Coney Island Kids 45 Record

City Room: Coney I. Bids Farewell to the Rabbi of the Beach

In Coney Island, he was known as "Rabbi."

With his white beard and thick mustache sharp, muscular biceps and faded white tank top, Abraham Novitsky, better known as Rabbi Abraham Abraham, has not been a traditional congregation.

His synagogue, people who knew him, liked to say, was the beach where he had been a fixture on the sidewalk and the scene of winter swimming in Brooklyn as long as anyone could remember .

Long before Mr.Novitsky died Wednesday at 77 after a long battle with cancer, his unusual interests - walking on hot coals, twisting his mustache in four embellishments, swimming in temperatures below zero - became the essence of mythology Coney Island .

"It was an unusual character, a nephew, Martin Novitsky said in a funeral service Thursday at Beth David Cemetery in Queens." So many people you can cut a cookie. They go to school. They go to work. They marry. Their life is finished. Everything about her life was eccentric."

When the magician David Blaine locked himself in a block of ice in Times Square in 2000 for 63 hours, for example, Mr. Novitsky has met the challenge: He built an igloo ice cube on Coney Island Avenue, near the promenade and he sat for 110 hours, said a friend and partner Swim Club, Bob Stewart. (Although Mr. Novitsky applied to Guinness World Records for the effort, said a spokesman for the society does not recognize the category.)

"He did not want you to know what was behind the character," Mr. Denson said.

Mr. Novitsky rabbinical authorities have been difficult to confirm, too.Friends said he had documents showing he had been ordered, and he played for the funeral of Jewish members of his swim club, but nobody knew where he had attended rabbinical school, and people seemed take him at his word.

Mr. Novitsky was born and raised in Coney Island and have lived in Brighton Beach and throughout his life, Mr. Stewart said. He had seven children and was the longtime owner of a chicken market in Crown Heights.

His ambitions, however, seems to have little to do with chicken.

"He used to do imitations Houdini before he met my mother," saidNovitsky daughter Sherrelyn Novitsky, 45. "He would jump off the dock and hold your breath. He always found a way to revel in the scene."

Swim in extremely cold water has become one of the activities of the signature of Mr. Novitsky.

mt kilimanjaro | World Travel Pictures Review and Gallery

Summer Solstice is active: it's about performing and expanding, living the dream envisioned in the dreamtime of Winter"(Ruth Barrett, 2004). Our trip around the world, visiting and practicing with sacred mountains , is entering it's second half, its third phase, as the cycle of earth enters summer. The shoots and cotyledons of spring have grown into muscular stems, ready to develop and support the fruit of our practice. We feel powerful and able to nurture and sustain our focus as we travel into the second half of our circumnavigation. We spent the winter solstice on Mt Shasta, California, the spring equinox on the slopes of Mt Illampu, Bolivia, and the summer solstice summiting Mt Kilimanjaro , Tanzania the other side of the globe.

We had been powerful on this mountain. "You are powerful, like Bu-FAllo", a porter said to us as we arrived at the high camp. Still acclimatized from our time in South America, the elevation of Kilimanjaro (5895m, 19340 ft) had small impact on us. But somehow, the physical act of hiking had small impact as nicely. We summited in record time, and amazingly, weren't even tired. It was no issue, no suffering, not even memorably any function. Extremely odd... it was the power of the Solstice. The prediction received at the Rock of the Jaguar (Isla del Sol, Lake Titicaca) was correct on.

Following we returned from Mt Kenya, Josiah hooked us up with bus transport over the Tanzania border and to the town of Moshi. He also hired his cousin, Jerald, to be our guide for the mountain. Kilimanjaro is extremely regulated by the Tanzania government (and milked for all the profit feasible). All climbers are needed to have a guide, regardless of the reality that the route is just a walk up trail, and camping locations are all nicely marked and obvious. And, it is essentially impossible to just hire a guide... they come with porters and a cook... the full shebang. Rod was calling it the Full Employment act of Tanzania.

Anyway, the morning we are to head to the mountain, a reggae blaring, red-yellow-green painted, "1 love" stickered van pulls up to our hotel... packed with a bunch deadlocked Rastafarians. We pile all our stuff in the Van and get in. Crammed full with us, the three porters, our cook, Josiah, bags of fresh vegetables and loaves of bread, our driver circled the van around town a couple of times searching for Jerald, the guide. As soon as everybody was stuffed inside, "Team Rasta" headed to the Kilimanjaro National Park gate, at Umbwe Village. We decided to hike the Umbwe route up to the Barranco Camp (3950 m), instead the much more well-liked and much less steep/direct Marangu route. Glad we did, simply because it was a stunning trail via the jungle and then along the leading of a steeply sided ridge. It even had some rock scramble sections to maintain it fascinating.

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Schwann record & tape guide

Various Artists Compilations Reference Book and Price Guide, Vinyl Record Albums Containing Five Or More Artists