The Satmar Town of South Blooming Grove Had Mayoral Elections but Didn't Tell Anyone!

 

The age old riddle will soon be resolved! "Does a tree that fell in a forest make a sound if there is no one around?"

כדרכם בקודש Satmar is always saying that the State of Israel is causing a Chillul Hashem, but as the Gemarrah says כל הפוסל במימו פוסל !

Satmar thinks that they are smarter than the goyim and can outfox them, but they are learning that the goyim are not so stupid; this is a potential massive Chillul Hashem! 

State officials are investigating a special election in the Village of South Blooming Grove that appears to have taken place with little to no public notice.

Village officials re-elected Mayor George Kalaj and trustees Abraham Weiss and Yitzchok Feldman on Oct. 22, but many residents and even local lawmakers say they never knew the vote was happening.

The last village election was held in March 2022, meaning most residents believed the next vote wouldn’t be until 2026 under the village’s four-year term structure.

State Sen. James Skoufis, who chairs the New York State Senate Investigations Committee, says his office began receiving calls from constituents after the election asking how it occurred and whether the village followed proper procedures.

“I didn’t know about it. Everyone I’ve spoken to in South Blooming Grove didn’t know about it. Everyone who pays attention to politics in Orange County that I’ve heard from did not know anything about it,” Skoufis told News 12.

Documents obtained by News 12 under a Freedom of Information Act request from the Orange County Board of Elections show village officials held a referendum in June 2025 to move elections from March to October. The measure passed 61-10 with only about 70 people voting.

Roughly 130 ballots were cast in the Oct. 22 election for the unopposed mayor and trustees — about eight times fewer than the nearly 1,000 ballots cast in the last regularly scheduled election in 2022.

Skoufis called the roughly 3% turnout “about as low as I’ve ever seen for a municipal election” and questioned whether voters were properly informed.

“I want to know whether the election was intentionally suppressed,” he said. “If that’s the case, that’s voter suppression — and that’s a really serious issue.”

The New York Attorney General’s Office confirms it is reviewing the matter, while Skoufis says his committee has requested all records from the village clerk, including any proof of how and when residents were notified.

He’s given officials until Friday to comply and says he won’t rule out using subpoena power if they don’t.

The Orange County Board of Elections says village elections are administered by the village itself, not by the county.

South Blooming Grove Village Attorney Scott Ugell declined to comment and the village mayor did not respond to an email requesting information.

The Balfour Declaration is a monument to humanity in this dark age of anti-Semitism

 

Jerusalem, 1925: British General Edmund Allenby, former British prime minister Arthur Balfour and First High Commissioner of Palestine, Herbert Samuel 

“It’s a boy”, Sir Mark Sykes, the government’s negotiator on the Middle East, told the Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, eventually to be the first president of Israel, on October 31, 1917. Two days later, on November 2, the British commitment to Zionism was born, with the Balfour Declaration that the “Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.

But the Declaration had no legal effect. It was a politician’s promise by Arthur Balfour, foreign secretary in Lloyd George’s wartime government. And, as we know, it is not unknown for such promises to be broken. So it did not wholly satisfy Zionists who had always sought “a home in Palestine guaranteed by public law”.

That was achieved in 1922 when the League of Nations awarded the Mandate for Palestine, including the Declaration, to Britain. And in 1922, the Lloyd George government issued a White Paper confirming that Jews were in Palestine as of right and would eventually constitute the majority.

Why was the Balfour Declaration made? Many claim that the motives were strategic – to secure the support of American and Russian Jews for the war effort and pre-empt German support for Zionism.

But that would not explain why the Declaration became more than a promise in 1922 after the war had ended.

The main motivation behind British support for Zionism was not strategic, but ideological, indeed religious. Britain in the early 20th century was a Christian society. Protestants and Evangelicals – Balfour and Lloyd George in particular – believed on Biblical authority that the Jews would eventually return to the Promised Land.

Yet Israel did not come into existence until 1948, over 30 years after the Declaration. Guilt over the Holocaust, some say, was the prime motive for its creation. That is absurd. There was precious little sympathy for Zionism on the part of Attlee and Bevin in the late 1940s nor from the American State Department.

It is more accurate to say that had Israel been created in 1938 rather than 1948, the Holocaust would not have occurred.

Before 1948, Jews, in the words of the historian, Lewis Namier, suffered from too much history but not enough geography. But in 1948, Jews became subjects of history rather than objects, able to determine their own future.

That is why, as Winston Churchill told the Commons in January 1949, the creation of Israel was “an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand or even three thousand years”.

Lacking a state, Jews were helpless in the face of Nazism. But after the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, which the then German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, compared to those of the Nazis, Jews could hit back at their enemies.

Balfour himself was far from being a sentimental philo-Semite. Indeed, he told Chaim Weizmann that visiting Bayreuth years before, he had met Cosima Wagner, the composer’s widow. and had “shared many of her anti-Semitic postulates”.

It is not that Balfour was himself anti-Semitic. But he believed that anti-Semitism was endemic wherever Jews lived in considerable numbers and, according to Weizmann, “he was thinking more of the West European Jews than those of Eastern Europe”.

Until recently, Balfour’s fears would have appeared absurd. In the years between the wars, Britain remained untainted by the anti-Semitic movements ravaging the Continent. When Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, took up anti-Semitism in the 1930s, he became a political pariah.

But hostility to Israel has now morphed into anti-Semitism in countries hitherto relatively free of it; Britain, Australia, Canada and the United States.

In Britain it re-appeared, not amongst ill-educated inadequates of the sort who supported Mosley, but first in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, and then in our top universities, amongst our future political leaders. In Andrew Neil’s words, the more prestigious the university, the stupider the students!

The revival of anti-Semitism has shown in a way no Zionist arguments ever could, the need for a state with a Jewish majority where Jews can live without fear.

The Balfour Declaration contained an important proviso – “that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. It did not mention the national rights of Arabs, since at that time many believed that such rights were reserved for those of European origin.

All the same, “the civil and religious rights” of Arabs are better protected in Israel than in the murderous regimes and failed states which constitute much of the rest of today’s Middle East.

The early Zionists hoped for Arab acceptance. But a brief period of amity soon gave rise, inevitably no doubt, to a persistent and often violent conflict between two national claims, each backed by religion.

Balfour would not have been surprised. As chief secretary for Ireland in the 1880s, he had been accused of being unjust to Irish nationalists. “Justice” he mused, “there is not enough to go round”. And indeed in the Middle East there isn’t.

Nevertheless, Israel has become an insurance mechanism for Jews against anti-Semitism; and sadly no one can predict when or where that mechanism will be needed.

And that is why, as the diplomatic historian, Tom Otte, has argued, the Balfour Declaration stands as “one of the few monuments to humanity in the 20th century”.

Sir Vernon Bogdanor is Professor of Government, King’s College, London and a member of the International Advisory Council of the Israel Democracy Institute

A Message from David Limbaugh

 

I would agree in principle that criticism of a country doesn't by itself imply animus toward the people of that country or their ethnicity, but what we're witnessing bespeaks of something more than that and if it didn't many of us wouldn't be concerned about it. There is . . .…

— David Limbaugh (@DavidLimbaugh) October 31, 2025

JD VANCE Allows Reporter to make an antisemitic suggestion that "Judaism openly supports the persecution of Christianity"

 

JD Vance was presented with an unambiguously antisemitic suggestion that Judaism openly supports the persecution of Christianity which was linked to “ethnic cleansing in Gaza”.

JD needed to blow that out of the water. He needed to say it was a sick prejudice. He needed to say… https://t.co/RdACpSyAHq

— Melanie Phillips (@MelanieLatest) October 30, 2025

Shabbas Ganiv keeps hitting NYC kosher stores on the Sabbath but remains free

 

Leave the gun, take the pastrami.

An unkosher ex-con, with a criminal record dating to the 1980s with over 40 arrests, has been burglarizing kosher groceries and delis on the Sabbath and High Holy Days for years – despite five prison stints.

Serial schnorrer Angelo Robinson was arrested again on Oct. 16 for allegedly breaking into two Brooklyn stores in 2024.

Robinson, 61, allegedly stole $30,000 from Kosher Korner in Gravesend on Yom Kippur in 2024 — the holiest day of the Jewish calendar — using a sawzall to break the lock on the back door of the McDonald Avenue supermarket, cops said.

“This is the epitome of the problem of New York,” the owner told The Post. “How many times can a guy get arrested?

“He keeps hitting Jewish stores on the Sabbath,” continued the disgusted store owner, who asked to be identified as Mr. Cohen. Observant Jews don’t work on Friday after sundown through Saturday at sunset.

Less than a month later, on Nov. 8, 2024, a Friday night, he allegedly used a crowbar to break through a rooftop hatch and enter Jerusalem Glatt, a kosher grocery on King’s Highway, cops said.

Robinson, who has a Staten Island address, then broke into a security room, snipping alarm wires and cutting open a safe to grab $107,000 in gelt, according to a criminal complaint against him.

He may also be a suspect in another burglary last month.

He last made headlines in October 2017 when he broke into then-Brooklyn state Sen. Simcha Felder’s office and punched a hole into the adjacent Mechy’s Gourmet on Avenue J, where he grabbed $5,000 from the register, cops said.

Robinson has served prison time for burglary and attempted burglary, and was most recently released from Bare Hill Prison upstate in 2023 after serving four years.

He also went to prison in 2014, 2008, 2001, 1992 and 1986, for burglary, according to the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision.

But his time behind bars has apparently not been a good enough deterrent.

The most recent case against Robinson went stale faster than day-old bagel when a fingerprint that identified him as the culprit wasn’t turned over by the cops to prosecutors in time to hold him, according to a law enforcement source. He pled not guilty at his arraignment and was released on his own recognizance, court records show.

When asked about the case, the NYPD said “this arrest remains active and the DA is proceeding with prosecution.”

Investigators got the fingerprint because Robinson left a Sawzall blade with a plastic wrapper on it behind in Cohen’s store, according to the criminal complaint.

“He threw a wrapper … on the floor,” Cohen said. “I put on a pair of gloves, threw it in a Ziploc bag.”

NYPD detectives were able to pull a latent print from the wrapper that led cops to Robinson through an FBI database.

Cohen got a call from the NYPD earlier this month telling him the fingerprint was matched with Robinson, according to Cohen and the court documents.

Robinson was arrested on Oct. 16 and arraigned on two dozen charges from last year’s heists, including burglary, grand larceny, possession of stolen property, criminal mischief and trespassing, the documents show.

Jerusalem Glatt owner Danny Farah said he isn’t afraid of losing money, but he is dismayed that Robinson keeps committing the same crime.

“I think the system is messed up and they gotta get him behind bars for a long, long while,” Farah said. “He’s hitting people and taking all their hard earned money.”

Before Robinson was arrested, another store was burglarized, police sources said.

Mountain Fruit on Avenue M in Midwood was hit in the early morning hours of Saturday, Oct. 11, store manager Eli Podrigal said. The culprit took $25,000.

The case is under investigation and nobody has been charged, the NYPD said.

The crook, who came in through the roof, had the chutzpah to spend two and a half hours sawing into the safe, the manager said.

“He used a grinder with crowbars and hammers and screwdrivers,” Podrigal said, explaining that the burglar repeatedly changed blades that broke during the process. “He had plenty of blades in his backpack to cover the whole night. It’s all on video.”

A Rally That Missed the Mark

DIN: I believe in Torato Umanuto—for those truly immersed in Torah learning. I don’t support mass arrests of yeshiva students, and I respect genuine Torah scholars who dedicate their lives to study. But the prayer rally organized on Thursday was a grave mistake.

Thousands of young Charedi men flooded the streets, many of whom are not learning full-time and are eligible for army service. Their absence from the IDF is glaring—and that public display alienated the Israeli public like nothing else. 

To secular Israelis, it felt like a slap in the face. Their children and grandchildren are fighting and dying in a brutal war, and this rally sent a message of indifference.

Are the organizers blind to how this looks? 

The insensitivity, the chutzpah, the refusal to share the burden—it’s supercilious and uncaring. 

I would like to know if this rally was "mekareiv" one single soul? I don't necessarily have an answer to that question, but what I am certain of is that it turned off hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Jews! 

These young men should have stayed in yeshiva and let the politicians handle the protest. Instead, they gained no supporters and likely lost many.

We need unity, not division. And we need honesty about who is truly learning—and who is simply avoiding responsibility.

And now this from Shoshanna Keats-Jaskoll

For years I have spoken about the dangers of allowing a community to segregate from society and make its own rules.

For years I have said an entire generation is being raised on fake enemies, intense fear mongering, and deep ignorance of reality.

For years I begged the moderate majority to speak against the mind control and extremism running rampant through the community.

For years I said this extremism is turning people away from Judaism and giving a bad face to Torah.

For years I said Beit Shemesh was the canary in the coalmine,

That the trajectory of a separatist community that vilifies the wider world and sees anything different as poison can only go one dark way

That allowing an exponentially growing population to not acknowledge the real world was a recipe for disaster.

That a curriculum that does not include math, science, civics, that holds one community above all while being told that the others want to destroy them crafts a wide and deep divide that will not be easily or quickly bridged

That a community built on fear and thriving on uniformity cannot stand without crushing everything beyond the mold and is not compatible with normative society

Because you can throw things at women when they aren't clothed the way you are taught they must be for you to be safe

And you can attack a newscaster's equipment when you're told he's trying to end your way of life

And you can destroy property when it belongs to an aggressive regime that seeks to steal your children's soul

And you can refuse to serve in an army that protects you when you're told it is run by heretics

And you can deny the sacrifice of thousands when you hold that all they stand for is illegitimate and nothing they do can come close to the importance of your deeds.

And we cannot allow this to continue

We cannot allow this divide, this hate, this pitting of our communities against one another.

We cannot allow the government to buy their votes while keeping them poor. We cannot remain silent while the government allows them to flout the laws against discrimination, enjoy tax benefits and discounts. We must demand an end to curriculums that make jobs impossible and people dependent.

We need to heal the rifts and balance the burden.

The damage is deep and vast and it will not change overnight. We must have tracks for integration and national service.

It's been 77 years of creating a population with a different set of rules. It will take decades to undo it.

But for this country to survive we must begin. Now.

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Military Advocate General "the Traitor" was dismissed, her rank will be revoked

 

After Military Advocate General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi informed the IDF Chief of Staff of her resignation on Friday morning, Defense Minister Israel Katz issued a statement later that afternoon clarifying that her dismissal had been his decision.

“This morning, I announced the dismissal of Military Advocate General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi from her position. I did not settle for placing her on leave,” said the Defense Minister.

He emphasized, “All necessary sanctions will be taken against her, beginning with the revocation of her rank. Anyone who slanders IDF soldiers and prioritizes the interests of Nukhba terrorists over theirs is unfit to wear the IDF uniform and belongs in prison.”

Meanwhile, former IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari addressed the matter, saying: “I have no connection to the leak of the video from Sde Teiman. I was unaware of any intention to release it and certainly did not approve it. At no point was the source of the leak brought to my attention. As I’ve said before, this is a serious incident that must be thoroughly investigated to uncover the full truth.”

Tomer-Yerushalmi was placed on leave earlier this week, following the opening of a criminal probe against her and investigation materials which clearly indicate that she instructed that materials from the Sde Teiman base be passed to the media, and on the day the video was leaked, she was informed in advance, many hours before publication, of the intention to leak it.

In the leaked video, soldiers from the elite Force 100 prison intervention unit are seen allegedly abusing a captured Hamas terrorist. The accusations have been under intense dispute since they were published, including claims that the video was doctored. Several of the soldiers involved were taken for investigation.

Israel’s deep state exposed.

The main story in the Sde Teiman video leak isn’t even the leak itself. It’s the lie to the Supreme Court, it’s the fake investigation where they said they didn’t find who leaked it, and it’s mainly this cover-up culture.

One protects another, the… pic.twitter.com/1x6sdDMxwy

— Amit Segal (@AmitSegal) October 31, 2025