Tzedek-Tzedek

By Rabbi Dov Lipman STORMIEST CITY COUNCIL MEETING IN YEARS This week's city council was the most fiery the city has seen in many years.   It included the Mayor trying to have Tziyon Sultan, editor of the Keren Or newspaper, removed from the room and a group of Old Bet Shemesh residents disrupting the meeting numerous times until some of them were removed from the room.   Issues raised at the meeting included : 1. The municipality grants arnona reductions to 7,000 out of the 17,000 homes in the city.   While this is a high number, it has not been granting residents the full reduction allowed according to the Interior Ministry.   This policy has saved the city 1 million NIS per year.   The Mayor wants to change this policy and provide the full arnona reduction according to the law.   The opposition protested that the only way the city could make up this loss of 1 million revenue would be through raising the arnona of others or through more parking ticket...

By Rabbi Dov Lipman   CITY COUNCIL APPROVES NEW CITY ENTRANCE The city council voted to move forward with a plan to transform the main entrance of the city near BIG to alleviate the constant congestion in the area.  The plan includes a gigantic traffic circle connecting a few streets and expanding the road to more lanes from the entrance past the turn off to Supersol Deal.  The estimated 20 million NIS for the project will be paid for by the city, the old BIG, the new BIG, and the builders of the new Shaar Haír housing project at that location.  Tenders for the project should begin within the coming months.    CULTURE HALL UPDATE The city council voted to appoint a committee to explore options for the location of the planned culture hall.  The location had always been set as the open land between Nachala Umenucha and Migdal HaMayim.  The Mayor has received pressure from Rabbanim to move the location and many in the opposition fear that the e...

[Published on Tzedek-Tzedek with kind permission of Yocheved Golani] Breaking News: Police in  Gaza  just announced the discovery of an arms cache of 2000  semi automatic rifles with 250,000 rounds of ammunition, 10 anti-tank  missiles, 4 grenade launchers, 20 tonnes of heroin, £50 million in forged   SWISS and USD  banknotes and 25 trafficked Ukrainian prostitutes all in a semi-detached house behind the Public Library in GAZA .  Local residents were stunned.  A community spokesman said: "We're shocked. We never knew we had a Library!!"

Rabbi Dov Lipman has kindly permitted Tzedek-Tzedek to publish "Bet Shemesh Weekly News" - an excellent weekly round-up of what's been happening in Bet Shemesh... (If you would like to contact Dov directly, please email to: ddlipman@aol.com). We are planning for "Bet Shemesh Weekly News" to be a weekly Friday feature in Tzedek-Tzedek. Please let me know what you think of this new service?   MK GAFNI PLEDGES TO HELP WITH 38 MK Moshe Gafni (Degel HaTorah, pictured) visited City Hall last Thursday.  He serves as the chairman of the Knesset Finance Committee and can help the city obtain the funding necessary to improve highway 38 which was the focus of his meeting with the Mayor and other city leaders.  Gafni acknowledged that no other city similar in size to Bet Shemesh has its only access road with one lane in each direction and pledged to work with the Transportation Ministry to allocate funding for improvements.  Degel Hatorah members of...