Source: Google Maps
A less-than-heimishe nightclub is eager to open for business in the heart of Gravesend, but Orthodox residents in the area do not want any of their crazy tsures, Vos Iz Neias is reporting.
The business, called Pleasure, would be situated on the corner of Avenue U and East 9th Street, within a stone’s throw from the “Torah Academy of Brooklyn, a boys yeshiva high school…numerous shuls, a kosher pizzeria and a school bus stop utilized by several yeshivos and Bais Yaakovs [girls yeshivas].”
The upscale restaurant and lounge would replace an identical establishment with the same name and at the same location, which Community Board 15 Chairperson Theresa Scavo railed against initially, calling the first incarnation of Pleasure “a detriment to the quality of life in this neighborhood.”
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A performance by Mikhail Svetlov (Source: mikhailsvetlov.com)
Principal soloist from the Bolshoi Theater and Metropolitan Opera, Mikhail Svetlov, will perform “The Cosmos, the Singer and the Stars,” May 22, 5 p.m. at the Shorefront YM-YWHA, 3300 Coney Island Avenue.
The Grammy-nominated bass, who performs in Russian and English, will showcase some of the classic masterpieces from his world vocal repertoire, a satirical mini-opera by Dmitri Shostakovich, “Anti-Formalist Rayok” (“The Peep-show”), and the premiere of two new Russian romances by internationally acclaimed composer Dennis Dougherty.
The program also features a dialogue between Svetlov and J. David Jackson, an assistant conductor of at the New York Metropolitan Opera.
Svetlov, nominated for a 2003 Grammy Award for his interpretation of the music of Igor Stravinsky, is the first Russian bass to ever perform the title roles in Don Giovanni and The Flying Dutchman.
To learn more, call the Y at (718) 646-1444, email mail@shorefronty.org, or go to www.shorefronty.org/arts or www.mikhailsvetlov.com.
The Shorefront YM-YWHA of Brighton-Manhattan Beach will host art historian and cultural critic Maya Pritsker, who will lead a discussion, entirely in Russian, entitled “From the Lower East Side to Broadway: The Jewish Mark on American Theater,” May 15, 4 p.m. at the Y, 3300 Coney Island Avenue, at the corner of Brightwater Court.
From Abraham Goldfaden, hailed as the father of the Yiddish theater, to such greats as Jacob Adler, Molly Picon and Menasha Skulnik, Pritsker will highlight the lives of the Jewish legends who, dating back to the 1870s, made their indelible mark on the Great White Way — from their humble beginnings staging Yiddish Theater productions in the Lower East Side to their significant social and cultural impact on the stages of Broadway.
To learn more, contact the Y at (718) 646-1444 or go to www.shorefronty.org.
Buzya Kimelfeld is awarded a plaque by Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes (left) upon her 103rd birthday, accompanied by her son (second from right) and Rabbi Moshe Wiener, executive director, Jewish Community Council of Greater Coney Island.
Happy birthday, bubele.
Buzya Kimelfeld, the beloved 103-year-old resident of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Coney Island’s (JCCGCI) Surf Solomon Senior Center, was fêted during a pomp-filled birthday celebration for the senior, who has literally seen it all.
Born in a small Ukrainian village in 1908 during the bloody reign of the last Tzar of Russia, Emperor Nicholas II, Buzya’s mother fell sick and died when she was very young and her father was murdered in an anti-Jewish pogrom, leaving the young orphan to care for her younger brother and sister while, according to Buzya’s son Peter, living “by her wits” to shield her siblings from anti-Jewish Russian authorities.
Keep reading about Kimelfeld amazing story.
Members of the Russian-Jewish youth movement EZRA USA @ Brooklyn will be hosting their annual commemoration of Yom Ha’Shoah — Holocaust Memorial Day — in remembrance of the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
The ceremony, May 1 at 3 p.m. inside the Sea Breeze Jewish Center (311 Sea Breeze Avenue), will feature a talk by a Holocaust survivor, a recitation of poems and selected readings, and a candle-lighting.
For more, call (718) 368-9200 or (718) 701-1527, or click here.
Vareniki comes smothered with crispy fried onions.
Welcome back to The Bite, Sheepshead Bites’ weekly column where we explore the foodstuffs of Sheepshead Bay. Each week we’ll check out a different offering from one of the many restaurants, delis, food carts, bakeries, butchers, fish mongers, or grocers in our neighborhood. If it’s edible, we’ll take a bite.
This week, we take a bite out of two Eastern Eurpean food standards: pelmeni and vareniki. Both are usually served hot; both are available in just about every “Russian” restaurant in the neighborhood; one is from Russia and the other from the Ukraine. Both are delicious.
“But what are pelmeni and vareniki? A Russian high wire act?” I hear you say. Find out more about the dish, and what we thought of Cafe Glechik.
Welcome back to The Bite, Sheepshead Bites’ weekly column where we explore the foodstuffs of Sheepshead Bay. Each week we’ll check out a different offering from one of the many restaurants, delis, food carts, bakeries, butchers, fish mongers, or grocers in our neighborhood. If it’s edible, we’ll take a bite.
Usually, we here at The Bite try to avoid controversy, but it seems to find us anyway. So this week I decided to embrace the controversial, and headed out to Cherry Hill Market to throw myself in the midsts of one of the neighborhood’s biggest, most heated controversies.
And by that, I mean I picked up one of the more contentious dishes in Russian/Ukrainian cuisine: Chicken Kiev. Oh, what controversy did you think I was talking about?!
Read our take on Cherry Hill’s Chicken Kiev, and a bit of the conflicting histories behind the dish.
In the back of my head, I keep an ever-growing list of marketing terms that appears to work on Eastern Europeans. These are terms you’ve seen proliferating on signs, billboards, newspaper ads and just about everywhere else since the neighborhood’s demographics shifted over the past two decades.
They’re words like luxury, gourmet, royal and premium. And, in our neighborhood, they’re more often slapped onto things that are so obviously… not… luxurious.
Well, I saw this ad on Avenue Z and East 13th Street for Transaero Airlines, which offers “Imperial” class service to Moscow. But there’s nothing particularly imperial about it. In fact, it looks like an example of Soviet utilitarian marketing, designed by the most talentless 4th grader they could afford.
But back to the terminology.
This kind of marketing – to the outside observer – suggests that every Russian in our neighborhood is obsessed with the appearance of luxury and elitism. Now, I know well-enough that that ain’t true.
But the marketing continues, so Royal Sheepshead Bites – the most luxurious news blog of gourmet information served at a premium to only the most imperial-class of readers – is asking if our Russian readers would like to give some insight into this phenomenon.
Can we? (Photo credit: Wikipedia Commons)
Looks like Little Odessa is far from united in their perception of the Brighton Beach reality series, and television producers looking for real Russkie drama need only follow around the community’s leadership.
Following the letter earlier this week written by Russian-Speaking American Leadership Caucus’ John Lisyanskiy and signed by dozens of politicians, media personalities, advocates and business owners bashing on the upcoming Brighton Beach reality show, another Brighton Beach heavyweight is criticizing the critics for not doing their homework.
Keep reading: Brightonites bash Brightonites’ bashing of Brighton Beach.
A March casting call for 'Brighton Beach'
Just weeks into shooting for the Brighton Beach reality show, the Russian-American community is blasting entertainment media for cartoonish depictions of Russian-Americans, and warning producers of the new series to avoid callous stereotyping.
A group of 42 elected politicians and Russian-speaking activists sent a strongly-worded letter to Lifetime Networks executives, taking issue with the proposed show’s model – the “highly contentious and ethnically derogatory Jersey Shore.”
“It has come to our attention that the casting call for the show sought out ‘the Russian Snooki and The Situation’, reducing would-be contestants to vodka-drinking ethnic caricatures who ‘love attention’ and do little more than ‘eat, drink and party’,” wrote John Lisyanskiy, the founder of the Russian-Speaking American Leadership Caucus, and the main signee on the letter.
The Brighton Beach reality show is already shooting – keep reading.
