissioner spots, and that he thought Sam was right for the position. Sam was elected as one of the commissioners. Tragically, within a year Mayor Franco passed away. After a few more years serving as commissioner, Sam ran alongside David Simhon with the goal of becoming Deal’s next mayor, and won. 

Mayor Cohen’s Praise of DSN 

Mayor Cohen praised DSN wholeheartedly, citing DSN’s strong influence on the Jersey Shore community. DSN brought people in Deal together, especially the youth. It provided community members with a central meeting place, which provided a venue for events, sports, and even restaurants. DSN truly lives up to its name as the “Deal Sephardic Network,” and acts as a unifying force for the community in Deal. 

Mayor Cohen  noted that at the opening of DSN, Steve Carasia, the former town administrator was honored. He worked tirelessly for the benefit of the community, unfortunately passing away this past year. Mayor Cohen said, “He was instrumental in helping us pave the way to many projects that we have implemented, and was a true friend to the community.” 

Current Status and Future Plans 

Mayor Cohen believes that Deal is on a very healthy path and is headed in the right direction. He notes that, “Deal boasts the lowest crime rate of any town in the area, and will continue to implement the latest security measures.” Due in large part to Deal’s robust monitoring system, Mayor Cohen said, “If any undesirables drive into town, we know within seconds.” 

Mayor Cohen’s main goal is to keep much of Deal as-is, keeping it from being overdeveloped. Currently, the town is healthy financially, and Mayor Cohen believes that leaving Deal in the steady, capable hands now at the helm is the way to ensure the best governing of Deal in the future. 

As for future plans, Mayor Cohen would like to see the Deal First Aid situated in their own building. Up until now they have been working out of the fire station. 

Mayor Cohen would like to beautify Norwood Avenue in partnership with Ocean Township. One project in progress is aimed at introducing plants that are more aesthetic and less intrusive. Mayor Cohen notes that despite bureaucratic red tape, the project is well on its way, and he takes pride in its progress.  

May Deal continue to prosper and be a source of blessing to all its residents.  

Rabbi Yehuda Finchas 

Ikey shared a serious dilemma. He is a medical student and his research entails experimentation on mice. Ikey is very fond of animals and asked me: “Rabbi, I know that our experiments may lead to a breakthrough in scientific understanding or even to a cure for a disease. But on the other hand, there is a fair bit of pain caused to the mice and other rodents. What should I do? Isn’t this a problem of tzaar baalei haim?”   

Moshe is an animal trainer who trains dogs to sniff out illegal substances for the police force. The training involves some discomfort and even cruelty to the dogs. He wanted to make sure that what he was doing was halachically acceptable. 

Animal experimentation has been vital to advancing medical science. Many life-saving medications and treatments were developed based on animal experimentation. On the other hand, causing pain to animals is biblically prohibited according to the majority of the poskim and is expressed through a number of different mitzvot. The Torah commands us to help unload the burden from a friend’s donkey (Bava Metzia 31a). Furthermore, “If you see your enemy’s donkey lying under its burden would you refrain from helping him? You shall surely help along with him” (Shemot 23:5). And one may not muzzle an ox while it plows a field (Devarim 25:4) as this can cause distress to the animal. In fact, we must be so careful in taking good care of our animals, that we must feed our animals before eating ourselves (Berachot 40a, S.A. OC 167:6, Kaf Hahaim 50). 

This is an area where we are taught to be particularly careful.  Rebbi was punished for his lack of compassion to a calf and his suffering only ended when he later had the opportunity to show mercy to an animal (Bava Metzia 85a). In contrast, Moshe Rabbenu was chosen to be the leader of Am Yisrael due to the compassion he showed to animals (Shemot Raba 2:2) [“If he can show compassion to an animal, he can show compassion to man.”]. 

Hacham Ovadia, zt”l, has numerous responsa on proper treatment of animals. In Yehave Daat (3:66) he prohibits bullfighting and expands that this even includes attending a bullfight as a spectator. He quotes the Noda Beyehuda who prohibits hunting for recreational purposes. “We only find the title, ‘hunter’ with regards to Nimrod and Esav (Beresheet 10:9, 25:27). But this is not the way of Avraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”  

And in Yabia Omer (YD, 9:3) Hacham Ovadia prohibits force feeding geese (which involves significant discomfort and even torture) and encouraged people to ban the sale of foie gras. At the same time, one may certainly visit a zoo, “For a person’s soul is moved by seeing the works of Hashem, as it says, “How great are Your works, Gd! All of them were made with wisdom (Tehillim 104:24).” Hacham Ovadia quotes how Maran Hida visited a zoo when he was in London to observe Hashem’s creations. 

Hacham Ovadia (Yabia Omer YD, 9:32) explains further that the prohibition of tzaar baalei haim is defined as inflicting unnecessary pain on animals. Consequently, he permits using doves in treating jaundice, as tzaar baalei haim does not apply when the action is necessary for human benefit. According to this principle, it is similarly permissible to perform clinical tests on animals for the purpose of developing medications and understanding disease in humans (Shevut Yaakov 3:71), always being careful not to cause any additional harm than is absolutely necessary. 

The Rishon Lezion, Hacham Yitzhak Yosef (Shu”t Rishon Lezion 1:5), was asked by the head of the Israeli police if they can train dogs to detect illegal narcotics, where the process would involve a certain level of suffering to these dogs. The Rishon Lezion, based on the principles above, ruled that if absolutely necessary, this would be permitted in order to ensure these dangerous narcotics would be out of harm’s way. However, any suffering to the dogs should be limited as much as possible. 

In conclusion, one must take great care not to cause cruelty to animals, however, as per Ikey’s and Moshe’s questions, since what they are doing is for human benefit it is permitted. However, they must try and minimize any harm as much as possible.  

Rabbi Yehuda Finchas is a worldwide expert, lecturer and author on Medical Halacha. He heads the Torat Habayit Medical Halacha Institute. His latest book is “Brain Death in Halacha and the Tower of Babel Syndrome.” To contact Rabbi Finchas, email rabbi@torathabayit.com.

DAVE GORDON 

There has never been a sovereign Palestinian Arab state, the Arabs  are not  indigenous to Israel, there was no “Palestinian” ethnicity in history, and many scholars hold that Arab populations did not really come in large numbers until the late 19th century. 

And unlike Zionism, the movement to return Jews to their ancestral homeland, there was no movement for an independent “Palestinian” state for Arabs anywhere in history. 

The Soviets Enter the Picture 

Then something happened in the 1960s that successfully pushed a narrative contrary to these facts. The Soviets, jockeying for global power and a larger sphere of influence, sought to get cozier with Arabs.  

The Arab countries had the oil– and the oil meant infinitely more than a tiny Jewish country with no resources. It helped that the USSR opposed anything America supported, including Israel. And  the Arabs were bitter about Israel’s existence, and bore a grudge against Israel for its victories over Arab armies in multiple wars.  

But it was not always this way. For a brief time in the late 1940s the Russians had Israel’s back: they recognized the state, supported its entry into the UN, and  let one of its satellite communist states, Czechoslovakia, sell arms to the nascent state. However, the honeymoon did not last long because  Josef Stalin – the Soviet dictator of the time – fell under the influence of anti-Semitic paranoia – and saw benefit in courting the Islamic world. 

“Palestinian Arabs” – Convenient Partners in Promoting Anti-Semitism 

The Russians knew of a key group that was already fighting the Jews from within the territory of Palestine – a group that did not have a nation,  and thus did not have to abide by international treaties – those who referred to themselves as Palestinian Arabs. They were the ones neatly positioned to punish the Jews. (By this time, the cause had already planted some roots. Haj Amin al Husseini, who eventually became the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and allied with Hitler during the Second World War. Husseini began spreading the Brotherhood’s jihadist doctrines.)   

The PLO and Yasser Arafat 

To further the cause of annihilating Jews, in 1964 the Soviets helped launch the Palestine Liberation Organization.  

Its Charter, drafted in Moscow, was rubber stamped by some four hundred KGB-picked Arab representatives. (As an aside, its preamble mentioned something called “Palestinian Arab People” – since up until 1948, “Palestinians” specifically meant Jews who lived in the Holy Land.) The Charter’s messaging was filled with a not-so-coded message to eliminate Israel. In 1968, Article 24 – which said that the Palestinians lay no claim to Gaza or the West Bank – was quietly removed, because, of course, it was a year after Israel won these areas in the Six-Day War. And naturally, Jews cannot have their land back after two thousand years, or acquire land in a defensive war, like so many other countries have. 

Hundreds of Soviet secret service agents fanned out in the Arab world, looking for leaders who would take up the cause – and in the 1960s one of them was arch-terrorist Yasir Arafat, at the time a dedicated Marxist-Leninist, who became chairman of the PLO in 1969.  

Onetime head of Romanian intelligence under Nicolae Ceauscscu, Lieutenant  General , Ion Mihai Pacepa – who later, in 1978, became the highest-ranking KGB officer to ever defect from a Soviet bloc country — was closely associated with Arafat, the PLO chairman as part of his KGB duties.  Decades after he defected,  Pacepa began writing and speaking about Soviet plans to destroy Israel. He had recorded several conversations with Arafat when they met in Romania, at dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s palace. Arafat, in these recordings, unabashedly revealed that his primary goal is to destroy Israel. Ceausescu personally mentored Arafat on propaganda techniques.  

Disinformation Campaign with International Partners 

The Soviet propaganda project  included a disinformation campaign that misused and contorted language to make the Palestinian cause appear noble and acceptable: that is, concocting a narrative of a human rights battle, a homeland struggle, or an anti-imperialist or anti-colonialist struggle, to hide the true aim:  destroying the Jews. After all – he needed to whitewash terrorism to make murdering innocent civilians “justifiable.” The strategy worked: the world was soon convinced that the Palestinian Arab dream was about a land claim, rather than the plain old anti-Semitic  desire to wipe Israel off the map. 

Other guidance for Arafat came from Muhammad Yazid, one-time minister of information in two Algerian wartime governments from 1958 and 1962, as well as from General Vo Ngyuen Giap, an important Vietnamese Communist revolutionary and military leader and a close colleague of Ho Chi Minh.  

During the Vietnam War, Giap was a North Vietnamese propagandist, who realized that the Palestinian Arabs would have an easier time “selling” a struggle for human rights, than a war of annihilation. In Pacepa’s view, the sanitizing of this kind of message had eventually successfully switched the West’s support during the Vietnam War and would do so again with the Palestinians. By this time, the Soviets already had created “liberation movements” in Bolivia (1964), Colombia (1965), and Armenia (in the 70s). The Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia bombed American airline offices in parts of Europe. Armenia remains something of a Russian puppet regime to this day. 

The Soviets Ramp Up Their Hate and Propaganda 

The Soviets bankrolled Palestinian leaders, and their terror activities, while ramping up a strategic propaganda campaign to demonize Jews and Zionism across the Arab world. That included a “disinformation office” that pumped out every kind of vile anti-Semitic message in every Arabic media publication. 

Pacepa confirmed this in his article “Russian Footprints” in National Review Online, Aug. 24, 2006, saying that the Kremlin decided to turn the Islamic world against the Jews and the US with “Nazi-style hatred.”  

KGB Chairman, and soon to be the sixth leader of the Soviet Union, Yury Andropov, told Pacepa, that a war of brainwashing of a billion Arabs “could inflict far greater damage” than could a few million soldiers. “We in the Soviet bloc tried to conquer minds, because we knew we could not win any military battles,” Pacepa wrote, paraphrasing Andropov. The point was that “no one within the American/Zionist sphere of influence should any longer feel safe.”
 

“The Islamic world,” he wrote, “was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred… Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep. The Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch.” 

“We had only to keep repeating our themes — that the United States and Israel were ‘fascist, imperial-Zionist countries’ bankrolled by rich Jews” and that the little Satan and the big Satan’s goals were to convert “the Islamic world into a Jewish colony.”  

The Soviet machine and its Warsaw Pact tentacles continued to provide intelligence, arms, training, aid, funding, and political cover to the Palestinian cause. 

These details are outlined in the Stanford Review, Feb. 27, 2008, in an article called “Deception of Palestinian Nationalism,” and in an online essay called “Soviet Russia, The Creator of the PLO and The Palestinian People” by Wallace Edward Brand. 

PLO Rejects Peace, Chooses Destruction 

In ensuing years, Arafat would preach one thing in Arabic – Jihad – and another, more palatable message in English to the West. He would go on to outright reject the generous offer at Camp David in 2000, that gave 96% of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria – which Israelis call Yehuda V’Shomron) to the Palestinians, choosing instead to launch a deadly Intifada. Five peace offers were rejected by Arafat since that time, demonstrating his single motive to destroy Israel, rather than build a state of his own.  

Current Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who kicked off his international political career by writing a paper denying the Holocaust during graduate studies at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow,  has vowed that any Palestinian state would be free of Jews and supported the destruction of Israel. Most recently, he has denied the atrocities of Oct. 7., and has– Throughout, he has courted  heads of state under the cover of being a partner in peace. The widespread support of these poisonous ideas has taken hold amongst leftwing activists around the globe, and many foreign leaders, while fully supported in many forms by the Russians, Iranians, Arab dictatorships, and to a certain extent, the Chinese. In recent months, global fora have pushed the idea of a “two state solution” even after the Hamas terror attacks, and the high number of Palestinians who supported it – still buying the idea that the war is about land. 

A member of the PLO’s Executive Committee,, Zahir Muhse’in, went on record plainly, on this very idea. “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the State of Israel for our Arab unity,” stated Muhse’in,  in a 1977 interview with Amsterdam-based newspaper Trouw.  

“In reality, today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.”