British newlyweds Ian and Janice Donoff sponsored a kiddush last Shabbat at London’s Stanmore Synagogue — but not for one of the usual reasons, like a bar mitzvah, aufruf, baby naming or birthday. Their celebration was to give thanks for surviving the recent Costa Concordia shipwreck off the coast of Italy.
As the couple was finishing their Shabbat dinner on January 13, they heard a loud crunching sound and the ship’s lights went out. Mr. Donoff, 62, told the Jewish Chronicle that when the ship came to a halt, they realized that something was wrong. “We decided something was amiss and that we should dress warmly,” he said. “We saw people were wearing life-jackets, so we took our passports and I stuffed my siddur and tefillin into my pocket.”
No sooner did the New York Post report that Mr. Chelsea Clinton — otherwise known as Marc Mezvinsky — had quit his hedge-fund job to become a “ski bum” than chatter about the couple’s marriage started burning up gossip sites. The investment banker “is forgoing work at New York-based hedge fund G3 Capital to hit the slopes for a few months in Jackson Hole, Wyo.,” the Post wrote. Only at the end of the item did the Post’s Page Six column note that “the happy couple lives — albeit separately while Marc hits the slopes — in an apartment on Fifth Avenue that Mezvinsky bought in 2008.”
For celeb site Hollywood Life, that sentence spelled possible doom for the young power couple. “This is definitely a bad sign,” a Beverly Hills psychologist named Dr. Carole Lieberman told the site. “He seems to be struggling under the pressure of being a husband, especially knowing that Chelsea wants a baby … The first year of marriage is supposed to continue the honeymoon as long as possible.”
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