Have a wonderful Shavuos!

Here is a short zmanim synopsis for Yom Tov: Hadlakas Neiros today 7:56; 72 tomorrow night 9:28. Sun morning- Alos 3:51, Talis 4:33, netz 5:32.

I too make my living off the internet. And I would like the writer to know, many in Klal Yisroel responded to the call of the Gedolim. One woman who called Verizon to cancel her home Internet service on Monday had the customer service representative ask her, “What is going on? We are getting so many such calls today!”

On Monday evening alone, approximately 1,000 people came to the TAG centers to have their devices safeguarded. I myself drove to the TAG office in Lakewood on Monday night to add additional safeguards to my computer. The parking lot was jammed so I drove on and came back on Wednesday night where I found the one available parking spot.

The scene inside was not to be believed. There were about 15-20 people waiting to discuss the issues with the TAG staff. There was a row of cell phones and a row of computers lined up on the desk waiting to be picked up. These were devices people had brought in to have filters installed, Wi-Fi removed, or internet capabilities blocked.

I have heard that similar scenes are being played out around the world. Klal Yisroel has responded on a mass scale to the call of “Mi Lashem Eilai”. Now that the time of Kabalas Hatorah is upon us one can safely say that there are no frum, ehrliche homes in Klal Yisroel where a step in the right direction wasn’t taken.

It is safe to say Klal Yisroel hasn’t had such an unbelievable hachana for Kabalas Hatorah in quite some time. We have cut back on our dependency on the internet. We have cut back on our time spent online. Can we do more? Yes. But the revolution started on Sunday is a revolution being heard far and wide.

It is the “Klal Yisroel Spring”. It is imbuing us all with greater kedusha, a greater connection to the One above. And there is no better way to enter Shavuos, the time of Kabalas Hatorah.

Let us make a “kimu, v’kiblu”, once again, reclaiming the kedusha that had waned from within us. And together let us be zoche to rebuilding of the Bais Hamikdash b’meheira b’yomeinu amen.

A Proud Member of Klal Yisroel

With many hitting the roads today for Shavuos, make sure you leave as early as possible. Memorial Day is on Monday, and the Memorial Day weekend starts today. The roads will be packed and it will take longer for you to get to your destination so leave yourself enough time.

UPDATED 1:45 pm: the delays now stretch for 15 miles back to the Asbury tolls.

The mother of three from Oakland, Calif., inspected three bags of Trader Joe’s semisweet chocolate chips, a staple in her kosher kitchen. They were alike in all ways but one: Two of them had a small D on the label, meaning they were classified as dairy under Jewish dietary laws.

The changed label was tough to swallow. Kosher law forbids mixing meat and dairy at any time, but Trader Joe’s chips used to be deemed “pareve,” meaning they could be eaten with either meat or dairy meals. An avid baker, Mrs. Labkowski tore through five to seven bags a week to make treats without worrying about running afoul of the rules.

“If I couldn’t get the pareve, I’d have to resort to making something without chocolate. It limits your choices a lot,” said Mrs. Labkowski, 26 years old and the wife of a rabbi.

So, she rushed to her local Trader Joe’s and bought 40 12-ounce bags of the pareve chips still in stock at $2.29 apiece.

As message boards and blogs burned with news of the switch last week, customers across the U.S. began hoarding the last bags of pareve chocolate chips. Now, empty shelves are all that is left at many Trader Joe’s outposts.

In a store in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, one woman bought 90 bags of chips, according to an employee, who declined to give his name. He said the store had been out of chips for a couple of days.

The ingredients in the chips haven’t changed, a Trader Joe’s spokeswoman said in a statement. She said the chips are still made on equipment dedicated to nondairy chocolate but that the cleaning process for the “bagging line” was different.

The change prompted the Food and Drug Administration to require that the chips carry a warning for milk allergies. That, in turn, triggered a review of the product’s kosher status, the Trader Joe’s spokeswoman said.

OK Kosher Certification, the company whose K-in-a-circle insignia adorns the Trader Joe’s confections, decided where the chips fell. The company claims to certify about 500,000 consumer products from food giants like ConAgra, Tropicana and Miller Brewing.

Under OK’s guidelines for going kosher, manufacturers undertake a rigorous process, including plant visits with a rabbinical coordinator who has expertise in the product, regular monitoring and an annual inspection.

The status change in Trader Joe’s chips follows a cost-cutting move by the manufacturer of the chips in April, said Rabbi Chaim Fogelman, a spokesman for the Brooklyn-based OK Kosher. Machines in the bagging line are no longer wiped down and checked for dairy residue after handling milk-based chocolate, he said. Both Trader Joe’s and OK Kosher declined to name the manufacturer.

“As much as everybody wants us to label these pareve, under no circumstances would we want to label something pareve when we have a suspicion or a hunch there might be a dairy chip in the bag,” Rabbi Fogelman said.

Fans of the product—who also include the lactose-intolerant—aren’t letting the cookie crumble without a fight.

A change.org petition, Trader Joe’s: Keep the Chocolate Chips Pareve!, has attracted more than 4,200 signatures. A similar Facebook campaign is under way.

Trader Joe’s, which operates stores in 32 states and Washington, D.C., according to its website, declined to comment on requests to return to the old way of making chocolate chips. But there is precedent for a successful pressure campaign.

For decades, Oreos were made with lard, rendering them decidedly un-kosher. Observant Jews complained vociferously they couldn’t eat the forbidden treat and had to settle for Hydrox cookies instead. Kraft Foods Inc. eventually ditched the pig fat and the cookie was deemed kosher in 1997. Kellogg Co., the last owner of Hydrox cookies, discontinued the biscuit in 2000 though it cooked up a special batch in 2008 for the snack’s 100th anniversary.

When it comes to Trader Joe’s chips, Elliot Lowenstein, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney, has been particularly active in calling for a reversal online, despite not being a baker.

“I just eat them. I didn’t really need to pay attention as to whether they were dairy or meat,” said Mr. Lowenstein, 36.

He grabbed 11 pareve packets from the Trader Joe’s in Washington’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood, but he is already hunting for a replacement snack. “I’m looking at the vegan websites now to see which ones are rated really well and then seeing if they’re kosher,” Mr. Lowenstein said.

The chip shortage could be bittersweet for Cheder Menachem, a Jewish school in Los Angeles. It will be raffling off 20 packets of the old chips at its auction night in June. Tickets are $5 apiece.

The head of OK Kosher Certification and its kashrut administrator, Rabbi Don Yoel Levy, said the company didn’t expect the hundreds of phone calls and emails it received after news of the changes.

“I know that the people who produce it are looking to, [shall] we say, rectify the situation or be able to produce it in a pareve method,” Rabbi Levy said.

And that would be welcome relief for customers.

“I’m hoping once they realize the significance to such a large amount of people, they’ll reconsider,” said Mrs. Labkowski, who cooks not only for her family but for visitors to a center she runs with her husband.

Otherwise, she said, “I’m going to have to buy the other kosher pareve ones. But I don’t like the quality. So I’m going to have to change how we enjoy our desserts.”

Others have been racing from store to store hoping to score a bag. Leo Brafman, who lives in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, first went to the one Trader Joe’s in Brooklyn last week and scooped up the last seven bags. He then dashed to a store in Rego Park, Queens, and bought its last 38 bags. Rumors of an extra shipment sent him back to Brooklyn, but the news was half-baked.

“All the packets were [dairy] already,” Mr. Brafman said. “And my wife was devastated.”

WSJ

A number of cars whose doors were left open were also burglarized.

With a three day Yom Tov now upon us, it is a stark reminder to both those who are leaving for Yom Tov and those staying home to makes sure all doors and windows of your home and cars are locked. Lakewood Police say virtually all homes and cars that are burglarized in town are crimes of opportunity, with burglars taking advantage of open doors and windows, skipping over locked doors.

The Ocean County CIU was on scene this morning investigating.

This is the fourth time in less than a year that the store has been inspected and each time, it failed, with among other concerns fresh mouse droppings.

Ag and Markets inspectors had a meetings scheduled for this past Tuesday to discuss the previous three inspections and while there, the rodent droppings were observed, resulting in the fourth inspection and failure.

That, said Ag and Markets spokesman Jessica Ziehm automatically kicks in a hearing process. The hearing officer has the authority to revoke the food processing permit in the store, which would include the areas dealing with produce, deli, and bakery. Ziehm believes at this particular store, meats are all prepackaged and would not be affected.

Among the specific critical deficiencies cited in the most recent inspection were romaine lettuce not being washed before being used as a garnish on ready to eat food; fresh appearance of mouse droppings on shelves near checkouts including a gnawed health bar; gnawed blueberries; mouse droppings near Kosher items; fresh mouse droppings between soup and canned pasta; and fresh mouse droppings present in packages in certain aisles.

Ziehm said those critical deficiencies are highly uncommon during inspections of most store.

General deficiencies found in the store included boxes of frozen foods stored on the floor of a walk-in freezer hampering proper inspection and cleaning; the floor around a drain in the meat room had standing liquid; fan guards over beer in the dairy walk-in cooler had an accumulation of dusty residue; a honey comb vent of retail cheese and process meat display exhibited discoloration. Other concerns included dead flies in a fly catcher located between a fryer and slicer table and a hot holding unit was not properly maintained with the sliding door missing from the unit.

Mid-Hudson News

There were thankfully no serious injuries; one person was transfered to the hospital as a precaution.

Click HERE to view photos on your mobile device

PHOTO: Rav Kalman and a chavrusah learning outside Citi Field this past Sunday, waiting for the asifa to begin.

Hatzolah responded to the scene.

The review and its findings, which have yet to be made public, concluded there was no evidence to show the NYPD’s activities in the state violated any New Jersey civil or criminal laws, according to officials in the attorney general’s office who participated in the review.

The New York Police have already been briefed on the findings, those officials said.

Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa is scheduled to meet this afternoon in Trenton with New Jersey Muslim leaders, where he is expected to provide details of the state’s inquiry.

At the same time, the state is set to announce an agreement with the NYPD that officials said will “strengthen the lines of communication” between New Jersey law enforcement officials and the city. That agreement calls for regular meetings with the NYPD, on at least a monthly basis, to exchange information concerning counter-terrorism intelligence and operations.

The attorney general is also planning to establish an outreach committee with the Muslim community.

Also, the attorney general will issue a general directive today to all state law enforcement agencies that will put in place new notification protocols that will be triggered when they learn of any law enforcement activity being conducted by out-of-state policy agencies within their jurisdiction. That directive comes after some questions were raised over whether the city of Newark, which was notified by the NYPD of its intelligence gathering operations, told anyone else about it. Newark Mayor Cory Booker and the New Jersey State Police both have said they were unaware of the operation, although other state officials said they knew the New York Police were here.

The fact-finding review ordered by the attorney general was sparked by disclosures that the New York Police Department had been running an aggressive domestic intelligence operation in New Jersey, targeting ethnic communities in the state’s largest city, the campus of Rutgers University and elsewhere, following an Associated Press report showing that a once-secret NYPD surveillance program aimed at Muslims had extended throughout the Northeast.

In Newark, the NYPD cataloged every mosque and Muslim-owned business in the city –from fried-chicken joints to houses of worship located in private homes, in a 60-page report later obtained by the AP that identified the work as “a joint operation with the Newark Police Department’s Criminal Intelligence Unit” with the aim of identifying “the existence of population centers and business districts of communities of interest.”

Most of the properties listed in the NYPD report were Islamic cultural centers, restaurants and stores where members of Newark’s Muslim community went to pray, eat or shop. Most of the information came through street surveillance.

City leaders later claimed that Garry McCarthy, the former police director, had been informed of the 2007 investigation and assigned a detective to provide a city tour to NYPD investigators.

In March, Muslim leaders from throughout New Jersey, who have criticized the NYPD, called for a formal investigation into the surveillance program—meeting privately with Chiesa as well as several federal law enforcement authorities to voice their concerns. Earlier this week, those leaders said they were asked to come to Trenton today for a follow-up meeting with the attorney general.

Officials in the attorney general’s office said the review ordered by Chiesa focused on learning exactly what the NYPD was doing and the motivation for that activity.
“Based on what we saw, their conduct was permissible,” explained one of the officials with knowledge of the review. “There was no evidence of illegal wiretaps or search and seizures. We’re not seeing any seeing violations of law.”

NYPD officials have repeatedly defended the program as legal and justified.

NJ.com