The death toll from last month’s wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui has dropped to 97 and the number of people missing is now 31, Hawaii Governor Josh Green told CNN in an interview on Friday.

Green said last week the death toll was 115 and 66 people were missing.

“The death toll dropped because we have Department of Defense anthropologists who are able to do a lot more advanced genetics. They were able to make sure we weren’t tragically commingling any of the people we lost,” Green said.

The grassland fire on Aug. 8 raced down the base of a volcano sloping into the tourist resort town of Lahaina, destroying or damaging some 2,200 buildings.

The Jewish Community Center of Greater Coney Island unveiled a new older adult center in Gravesend on Thursday, hoping to help ensure the comfort and longevity of Brooklyn’s senior community.

Located within the Edmond & Lily Safra Senior Living on Kings Highway and East 3rd Street, the brand-new Kings Highway Older Adult Center is set to act as a hub of activity and services for southern Brooklyn’s seniors. 

The Edmond & Lily Safra Senior Living and the Kings Highway Older Adult Center are operated by Ahi Ezer Kings Highway Housing Development Corporation, which provides homes to hundreds of older adults in Brooklyn.

“This ribbon cutting was the culmination of years of work to prepare our Center to serve community older adults,” said Rabbi Moshe Wiener, Executive Director of JCCGCI, in a statement. “JCCGCI is privileged to be in a position to deliver critical services to our clients, and to ensure that we are caring for our community’s most vulnerable.”

According to city data, more than 25% of the population in Community District 13 — which includes Coney Island, Gravesend, and Brighton Beach — is over the age of 65. JCCGI runs eight older adult centers, including the new Kings Highway facility, and offers transportation services, home care, and meal delivery for the neighborhood’s older adults. 

The center’s directors have worked “tirelessly” to overcome obstacles and issues to open the facility, said Rabbi Moshe Weiner. Photo courtesy of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Coney Island

The ribbon-cutting was attended by local assembly members Simcha Eichenstein and Michael Novakhov, Ryan Murray and Anya Metlitsky Herasme of the city’s Department for the Aging, and Karen Cherry, Senior Liasion for Older Adults to Mayor Eric Adams. 

The Kings Highway Older Adult Center will offer a number of engaging classes in art, jewelry making, strength training, and aerobics as well as providing wholesome Glatt kosher lunches daily. The center will also run musical sing-a-longs, discussions, and a “delightful” Coffee & Games Club.

Wiener said the center was the brainchild of Eliot Harary, executive director of the Ahi Ezer Housing Development Corporation, who suggested building a new facility for homebound seniors. 

Harary “expended great expense and effort to upgrade the site to make it compliant with various regulatory requirements,” Wiener said. 

Grace Brandi, the supervising director of Older Adult Centers at JCCGI, and Risa Erps, director of the Kings Highway Older Adult Center, “both worked tirelessly over the past year to overcome multiple hurdles and make this OAC a reality,” Wiener added. 

When I left The New York Times four years ago, my staff gave me two treasured gifts: A big coffee mug emblazoned with the Yiddish word “Balaboosta” and a hot pink apron that says, “Badass boss lady.”

I thought the pair aptly and hilariously represented two distinct parts of my personality. Until this week, when the Israeli chef Einat Admony — whose Manhattan restaurant and first cookbook are called “Balaboosta” — showed me they’re actually synonyms.

I’d asked Admony, whose parents are from Iran and Yemen, why she picked an Ashkenazi term with the old-fashioned and unsexy definition “perfect homemaker.” Turns out it grew out of a conversation with a non-Jewish chef as they were preparing a pop-up before the restaurant opened in 2010.

“She said, ‘What is a badass woman?’ I’m like: ‘Balaboosta.’ All the kitchen was, ‘Yay!’ Everybody loved that name,” Admony recalled. While an older generation might think of “Balaboosta” as “a little bit oppressive, woman in the kitchen,” she added, as a mother of two teenagers who has run multiple restaurants, “for me, it’s a very different thing.”

“There is something very strong and even spiritual about the Balaboosta in my head,” Admony explained. “It’s not just about, ‘Oh, this woman can cook and clean so well she’s a balaboosta. A lot of times, it’s the woman that brings the family together, she makes peace. It’s that woman that people can trust.”

I met Admony, who is 52, over Labor Day weekend, when I splurged to take my teenage foodie to a fundraiser for the James Beard Foundation that the chef hosted at her country home in Kerhonskon, New York.

Called “Nine Chefs, One Table,” it was an indulgent 13-course tasting menu served to perhaps 100 guests at, yes, one long table under a tent in a large field by Admony’s new pool. Many of the ingredients and the flowers adorning the table were plucked from Admony’s ample garden on the property. Her chickens and ducks strolled the grounds.

It was an impressive professional operation, duly documented by Instagram influencers. But what I really wanted to know was what goes on in the kitchen when no one is watching. Specifically, what would Admony — creator of the Taim falafel chain, James Beard finalist and two-time winner of the Food Network’s Chopped — be cooking for Rosh Hashanah?

When we spoke via Zoom on Monday, she had just gotten chicken from a farm in the Catskills that she planned to roast stuffed with pomegranate and rice. There would also be goat shoulder braised in her Middle Eastern spin on manchamanteles mole (hint: add harissa). The chicken is something her mom used to make; the goat is rooted in a food memory about lamb.

“My dad, right before Rosh Hashanah, used to go and slaughter a lamb,” Admony explained. “And he took me when I was 5 or 6 years old to the farm to choose, and I thought it was the most repulsive thing. I don’t know how I did not become vegan right there at that moment.

“Then the family used to fight over the best part — the brain, the spine, the head, all the stuff Americans hate,” she added. “And especially the head, because on Rosh Hashanah, you want the head on the table for the blessing.”

Admony was referring to the Sephardic custom (which many of us Ashkenazi Jews have also adopted!) of a Rosh Hashanah “Seder” in which distinct blessings are recited over eight symbolic foods — apples and honey, dates, leeks, beets, beans, gourds, pomegranates and the head of the a ram (or fish). The head is always the hardest part, especially for vegetarians. I once attended a Rosh Hashanah dinner where the head was represented by fish-shaped ice cubes made of pomegranate juice as part of a signature cocktail — Yum! But I digress.

Admony was also planning a vegan tanzia, a Moroccan dish of her famous couscous with a lot of caramelized onion, roasted butternut squash, parsnip, celeriac; dried fruit including apricots, raisins and prunes; almonds and cashews. And, of course, homemade challah — and not just round for the holiday, but braided and then baked around a little ceramic dish, so there’s a hole in the middle, where she would put a dish of honey for dipping at the table.

She was expecting 20, or perhaps 22 — her brother, a cousin from Costa Rica, some Colombian Jewish friends. “I think it’s not going to be too many,” she said.

Admony, whose kids are now 14 and 17, splits her time between Brooklyn and Kerhonkson, which is about 100 miles north. She grew up secular in Bnei Brak, a now-Haredi town near Tel Aviv, was a cook and a driver in the Israeli army, and spent a few years wandering around Germany before coming to the U.S. in 1999.

She said she originally wanted to be a dancer, but realized at some point that cooking “is the one thing I can do forever — I never get tired of it.”

Her mother, who made aliyah as a child of 10, was a big food influence, as well as a Moroccan lady who lived across the hall in their apartment building and was like “a second mom,” Admony said. Also, “Doda Chana” — her mother’s sister, who also lived in Bnei Brak, in a ground-floor apartment that was as busy as a train station.

“My aunt was the one that did not just cook, she really enjoys cooking,” Admony explained. “Like, that was the essence of life: cooking. And she is very poor, with five kids, got divorced very fast, now I think she has, like, 30 grandkids. And Chana always has pots on the stove.

“So, always when I used to come visit her, there is always people in and out,” she continued. “She always feeds people. I think that’s the one person I always was so related to, because I always want to feed people.”

“Then the family used to fight over the best part — the brain, the spine, the head, all the stuff Americans hate. And especially the head, because on Rosh Hashanah, you want the head on the table for the blessing.”

– Chef Einat Admony

Me, too. I’ve got 16 people for lunch tomorrow. Brisket, salmon, squash soup, massaged-kale salad with grilled peaches, avocado and pickled onion; a grain salad with dates, pomegranate seeds, roasted beets and frizzled leeks; homemade challah served with applesauce and peach chutney made from the fruit we picked while upstate for the Admony fundraiser. Multicolor carrots roasted with hot honey, green beans to fill out the Rosh Hashanah Seder symbols.

I asked Chef Einat, who grew up secular and remains so, why it’s so important to her — to us — to cook for the holidays.

“This is something that always keeps us together,” she said. “I don’t want to follow rules because most of these rules are not applied to me, I am not relating to them and they make no sense whatsoever. But Friday night was always, like, sacred for me. It’s the one day a week that nobody does anything but sit together and have a real dinner.”

I also asked what 5784 has in store for her. She said she is working with her brother-in-law to write a 17,000-word “love story” for the digital publisher Scribd, based on how she met her French husband, Stefan Nafziger, who is also her business partner.

“It’s a very good story, a great story, we make it funny and crazy,” Admony said. “And it’s also going to be through the lenses of cooking and the industry at this time. Yeah, a little bit about my upbringing and a little bit about now.”

She also recently went to Albania with a film crew, as part of a TV series she is developing in which she would travel around the world and cook with people using local ingredients and traditions, focusing on sustainability and the role of women.

“A little bit like Anthony Bourdain, although character-wise it’s day and night, I’m very warm with people,” Admony said. “It’s a lot about how to see women that are very, very strong in their own communities”

The working title is Finding Balaboosta.

For decades, the Forward ran classified ads in which Jews displaced by pogroms, war, and especially the Holocaust sought help from people in the U.S. The story behind those ads has never really been told — until now. Our contributor Andrew Silverstein unearthed an archive of the original letters that desperate Jews wrote to the Forward before, during and after World War II, and with research and translation help from our archivist Chana Pollack, painstaking tracked down the writers and their descendants. The resulting special report is now a beautiful e-book for you to download, print, and share.

WATCH: MOIST HONEY CAKE Our Yiddish editor Rukhl Schaechter and food scholar Eve Jochnowitz have a recipe that includes coffee — and chocolate. Plus, roasted whole fish — that’s right, with the head. And don’t worry, there are English subtitles!

Sam Lin-Sommer, a 2017 graduate of Brown University, founded Taking Root Collective, a zine of food and Asian identity, and recently finished a fellowship at Atlas Obscura. You may have already been enjoying his excellent feature writing, including this deep dive into Mexico City’s hand-rolled bagel renaissance and this essay about date cookies for a Chinese-Jewish new year.  He grew up on Long Island in a journalism family, and, yes, he can balance a pumpkin on his head.

Odeya Rosenband comes to us fresh off a Fulbright fellowship in the Czech Republic, where she taught English to local teenagers as well as Ukrainian refugees, and worked on a farm near the border of Slovakia. Odeya graduated in 2022 from Cornell, where she was opinion editor of the Daily Sun, and has interned at Food Bank News and a Jerusalem think tank. Her mom is Israeli and she speaks Hebrew, French, Italian, German and Arabic. She is working closely with me on a variety of projects, including this here newsletter!

Ngozi Williams starts on Monday as our community engagement fellow, working with our marketing and development teams. She is a co-founder of Jews of Color: Cleveland, and calls herself “a multi-hyphenate social-impact professional.” With dual degrees in physics and engineering from Cleveland State, Ngozi said she “has learned everything worth knowing” from toddlers during four years working as an early childhood educator at the Gross Schechter Day School. She’s proud of her “neurotic calendaring” and stewardship of 50-plus houseplants.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK Support Independent Jewish Journalism The Forward is a non-profit 501(c)3 so our journalism depends on support from readers like you. You can support our work today by donating or subscribing. All donations are tax-deductible to the full extent of US law. Make a donation  ➤ Subscribe to Forward.com  ➤ “America’s most prominent Jewish newspaper” — The New York Times, 2021

The post On being a badass and a balaboosta at the same time appeared first on The Forward.

The U.S. and Britain on Friday imposed sanctions on Iran ahead of the one-year anniversary of the death of Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Amini whilst in Iran’s morality police custody, which sparked months of anti-government protests that faced an often violent crackdown.

Amini, 22, died on Sept. 16 last year after being arrested for allegedly flouting the Islamic Republic’s mandatory dress code. Her death sparked months of anti-government protests that marked the biggest show of opposition to Iranian authorities in years. Iranian security forces have been deployed in her hometown in anticipation of unrest this weekend.

The U.S. States and Britain, along with the European Union, have announced multiple rounds of sanctions against Iran, citing the widespread and often violent crackdown on protests after the death of Amini.

“Mahsa’s tragic and senseless death in the custody of Iran’s so-called ‘Morality Police’ sparked demonstrations across Iran that were met with unspeakable violence, mass arrests, systemic internet disruptions and censorship by the Iranian regime,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement.

“We will continue to take appropriate action, alongside our international partners, to hold accountable those who suppress Iranians’ exercise of human rights,” he said, adding that Canada, Australia, and other partners were also imposing sanctions this week.

The U.S. Treasury Department in a separate statement said it imposed sanctions on more than two dozen people and entities it said were connected to Iran’s “violent suppression” of protests in the wake of Amini’s death its crack down on dissenting voices and restrictions to internet.

The action targets 29 people and groups, including 18 key members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Iran’s Law Enforcement Forces (LEF), as well as the head of Iran’s Prisons Organizations, the department said. They also target officials linked to Iran’s internet blockade and several media outlets.

The sanctions target LEF spokesperson Saeed Montazerolmehdi, multiple LEF and IRGC commanders, and Iran’s Prisons Organization chief Gholamali Mohammadi.

Douran Software Technologies CEO Alireza Abedinejad as well as state-controlled media organizations Press TV, Tasnim News Agency and Fars News were also among those sanctioned.

“The United States … will continue to take collective action against those who suppress Iranians’ exercise of their human rights,” the Treasury’s Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Brian Nelson, said in the statement.

Britain separately announced its sanctions targeting senior Iranian decision makers enforcing Tehran’s mandatory hijab law, including Iran’s minister for culture and Islamic guidance, his deputy, the mayor of Tehran and an Iranian police spokesman.

(NewsNation) — A 4-year-old war orphan is at the center of a custody fight that has implications for national security. The U.S. government warned a judge that allowing a U.S. Marine to retain custody could be a violation of international law.

The legal battle has been ongoing for two years, pitting the child’s adopted parents, one of whom is a Marine officer, against her Afghan family.

Marine Major Joshua Mast brought home an Afghan orphan, but now stands accused of kidnapping by the U.S. government.

The case is complex and, much like the complicated withdrawal from Afghanistan, spans two presidential administrations with both the Trump and Biden administrations involved.

The U.S. government has now issued a warning to the Virginia judge that the Marine’s actions could risk violating international law and be seen as “endorsing an act of international child abduction.”

In court filings obtained by the Associated Press, the U.S. Justice Department is working to intervene in the case, warning that failing to return the 4-year-old to her Afghan relatives, who are now in the U.S., could risk American efforts to resettle Afghan refugees.

DOJ lawyers wrote a scathing assessment of how Major Joshua Mast and his wife Stephanie got a Virginia judge to sign off on the adoption of the girl, citing a litany of falsehoods and intentional misrepresentations.

“The grave harm that the Masts have inflicted upon the Child, her family, and the United States is ongoing,” court documents read. “Most troublingly, the child remains with the Masts to this day.”

The Marine convinced a local circuit court judge that the child was a stateless daughter of foreign fighters, but the DOJ says the girl was never stateless and the Afghan government did not relinquish its claim over her.

Mast was an attorney in Afghanistan and met the baby in a U.S. military hospital.

In an earlier court filing, Mast’s lawyers wrote he and his wife worked at “great personal expense and sacrifice” to protect the baby and “provide her a loving home.”

Both the Masts and the girl’s Afghan relatives are suing to get the girl back.

Military adoptions are not rare, and the military sometimes offers up orphanage visits to active service members who are serving overseas as part of their community outreach. Some of those interactions do result in adoptions.

In 2020, there were 1,622 adoptions of foreign-born children by U.S. service members. In 2021, 1,785 children were adopted from overseas and in 2022 there 1,517 such adoptions. The majority of those were female children who ranged in age from five to 12.

NewsNation reached out to the Department of Defense for comment. The DOD declined to comment on the case, citing ongoing legal proceedings.