Yesterday Yisroel met with the governor. They’ve been planning this meeting for a while, but it took over a year to actualize. Once our (former) secretary scheduled the meeting for yom tov, so that wasn’t doable, then the governor was out of town for a few weeks, and so it went.
So they had their meeting.
On the agenda: the synagogue, a school building, and a cemetery, all of which we need (well, we have the synagogue, but it needs restoration).
The governor promised to help with the synagogue, whatever that means.
He promised to help us a school building – guess we better be ready for a school real fast.
And he promised us help with the cemetery. Vladivostok used to have a Jewish cemetery, but at one point it was torn up and was built over. Now, really the cemetery is under the jurisdiction of the city, not the state. Unfortunately, the mayor of Vladivostok is in prison, so hopefully, the state will help us out with that.
Our cleaning lady was frustrated at having to iron shirts before the meeting – she was worried that she wasn’t doing a perfect enough job. Today she was very excited to tell me that she saw the Rabbi on TV. She worked extra well today too ;-). That may have been the best thing that came out of the meeting.
2 comments:
What was the objective in the meeting? Were you trying to get grants from the government or just help with permits?
We were trying to get money to help build the various institutions. Vladivostok is holding the APEC (Asia Pacific soemthing-or-other Conferance) in2012, and it's basically a major conferance, so they are officially going to pour a lot of money into the city to fix it up. We were hoping to get money for the shul from that budget.
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