Zaki, Shea Meet Volunteers

By COLlive reporter
Photos by Simcha Steinmetz

Chairman-elect of the Vaad Hakohol – Crown Heights Jewish Community Council Zaki Tamir met this week with a group of Crown Heights residents who are volunteering their time to help correct various community issues.

The meeting was held at the offices of NCFJE on Eastern Parkway, and was attended by its Chairman Rabbi Shea Hecht, who will face Fishel Brownstein and Yossi Hackner in an election runoff for Vaad Hakohol this Tuesday, July 6.

The group was briefed on efforts to develop and promote a new community blog under Tamir’s Machatzis HaShekel project, an initiative he began during his election campaign and unveiled in an interview to COLlive.com.

It will allow any resident to raise community issues as petitions, and then suggest solutions or suggestions, to be implemented by the community council. Each petition’s relative significance is determined by the amount of endorsements they attract via the site.

Tamir said he was amazed at the response from the community, expressed in dozens of emails to him, along with offers for volunteering.

“The fact that people would come out and have this meeting late in a long fast day, to discuss community issues, just shows how much people want to help and get involved,” he told COLlive.com.

Other participants in the meeting were Nissan Adry, Ronnie Rendel, Aaron Vogel, Itzhok Mushinsky, Shmuli Evers, Daniel Melul and Mendy Jacobson.

Response since the election has been incredible, he says. “People were coming out of nowhere, sharing ideas, frustrations, hopes – everyone asking what they can do to help.”

The new blog is very basic, and is just the beginning, Tamir says. It will later serve as a platform to continue sharing ideas and progress with the community.

Rendel: “The name Machatzis HaShekel is reminiscent of the last sicha we have heard so far from the Rebbe, which is in many ways the last direction the Rebbe gave us collectively as we were faced with the challenges of the past twenty years.

“The Mitzva of Machatzis HaShekel, the Rebbe says, is the key to uniting the Jewish people – achdus. The blog, in a small way, is doing just that on a community level in Crown heights – giving anyone the opportunity to share their opinion.”

The blog is one of several initiatives Tamir’s team is introducing to bring more transparency and community involvement to the CHJCC, including a social services portal, professional networks, and more career training and placement.