__________________ Nassau _________________
HERALD All the news of the Five Towns
Competing in the Brandeis 5K
Soccer fun on the beach
Remembering Jay Gordon
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Vol. 100 No. 24
JUNE 8 - 14, 2023
$1.00
Village land battle continues By HERNESTo GAlDAMEZ hgaldamez@liherald.com
Joe Abate/Herald
RABBi Eli GooDMAN with Long Beach Police Commissioner Ron Walsh last year. Goodman’s Chabad of the Beaches remains locked in a legal battle with the Village of Atlantic Beach.
The legal fight between the Village of Atlantic Beach and the Chabad of the Beach, in Long Beach, over two Atlantic Beach properties continues in federal court. The Chabad purchased both vacant properties, at 2025 and 2035 Park Street, for $950,000 over two years ago from M.A. Salazar Inc., a real estate company. The parcel at 2025 Park was the site of a Capital One bank, and the Salazar family had owned the adjacent lot, which once housed the compaContinued on page 8
Looking back on pandemic’s unprecedented challenges By HERNESTo GAlDAMEZ hgaldamez@liherald.com
While on vacation in Israel in January 2020, Cedarhurst-based immunologist Dr. Marc Sicklick was reading a news article about the first documented case of Covid-19 in the United States. When he flew home later that month and landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport, he saw only a couple of people wearing facemasks. Over the next two months, the number of cases grew, and it finally hit Sicklick that something about the coronavirus was different. “This was a really bad dis-
ease,” he recalled. “This was a virus that we were not ready for.” The World Health Organization declared the virus a pandemic on March 11 of that year. Now, over three years later, the public health emergency in the U.S. ended last month. But many questions about the deadly virus — which killed roughly 1.8 million people in 2020 alone, according to the WHO — remain unanswered. “Not every Covid death was a Covid death,” Sicklick said. “It was a death with Covid, meaning if somebody had a heart attack and they were in the hos-
Covid pital and they died and tested positive, that was listed as a Covid death. Anyone with Covid was initially listed like that, and it was just impossible for me to understand the real numbers.” Sicklick has over 40 years of experience as a physician, and
works with a wide range of patients, from those with fundamental allergy problems to those with complex immune system deficiencies. He recounted how he learned as a child about his great-grandfather, who died during the Spanish flu pandemic that ravaged populations around the world from 1918 to 1920.
“I thought I would never see something like that again,” Sicklick said. The coronavirus pandemic was the fifth documented pandemic since 1918. The after-effects of a Covid diagnosis remain in some of Sicklick’s current patients, and even in new ones, many of Continued on page 12