30 d e c e m b e r 5 , 2013
The Week
The Jewish Home n
A Virtuoso without a Home
e”pdA
OPEN HOUSE
fair
...where every child is a world...
כל אדם עולם מלא
Staff and customers at a secondhand store in Vancouver are moved to tears when David Allen Welsh walks in. The fifty-year-old has been homeless since he was six but when he sits at the piano in the store, the classical melodies his numb, purple fingers play can fit a concert hall. The Iowan says he never had a piano growing up and he doesn’t know how to read notes. In fact, he says, sometimes his eyes are closed when he plays. “I don’t know how to play music, but I like what I hear in my head,” he related. “Sometimes I don’t even know what key I’m pushing. My eyes aren’t even open. I’m just letting the music play the music.” Welsh was raised in the Dakotas and discovered his talent at an early age but because of his economic status, he was only able to play on borrowed pianos in various homeless shelters and stores. One customer related that she first heard Welsh playing when stopping into the thrift store for coffee. “He started to play and I choked on my coffee,” Maynard, who is a longtime classical music enthusiast, said. “I had tears coming to my eyes when I saw his fingers go down one end of the piano to the other,” another customer related. Clearly this homeless man has found something he can call home.
Planet of the Apes
Sephardi Yeshiva excelling in Torah scholarship, Yirat Shamayim & Middot Tovot
Dedicated to the highest level of academic excellence
Caring and dedicated Rebbes and Morot
December 8, 2013 @ 7:00PM Temple Emanuel 150 Hicks Lane, Great Neck 516-482-1261
n3cubed graphics 516-817-9992
On Monday, a U.S. animal rights group decided that it was not monkeying around when it filed the first lawsuit to establish the “legal personhood” of chimpanzees. The non-profit Nonhu-
In News man Rights Project asked a New York state court to declare a 26-year-old chimp named Tommy “a cognitively complex autonomous legal person with the fundamental legal right not to be imprisoned.” The lawsuit declared that Tommy’s “detention” in a “small, dank, cement cage in a cavernous dark shed” in central New York is unlawful. Chimpanzees “possess complex cognitive abilities that are so strictly protected when they’re found in human beings,” Steven Wise, the president of Nonhuman Rights Project, told Reuters. “There’s no reason why they should not be protected when they’re found in chimpanzees,” he added. Believe it or not, this lawsuit is among three the group is filing for this week on behalf of four New York chimps. The other chimps they are trying to protect include Kiko, who lives in Niagara Falls, and Hercules and Leo, who are used in research at Stony Brook University on Long Island. This is definitely worth going bananas over.
$24K Donated after Student Asks Mom for Money
Modern technology has made a college student really rich. It used to be when they needed money, college students would be forced to work a job waitressing or calling home for the extra funds. Now, all they have to do is wave a sign and thousands of dollars will come their way. This week on ESPN’s College GameDay, some students held up a sign that read “Hi Mom Send” and then the Bitcoin logo and a QR code. The QR code on the sign represented a bitcoin wallet and dedicated bitcoin fans managed to enhance the code from the screen on TV to identify the student’s wallet. Once identified, the wallet ad-