Five Towns Jewish Home 12.28.23

December 28, 2023

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Dear Readers,

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what we can do to make the upcoming few months more productive and more valuable.

The past few months have taught us that we can become even better people. They have shown us that we can unite with each other despite – or even because of – our differences. They have shown us that even when we think we don’t have the reserves within us to give more or daven more or connect more, we can still dig deeper and find something more deep within. They have shown us that we have the extraordinary ability to see the beauty within so much pain, to highlight the joy in so much sorrow.

As we flip the secular calendar to a new year, we are met with a fresh slate, one which we can pledge to continue to fill with acts of love and kindness. We can imbue all those new boxes with renewed enthusiasm for the love we have for one another. We can try to saturate the upcoming months with thoughtfulness and kindness. We can use the opportunity to recharge our tefillos and our pleas as we turn to the One Above to show us His guidance and helping hand.

May this year bring with it only good news for all of Klal Yisroel, and may it bring with it a time that is truly “After,” a time when the world will see Who truly runs the world and the goodness in all He does.

Wishing you a wonderful week, Shoshana

here’s 2023 Before. And then there’s 2023 After.

It’s hard to remember what life was like Before. It’s hard to recall how life seemed less heavy, less worrying. How we had “simple” things to worry about – the standard concerns of life. The little stresses of carpools and laundry and the more substantial concerns we had of davening for those who needed shidduchim and health and parnassah. But now, After, we still have those concerns, but in the background – and even in the foreground – we are aware, constantly, that there is a larger worry looming, an existential apprehension that we carry around, an unease that permeates our thoughts, our day, our davening.

I know that, as Jews, our year is dictated by the Jewish calendar, in which all our actions are made to propel us to become better people and in turn be part of propagating a better world. But we live in the United States, a country that is run by the secular calendar, and so much of what we do is also influenced by the rhythms of that year. We pay our bills and write our checks and calculate our taxes all based on the secular dates. And although our new year was welcomed and celebrated three months ago, there is something refreshing about being offered another fresh start.

Turning the calendar on 2023 allows us that. It offers us another opportunity to look back on the last year and think about

Yitzy Halpern, PUBLISHER

publisher@fivetownsjewishhome.com

Yosef Feinerman, MANAGING EDITOR ads@fivetownsjewishhome.com

Shoshana Soroka, EDITOR

editor@fivetownsjewishhome.com

Nate Davis Editorial Assistant Nechama Wein Copy Editor Rachel Bergida Shana Brecher Lani White Design & Production Gabe Solomon Distribution & Logistics P.O. BOX 266 Lawrence, NY 11559 Phone | 516-734-0858 Fax | 516-734-0857 Classified Deadline: Monday 5:00PM classifieds@fivetownsjewishhome.com text 443-929-4003 PAYMENT VIA CREDIT CARD MUST BE SUBMITTED ALONG WITH CLASSIFIED ADS The Jewish Home is an independent weekly magazine.

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Shabbos Zemanim

Weekly Weather | December 29 – January 4

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Candle Lighting: 4:17 pm Shabbos Ends: 5:23 pm Rabbeinu Tam: 5:49 pm

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Contents LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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COMMUNITY Readers’ Poll

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Community Happenings

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NEWS

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Global

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National

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That’s Odd

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TJH Year in Review

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ISRAEL Israel News

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My Israel Home

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Kissinger and the Jews by Uri Kaufman

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JEWISH THOUGHT Rabbi Wein on the Parsha

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The Chizuk of Parshas Vayechi by Rav Moshe Weinberger

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Delving into the Daf by Rabbi Avrohom Sebrow

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Headlines and Halacha by Rabbi Yair Hoffman

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PEOPLE The Wandering Jew

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Inspiration Nation

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2023’s Military Stories by Avi Heiligman

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HEALTH & FITNESS What Do You Advise? by Rabbi Dr. Dovid Fox

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Skip the Snooze Button by Aliza Beer, RD

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FOOD & LEISURE Food for Thought

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The Aussie Gourmet: Ceviche

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LIFESTYLES

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Dating Dialogue, Moderated

by Jennifer Mann, LCSW

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Parenting Pearls

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School of Thought

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Report Cards by Barbara Deutsch

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Mind Your Business

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Do You See Me? by Rivki D. Rosenwald Esq., CLC, SDS

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HUMOR Centerfold

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POLITICAL CROSSFIRE Notable Quotes

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The 10 Best Things President Biden Did in 2023 by Marc A. Thiessen

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Why I Can’t Stop Writing About Oct. 7 by Bret Stephens

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CLASSIFIEDS

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Dear Editor, This is addressed to both neighborhood walkers and drivers of all ages: Keep your head out of your phone when on the streets! The traffic volume is increasing as the neighborhood population increases. Broadway and West Broadway, the two main thoroughfares in the Five Towns, are choked with traffic at all hours of the day, but especially early morning and mid-afternoon – early evening. Both roads are narrow, and West Broadway is notorious for non-perpendicular crossings and poor nighttime lighting. When I drive, I am astounded to see how many kids are scootering, biking, and walking with earbuds in their ears or their heads staring at their phones. I almost drove into one of these kids the other day. I honked my horn at another to stay on the sidewalk as I had the green light. The girl had her buds on and didn’t hear a thing and crossed on the red light.

I plead with parents to teach their children not to use their phones while walking to/from school. Kids need to focus on the traffic and be fully aware of their surroundings. If their children won’t heed this advice, confiscate the phone. It really is that important, and it should not require this letter for anyone to understand this.

If you are a driver, likewise, store the phone in your glove box, or better in a coat pocket where the coat is in a back seat or the trunk where you can’t even be tempted to reach it. Focus fully on safely driving the car. Most phone calls can wait even two hours until you finish driving. If you really do need to check more often, go to a safe side street or parking lot, turn off the engine (yes! Turn it off! You wouldn’t

believe how many people accidentally hit the gear and sent the car moving!) and check your phone that way.

The Five Towns Central chat posts at least one neighborhood accident daily.

This is astounding. I wouldn’t be surprised if a significant percentage of them were caused by distracted drivers or pedestrians. Be smarter than your smartphone. Do your part to always be aware of street traffic and walk and drive safely.

Let’s make the Five Towns one of the safer neighborhoods in the world.

Daniel Feldman Dear Editor, In recent parshios, we have encountered two kingly figures, Yosef, who “ruled” over his desires, and Yehudah, who “ruled” over his ego by way of admitting mistakes. Being fit for the throne comes by way of defeating desire and reaching a level of humility to be able to admit mistakes.

This focus on controlling human desires and pride is emphasized by Dovid, the king and Messianic precursor.

As poet extraordinaire and man of emotion, he beseeches G-d in Psalms 51, numerically equivalent to the word “na,” please in Hebrew.

In precise language, he asks G-d to “create” for him a pure heart. Create, bara, of course leads us to Bereishis, the creation of the world, a bastion of creativity. One of the most creative entities is the yetzer hara of which G-d says in creation that it is “tov meod – very good.”

How can the angel that exists to destroy us on a moment-to-moment basis be very good? The answer is that the yetzer hara works for G-d with the importContinued on page 10

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ant mission of discovering how faithful we are to our Creator as opposed to our desires. When the evil inclination will be slayed at the end of time, it makes those who chose good to see how far they came and how deserving they are.

We thought we knew the end in this week’s parsha when Yaakov wanted to reveal the end of time. Where did this enthusiasm to express from his mouth (peh, the number of pesukim in the parsha) come from? He lived a hard life. Everything changed though when he came to Mitzrayim. There was now peace among his children, and he felt the end was a given. However, though he defined the essence of the brothers at this time which would seem to portend a smooth ending, there was no guarantee that they would enact the mussar given and fix themselves.

The last piece left is fixing ourselves where we naturally stumble. The yetzer hara is faithful to its mission, to deflate us and make us believe that we can’t fix our bad traits, especially in the areas that often need fixing, such as in the realms of desire, jealousy, ego, anger and brazenness.

Dovid finishes Psalms 51 with the notion that in the Third Temple we will be bereft of sin and sacrifice to G-d in purity.

Reaching purity requires a renewal of the heart to combat an enemy that is equally as creative in fulfilling its mission: to see how faithful we really are to G-d.

Steven Genack Dear Editor, Thank you for publishing the excellent letters about the importance of supporting the candidacy of Mazi Pilip.

The issues at stake are numerous and important. We hosted her for a speech at the Jewish Center of Roslyn about six months ago. I hope she will be able to come again before the election.

Really, every shul in the district should have her come to speak and should run a voter registration drive. We should all encourage and remind all shul members to vote and to get their neighbors to vote.

Sincerely, Eli Reit A teacher at Jewish Center of Roslyn

Dear Editor, In 2023, just like in past 24 years, Senator Chuck Schumer has taken pride in visiting all 62 counties in New York State. He just visited Hudson, New York, in Columbia County to complete his tour.

These annual visits provide him with a better understanding of the needs for residents of each county. When was the last time he visited our southern border? He could view firsthand our ongoing invasion of illegal immigrants. When will he visit the famous Manhattan Hotel Roosevelt or Brooklyn Floyd Bennet Field (in his home borough of Kings County) migrant shelters? For the third year in a row, illegal migration will exceed 2 million.

Schumer could also learn from border agents about their fight to stem the smuggling of fentanyl. This drug is killing over 100,000 Americans every year. When will Schumer travel to El Paso, Texas, and observe this crisis firsthand? Perhaps it will convince him to stop holding up fully funding completion for construction of a border wall to protect our sovereignty as a nation.

Sincerely, Larry Penner Dear Editor, I could not stop thinking about Etti Siegel’s wise words in last week’s column (although every week she shares wise words!).

Etti wrote about how when we try to empathize, we are sometimes feeling our own past experiences instead of fully trying to understand the other person’s experience. How true that is, and how unbelievable that I never realized that beforehand.

To truly be empathetic, we need to remove our own negius and focus completely on the other person. Etti’s column refers to parenting. I think this is a great concept that can be utilized when it comes to all relationships.

A Reader

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The Week In News

Prague University Shooting

dent in the history” of his country.

On X, Charles University announced that it had increased safety protocols on campus and had called off events that were scheduled to take place on Thursday and Friday. The university also “called for an adequate and sensitive approach to [Friday’s] possible exams or credit examinations.”

Instances of gun violence are few and far between in the Czech Republic, a country where it is difficult to legally acquire guns. Over 300,000 people in the Czech Republic have guns, according to the police.

British Boy Missing For 6 Years Fourteen people were killed and 25 were injured on Thursday, December 21, in a shooting at Charles University, in Prague, Czech Republic, marking the Central European country’s most fatal shooting in recent history.

Following the attack, the assailant, David Kozak, took his own life, according to Martin Vondrášek, the police chief of the Czech Republic. Kozak, 24, was a student at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University, where the shooting took place.

The shooting came mere days before the university’s scheduled holiday break.

Many students, alarmed by the sounds of screams and gunshots, hid inside their classrooms and lecture halls, barricading the entrances. Some even hid atop a ledge on the building’s exterior.

“After I made the barricade and locked the door, I hid under the desk and I was preparing myself for anything that could happen,” Jakob Weizman, a graduate student who was at the university at the time of the attack, said. “I did not know if [the shooter] was going to come through the door or from the window.”

Of the 25 injured, ten are in serious condition, according to Vondrášek.

The shooter legally owned a number of guns and is speculated to have been connected to a few other homicide cases, including the killing of his father in the town of Hostouň and a double homicide elsewhere in Prague.

A day of mourning was declared in the Czech Republic on Saturday.

“I want to express my deep sadness and also helpless anger over the loss of so many young lives,” President Petr Pavel of the Czech Republic said, declaring the mass shooting as “the most tragic inci-

Alex Batty went missing in 2017 at the age of eleven. Now seventeen years old, he is finally back home in England, six years after his mother and grandfather, who did not have legal custody over the young boy, took him to Spain.

According to Fabien Accidini, a French man who found and rescued Batty in the French department of Haute-Garonne, said the boy said he was “kidnapped by his mother” and had spent three years living in Spain before moving with his mother to France, where he had been living for the past two years “in a spiritual community.” In his conversation with Accidini, Batty said his mother is a “bit crazy.”

Batty was walking on the side of the road, holding a jacket, skateboard, flashlight, and backpack, when he was spotted

by Accidini, reported French television network TF1. It was raining, and Accidini, who was driving in his car, pulled over and asked the teenager where he was going.

“He told me that it had been four days that he was walking since he had left the mountains, he didn’t know where,” recalled Accidini. “He was relieved to leave, to return to England, to see his grandmother again because he didn’t want to live his whole life in that community. He wanted to have a real life with a real future.”

His maternal grandmother and legal

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guardian, Susan Caruana, said she was shocked, yet overjoyed to be reunited with her grandson after six years.

After he returned to the United Kingdom, Batty was interviewed by The Sun. He described the first three or so years of living away from England as a “vacation” in which he kept himself busy by “reading, drawing, [and] going to the beach.”

But the novelty wore off when he turned fourteen years old, at which point he was suddenly thrust into a world of responsibility; he had to start working and paying for food and rent. He described his social life during that period as virtually “non-existent,” as he had only become friends with one person while away from home.

“I started weighing up the pros and the cons from each lifestyle, and, after a couple of months of contemplation, I realized England was definitely the way forward,” he said.

And so he decided to escape from France, opting to leave when it was “pitch-black” outside. Before his departure, he left his mother a goodbye note. “[I] told her how much I loved her; how much I appreciated what she had done for me. I didn’t want her to worry about me,” Batty said.

Hamas’s Business Portfolio

New reports by Shomrim and the International Consortium for Investigative Journalism (ICIJ) reveal that Abdelbasit Hamza, a former Sudanese prisoner and businessman who was sanctioned by the U.S., holds shares in several businesses, including ones in Cyprus, Spain, Egypt, and Sudan.

While all his businesses pose as legitimate companies, each exists only “for the purpose of financing the movement’s [Hamas’] operations, including its military activity,” according to former IDF and Mossad intelligence officer Udi Levy.

Hamza, who is one of the Hamas terror group’s most prominent financiers, reportedly has ties to Osama Bin Laden.

His role in financing the Gaza-based terrorist organization landed him in a Suda-

nese prison in 2019, after dictator Omar Al-Bashir was overthrown from his position of power. Hamza was released from prison in October 2021 after Sudan was hit by a military uprising.

The Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7, in which 1,200 Israelis were murdered, over 240 people were abducted, and thousands more were injured, prompted the U.S. to sanction Hamza. In November, the United Kingdom joined the U.S. in sanctioning the businessman, although Hamza denies having any involvement in financing Hamas.

The ICIJ, Shomrim, and others gained access to over 3.6 million documents that contained information on Hamza’s business dealings. In 2005, he bought a stake in Cyprus-based Matz Holdings, the majority of which he sold to Al-Bashir in 2019; he currently owns 10% of the company. Additionally, he is the owner of a Spanish real estate firm that was sanctioned by the U.S. a week after Hamza was sanctioned.

According to the U.S. Treasury Department, Hamza has “longstanding ties to terrorism financing” and has connections to companies that are linked to Bin Laden.

Hamza’s partner at Matz Holdings, Jakob Bliggenstorfer, claimed that Hamza has no connections to Hamas, asserting that the imposed sanctions are merely “a case of mistaken identity.”

Navalny Now in Arctic Prison

Navalny’s chief strategist, Leonid Volkov, shared on X. Navalny’s advisors had previously warned that the opposition leader was ill as he was kept in an unventilated cell and denied food.

“I am your new Father Frost,” Navalny wrote jokingly in his first post on X, via his attorneys, from his new prison, a reference to the harsh weather conditions there.

“Well, I now have a sheepskin coat, an ushanka hat (a fur hat with ear-covering flaps), and soon I will get valenki (traditional Russian winter footwear).

“The 20 days of the transfer were quite tiring, but I’m still in an excellent mood, as Father Frost should be.”

Navalny’s new home, known as “the Polar Wolf” colony, is considered to be one of the toughest prisons in Russia.

Most prisoners there have been convicted of grave crimes. Winters are harsh – and temperatures are due to drop to around minus 28 Celsius (minus 18.4 Fahrenheit) there over the next week.

Navalny was poisoned with a militarygrade nerve agent in the Siberian city of Tomsk in August 2020 and later evacuated to Berlin for medical care. After spending more than one week in a coma and recovering from the assassination attempt, Navalny returned to Moscow on January 17, 2021, and was arrested at passport control for violating the terms of his parole.

He has denied the charges he faces as politically motivated over his anti-Kremlin protests and campaigns against corruption in Russia.

Russia-China Reach $200B in Trade For three weeks, supporters of Alexei Navalny were concerned for his whereabouts. He had been imprisoned in Russia’s Vladimir region, and his attorneys had not been able to contact him since December 6.

On Monday, it was confirmed that Navalny, longtime critic of President Putin, is now imprisoned farther north in the Yamalo-Nenetsk region.

He is serving a 19-year sentence on charges of extremism.

“It is almost impossible to get to this colony; it is almost impossible to even send letters there. This is the highest possible level of isolation from the world,”

As promised in 2019 by Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, the presidents of China and Russia respectively, Moscow and Beijing have reached over $200 billion in trade. The announcement was made by Xi on Wednesday, December 20, during his meeting with Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.

At the meeting, Xi, as quoted by state news agency Xinhua, said that Russia

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and China should “give full play to the advantages of political mutual trust” and “deepen cooperation on economy, trade, energy, and connectivity.”

Before December 2023, China and Russia exchanged about $218.2 billion in trade, according to data released by Chinese customs authorities. Globally, China, which has the world’s second-biggest economy, conducted $5.41 trillion in trade. Its business relationship with Russia thus makes up only 4% of China’s global trade deals, as of December.

In 2022, trade between Russia and China increased 30%, reaching $190 billion amid the launch of Moscow’s war against Ukraine. Although Beijing asserts that it hasn’t taken either Russia’s or Ukraine’s sides, since 2022, China has assisted Russia in weathering the storm of sanctions imposed on it by the U.S. and much of the Western world, by entering into a significant economic partnership with the Kremlin.

Last Tuesday, during Mishustin’s visit to China, Chinese Premier Li Qiang co-led an end-of-year meeting in which the two countries agreed to boost their relationship in a variety of ways, including with regard to trade, transport, e-commerce, space exploration, satellite navigation, and more, according to a statement from

the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

While in China, Mishustin praised the “centuries-old friendship between the Russian and Chinese peoples” and claimed that Moscow and Beijing’s relationship has reached a new peak.

“The governments of Russia and China are deeply involved in achieving the goals that we set together, my friend President Xi Jinping – also Russia’s friend – and I. The work is progressing rapidly, steadily, and confidently,” Putin said last week during an end-of-year broadcast.

Unrest in Serbia

Fishing in Serbia’s troubled waters after a contested general election, Russia on Monday accused the West of orchestrating anti-government street protests in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, that

flared into violence Sunday evening.

Claims of a Western plot by Russia’s ambassador to Serbia, Alexander Botsan-Harchenko, were the latest efforts

by Moscow to thwart a so far mostly fruitless diplomatic campaign by the United States and Europe to lure Serbia out of Russia’s orbit and break traditionally strong ties between the two Slavic and Orthodox Christian nations.

Previously peaceful street protests in Belgrade over what the opposition says was a rigged general election on December 17 turned ugly on Sunday after protesters tried to storm the capital’s City Council building and were met by volleys of tear gas from riot police officers.

The Russian ambassador, in a television interview, said there was “irrefutable evidence” that the “riot” had been incited by the West. This echoed claims

by Serbia’s strongman leader, President Aleksandar Vucic, that his government had come under attack from outside forces seeking a “color revolution,” a term coined by Russia to describe popular revolts that it invariably dismisses as Western conspiracies.

“This was an attempted violent takeover of the state institutions of the Republic of Serbia,” Vucic told Pink TV, a pro-government television station, de-

riding accusations of election irregularities as “lies” ginned up by his political opponents.

There is no evidence that Western governments instigated the past week’s street protests against Vucic and what his opponents believe was a stolen Belgrade election.

A December 18 report by election monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said that Serbian voters had been given a wide choice of candidates and that “freedom of expression and assembly were generally respected.” But, it said, the governing party had enjoyed a “tilted playing field” because “pressure on voters as well as the decisive involvement of the president and the ruling party’s systemic advantages undermined the election process overall.”

Vucic’s governing Serbian Progressive Party trounced the opposition in this month’s parliamentary vote but fared less well in an election for the Belgrade City Council, eking out a narrow win that the opposition attributed to voters whom they say were illegally bused into the capital from other areas of the country and from neighboring Kosovo and Bosnia. (© The New York Times)

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Iranian Forces Give Houthis Intel

Since Israel launched its ground offensive into Gaza in hopes of ridding the strip of the Hamas terror group which invaded part of the Jewish state on October 7, other Islamic militant groups have involved themselves in the conflict.

Most recently, Iran-backed Houthi forces launched a series of attacks on ships in the Red Sea in order to retaliate against the Jewish state for its ground campaign – although the ships attacked by the Yemen-based group have few connections to Israel. In fear of the Houthis, many ships have deliberately avoided the Red Sea. According to reports released by The Wall Street Journal on Friday, a ship controlled by Iranian paramilitary militants has been monitoring the area, providing

the Houthis with intelligence required to attack ships on the Red Sea. The Iranian ship in question is “enabling the Houthi drones and missiles to accurately target the ships,” the Journal explained.

A Houthi spokesman denied these reports, asserting that the group “didn’t need to rely on Iran” to carry out attacks on the Red Sea. However, a Western official has rejected the spokesman’s claims.

“They need Iranian assistance [as the Houthi group] doesn’t have the radar technology to target ships,” the official said, adding that, without Iranian intelligence, “the missiles would just drop in the water.”

“It’s strange to attribute everything to Iran as if it were the world’s strongest power. We have intelligence facilities that have proven themselves over the years of aggression against us,” the official added.

A Mysterious Poisoning Zhu Ling fell ill from a mysterious poisoning while in college in 1994. She died on Friday in Beijing at the age of 50.

Zhu was a second-year chemistry

major and accomplished musician at Tsinghua University, when she began to experience stomach pain, hair loss, and other seemingly inexplicable symptoms. It was later found that she was suffering from thallium poisoning.

The highly toxic chemical – used in rodent and insect poisons – left Zhu practically blind and with the mental capacity of a 6-year-old.

She had suffered for months and ultimately fell into a coma before the cause of her ailment was diagnosed.

Despite suspicion of foul play and a police investigation, no one has ever been charged.

Zhu’s case has captured the attention of the country across the decades since she was poisoned, sparking outrage and calls for justice.

“The main reason that Zhu’s case evokes so much public anger and sympathy is because many people in China see a piece of themselves in Zhu: They have suffered injustice of some sort, but there is never a fair, independent or transparent investigation by the authorities,” said Yaqiu Wang, research director for China at the Washington DC-based non-profit Freedom House.

“Zhu’s devoted parents, who took great care of her for nearly three decades, also symbolize the familial care that people in China intimately know and have to rely on, because the system is not something you can trust and depend upon.”

Following the poisoning, police had investigated one of Zhu’s roommates, Sun Wei, but subsequently cleared her as a suspect, according to previous reporting from state news agency Xinhua.

Many netizens in the past have linked the uneventful probe to Sun’s family background.

Sun’s grandfather was a high-ranking official in the Nationalist government before the Communist takeover of China in 1949. He later held senior – though largely symbolic – positions in the People’s Republic until his death in 1995.

One of Sun’s father’s cousins was considered a national leader from 1993 to 2003 when he was a vice-chairman of China’s top political advisory body.

Sun has reportedly made a few online statements on Tianya, a Chinese Internet discussion forum, over the years, including one in 2005, in which she said police cleared her as a suspect in 1998 due to lack of evidence.

She had access to thallium at the college’s laboratory, although she has pointed out that she was not the only student to have had access to the toxic substance.

Ukraine Official Embezzled $40M

The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) announced this week that a senior Ukrainian Defense Ministry official has been detained over allegations he embezzled 1.5 billion Ukrainian hryvnia ($40 million) relating to an artillery shells contract.

The official signed an agreement with a special export company to purchase a wholesale batch of artillery shells in December last year. However, a more favorable contract for the supply was later signed with the same manufacturer – one that did not involve intermediaries. The SBU said this significantly shortened the delivery time and reduced the cost of the products.

According to the SBU, the defense official extended the original – more expensive – contract, and funds totaling 1.5 billion Ukrainian hryvnia ($40 million) were transferred to the accounts of an affiliated foreign intermediary firm.

The official faces up to 15 years in prison if found guilty.

In September, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky fired his Defense Minister, Oleksii Reznikov, citing the need for “new approaches” amid a number of corruption scandals involving Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense.

Rustem Umerov, the former people’s deputy of Ukraine, was appointed as his replacement.

The following month, CNN reported that the U.S. was increasingly urging Ukraine to do more to combat governmental corruption. Officials said Washington had issued several notices

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to Kyiv indicating that certain kinds of U.S. economic aid will be linked to Ukraine’s progress in reforming its institutions.

Zelensky sought to address concerns about corruption when he travelled to Washington, DC, and met U.S. senators this month. The issue has also become more pressing after the EU agreed to open membership talks with Ukraine.

A Plane for Human Trafficking

lines, a company based in Romania, was on its way from the United Arab Emirates to Nicaragua and had stopped over at Vatry airport, roughly 150 kilometers east of Paris, for supply.

French authorities seized the plane on December 21 after receiving an anonymous tip.

“The cabin crew have all been questioned and have been let go freely,” Liliana Bakayoko, the airline’s lawyer, said, adding that the company which chartered this plane had been a loyal client of Legend Airlines and had chartered several flights before.

Under French law, organized human trafficking is punishable with prison terms of up to 20 years and fines of up to $3.3 million (3 million euros).

Fatal Furnace Blast Last week, French authorities grounded a passenger plane carrying 303 Indian citizens, including 11 non-accompanied minors, at the airport of Vatry, on suspicion of human trafficking.

The plane, belonging to Legend Air-

On Sunday, at least 13 people were killed in a Chinese-owned nickel factory in Indonesia after a furnace explosion. At least 38 others were injured in the blast.

The incident took place at a factory in the Morowali Industrial Park on the island of Sulawesi.

The factory is operated by Chinese

steel and nickel giant Tsingshan, which has stakes in Indonesia’s lucrative nickel mining industry and runs operations under its local arm, Indonesia Tsingshan Stainless Steel (ITSS).

global leader in nickel production and has been aggressive courting foreign investment in smelters and processing plants from countries like China with its EV-friendly business policies.

Incidents such as this have prompted critics to urge the government to put safety measures into place.

Al-Shabaab Commander Killed Among the workers killed were eight Indonesians and five Chinese.

The blast was said to have occurred when workers were repairing a furnace.

“During the repairs process, an explosion occurred. Based on initial investigations, it (was) possibly caused because there was still some explosion-inducing liquid at the bottom of the furnace,” the company said.

Several oxygen cylinders nearby also exploded, which fueled the fires.

Indonesia is the world’s largest exporter of nickel and is also rich in copper, cobalt, and bauxite, used in the making of electric vehicle (EV) batteries. As demand for EVs surges around the world, Indonesia has emerged as a

In a joint operation, U.S. and Somali forces killed Maalim Ayman, a senior leader of the Al-Shabaab militant group operating in Somalia and Kenya, on December 17.

“Ayman was accountable for planning multiple lethal terrorist attacks in Somalia and nearby countries,” Somali Minister for Information Daud Aweis said.

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Most notably, Ayman is responsible for a terrorist attack on U.S. and Kenyan personnel at Kenya’s Manda Bay Airfield on January 5, 2020 in which three Americans were killed, including one soldier and two civilian contractors.

Two more U.S. service members and one civilian contractor were wounded, according to a statement from the U.S. Department of State.

The U.S. government put out a bounty of up to $10 million for “information leading to the arrest or conviction in any country of Maalim Ayman” in January of this year.

Al-Shabaab was designated by the U.S. as a terrorist group in 2008 and by a UN Security Council committee in 2010.

IDF Destroys Major Hamas Tunnel

ings.

Before the Israel-Hamas war broke out, several Hamas leaders were based physically in Palestine Square, which is in Gaza City’s upper-class Rimal neighborhood. The busy retail area had effectively concealed the terror group’s underground affairs. During the tour of the square, IDF officials showed the media a penthouse apartment where senior Hamas official Ismail Hainiyeh’s daughter lived, as well as a community college, Hamas government buildings, and more.

Within the tunnels, there were blast doors and places where one could live, the military said. In some places, the IDF found food and water supplies abandoned in the tunnels. The tunnels were connected to the living quarters of top Hamas officials.

On Wednesday, the IDF, in a statement, called the network an “underground terror city” with a “strategic tunnel route connected to other significant underground infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.”

It is no secret that Hamas has terrorist tunnels beneath the feet of its civilians, but Israel’s ground campaign has revealed just how large its underground network is. Earlier in December, the IDF found a tunnel beneath northern Gaza which spanned 2.5 miles and was wide enough for a car to fit. The Israeli army uncovered footage of Mohammad Sinwar, the Hamas leader’s brother, driving a car in the tunnel.

A True Act of Forgiveness Hidden beneath Palestine Square in Gaza City was a large network of Hamas tunnels connected to various locations.

On Thursday, December 21, the IDF announced that its Yahalom combat engineering unit and the 401st Armored Brigade had completely destroyed those tunnels.

The tunnel network is said to have hosted Hamas leaders Muhammad Deif and Yahya Sinwar at the time of the October 7th terrorist attacks on southern Israel. Before the network’s demolition, the IDF gave several media outlets a tour of Palestine Square and the tunnels’ open-

Iris Haim, the mother of 28-year-old hostage Yotam Haim, who was mistakenly killed by Israeli soldiers on December 15, met with one of the soldiers who was in the battalion who mistakenly shot Haim and two other hostages.

Did you know?

The Empire State Building has its own zip code.

Haim’s mother told the soldiers involved in the incident via a voice recording that she places no blame upon them for the death of her son. The next day, a soldier who was in the battalion came to visit her.

“I am Yotam’s mother. I wanted to tell you that I love you very much, and I hug you here from afar,” she said in the message. “I know that everything that happened is absolutely not your fault, and nobody’s fault except that of Hamas, may their name be wiped out and their memory erased from the earth.

“I want you to look after yourselves and to think all the time that you are doing the best thing in the world, the best thing that could happen, that could help us. Because all the people of Israel and all of us need you healthy,” Iris said in the recording, urging the soldiers to not hesitate if they think they see a terrorist. She then invited the soldiers to visit her, adding that no one in her family – not her, her husband, her daughter, or Yotam’s brother – would judge or be upset with them.

“We received your message, and since then we have been able to function again,” said the soldier who visited her. “Before that, we had shut down.”

According to the IDF, while in Gaza, Alon Shamriz, Yotam Haim, and Samar Talalka held up signs that read “SOS” and “Help, 3 hostages.” Upon seeing the battalion, the three abductees began moving towards the soldiers to ask for help. The IDF soldiers didn’t know the three were hostages and thus shot at them.

In order to prevent a devastating occurrence such as this from happening again, the Israeli military has shown its soldiers images of the abductees who are still in Gaza so that the soldiers will know what the hostages look like.

Of the 240 people who were abducted by Hamas on October 7, 129 are still in Gaza, some of whom were murdered while in captivity; 105 were released as part of a short-lived truce that ended on December 1.

Determining the Fate of Hostages The Health Ministry has selected Dr. Hagar Mizrahi and Prof. Ofer Merin, who head the National Center of Forensic Medicine and Shaare Zedek Medical Center respectively, to lead a new medical committee that was formed to assess which hostages were killed by Hamas.

There is an unspeakable trauma to living life without the certainty of knowing

if your loved one is still alive, said Merin.

“In these weeks, I learned the term ‘ambiguous loss.’ It’s the continuous grief day after day of living with uncertainty, always with a slim hope that maybe their loved one is alive or just wounded or okay,” the professor said. “There is a clear understanding that these people need the closure. If we know for sure that someone is dead, I think we’re doing right by these families by telling them.”

By employing a variety of investigative methods, the medical committee is able to confirm hostage deaths with absolute certainty.

“Some of the initial materials we worked with were videos from inside Israel, such as footage from security cameras from kibbutzim and villages,” Merin said in an interview with The Times of Israel. “If a person who was shot is seen lying on the ground in the same exact spot showing no movement at the 7am mark, at 9am, at 11am, and at 1pm, and is then seen being thrown into a car, you can make some conclusions.”

However, mere footage is not enough to declare that a hostage passed away, he added. There must be “at least two sources of information,” he said, adding that they will never consider evidence that comes from photographs or information released by Hamas. Additionally, they will not jump to the conclusion that a hostage died just because they were critically injured at the time of their abduction.

“We have no way of knowing whether, when, or even if they received medical treatment. We don’t know the quality of the treatment and whether they survived or not,” Merin said. Lastly, he added, the committee does not rely on testimony of a hostage’s wellbeing, even if the testimony came from fellow hostages.

“There was a case where a returned hostage said she was in a medical place and next to her there was a hostage who was alive, but the next day he wasn’t. We will not go on something like this,” he said, adding that he cannot give exact details on how his team acquires the intelligence and evidence required to determine the wellbeing of a hostage.

Upon making a final decision, the committee writes up a report in which

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Mousavi was responsible for coordinating the military alliance between Iran and Syria and was believed by Israel to be heavily involved in Tehran’s efforts to supply weapons to terror proxies in the area, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah terror group. He had been living in Syria for the past 30 years and had his own office in the Syrian Defense Ministry.

Hezbollah commented that it regards the killing as a “flagrant and shameless violation, which is off limits,” according to Iran’s state-owned Press TV. Israel has not yet admitted to killing the terrorist. Still, Israel has been hitting at Hezbollah targets in Lebanon as the Iran-backed terror group has been sending rocket fire into northern Israel.

The Tasnim report said Mousavi was “one of the oldest advisors of IRGC in Syria” and was close to former IRGC Quds force head, Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a 2020 U.S. drone strike in Iraq.

At the beginning of the month, Iran said two IRGC officers were killed in an attack in the area of the Syrian capital, and blamed Israel. The IRGC said Mohammad Ali Atai Shoorcheh and Panah Taghizadeh were “martyred” while on an advisory mission to Syria, blaming the “Zionists” for their death. At the time, Syria said Israeli airstrikes targeted multiple areas near Damascus.

Rebranding Turkish Coffee

it shows evidence of how it made its decision, and, if the victim was a soldier, it submits the report to the IDF Rabbinate.

If the victim was a civilian, both the IDF Rabbinate and Israel’s Chief Rabbinate must authorize the report.

“We give the rabbis the protocol, which explains how we reached the determination of death, but it does not include the actual intelligence material we referred to,” said Merin.

Iranian Commander Killed According to Iranian media, a senior officer in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was killed on Monday in an alleged Israeli airstrike in the Syrian capital of Damascus.

The semi-official Iranian Tasnim news agency said that Brig. Gen. Razi Mousa-

vi was killed in a strike in the Damascus suburb of Sayeda Zeinab.

Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi vowed that Israel “will certainly pay for this crime.”

“Without a doubt, this action is another sign of frustration, helplessness, and incapacity of the usurping Zionist regime in the region,” Raisi said in a statement.

Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian tweeted that “Tel Aviv faces a tough countdown.”

Since October 7, there have been calls to boycott Turkish goods, after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey praised the Hamas terrorists, referred to Israel’s prime minister as the “the butcher of Gaza,” and called Israel a “terror state.”

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Now, Strauss has announced that it has new packaging for Elite Turkish coffee, adding an Israeli flag to the red bag and including patriotic slogans such as “The victory generation,” “Stronger together” and “Am Yisrael Chai.”

The coffee is not connected to the country of Turkey; it is meant to make Turkish-style coffee. Still, Israelis were calling for the company to change the branding on the product.

“Demand for coffee has been high since the start of the war,” Strauss Israel Coffee CEO Avi Laufer noted. “There were posts that asked us to change the name to ‘Israeli coffee’ because of the calls to boycott products from Turkey.

We wanted to clarify that there’s no connection between [our] Turkish coffee and Turkey. The coffee beans come from coffee producing nations like Brazil, Vietnam and Ethiopia.”

The company also changed the packaging to raise morale in Israel, especially for soldiers fighting in Gaza, who drink the Elite Turkish coffee because it’s easy to make in the field.

This is not the first time that Israelis knocked the Turkish coffee. In 2014, during the flotilla incident in which Turkey sided with Hamas, Israelis wanted to rename Turkish coffee “Israeli coffee.”

Sinwar: Hamas Won’t Surrender

Hamas is not surrendering, the terror group’s leader Yahya Sinwar announced on Monday.

Hamas is facing a “fierce, violent and unprecedented battle” against Israel, he said. Sinwar was defiant, claiming that the terror group is on its way to crushing the IDF. He added that Hamas will not submit to “the occupation’s conditions.”

Sinwar falsely claimed that the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, had “targeted” over 5,000 Israeli soldiers and officers, and killed about third of them — that is, over 1,500.

So far, according to the IDF, 156 IDF soldiers have been killed in the ground operations in Gaza. More than 300 members of the security forces were killed in Hamas’s initial October 7 onslaught.

The terror leader also gave inflated claims of the number of Israeli soldiers injured in the war and the amount of Israeli military equipment that has been destroyed. He claimed that around 3,500 troops were seriously wounded or disabled, whereas that figure according to the IDF stands at less than 200.

Sinwar also said that Hamas had completely or partially destroyed 750 Israeli military vehicles. The IDF, last month, said that very few IDF vehicles had been severely damaged beyond repair, and that most vehicles that are hit return to fighting.

On Friday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that the IDF has been “gradually achieving” its goals in northern Gaza and is continuing operations in the Khan Younis area in the south of the Strip.

He also issued a renewed personal threat against Sinwar, saying he would soon “meet the barrels of our guns.”

On Sunday, Prime Minister Netanyahu reiterated Israel’s three primary goals for the war with Hamas: to destroy Hamas, remove it from power in Gaza, and release the hostages being held by the terror group.

“We are deepening the war in the Gaza Strip,” Netanyahu said in a video statement. “We will continue to fight until complete victory over Hamas. That is the only way to bring back the hostages, to eliminate Hamas, and to ensure that Gaza will no longer be a threat to Israel.”

Netanyahu acknowledged the “very heavy toll” that the war was taking on IDF soldiers.

“We are doing everything to protect the lives of our fighters,” Netanyahu said.

“But one thing we will not do — we will not stop until we achieve victory.”

According to Hamas, more than 20,000 people have been killed in Gaza.

Israel says that the IDF has killed around 8,000 terrorists in Gaza. Another 1,000 Hamas terrorists were killed in Israel on October 7, during the massacre.

Hochul Moves Elections On Friday, on the eve of the holiday break, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed legislation to move most local elections in the state to even years. The law, sponsored by Democratic state Sen. James Skoufis and Assembly Member Amy Paulin, will go into effect in 2025

and affect offices outside of New York City.

Individuals elected after January 1, 2025 would have their terms shortened to match up with an even-year election cycle.

“Every eligible New Yorker deserves the right to participate in the democratic process without unnecessary barriers,” Hochul said in a press release. “This is a meaningful first step, and I would support a constitutional amendment to align all election years, to save taxpayer dollars and avoid voter fatigue.” A constitutional amendment would be required to move all elections not under legislative authority, including judgeships and offices within New York City.

Despite Hochul’s excitement about the new law, many noted that with local elections being moved to even years, the ballots will be longer, confusing voters.

“At a time when we should be keeping the divisiveness at the federal and state levels out of our local communities, this bill does the opposite, burying the local issues that impact New Yorkers’ daily lives at the back of exceedingly long ballots,” New York State Association of Counties Executive Director Stephen Acquario said.

Republicans also opposed the legislation. “With total disregard for the bipartisan opposition to this proposal, Governor Hochul shamefully signed a bill that effectively ends local elections in New York State,” state Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt said. “The touted benefits of this bill are a total sham concocted to hide the Democrat’s goal of expanding one-party control to every level of government.”

Off-year elections typically have low turnouts without a presidential or congressional race to draw people in.

Venezuela Prisoner Exchange The United States has released a close ally of President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela in exchange for 10 jailed Americans, including six designated as wrongfully detained.

Alex Saab, who has been accused

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by the United States of “profiting from starvation” of Venezuelans, is a Colombian businessperson and financial fixer for Maduro. He was indicted in 2019 in connection with a bribery scheme that siphoned an estimated $350 million from a Venezuelan government housing project.

Among the Americans released were Jerrel Kenemore and Eyvin Hernandez, who had been arrested in March 2022; Joseph Cristella, who was arrested in Venezuela in September 2022; and Savoi Wright, a businessperson from California whose family said he had been wrongfully detained after the FBI learned in October that he had been arrested. The United States had designated them all as wrongfully detained.

Senior U.S. officials declined to reveal details about the other Americans who were released, but they said the exchange meant that all the Americans believed to

be wrongfully detained in Venezuela had been freed.

As a part of the agreement, Venezuela also agreed to return to the United States former defense contractor Leonard Glenn Francis, known as Fat Leonard, who is at the center of one of the U.S. Navy’s largest corruption cases. He was set to be sentenced last year but escaped house arrest in September 2022 and fled to Venezuela.

Maduro will also release 20 Venezuelan political prisoners, as well as Roberto Abdul, an opposition leader in Venezuela, U.S. officials said. The arrest warrants of three other Venezuelans were also suspended.

The deal came after months of negotiations between President Joe Biden and Maduro’s top officials, which were brokered by Qatar, according to U.S. officials. It comes as the Biden administration tries to improve relations with the authoritarian government in Caracas.

The United States recently restarted deportation flights to Venezuela and agreed to lift some sanctions after the Maduro administration agreed to take tentative steps toward free and fair elections.

“It looks like Maduro, so far, is keeping his commitment on a free election,” Biden told reporters. “But it ain’t done yet. We’ve got a long way to go. But it’s good so far.” (© The New York Times)

A Better Coffee

difference in flavor, but it does confirm the benefit of the “Ross droplet” technique.

Hendon noted, “What I would recommend for the home user is to start with a single drop of water and build up from there — there is a substantial amount of nuance in this process.”

Giuliani Files For Bankruptcy Want a more delicious cup of coffee? Consider adding water to the beans before grinding them, that’s what researchers at the University of Oregon confirm.

“When you grind coffee, it goes everywhere,” said study coauthor Christopher Hendon, an associate professor of computational materials chemistry at the University of Oregon. “Dust comes out of the grinder, it’s like a plume that covers everything. But if you add a little water, it seems to not go everywhere.

It’s cleaner. That was the primary reason people did it.”

The static produced by grinding the coffee repels the particles in the coffee from each other. But water seems to dampen the effect in a technique known as the “Ross droplet.”

The researchers noted that adding water is not just better to prevent a mess. It also prevents microscopic clumps from forming during brewing. The clumps force water to flow around them, leaving some coffee untouched by the hot water – and decreasing the flavor in the brew.

“If you have clumps forming, there’s going to be significant amounts of void space, kind of like when you stack watermelons,” Hendon said. “As a result, when you push water through, you end up with less surface area touching the water and therefore lower extraction.”

The study, published December 6 in the journal Matter, tested this more subtle, harder to see potential benefit of adding water to the beans: getting rid of the flavor-robbing microclumps.

On average, the study found that adding water increases the extraction yield by 10%. Hendon warned that this doesn’t necessarily equate to a tangible

Rudy Guiliani, “America’s favorite mayor,” declared bankruptcy on Thursday, December 21, at a federal court in New York.

The former New York City mayor’s filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy comes days after he lost a court case against two former Georgia election workers who sued him for defamation. Ordered to pay the workers $150 million and bombarded by a series of additional court battles, Giuliani’s financial situation has been in a great deal of trouble. In the filing, he valued his assets at up to $10 million and listed his debt between $100 million and $500 million.

Aside from several other suits, Giuliani is $1 million in debt from unpaid taxes and also owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to lawyers and accountants.

“The filing should be a surprise to no one,” said Ted Goodman, the political advisor of Giuliani. “No person could have reasonably believed that Mayor Rudy Giuliani would be able to pay such a high punitive amount. Chapter 11 will afford Mayor Giuliani the opportunity and time to pursue an appeal, while providing transparency for his finances under the supervision of the bankruptcy court, to ensure all creditors are treated equally and fairly throughout the process.”

Giuliani’s lawyer, Joseph Sibley, claimed that the defamation lawsuit filed

Did you know?

There are 472 stations along 665 miles of track in the New York City Subway.

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about 39.1 million Americans, but with the “Californian exodus” becoming more popular due to the state’s high housing costs and a variety of other pressing issues, many have become concerned for the state’s future. With fewer residents, California can lose political power, federal funding, and more.

Since April 2020, the state’s population has declined by 1.5%, while Florida, Idaho, and South Carolina each saw a population increase of 5% or more during that same period. New York, Louisiana, West Virginia, Illinois, and Hawaii were the only states to lose a larger number of people than California from July 2020 to July 2021.

Before July 2020, there was not a single year in which California experienced a population decrease since the year 1900, according to data released by the U.S. Census Bureau.

It is projected by the Brennan Center for Justice that, if the California population decline continues, California may be left with only 48 seats in the House of Representatives as a result of congressional redistricting in 2030. California lost one seat in 2021 and currently has 52 House members.

However, some experts reject the possibility of California losing a significant number of seats, instead asserting that it is too early to tell what the future holds. According to Paul Mitchell, a prominent political data analyst from California, a more likely projection would be a decrease to 50 seats by 2030.

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by election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss was, in effect, requesting “the civil equivalent of the death penalty.”

“They’re trying to end Mr. Giuliani,” said Sibley.

Giuliani’s legal troubles started after he made a number of controversial statements about the 2020 election while he was working as former President Donald Trump’s attorney.

Giuliani will have the opportunity to request that the bankruptcy court absolve

him of the debt he owes to the two election workers, although the court may refuse to do so. Now, the attorneys of Moss and Freeman hope to place liens on real estate owned by Giuliani in New York and Florida; they are also considering going after other sources of the former mayor’s income, including Newsmax, an American news network where Giuliani has a show.

California Population Drops From July 2022 to July 2023, the population of the state of California decreased by about 37,000 people. From April 2020 to July 2022, the state lost over half a million of its residents.

California, still the most populous state in the United States, is home to

Not all parts of the Golden State are declining in population. According to Mitchell, conservative areas of California have lost far fewer people than the more left-leaning areas.

“Places like the Inland Empire are not losing population as fast as places like L.A. County,” he noted, indicating that there’s a possibility that state funding, political power, and congressional representation may be allotted to locations such as the Inland Empire and Central Valley more than to areas like L.A. County, Bay Area, and other city areas.

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NYU Student Has Crypto Mine

Jerry Yu has the trappings of what the Chinese call second-generation rich. He boasts a Connecticut prep-school education. He lives in a Manhattan condominium bought for $8 million from Jeffrey R. Immelt, a former General Electric CEO. And he is the majority owner of a bitcoin mine in Texas, acquired last year for more than $6 million.

Yu, a 23-year-old student at New York University, has also become – quite unintentionally – a case study in how Chinese nationals can move money from China to the United States without drawing the attention of authorities in either country.

The Texas facility, a large computing center, was not purchased with dollars.

Instead, it was bought with cryptocurrency, which offers anonymity, with the transaction routed through an offshore exchange, preventing anyone from knowing the origin of the financing.

Such secrecy allows Chinese investors to avoid the U.S. banking system, and the accompanying oversight of federal regulators, as well as sidestep Chinese restrictions on money leaving China. In a more traditional transaction, a bank receiving the funds would know where they were coming from and would be required by law to report any suspicious activity to the U.S. Treasury.

None of this would be known had Yu’s company – BitRush Inc., also known as BytesRush – not run into troubles in the tiny Texas Panhandle town of Channing, population 281, where contractors say they weren’t fully paid for their work on his mine there.

A flurry of lawsuits over the work has shaken loose documents that bring to light transactions not normally made

public as Chinese investors have flooded into the United States, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build or run crypto mines, after the Chinese government banned such operations in 2021.

The mines are a way for Chinese investors to generate cryptocurrency, primarily bitcoin, which they can cash in for U.S. dollars on exchanges. The Channing mine, built on an open field, consists of several dozen buildings designed to hold 6,000 specialized computers that can operate day and night trying to guess the right sequence of numbers that earn new bitcoins, currently worth more than $40,000 each. Such sites can place a burden on the nation’s electrical grid, The New York Times has reported, and their Chinese ownership has drawn national security scrutiny. (© The New York Times)

Protecting Workers from Indoor Heat

California is set on protecting workers from extreme work conditions – indoors.

Workers have testified in a public hearing about nosebleeds, nausea and dizziness that stem from extreme heat. In some warehouses, the walk to find a place to cool down is at least half a mile.

“We are in constant motion. Throughout the day, my shirt is soaked in sweat three to four times,” said Sara Fee, a former worker at an Amazon warehouse in San Bernardino, California, who testified before a state workplace safety board in May. “I have been nauseous, dizzy.”

California has had heat standards on the books for outdoor workers since 2005, and indoor workplaces are next.

Only two other states, Minnesota and Oregon, have adopted heat rules for indoor workers, according to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administra-

Did you know?

The Federal Reserve in New York is home to around 497,000 gold bars, with a combined weight of about 6,190 tons.

tion. Nationally, legislation has stalled in Congress.

If California adopts its proposal in the spring, businesses would be required to cool worksites below 87 degrees Fahrenheit when employees are present and below 82 degrees in places where workers wear protective clothing or are exposed to radiant heat, such as furnaces. If businesses are unable to lower the temperatures, they must provide workers with water, breaks, areas where they can cool down, cooling vests, or other means to keep employees from overheating.

Some businesses fear they won’t be able to meet the requirements, even with the flexibility the regulation offers. Workers argue buildings should be kept even cooler.

Heat stress can lead to heat exhaustion, heatstroke, cardiac arrest and kidney failure. In 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 1,600 heat-related deaths. It’s not clear how many of these deaths are related to work, either indoors or outdoors.

In California, 20 workers died from heat between 2010 and 2017, seven of them because of indoor heat, according to the Rand Corp.

California regulators have crafted the indoor rules to complement the state’s protections for outdoor workers.

For outdoor workers, when temperatures exceed 80 degrees, employers must provide shade and observe workers for signs of heat illness. At or above 95 degrees, they must come up with ways to prevent heat illness, such as reducing work hours or providing additional breaks.

California has a workforce of 18 million people.

Colorado’s New Wolves

by a video of the wolves running after their release. “Captured in Oregon, the wolves were evaluated by our veterinarians & biologists, fitted with GPS collars & transported to Colorado for their release.”

Despite being released into designated areas, other states are preparing for the wild animals to possibly enter their states. Farmers in Utah are concerned for their livestock.

“Whenever you do a reintroduction of, especially of a large animal that’s prone to wandering, and young as those wolves are...there’s certainly a good chance that they could wander outside of Colorado and the experimental population boundary,” Kim Hersey, mammal conservation manager with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, noted.

The wolves are protected, meaning Utahns can’t harm them even if the wolves target their herds. Instead, state wildlife officials obtained permits from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to capture the wolves and return them to Colorado.

A study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that less than 4 percent of cattle deaths were caused by wolves.

The study examined the thousands of cattle deaths caused by predators in 2010, which represented 5.5 percent of all cattle deaths and triggered a $98.5 million loss.

Wolf-caused deaths were highest in Wisconsin at the time, when wolves accounted for 48 percent of cattle losses by predators. No cases of cattle killed by wolves were documented in Colorado or Utah.

Gray wolves once thrived in Colorado, but humans eradicated the species in the 1940s. Wolves have since returned to Colorado over the past 10 years after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service worked to restore the species in Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, and Arizona.

Some of those wolves migrated to Colorado.

Brotherly Love Last week, Colorado released five new gray wolves into the wild in Grand County as part of the state’s reintroduction efforts.

“A historic day for Colorado and for the first time ever — we released 5 wolves, 3 males and 2 females, in Grand County today,” Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) posted last Monday, accompanied

Timothy Emerick is the best brother around.

The North Carolinian had bought two

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identical Powerball tickets due to a clerk’s error. But there were no tears from Emerick after he won two $100,000 prizes from the winning numbers.

Emerick works in BJ’s. It was there that he bought the tickets from his coworker.

“The gentleman at the store accidentally printed two tickets with the same numbers so I just decided to buy them both,” Emerick recalled.

What to do with the double bounty?

Emerick’s parents taught him well. He plans on giving the second ticket to his brother.

“I always said if I won, I would share it with him,” Emerick said.

He said his brother has definitely earned the prize.

“Over the years, whenever I’ve needed him, he’s been there,” Emerick said. “I think he’d do the same thing if the situation was reversed.”

That’s what we call brotherly love.

Put a Ring On It Bailey Davis was overjoyed when her fiancé gifted her with a sparkling engagement ring. But just two weeks after the proposal, David lost the ring at a rest

stop, much to her dismay.

She frantically went back to the area to look for the sparkler, but it wasn’t there.

“I just went back home. I didn’t even work that day. I just went back home. I went to bed,” she said.

Davis said that realizing she might lose her ring forever made her “sick.” Despite having insurance on it and knowing that “it was likely all going to be OK,” she was sad that any other ring wouldn’t be the one that her fiancé proposed with.

Despondent, Davis posted her loss on Facebook, asking anyone who had any knowledge of the lost ring to contact her.

Thankfully, Coty Warren came to her rescue.

Warren had gone into the same rest stop as Davis. The men’s bathroom was being cleaned, so Warren entered the single-family bathroom. He was washing his hands when he saw a ring on the counter.

Thinking he could possibly find the

person it belonged to, Warren took the ring and put it on his truck dashboard.

He thought it was fake.

“It didn’t even look real. It looked like it was like costume jewelry at first because it was so big and extravagant,” he said.

The next day, he came across the post Davis put on Facebook.

“I called her up and I said, “Well, I guess tonight’s your lucky night.’ She was very ecstatic,” he said.

Davis was overjoyed upon being reunited with her ring. Warren, for his part, declined the $1,000 reward she offered him.

“I feel what goes around comes around and you do good deeds upon others, it’ll come back to you tenfold,” he said.

That certainly has a ring of truth to it.

Fireball Flo Florence Hackman just turned 105 years old, but that doesn’t mean she is giving up her beloved drink.

The centenarian, who lives in an assistant living community in Ohio, supposedly takes a nip of Fireball cinnamon-flavored whisky every day.

When the brand heard of her unique affection for the drink, they sent her 105

shooters.

Surrounded by about 50 guests, “Fireball Flo” celebrated her birthday by watching the Cincinnati Bengals and drinking Fireball.

She said that she was “totally shocked” by the Fireball surprise and “thrilled to see it.”

“It was a totally unexpected thing,” Hackman said.

Hackman was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Dec. 16, 1918, and worked for an insurance company before becoming a homemaker later in life. According to the assistant living facility, she has a great personality and is a “beloved resident.” She was also described as the “life of the party” and someone who reminds the community “how joyful life can be as we age.”

Sounds like a real firecracker.

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Community Torah Dedicated to the Bibas Family

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n the HALB Mission to Israel, Woodmere residents Shira and Ari Hoschander and their family, on behalf of HALB, donated a Sefer Torah to the Bibas family in the merit that we should speedily see the return of Yarden, Shiri, Ariel and Kfir and all the other hostages currently being held in Gaza. The Torah dedication took place at the Bibas home in Nir Oz. “It is hard to accurately describe,” recounts Rabbi Englander, HALB Head of School, “but imagine standing in front of the home where this family was brutally taken, their toys still on the ground, standing next to the Bibas grandfather and members of their extended family, filling in letters of a sefer Torah, singing Ani Maamin, crying, hugging and dancing. The family could not stop telling us how much this meant and what chizuk this gives them.”

The Torah dedication continued in Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square, where the Young Israel of Woodmere mission and hundreds of others joined to sing, dance and pray. The experience was overwhelming, emotional, heartbreaking, and uplifting for everyone who had the opportunity to be part of it, both near and far.

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MTA Students Participate in Chesed Mission in New Orleans

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ast week, 16 talmidim from the Yeshiva University High School for Boys traveled to New Orleans, Louisiana, for four days to provide relief, assistance and strength to those who have been directly impacted by natural disasters over the past several years.

Students had the opportunity to volunteer at a local homeless shelter and provide meals and entertainment to its clients. Tzvi Sorotzkin, MTA senior,

remarked that what he realized from spending time in the homeless shelter is that “you look at the people and think they are living a normal life, until you realize they are coming to the shelter for a meal. It makes us feel grateful for everything we have.” Another chesed opportunity that our talmidim had was to paint a multi-family house which will ultimately reduce the energy bills of these families significantly.

Talmidim were also able to explore the city of New Orleans, seeing the Saints play the Giants as well as the Pelicans facing off with the Grizzlies. Students received a tour of the iconic French Quarter as well as the legendary Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood.

Rabbi Akiva Ackerman, who attended the trip, said, “It was truly incredible seeing our talmidim make a huge Kiddush Hashem especially on these times.”

Stay tuned for MTA’s upcoming Chesed mission next semester!

The Jewish People are Coming Back

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e witnessed something special. While many of our fellow Jews in Brooklyn are living lives of spiritual darkness, it’s always refreshing to see firsthand secular Jews embracing Torah and mitzvos.

One such student joined BJX while still a public high school student. He had no knowledge of Yiddishkeit. After completing our Leadership course, we got Eric a great chavrusah. He continued learning in BJX over his summer vacation. Then Eric went off to Boston for university. He just returned home for vacation. His first stop was to come Thursday night to learn Torah. He stood amongst our students with his tzitzis proudly out.

“I walk around like this on campus. I’m viewed as a religious Jew.” Another attendee is a first-year medical student at Downstate Medical School. She lives in the dormitory and is deprived of spiritual connection. A different medical school student had told her about BJX. She enjoyed our program and now recommended another first year student to join.

After dinner, the students met Philip (Sruli) Werdiger, a founding member of the BJX board. They were fascinated by his insights on being a proud Torah Jew while engaging in business and visit-

ing numerous countries in a post October 7th world.

They then heard a fascinating shiur about the Asara B’Teves fast and the importance of keeping their heritage alive.

Many students committed to fasting for the first time; trying their best to observe more and more.

Can we bear to see our fellow Jews living lives of spiritual darkness? The survival of the Jewish nation is dependent primarily on Torah education. Now, more than ever, we need more Torah.

Let’s spread more Torah!

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Around the Community

On Friday, the NYPD held a promotion ceremony in which Jewish police officer Eduard Weis of Patrol Boro Brooklyn South was promoted to Detective.

YOSS ECC Making of a Mensch Program

L-R: Simon Sebag, Rabbi Simcha Scholar and Pinny Hikind, representing the NYC Comptroller, at the Chai Lifeline gala dinner. Mr. Hikind presented a commendation to Rabbi Simcha Scholar for his outstanding work and dedication for the organization.

Kidnapped From Israel: Milk Carton Project in Cedarhurst

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he YOSS ECC had chosen to begin the Making of a Mensch program last week in memory of Rabbi Chanina Herzberg, zt”l, our esteemed Menahel, whose Yahrzeit was last week.

The boys were taught by Rabbi Rotbard and their moros about the greatness of Rabbi Herzberg. Among the many things that we learned from Rabbi Herzberg was that when you smile at someone, it will cause others to smile back.

Last week, the boys focused on simchas hachaim. Each class designed a large

Rabbi Chanina Herzberg, z”l

smiley face in their classrooms and every time a child helps another child smile, he adds smiley stickers to his class chart.

Next week, we will start our Mitzvah Mensch Mission Sheets. Over the next few weeks, we will be working on our skills of respecting our parents and other adults, remembering our “manner words,” and acting like a mensch wherever we go.

This program will go on throughout the month of Tevet and Shvat, and will continue…for the rest of their lives.

L-R: Deputy Mayor Ari Brown, Mayor Benjamin Weinstock, Village Administrator Sal Evola, Guy Tsadik, Trustee Daniel Plaut, and Trustee Israel Wasser

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he “Kidnapped From Israel: Milk Carton Project” on exhibit in Andrew J. Parise Park in Cedarhurst is a powerful and moving reminder of the continued captivity of hostages kidnapped by Hamas terrorists on October 7th more than 75 days ago. This commemorative endeavor brought to life

by Israeli artists Dede Bandaid, Nitzan Mintz, and Ayal Huber was first exhibited at the Art Basel Festival in Miami.

Loving Moms United wanted to keep the momentum going and most importantly keep the hostages in the forefront of peo-

ple’s minds ensuring that they are never forgotten.

One milk carton, part of the original display, was placed in the park, invites passersby to pause and reflect on the victims that were abruptly taken, families torn apart, and the painful impacts of terrorism.

This milk carton display, now part of a travelling exhibit, will stand tall in our park for approximately one week as a reminder of our steadfast commitment to the return of all the hostages.

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A Truly Colorful Event at TAG

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The girls in BYAM’s nursery learned about the words of Shema and how they can be found in tefillin and mezuzos. Rabbi Neuman, Menahel, showed the girls what the Shema looks like inside the mezuzah scrolls.

AG’s Women’s League invited the fourth grade talmidos, their mothers, or grandmothers or aunts, to join the popular Paint Night, which was held this past Motzei Shabbos. Led by TAG’s own talented Morah D’vora Weinberg, the beautiful paintings of Kever Rochel will no doubt be hanging in many a home.

Kudos to the amazing team of mothers who headed this special evening: Brochi Kaplan, Devory Zolty, Dvorah Rotberg, Elena Schwartz, Esti Danziger, Esti Mase, Estie Mendlowitz, Miree Segal, Nechama Salomon, Pnina Vogel, Suri Feuchtwanger, Zahava Nussbaum, Chaya Leah Weiss, and Mindy Glaser.

A special yashar koach to our Machon Sarah High School volunteers: Leah Rizel, Rochel Caplan, Shifra Posen, Gitty Osina, Rachel Avezov, Ilana Gross, Nechama Danziger, Shoshy Danziger, Ahuva Danziger, and Shoshana Berger.

by spirited singing, raffles, and indulging in festive treats like doughnuts. The Chanukah celebrations culminated in the heartwarming annual “Zeidy Day” held on Friday. Students had the opportunity to reconnect with their rabbeim from the previous year, spending quality time

together to hear Divrei Torah and catch up on life. This cherished tradition highlighted the enduring impact of the Rebbe-Talmud relationship, emphasizing the importance of mentorship and guidance in shaping a meaningful high school experience.

Chanukah at DRS

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he halls of DRS were aglow with the warmth of Chanukah as the school embraced the festive spirit with a series of memorable events, bringing together students, rabbeim, and the broader community.

At the heart of the Chanukah festivities were the Shiur Chanukah parties, where students went to their rabbeim’s houses to celebrate the special yom tov.

These gatherings provided a unique opportunity for the Rebbe-Talmud relationship to flourish outside the classroom setting. Each rebbe opened their home for special Chanukah parties and breakfasts, fostering an atmosphere of camaraderie and shared joy among students and rabbeim. Beyond the school’s walls, DRS extended the Chanukah joy to the nearby Premier Nursing Home. Rab-

bi Wolf, Rabbi Farber, and a group of 20 students brought smiles and warmth to the residents, singing songs and spreading the festive spirit. This outreach initiative exemplified the values of community and kindness that are integral to the DRS experience.

Adding a touch of friendly competition to the celebrations, DRS organized the “School’s Strongest Man Competition.” Students engaged in a series of fun races and competitions, testing their strength and skills while fostering a sense of unity and school spirit. The event not only showcased the students’ physical prowess but also underscored the importance of friendly competition and camaraderie among peers.

At the end of each school day, menorah lighting ceremonies were accompanied

YKLI’s Annual Dinner: A Night of Koach

By Mordechai Kastlebaum

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eshiva Ketana of Long Island’s 28th Koach Dinner will take place on Monday, January 8 at the Sands Atlantic Beach. This year’s event promises to be a most memorable evening, marking the expansion of our campus and the incredible koach haTorah that infuses our entire Yeshiva.

YKLI has been a cornerstone of chinuch for almost three decades, providing a nurturing environment that empowers talmidim to reach their full potential.

Indeed, it is the realization of each boy’s

unique koach that makes our Yeshiva unique and has given Klal Yisroel thousands of alumni who are proud, exemplary Bnei Torah.

One of the highlights of the evening will be the celebration of our massive expansion, as we quite literally Raise the Roof of our Makom Torah to accommodate the next generation of talmidim at YKLI. This expansion represents not only physical growth but also a commitment to broadening the Chinuch opportunities for every child under our roof.

“We are so excited to embark on this journey of expansion and strength,” Rab-

bi Tzvi Krigsman, Menahel. “Our commitment to providing exceptional Chinuch experiences remains unwavering.

The addition of a third floor is a testament to our dedication to the community and our youth.”

We will also pay tribute to three dedicated families who have each made an indelible impact on our Yeshiva. Our long-time beloved rebbi, Rabbi and Mrs. Yitzchok Messner, will receive the Harbotzas Torah Award. Mr. and Mrs. Omid Alyeshmerni, devoted YKLI parents for the past 13 years, will be given the Kesser Shem Tov Award; and Mr. and Mrs. Eli

Langer will receive the Chessed Leadership Award for their unending service to our community at large.

Please join us to enjoy the camaraderie of the YKLI family and take the opportunity to engage with YKLI’s leadership, learn more about the expansion plans, and contribute to the ambitious project.

Join YKLI on Monday, January 8, at Sands Atlantic Beach for an unforgettable night of celebration of a bold new chapter in our Yeshiva’s history.

For dedications and reservations, go to YKLIDinner.org or call 516-791-2800.

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The Power of Simchah

By Rabbi Mayer Yedid

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e’re living in a time when many of us are experiencing almost unprecedented tears and fears. Missiles and sirens, increasing anti-Semitism around the world, and heartbreaking pictures of levayos have become a part of our daily headlines and newsfeeds. Sorrow seems to be in the very air we breathe.

Is this a time to talk about simchah?

The answer, says Rabbi Meyer Yedid, is a resounding ... YES! As a rosh yeshivah, educator, sought-after speaker, successful author and rav of Brooklyn’s large and thriving

Congregation Shaare Zion, Rabbi Yedid has taught, guided, and helped thousands of people of all ages. In his newly released book, The Power of Simchah, he takes us on a fascinating journey to simchah.

How do we find the positive in our lives, even in difficult times and circumstances? What is the amazing power of optimism and how can we achieve it?

Yishuv hadaat – what is it, why is it important, and how do we make it a part of our lives? What is the connection between savlanut, patience, and simchah – and how do we incorporate both of them into our daily interactions?

Drawing on examples and wisdom from Sarah Imeinu, Rabbi Yedid shows us how simchah is based on our perspec-

tive, our thoughts and feelings, rather than our actual circumstances. From Yosef Hatzaddik, we learn the power of positive thinking. We will also discover how to strengthen simchah through incorporating the “Dayeinu attitude” into our lives: taking each moment, each event, each item in our lives and realizing how special it is.

Just as he did in his other highly praised and popular books, The Power of Chinuch and The Power of Tranquility, Rabbi Yedid blends Torah hashkafah with practical advice and a deep understanding of human nature, teaching us how to tap into the wondrous power of simchah – and lead the best life we can.

Beis Medrash of Woodmere Groundbreaking Event

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n a beautifully appointed tent, setup in the backyard of its shul, the membership and friends of the Beis Medrash of Woodmere (BMW) along with numerous community rabbonim and local dignitaries came out in large numbers and multiple generations to celebrate the groundbreaking of their new shul building on Sunday morning, December 17.

Treated to a delicious spread catered by the Cheese Store, the assembled crowd also marveled at the beautiful renderings of the new building posted at various points throughout the tent.

Just across the street on a parcel of land located on W. Broadway running from Forest Ave to Grant Avenue rests a large construction zone, approximately a half-acre in size, which b’Ezras Hashem will provide space for a large, new edifice including a main sanctuary, a beis medrash, youth spaces, and a large social

hall for simchas. This will replace the shul’s current home, which, while cozy and intimate, has been quickly outgrown by the pace of the shul’s rapidly growing membership.

Serving as Master of Ceremonies, long time BMW member Moshe Horowitz got the festivities rolling with his trademark warmth and humor. Upon recitation of Tehillim, led by Rav Feitman, Nassau County Legislator Howard Kopel was thanked for his ongoing efforts on behalf of the building campaign, and he delivered a message and bracha for the continued success of the shul, its campaign, and noted the prominence of its place in the Five Towns Torah community.

This was followed by remarks from the Morah D’Asrah, Rav Akiva Willig, who delivered a vision and charge for the bright future that lies ahead for the community. He highlighted that “as the

shul’s physical presence grows, so will its commitment to build upon its trademark of being a beacon that attracts those who seek a place where opportunities for Torah learning: shiurim, chaburos, chavrusa learning abound. Concomitantly, those seeking a shul where warmth, a focus on bein adam l’chaveiro and a strong emphasis on a davening environment which is predicated on promoting the highest level of kavanah with minimal distraction will continue to find such a cherished place within the koslei of the Bais Medrash of Woodmere.”

The attendees were also privileged to hear divrei bracha and chizuk from Rav Mordechai Willig, Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivas Rav Yitzchok Elchonon as well as the proud father of Rav Akiva Willig. He was effusive in his pride and praise for the makom Torah u’tefillah that his son has created and led these past ten years, and

he shared an analogy given by the Chofetz Chaim of just how a train (a new invention in his time) gets its energy, direction, and momentum by the locomotive that is at the front, so must a shul follow the lead of its Morah D’asrah to insure that it moves at the right pace with all of its cars in-sync with each other.

The ceremony concluded with words from Dovid Lasker, whose yeoman behind-the-scenes work enabled the shul to even get to this point. Dovid thanked the groundbreaking committee chairs, Rocky and Renee Schechter and Brian and Gila Gluck, for their inspiring work and went on to emphasize that as wonderful as it is to be celebrating the groundbreaking, there is much work and resources necessary to convert a hole in the ground to the magnificent shul that b’Ezras Hashem will be built in the near future.

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Rabbi Paysach Krohn Speaks at “Be My Guest” Event

By Chaya Feldstein

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t was a dream come true, beyond my expectations. The day of the inaugural event, a rebbetzin pre-warned me, “Chaya, people are busy, let’s lower our expectations... Let’s not anticipate a huge crowd.” But we are an amazing nation who cares oh so much! On a cold, busy Tuesday night in December, Rabbi Paysach Krohn drew a crowd of approximately 300 men and women who care so much about the mitzvah of Hachnosos Orchim.

This mitzvah is a pivotal one, especially now during the situation Am Yisrael finds itself in, especially in Eretz Yisrael where hosts have been tasked with the job at a moment’s notice. But even in our own locale, how crucial this mitzvah is, where there are so many on their own, who would so relish being included in a warm, family setting, The “Be My Guest” initiative had its roots years ago. Two wonderful women set up an email address in order to ensure that all who needed an invite would be granted a warm welcome. Those women made Aliyah, and with it, the program closed. In the classic, “Love Your Neighbor,” by Rabbi Zelig Pliskin, he quotes a source from Parshas Vayeira that even if one is not in the position to host, but he/ she facilitates the mitzvah, it is as if he/ she fulfills the mitzvah.

The Siyata D’shmaya was apparent.

One thing led to another… The Rav and Rebbetzin were in full support of my idea.

We reached a special woman who davka was looking for a chessed to be involved in. Within days, an incredible White Shul

team of devoted members, who want to make sure that all members of our Kehilla feel like family, banded together to work on this event.

Around the table, at our meeting, we were all in agreement. We must get Rabbi Paysach Krohn to speak about the great mitzvah and how we ought to do it right.

Initially, the goal was to have the event before Chanukah, to inspire shul members to invite neighbors who on their own, to join the family for the Chanukah lighting. However, the first realistic date possible for the event was December 19.

Little did we know how amazing that date would be, Ches Teves, a few days short of the Yartzheit of the heilige Erech Shai, my great-great-great grandfather, who provided an amazing commentary on the bracha that the guest presents to the host.

I am still blown away by the Hashgocha Pratis of it all.

A beautiful table was set up to greet our guests that night, in the banquet hall of the White Shul. All participants enjoyed the pastries and especially appreciated the gorgeous magnets that had been especially prepared for this event. The magnets display the Birchas Haorayach with the explanation of the Erech Shai.

Business cards with the contact email address, bemyguest@whiteshul.com, were also available for the taking.

Rabbi Neuberger opened the evening with the recitation of Tehillim and a special Mishebarach and Acheinu for our brethren in Eretz Yisrael and worldwide.

Rabbi Feiner’s introductory remarks hit home. “Mahu rachum af ata…” emulating Hashem is greater than actual conversation with Avinu Av Harachaman! Then the Rav introduced Rabbi Krohn, who re-

ally, as Rabbi Feiner stated, does not need an introduction.

Rabbi Krohn amazed the audience with the explanation of the Birchas Haorayach and the series of Hashgocha Pratis in the timing of the event and my relative’s Yartzheit. As explained on the magnet, “There are two types of givers in this world, those who want to give and don’t have the resources, and those who have the resources but don’t want to give. Both are embarrassed, so they give anyway, the first even though he can’t afford it, and the second even though he doesn’t want to. He explains that the one who gives even though he doesn’t have is embarrassed in this world, and the one who doesn’t want to give but gives anyway will be shamed in the next. The guest therefore blesses his host that he should be saved from both predicaments – he should desire and be able to share his wealth!”

Rabbi Krohn explained that the reason he was standing in front of us that night was precisely because of the mitzvh of Hachnosos Orchim. His father had found out that Rav Shalom Schwadron, the great Maggid of Yerushalayim, was coming to town and made sure to have him as a guest. Rav Schwadron stayed for six months and became very close to the entire family. Rabbi Krohn indicated that that relationship molded and shaped him to be the person that he is today.

Rabbi Krohn shared his wisdom, empathy and life experiences through his magnificent story-telling approach.

Hosts, don’t keep your cats out at night… they may crawl onto your guests’ face…

If you give your guests your master bedroom, let your children know so they don’t crawl into bed with your guest…

The audience was laughing and crying simultaneously. The mantra and mission statement, as stated so eloquently

by Brene Brown, “Empathy has no script.

There is no right way or wrong way to do it. It’s simply listening, holding space,

withholding judgment, emotionally connecting, and communicating that incredibly healing message of ‘You’re not alone.’”

We all need to feel wanted, appreciated and welcomed. A phone call early in the week shows someone that he or she is valued by you and in your thoughts.

“Hi, we’d love to have you; can you join us?” That’s a very different message than, “Do you need a meal/place?” or “Are you booked?”

It’s just a subtle word change and shift but a world of a difference that leaves the guest feeling warmed to the core. That’s our goal in “Be My Guest.” We want to make all parts of our community, especially those who may be alone, feel part of our greater family called Am Yisrael.

We are a people like no other. We must acknowledge and befriend those on their own and those struggling with challenging life situations.

Each shul should have an ambassador of Hachnosos Orchim. We are in the process of matching up hosts and guests so that each invitee feels at home. We all pine to be home – home in Yerushalayim Habenuya – and this is most definitely a stepping stone in that direction!

The introductory remarks by Rabbi Feiner and the full talk by Rabbi Krohn, “Opening our homes: Hachnosos Orchim the way it ought to be,” can be found on Torah Anytime and the website of the White Shul, https://www.whiteshul. com/ There you will hear the story about “Laibel” and how his host would not make kiddush and personally went back to shul to invite him back home. You will also hear the story about Rabbi Krohn’s guest who chose not to come because he felt like an afterthought being invited on Thursday. You will gain insight that will inspire you to treat this mitzvah. with royalty.

To reach out, please email bemyguest@whiteshul.com. May Hashem reward our efforts!

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Rav Asher Weiss spoke at Young Israel of Woodmere last Shabbos and then at Kehillas Ahavas Yisroel on Motzei Shabbos. Kehillas Bais Yehudah Tzvi co-sponsored the Motzei Shabbos event. Rav Weiss spoke very movingly about the shaalos he has been receiving from soldiers in Gaza.

Rabbi Yaakov Feitman is seen here greeting Rav Asher Weiss.

Yom Central

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n December 27, Yeshiva University High School for Girls (YUHSG) held its annual Yom Central event to welcome prospective eighth graders onto Central’s campus.

The day provides students with the opportunity to immerse themselves in student life on the Holliswood campus. For Central students and faculty, it’s an opportunity to play host and to share what makes the Central experience special and unique.

“It’s a chance for our eighth grade candidates to meet other applicants, meet our students, and see what our school has to offer them,” said Ms. Kymmie Baker, Central’s Assistant Director of Admissions and Office Manager.

Central’s Dean of Students, Mrs. Aliza Gewirtz, agreed that Yom Central is a key event in truly introducing newcomers to life at Central. “The goal of the day is to allow eighth graders to get a feel for the Central family. We try to allow our product to sell itself – the warmth of our faculty and students.”

The day began with davening, led by Judaic Studies faculty member and Senior Grade Dean, Mrs. Rebecca Teper, followed by a welcome from Central’s Associate Principal, Ms. Leah Moskovich, and breakfast. The eighth grade visitors then sat in on a variety of Central

classes, with subjects ranging from art to STEM. With the year’s focus on positivity and positive action in mind, a chesed project was incorporated into this year’s Yom Central event, highlighting the important role that service plays in Central life. Visiting eighth graders helped to assemble care packages for the families of those in the Israel Defense Forces. And no Yom Central event is complete without Central student ambassadors. An indispensable part of the day, these senior guides were the perfect representation of the Central experience, and freely shared their perspectives and reflections to fully support these visiting eighth graders.

“We are so happy to have our student ambassadors guiding our visitors,” Ms. Baker said. Senior Leora Strauss reflected on the meaningful nature of serving as a Central ambassador. “It’s such a special opportunity,” she said. “I get to meet incredible eighth graders and help guide them in their high school decisions. I was so excited to greet them on Yom Central, and to give them a real taste of what Central is all about.”

Over 75 eighth graders visited Central and took part in the experience. Upcoming events include Central’s Annual Dinner of Tribute, “Strengthening our CommUNITY,” on Tuesday, January 9.

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MTA Celebrates YU Honors Early Decision Awardees

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ongratulations to Moshe Anapolle, Elie Beer, Eli Dyckman, Yaakov Erdfarb, Naftali Frankel, Yitzy Rosenbluth, and Avichai Tarshish (not pictured), who were admitted to Yeshiva University Honors under its Early Decision program. Each of them were awarded a $25,000 scholarship to YU. Some will be enrolling in the Jay and

Jeanie Schottenstein Honors Program at Yeshiva College, the others in the Business Honors and Entrepreneurial Leadership Program at the Sy Syms School of Business.

We are extremely proud of these excellent students and wish them tremendous hatzlacha as they continue their learning in Torah UMadda at YU!

Chanukah events at Kulanu truly lit up the Five Towns! Torah L’Kulanu held incredible inclusion programs with local yeshivas including HAFTR, HALB, SKA, DRS and Shulamith

Chagigat HaSiddur at Shulamith

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arents, grandparents, and great grandparents were delighted

by Shulamith Kitta Aleph’s Chagigat HaSiddur that took place last Sunday in the school auditorium. Each girl had her moment in the spotlight as the classes sang songs about tefillah, Shabbat Kodesh, family and a special song dedicated to our Chayalim.

In the weeks leading up to the event, Kitta Alef teacher Morah Masha Hoffman with music teacher Morah Rena Greenberg taught the girls the beautiful songs, their meanings, and the accompanying choreography. In the months prior, the students had been learning to

read the words so they would be able to use their siddurim for tefillah.

Mrs. Ginsparg, principal, addressed the audience, speaking about the root of the word tefillah, the thoughts and expectations inherent in tefillah, and our connection to tefillah. The girls performed in fluent and flawless Ivrit, expressing understanding and connection to the words.

Shulamith Kita Aleph students are already davening with their brand-new siddurim. Mazal tov and much nachat to the Shulamith families on this special and meaningful milestone.

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HAFTR Shines in CIJE Robotics Tournament

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n a spectacle of innovation and collaborative prowess, HAFTR proudly concludes another remarkable year hosting the Center for Initiative in Jewish Education (CIJE) Robotics Tournament. The event, drawing schools from across the nation, witnessed the victory of our teams, illuminating the brilliance that defines our school’s commitment to excellence.

A resounding cheer reverberates for Shirley Lane, Ashley Alibayof, and our exceptional Lower School crew, secur-

ing an impressive first place in only their second-ever tournament. Their early triumph underscores their dedication, determination, and the elevated standards set by our budding innovators. Ms. Lane expressed admiration for their maturity, skills, and strong teamwork and eagerly anticipates future successes.

In the Middle School category, Jonah Hardy, Director of STEAM and Robotics at HAFTR, through his coaching prowess propelled the team to a solid top-10 placement in a competitive field of over

80 schools. This achievement not only showcases individual talent but also exemplifies the teamwork that defines HAFTR. The apex of success was reached in the High School division, where Mr. Hardy led the team to a stellar 1st place finish. These students, true champions, embody the brilliance characterizing HAFTR’s dedication to excellence. Mr. Hardy hopes the students can carry this sensation of fulfillment and teamwork with them through their future trials.

These triumphs resonate beyond the tournament, echoing the power of HAFTR’s top-notch STEM curriculum. Gittel Grant, K-8 STEM chair, emphasized that the students’ success is a testament to the strength of the STEM program spanning from Early Childhood through 12th grade. The curriculum plays a pivotal role in unlocking our students’ potential, fostering collaboration, and honing critical problem-solving skills—a testament to HAFTR’s commitment to providing an educational experience beyond textbooks and classrooms.

Most importantly, this success is a

celebration of our brilliant students. Mr. Hardy emphasized that it was the students’ imaginations and ideas that fueled them to great success on the stage - stating that “HAFTR Students have an incredible drive and dedication to their craft.” Our deepest thanks are extended to CIJE’s leaders, Phillip Brazil, Adam Jerozolim, and the judges, for providing our students with the opportunity to shine. Mr. Brazil’s gratitude for HAFTR’s warm environment stands as a testament to our collaborative spirit, creating an atmosphere where innovation and achievement flourish.

Congratulations to each participant for their hard work, perseverance, and relentless pursuit of excellence. As we revel in these victories, HAFTR remains dedicated to pushing boundaries, fostering innovation, and inspiring our students in every endeavor. The journey has just begun, and HAFTR is poised to continue its legacy of excellence in STEM education.

Congratulations to our brilliant students!

Socks for our Soldiers at YOSS

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lizzards of packages have been arriving in the main office of Yeshiva of South Shore! For two weeks, we have been filling up duffel bags with socks and neck warmers for our soldiers fighting in Eretz Yisroel. The fundraiser was a smashing success, filling up duffels with over 500 pairs of socks and neck warmers! Beautiful letters made by our boys were attached to all the socks and neck warmers.

Thank you to our amazing PTA volunteers for coming into school to pack up everything! Thank you to all the parents who generously contributed to this very

worthy cause.

May Hashem keep the chayalim protecting Eretz Yisroel safe.

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Around the Community

A Show of Support

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his week, Tom Suozzi, candidate for the 3rd Congressional District, visited Israel and met with the Neutra family.

During the trip, Suozzi said, “I am trying to demonstrate my unequivocal support for, and solidarity with, Israel and Jewish people throughout the world during this difficult time. While here in Israel, I plan to visit the Gaza envelope, meet with the families of hostages and constituents in Israel now, and hear firsthand about the resolve of the Israeli people and explore how the U.S. can further assist our democratic ally in its fight to eliminate Hamas.”

Art at BYAM

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he girls at Bais Yaakov Ateres Miriam enjoy their weekly art session and for good reason! The art class, taught by Mrs. Faigie Kobre, provides the girls with an amazing creative outlet. Not only is it a fantastic art experience, but the choice-based program provides training in life skills such as planning and problem solving.

Mrs. Kobre follows the model of TAB – teaching for artistic behavior – a choice-based program and leads the girls to express their creativity through different modalities. The program features various art centers, introduced in a sequential manner. Drawing, collage, painting, fiber art, and sculpture are just some of the centers that help provide training in using these particular mediums. For example, in the sculpture center, the girls can create using paper, clay or cardboard construction. After learning the skills associated with each center, the girls are empowered to make their own choices and create!

What is unique about this program

is that the students can choose what they’re going to create using the centers and apply their skills according to their own abilities and developmental levels.

With collage, for example, the students can decide what they want to make and how they will go about doing it. Here is an array of collages that have been done with different age groups.

How does art serve as a vehicle for problem solving? Well, take for example a student who might want a specific color to paint with but is only presented with the three primary colors and black and white. The student is encouraged to use what she knows about colors and will apply that knowledge to mix the colors to create one that she wants to use.

The art class, which is offered to grades 1 through 6, provides a creative, calm, and relaxing space which carries over into other parts of the student’s school day. Art is such an integral part of their week that the junior high students rallied to keep it part of their schedule, and lunchtime optional art journal-

ing was born! The seventh and eighth grades currently have an opportunity to participate in an optional art journaling session, where they respond to various prompts and work on creative spreads.

The girls at BYAM treasure the special opportunities during their art experiences at school. We can’t wait to see what their future creative endeavors might be.

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Shabbos Vayechi and Its Importance to Us

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By Rabbi Ron Yitzchak Eisemann

Y Winter fun at Shulamith ECC

Mercaz Academy Robotics Team Competes at League Tournament

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ourteen fourth and fifth graders from Mercaz Academy in Plainview competed last week in the elementary division of the CIJE Robotics League Tournament. It was the culmination of months of hard work in which the extracurricular Robotics Club spent one or more recesses a week working together to build robots for the tournament.

Through lots of collaboration as well as trial and error, and under the guidance of Director of Educational Technology Lynda Last, five teams from Mercaz completed robots able to fulfill the assigned tasks at the tournament.

The Mercaz Academy teams joined at least 40 schools–one school even flew in from Texas to compete–and more than 150 robots at the event, which was held at HAFTR. Over the course of more than 200 rounds, members of the Robotics Club collaborated with assigned teams from other schools at the event, which al-

lowed for teamwork, rather than competition, to be the main focus for students.

All the teams performed admirably, and the robots proceeded through the game field completing the assigned tasks in tandem with the collaborating teams.

The Robotics Club members navigated their robots through the series of four tasks, looking sharp in team shirts emblazoned with the Mercaz logo and gears to represent mechanical engineering.

The Mercaz Academy Robotics Team served as excellent representatives for Mercaz at their first-ever Robotics League appearance, always assisting other teams and schools and focusing their attention on every match. Although they did not place in this particular tournament, the Robotics Team is already rebuilding their robots in preparation for the next meet in April and are eager to once again put their robots through their paces.

aakov Avinu tells his beloved son Yosef, “I had not expected to ever see your face again, and Hashem has given me the privilege of seeing your children as well!”

Yaakov realized the transient nature of this world, and appreciated everything he was privileged to experience.

This world is a short-term, transitory existence.

This reality, unfortunately, has been enforced by the events of the last two months. So many young people who had their entire futures in front of them had their earthly lives terminated and destroyed in the most shocking and unimaginable ways. The reaction of the Jewish people was immediate and singular in purpose. Suddenly, petty differences became irrelevant, and the reality that “much more unites us than separates us” set in.

Yet, on a personal level, there is another lesson we cannot allow to fall between the cracks. Recognition of the transitory nature of this world, Olam Hazeh — and the eternity of Olam Habah — must not be forgotten. We must realize, as Yaakov Avinu realized, that our essential existence is in the Next World.

As Chazal teach us, “Rabbi Yaakov would say: this world is like a hallway before Olam Habah, the World-toCome. You should prepare yourself in the hallway, to enter the Palace.”

The events of this last difficult period are a time to reinforce the recognition that our lives here are fleeting. We must focus on what is really critical — our eternal life. Our true achievements are measured in what we prepare for ourselves in this temporary world for the eternal world of Olam Habah.

Recently, an older man I had not spoken to for many years called me and asked me to come over. When I arrived, I was certain he was going to bring up an old gripe he had had with me for many years.

Surprisingly, It was just the opposite.

We sat and talked and reminisced without any mention of the friction that had separated us for years.

Finally, I could no longer restrain myself. “Laibel, we have not spoken for almost seven years. What happened?”

He turned to me and said, “What

happened was the events of October 7th.

I am seven years older now, and I finally realized I never want to have to explain ‘upstairs’ why we hadn’t spoken for seven years. I knew that in the next world, I no longer wanted to explain why we could not be seated together.”

Tears ran down our faces, and as we held each other tightly, both of us wished the moment of connection would never end. ** Every morning, we wake up, and the first words out of our mouths are “Modeh Ani Lefanecha,” “I thank you, Hashem.”

For what do we thank Him? For returning to us our neshama.

The tefilla says “nishmasi,” which translates as “my soul.” The eternal neshama, a part of Hashem, which we entrust back to Him each night.

Each day, Hashem returns to all of us our unique, special, singular soul. It is our consciousness, our essence — and through it we live forever. Every neshama has a special purpose and a unique challenge. And every day Hashem returns to us “My Soul” — Nishmasi!”

He gives me back my special soul, which has its own particular mission that only my neshama can fulfill.

We conclude with “Rabah Emunasecha,” where we declare, “Hashem, how great is your faithfulness.” This means, we declare that Hashem is “true to His word.”

This world is one in which we prepare for the Next World; the ultimate reward Hashem will grant us is in Olam Haba, the Next World.

When we awaken to another day, we declare that “Hashem, just as You gave me back my unique neshama this morning, so too ‘You are faithful’ to ultimately return our neshama for its true reward in Olam Haba.”

“Rabah Emunasecha” also declares Hashem’s faith in us to use this new day to accomplish our unique mission and purpose.

The Modeh Ani therefore begins every day with a burst of inspiration, motivation and clarity.

Take part in NASCK’s Shabbos Vayechi initiative and download a beautiful Modeh Ani poster to hang in your home, so that you too can live each day with the reality of your eternity.

ShabbosVayechi.org

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Around the Community

Our Family — Mishpachtainu

By Ahava Ehrenpreis

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t was the sixth Chanukah light, Rosh Chodesh Teves, and the voices of many warm and celebratory friends rose above the musical background as I entered the room. For those who couldn’t wait for the holiday-themed dessert, trays of varying types of donuts, elegantly presented, were displayed around the room together with other pastries and petit fours. It seemed as if everyone knew each other, the camaraderie evident at all the many tables, and the elegant place setting made each tablescape a delight to the eye.

I had been invited to attend this warm group of women at a hall in the Boro Park section of Brooklyn. Women of varying ages had gathered, having lit their Chanukah menorahs at home, and their children settled with babysitters or older siblings. These women came to find the friendship and support of others who had also lit the menorah for themselves and their children. These are the women who belong to the extended family called Mishpachtainu.

Mishpachtainu was originally one single mom reaching out to another single mom who needed a welcoming Shabbos table when her children were not with her.

Enveloped in the warmth of her hostess, a single mom by the name of Yehudis Sherman and enjoying the delightful Shabbos fare, the guest asked if she could return the following week with two friends who were in a similar situation: single moms whose children were spending time with their fathers or away at yeshivah or seminary. Yehudis saw that there many wom-

Rabbi Dovid Goldwasser, lighting the menorah and giving chizuk

en like herself who needed a safe haven in which to find a welcoming, joyful Shabbos atmosphere with others who understood her challenges. In a world where Shabbos brings family members together — fathers, mothers, and their children — after a long week to feel the comfort and support of each other’s love and companionship, it is the weekly void, there is a weekly reminder of being alone, without a spouse or father to make kiddush and complete the family circle.

Yehudis realized that despite existing organizations, so many women needed a place to go on Shabbos where this void could be filled by the companionship of other women who knew without words the challenges of raising children alone, to somehow manage emotionally, financially, and spiritually. Following her instinct for elegant and gracious hostessing, each week became a beautifully presented Shabbos of delicious food, camaraderie, and love. Seeing the need for sleeping accommodations for women whose homes were too far for them to walk to join the newly named Mishpachtainu group of women, she elegantly furnished several

Yehudis Sherman, founder of Mishpachtainu, in front of the gifts she distributes to the single moms and their children

guest rooms in her home to accommodate women who would not otherwise be able to be there for Shabbos. In short time, her house could not accommodate the number of women, from all over the tri-state area who wished to become part of this caring and nurturing organization.

Yehudis rented a larger house, in addition to her own, to be assured that no woman who wished to come for Shabbos or Yom Tovim would not have comfortable and gracious accommodations.

One Friday night, one of the women rushed into the kitchen to ask Yehudis to make kiddush rather quickly and begin the Friday night seudah, as one of the guests was faint. Yehudis learned that that guest had limited resources and often did not eat much until she came to spend Shabbos with Yehudis and Mishpachtainu. Thus, was born a Free Food Pantry! Women can come to stock up with food staples, snacks, chocolate, and other household items otherwise beyond their financial capabilities.

Shabbos and then Yomim Tovim became elegant and festive seudos with the companionship of their newly found

extended family. Often, women shared other challenges with Yehudis, including legal and even halachic issues, and finding resources for women dealing with the problems of attaining proper get from recalcitrant spouses. How to deal with financial crises, even emergency medical crises, finding resources to send children to camp, even making sure that they leave with all the nosh and supplies other children take for granted! So many issues that a couple would face together was the sole responsibility of these Mighty Moms!

Mishpachtainu has become a support system for so many women, but Yehudis cannot do it alone. The need for financial backing from the community has become imperative as the need for resources increases, literally on a daily basis.

With the prayer that the miracle of Chanukah will extend to this amazing group of women, a major campaign was initiated at the Chanukah event. Its goal is to raise critically needed funds to continue and extend the resources for these very special Mighty Moms!

Bringing the Simcha of Marriage to Yidden Around the World

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he feeling of love and pride as the kallah carefully walks her seven hakafos.

The feeling of pure and complete simcha as the chosson is hoisted in his chair by his closest friends and family.

The feeling of excited anticipation as they prepare to build their new home together.

These are feelings every Yid yearns for. For themselves. For their children.

For all of their loved ones.

For the past seven years, ChesedChicago (formerly Chicago Chesed Fund) has been providing Jewish singles across the

globe with an incredible segulah to find their zivugim through their annual Shas for Shidduchim campaign. This unique initiative helps them harness the strength of limud haTorah and tzedakah as a powerful segulah for a shidduch.

On January 14, over 400 lomdim will gather to learn the entire Shas in just 24 hours. By sponsoring the learning of a daf, participants can take part in this monumental undertaking of limud haTorah as a tremendous z’chus for themselves or their loved ones to find a shidduch. But that’s not the only way Shas for Shidduchim is helping singles experience

those meaningful wedding moments.

By sponsoring a daf, donors help support ChesedChicago’s many shidduch and marriage-related programs. For decades, these programs have aided Yidden through the entire marriage process: from organizing the very first introduction to assisting with needs for the wedding, to helping them build their new home. In the past seven years, ChesedChicago has been responsible for 320 engagements, 4,119 first dates, and more than 25,000 shidduch suggestions!

Those wishing to partake in this monumental z’chus haTorah can visit Shas-

4Shidduchim.org to sponsor a daf as a segulah for a friend, relative, or even yourself and may the power of this siyum haShas lead to a shidduch b’karov!

ChesedChicago is a non-profit organization founded by Dayan Shmuel Fuerst, committed to helping families in crisis throughout the Chicagoland area. Its 80+ programs provide critical assistance in the form of goods, services, and financial support while maintaining the dignity of each recipient.

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rs. Weiss’ third grade class at YOSS has been working diligently on mastering the concept of main idea and supporting details.

The boys have learned how to identify the main idea in whatever selection they are reading. After finding the main idea, they have worked on locating as many supporting facts in the selection as they can find. They worked together to create “Main Idea and Supporting Detail Kites” to go along with our latest ELA reading piece about the Athabascans.

The boys have also used this concept

DECEMBER 28, 2023 | The Jewish Home

ELA at YOSS

to improve their own writing skills. After creating a hook for their creative writing assignments, they are reminded to have a main idea and use supporting details to organize their thoughts and writing.

They used this skill when writing persuasive pieces about their favorite donut that they created for Chanukah and their favorite cookie (chocolate chip, Oreo or Swiss Fudge).

The boys’ writing skills are really improving, and they look forward to our creative writing assignments.

Ezra Academy Shabbaton

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his past Shabbos, Ezra Academy held its annual schoolwide Shabbaton with the goal of introducing all their students to different Jewish communities all over New York. Previous Shabbatons were held in Far Rockaway and Long Beach, but this year, the students were welcomed by Rabbi and Rebbetzin Lesser into West Hempstead.

Shabbatons are a seminal moment in any Ezra student’s high school career, offering an opportunity to bond with their peers and their teachers. Ezra morot and rebbeim bring along their families for Shabbos, and the students get to see a different side to their faculty.

This year’s theme for Shabbos was “gratitude.” Students began their prep for Shabbaton by wrapping presents for their host and writing sincere thank you cards. They then participated in a beau-

tiful kabbalat Shabbat replete with singing and dancing. The meals were a mix of different ethnic foods featuring potato kugel and bakhsh. Each grade went to a host’s house for a special oneg, then reconvened back in the shul for some time to talk and play board games.

The highlight of the weekend was an incredibly powerful Saturday night kumzits where the outgoing seniors relayed poignant messages about their time at Ezra. The kumzits truly was a culmination of all the spiritual and emotional energy each student and faculty put in the entire Shabbat.

Ezra is a warm, welcoming environment that fosters spiritual and academic growth, and Shabbatons are the perfect chance to see the progress of students, build friend groups, and create lasting bonds and feelings that last a lifetime.

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Migdal Ohr’s “Magen Israel” Relief Effort and Rabbi Grossman are a Force for Good

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igdal Ohr, one of Israel’s most impactful social welfare organizations, is leading its largest humanitarian relief effort, called Magen Israel, under the leadership of its founder, the tzadik and Israel Prize Laureate Rabbi Yitzchak David Grossman. Now, in the difficult and uncertain days of the war, it has been providing ongoing care for thousands of displaced parents and children, visiting and blessing hundreds of wounded victims and soldiers, inspiring army units, and, of course, caring for the 10,000 orphaned and underprivileged children who are a part of the Migdal Ohr family.

In times of national crises, Rabbi Grossman and Migdal Ohr have consistently played an active role in supporting Israel, collaborating with government bodies to deliver immediate relief.

When the COVID pandemic struck, Rabbi Grossman was called upon by the Israeli government to lead a significant packaging relief effort. Similarly, during the Second Lebanon War, Migdal Ohr opened its campus doors to host hundreds of soldiers. The commitment to providing assistance remains unwavering during these ongoing times of war in Israel.

Operation “Magen Israel” Mobilizing During War With the outbreak of the war with Gaza, the organization mobilized donors all over the world in a massive campaign to provide shelter to over 4,000 evacuees from the Gaza border and to help the families most affected by the massacres in the south of Israel. The Magen Israel initiative continues to quickly expand, responding to immediate needs that are emerging on the front lines and in Israel’s hospitals.

As a unifying and beloved national figure, Rabbi Grossman has always taken the approach that Israel is one family, with one heart, and has always been willing to do anything necessary to help Israel with the resources at his disposal.

As such, Magen Israel has hosted over a thousand soldiers on Migdal Ohr’s campuses, cooked over 2,000 meals a day out of Migdal Ohr’s soup kitchens, and sent thousands of supplies to soldiers on the frontlines, among many other activities.

Rabbi Grossman on the National Stage Rabbi Grossman has personally vis-

ited dozens of army and air force bases, blessing the soldiers with coins to give to tzedakah upon their safe return from war.

His regular visits to Israel’s hospitals provide strength to the wounded and instill hope in their families. Miraculous stories are emerging from Gaza, a testament to the profound impact of Rabbi Grossman’s outreach.

The Rav has been seen on national television multiple times, offering interviews that fortify the nation’s unity and resolve. Following each of these appearances, he returns to Migdal HaEmek in the north of Israel, to be among his beloved children. There, surrounded by thousands of orphaned and underprivileged kids, he imparts his values and actively builds his visionary future for Israel.

Migdal Ohr’s Alumni For over five decades, Rabbi Grossman and global supporters have devoted themselves to nurturing orphaned and at-risk youth, transforming them into productive, inspired citizens of Israel.

Today, tens of thousands of alumni lead institutions, serve in the army, run companies, and raise families, showcasing the profound impact of Migdal Ohr’s work.

These alumni form a resilient shield in Israeli society, embodying dedication, selflessness, and a Zionistic spirit. Like Rabbi Grossman, they are unwavering in their commitment to do anything and everything for Am Yisrael.

One standout example is alumnus Shai Knopfer, who, on October 7th, dropped everything to enlist in the reserves. Tasked with identifying bodies in Be’eri and ruling out hostage scenarios, Shai leveraged his networks to raise $7 million for gear, aiding evacuated families and treating the wounded. Alongside friends, he organized large-scale BBQs and even orchestrated a wedding for a soldier within hours.

Shai reflects, “Rabbi Grossman has been like a father to me since I was 16.

When I met him, I was lost in life, caught up in crime and drugs. That wasn’t me, but I didn’t know how to find my way back. I came to Zoharim Youth Village when it was just a dream. ‘There’s nothing here!’ I said. ‘So,’ the Rav replied, ‘you and your friends will be the ones to build it. If Hashem sent you now, then surely that is your purpose.’”

This ethos pervades Rabbi Grossman’s approach—where there’s a need, build it; where there’s no leader, lead.

The Rav encouraged Shai to marry, officiated his wedding, and inspired the names of his sons. Alumni share a common thread of love for the Rav and a drive to reveal the goodness he sees in them.

Observing Rabbi Grossman’s impact—whether at army bases, hospitals, with evacuated families, or at home in Migdal HaEmek—inspires Shai to question, “What excuse do any of us have not to do MORE for Am Yisrael?”

The achievements of fellow alumni, whether in leadership positions, the army, or community leadership, showcase the pervasive spirit and drive to help, instilled by the Rav in each and every one of them.

Local Support In the U.S., the Magen Israel campaign has seen an incredible outpouring of support from synagogues, schools, restaurants, and local businesses, all raising funds and sending donations to Israel.

During Chanukah, 14 partner schools and communities united with American Friends of Migdal Ohr (AFMO) to raise funds for gifts and celebrations benefiting children from evacuated families. Notable participants included HALB, The Frisch School, SAR, Yeshivat He’Atid, Ben Porat Yosef, NCSY, and many others, each contributing to bring light to Israel’s children and support the Israeli economy.

The Rav has been profoundly touched by the unwavering dedication and support emanating from Jewish communities across America and the world. The collective impact of each individual’s personal care, and the solidarity of the community at large, has been truly inspirational. In a remarkable display of compassion, members of the community have demonstrated robust support, both in giving, ruach, and physical presence, offering a comforting embrace during this

challenging time for Am Yisrael.

“We are all driven to act, and the Jewish people have been an inspiration as a force for good,” shared AFMO’s Executive Director, Atara Solow. “With needs on the ground that are so vital, the feeling and spirit of Am Yisrael together not only supports but strengthens our resolve.”

Among other initiatives, Atara was blessed to take part in missions with members of Yeshivah of Flatbush High School, Keter Torah, Bnei Yeshurun, The Manhattan Jewish Center and others. Each mission dedicated to offering strength and support to those in need across Israel since October 7th and to supporting the children of Israel and Migdal Ohr during this challenging time. Groups have renovated bomb shelters, provided critical goods and uplifted the morale of the nation.

“As an Israeli living in the Diaspora and far from home,” says Atara, “ it has been extremely comforting and inspiring to see the love and unity of the Jewish people. We truly are one nation. When we are hurting in Israel, the Jewish community abroad is with us, feeling the pain and doing everything in their power to send support and assistance. I cannot tell you how proud and humbled I have been to be involved in Migdal Ohr’s Magen Israel war relief efforts. Thank you to everyone who has stepped up to get involved.

Our communities in particular have been a tremendous part of the Magen Relief effort and Rabbi Grossman wants to extend his deepest appreciation and thanks from Israel.”

To learn more about Magen Israel and how you can get involved visit migdalohrusa.org/israel In March, American Friends of Migdal Ohr’s Online Auction for Israel will go live for bidding! The organization is asking the community to donate goods and services items to benefit Magen Israel. Reach out to hear more about he auction and donate items at: auction@migdalohrusa.org.

To learn more, visit migdalohrusa.org.

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Yeshiva Darchei Torah’s Upcoming Dinner Awardees Part 1 of 2

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eshiva Darchei Torah looks forward to paying tribute to these illustrious couples who have lent their time, efforts, and sheimos tovim to supercharge the Yeshiva’s annual campaign.

Mr. and Mrs. Shabse and Tova Fuchs Guests of Honor

Mr. and Mrs. Shabse and Tova Fuchs truly exemplify the ideals of Yeshiva Darchei Torah and of their illustrious families. Their dedication to creating a home where limud Torah and gemilas chesed are paramount is a proud legacy they carry forward.

Shabse is originally from Flatbush, where his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Berish and Hannah Fuchs, raised him in a home that emphasized the importance of hakaras hatov – to their rebbeim, to their beloved Rosh Yeshiva, Harav Avrohom Pam, zt”l, to mosdos hachinuch, and above all, to Hashem. Shabse is a talmid of Yeshiva Torah Vodaas, which he attended all the way through his bais medrash years. He was privileged to benefit from his family’s close relationship with Rav Pam and to watch from a close vantage point how a gadol b’Yisrael conducts himself. He also built and still treasures a special relationship with Harav Yisroel Reisman, shlita.

Along with this appreciation for the paramount value of Torah, Shabse imbibed the importance of chesed in every aspect of life. His parents welcomed his grandparents into their home, and he saw firsthand their exquisite fulfillment of kibbud av v’eim and chesed on a daily basis.

His memories of his grandmother Mrs. Molly Fuchs, who generously supported the kollel yungeleit of Torah Vodaas – and insisted on making out each check

with her own hands – helped give form to his life’s mission. Today, he brings this mission into every aspect of his life; as a leader in the healthcare field, he is dedicated to giving the elderly people in his charge the best care possible. When they are happy, fulfilled and comfortable, he feels he is seeing success.

His devoted wife, Tova, grew up on the Upper West Side, where her parents Dr. Sammy and Mrs. Denise Fuhrer, are mainstays of the community and raised their children with unshakable values.

Dr. Fuhrer served as a gabbai for 50 years, both at the Boyaner minyan in Manhattan as well as in Luxor Estates, in upstate New York. Tova, too, has memories of the hands-on chesed performed by her grandmother, Mrs. Martha Doppelt, who for many years personally prepared and delivered food to nursing homes and those in need. Today, Shabse and Tova work together on their own, exceptional brand of chesed – to date they have made 77 shidduchim. Tellingly, they are quick to express their hakaras hatov for this too – to Hashem, for allowing them to partner with Him in this wonderful endeavor. Tova takes chesed into her professional life as well – as a licensed clinical social worker, who goal is always to help others. She is also a talented artist, dedicated daughter and an incredible wife, mother and grandmother.

Along with their commitment to chesed, the Fuchses emphasize the central role limud Torah and chashivus haTorah plays in their home. Shabse is on his second cycle of Daf Yomi and is proud to have two sons-in-law learning in Eretz Yisrael, with the support and encouragement of the Fuchs daughters. Their son, Yehuda, currently a twelfth grade talmid in Mesivta Chaim Shlomo, is a true ben Torah who has grown in so many ways since his very first year in Darchei’s preschool. True to their commitment to hakaras hatov, the Fuchses are quick to express appreciation for the exceptional warmth of every one of Yehuda’s special rebbeim, who they believe play a huge part in their son’s success. Each one has helped him grow in Torah, middos tovos, b’ruchniyus and b’gashmiyus, shaping him into a mensch and a budding talmid chacham.

As part of a family that has been attached to the yeshiva world for genera-

tions, the Fuchses’ connection to Darchei is particularly precious, and it is an honor to partner with them in passing on their beautiful mesorah and ideals. We are proud to recognize this exceptional couple as our Guests of Honor.

Mr. and Mrs. Adam and Yael Goller Parents of the Year

Mr. and Mrs. Adam Goller stand out as exceptional parents who personify a special combination of refinement and commitment to growth in ruchniyus, along with a single-minded focus on the hatzlachah of their children. Their focus is on instilling the Torah values they hold so dear in their children.

A native of West Hempstead, Adam is carrying forth the legacy of his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Irving and Janice Goller, whose hands-on involvement in the Young Israel of West Hempstead and in every aspect of their children’s lives laid the groundwork for their son’s future goals. Adam was fortunate to have forged a close connection during his formative years with Rabbi Yehuda Kelemer, zt”l, the Rav of the Young Israel, as well as with, ybl”c, Rabbi Shmuel Zucker, shlita, a rebbe from Ohr Yerushalayim, which he attended following his graduation from high school. A financial executive by profession, Adam’s primary focus in life is limud Torah and tefillah, climbing rung by rung up the ladder in ruchniyus. His wife Yael is a true partner with him in his aspirations.

Yael’s parents, Dr. Keith and Mrs. Eva Staiman, are mainstays of the Five Towns community; their rock-solid commitment to tefillah b’tzibbur and respect for Torah and their rebbeim led them to choose this positive environ-

ment in which to raise their children.

Dr. Staiman is a beloved pediatrician; as a pediatric nurse practitioner, Yael has enjoyed working alongside her father for almost twenty years. Their patients at East Rockaway Pediatrics value their expert and compassionate care.

Adam and Yael are longtime mispallelim of Yeshiva Gedolah of the Five Towns. They played a central role in facilitating its growth and building its current, beautiful edifice. Yael is a founding member of the yeshiva’s Nshei, and Adam was president of the yeshiva for ten years. Their involvement is a manifestation of their chashivus for tefillah, something both Adam and Yael absorbed in their childhood homes, as well as their desire to surround themselves with likeminded bnei Torah.

They are also involved in a number of other causes, taking active roles, both formal and informal, in their children’s schools, Darchei Torah and Bnos Bais Yaakov.

While their accomplishments on behalf of the community are impressive, the Gollers embody the middah of hatznea leches, devoting time and resources to the klal and the individual in a most modest and unpretentious manner.

This, along with their constant trajectory toward growth in all areas of avodas Hashem, are the sterling example they set for their children. It is no wonder, then, that they have chosen Darchei to partner with them in the chinuch of their children. They appreciate that the yeshiva is constantly driven to develop and build upon its already impressive track record, but at the same time, there is no compromising on the warmth and concern for every talmid’s needs.

It is with deep gratification that the Gollers have watched their son, Yosef Shmuel, now an eleventh grader in Mesivta Chaim Shlomo, blossom, and they are thrilled to be beginning the journey again with their son Aharon Yehuda, a happy talmid in the preschool division. The Gollers are so thankful for the strong connection their sons feel to their rebbeim and teachers both past and present and the personal interest taken in their needs.

Adam and Yael embody a sincere desire to grow and move ever forward.

B’ezras Hashem, they are zoche to

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Around the Community

Building children. Building parents.

Building worlds. This is beloved fifth grade rebbi Rabbi Shragie Polter’s life mission. Throughout his thirty-six years in chinuch, with the backing of his wonderful wife Rachel, he has left an indelible impression on hundreds of talmidim. It is a kavod for Yeshiva Darchei Torah to pay tribute to the Polters with this year’s Harbotzas Torah Award.

Rabbi Polter grew up in Montreal, where his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Mendel and Carol Polter, laid the strong, healthy foundation upon which he would build a career of molding tinokos shel bais raban. The seeds of that calling were planted even before R’ Shragie’s bar mitzvah, when the indefatigable Mr. Bob Ament, z”l, invited him to serve as a Pirchei leader and encouraged his efforts for years to follow. As a camp counselor, his love for children and harbotzas Torah led him to run a pre-davening learning program and cocoa club. It was during his stint as a counselor in Camp Munk that he was further inspired by the unforgettable Rabbi Josh Silbermintz, zt”l.

Following his graduation from Yeshivah Gedolah of Montreal, Rabbi Polter moved on to Yeshiva Ner Yisrael in Baltimore, where he was privileged to learn under Rav Yaakov Kulefsky, zt”l, and ybl”c, Rabbi Yissocher Frand, with whom he built a strong kesher. Still driven by his passion for teaching children, he used his precious free time to run Pirchei for the young boys living on the yeshivah’s campus.

In 1988, R’ Shragie married his wife Rachel, a native of Far Rockaway. Her parents, Rabbi and Mrs. Nechemia and Rheta Zabrowsky, currently of Ramat Beit Shemesh, were one of the found-

ing families of Yeshiva Darchei Torah; Rachel’s older brother R’ Eliezer was a member of the yeshiva’s first graduating class. The Zabrowskys ingrained in their children a love for learning and Yiddishkeit and helping those in need of extra warmth and a helping hand. Rachel’s wholehearted support and excitement for her husband’s avodas hakodesh is no doubt an outgrowth of the ideals with which she was raised.

Shortly after their marriage, the Polters moved to Denver, where Rabbi Polter was a very successful third-grade rebbi in Hillel Academy for nine years. Rabbi Polter’s transition to Darchei in 1997 was simply the continuation of his calling to build Yiddishe kinder and infuse them with a love for learning and simchas hachayim. For more than twenty-five years, Rabbi Polter’s talmidim, first in third grade and now in fifth grade, where he gives them their first delightful taste of Gemara, respond to his positivity and understanding of what each one needs to succeed. R’ Shragie describes Darchei as a “happy, well-run place to be. There’s nothing like it.” Certainly, his demeanor contributes immeasurably to this unique atmosphere.

The Polters’ five sons are all graduates of the yeshiva, benefiting from the vision of their grandparents many decades ear-

lier. With the special, inside perspective they are privy to, the Polters appreciate the exceptional brand of chinuch their children gained from during their years in Darchei.

Rabbi Polter also works with talmidim one-on-one. In this capacity he has seen tremendous hatzlachah developing learning skills and working hand-in-hand with parents, encouraging them and guiding them on the path to their children’s success.

It is easy to see that Rabbi Polter truly loves what the does. He arrives early each morning so that he can give his students his all, invests his entire neshamah in each child and values the opportunity to partner with their parents – which he sees as the key to maximizing a child’s school experience.

No doubt, there are many, many parents and former talmidim who can attest to Rabbi Polter’s special touch, augmented by his wife’s encouragement and enthusiastic support. Surely, they all agree that the Polters are exceptionally fitting recipients for this year’s Harbotzas Torah Award.

successful DRS graduates in fields such as medicine, dentistry, law, finance, accounting, rabbanus, real estate, chinuch, psychology, and music production. Their stories served as a source of inspiration for current students, showcasing the diverse opportunities that await them beyond high school.

The palpable sense of pride and accomplishment resonated throughout the

event as alumni returned to their alma mater to give back and guide the next generation of DRS students. The unique perspective offered by former students who once sat in the same classrooms added a special touch to the career fair, creating a strong connection between past and present.

For journal ads, reservations, and more information, please call 718-868-2300 ext. 301; email dinner@darchei.org; or visit Beyond.darchei.org.

DRS Holds Career Fair

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n Monday, DRS arranged an informative career fair for its 11th and 12th grade students, exclusively featuring accomplished alumni of the yeshiva! This year’s career fair showcased the remarkable achievements of former DRS students who have carved out successful paths in various professional fields.

The event kicked off with a compelling keynote address by Gavri Butler, a distinguished DRS alum and Managing Director/Associate General Counsel at Affinius Capital. Affinius Capital. Mr. Butler shared his invaluable “rules and guidelines” for achieving success, shedding light on his journey as a Jew navigating a secular workplace. His address emphasized the significance of making a Kiddush Hashem—a sanctification of G-d’s name—in every possible professional encounter.

Following the inspiring keynote, students dispersed into different

rooms to explore specific professions of their choice. What set this year’s career fair apart was the exclusive participation of DRS alumni as presenters. The alumni, all highly accomplished in their respective fields, shared personal anecdotes about their journeys, highlighting both the positive aspects and challenges of their professions.

The array of presenters included

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watch as their children follow in their footsteps. It is an honor for the yeshivah to bestow the Parents of the Year Award upon Mr. and Mrs. Adam and Yael Goller, who set a sterling example not only for their own children, but to the entire Darchei Torah family.

Rabbi and Mrs. Shragie and Rachel Polter Harbotzas Torah Award

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Around the Community

Flatbush Community Gathers For “Connected – Kesher Shel Kayama” Event Celebrating Bonds At Yeshiva & Mesivta Toras Emes Kamenitz

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he Flatbush community came together this Sunday evening for the “Connected” event hosted by Yeshiva & Mesivta Toras Emes Kamenitz. It was an inspiring celebration of the bonds connecting the talmidim, rebbeim, and the Yeshiva today and in earlier generations. Held at the Sterling Banquet Hall, this event brought together talmidim with their parents and grandparents, alumni, rabbanim, Yeshiva supporters and community members in a remarkable display of unity and tradition.

The event began with what was the true highlight of the program: a special learning session for grandfathers, fathers, and sons, symbolizing the transmission of Jewish values and teachings across generations. It was a true kiddush Hashem and built upon the thousands of extra hours of Torah learning undertaken by talmidim during the Yeshiva’s “Hasmada Drive.” This was followed by a Siyum Hashas in tribute to the memories of a truly esteemed couple, Mr. and Mrs. Lester Klaus, a”h. This celebrated their lasting contributions as longtime partners of the Yeshiva. As we are approaching the first yahrtzeit of Mr. Klaus, it was also the perfect occasion to honor his

memory with a Siyum Hashas.

Rav Yaakov Bender, the venerable Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshiva Darchei Torah of Far Rockaway, recited the Hadran, which was followed by Kaddish, said by Mr. Shmulie Klaus, a respected son of Mr. & Mrs. Klaus. The event then transitioned into spirited dancing and singing, with everyone joining in harmonious celebration. All in attendance immensely enjoyed the experience, especially the performance by singers Levi Falkowitz and Chaim Brown, accompanied by the Shira Orchestra. The music brought an added joy and energy to the event, resonating deeply with both young and old.

Mr. Daniel Sofer thanked the many people who made the event possible. He introduced the speakers and honorees as the attendees sat to enjoy a sumptuous and elegant dinner.

Rav Yisroel Meir Zelinger, the Rosh Hanhalas HaYeshiva, spoke of the deep kesher a Rebbe can create with his talmid. “The connection formed by working on their neshomos lasts forever,” he said. He expounded on the theme of the evening. “For true life and real connection, just walk the halls of Yeshiva, which are pulsating with chiyus.”

The event proceeded with video presentations showing scenes from around the yeshiva and introducing the honorees. Mr. & Mrs. Avrohom Kravitz were the elementary school Parents of the Year. Mr. & Mrs. Avrumi Izsak were the Mesivta Parents of the Year. Renowned 11th Grade Maggid Shiur, Rabbi Avraham Aryeh Kempler, was the recipient of the Harbotzas Torah Award, celebrating over a decade of sterling chinuch. Also celebrated was the great achievement of the fundraising campaign, thanking the over 1,500 donors who helped the Yeshiva reach the million dollar goal.

The YTE Boys Choir entertained dinner attendees, led by the English Principal, Rabbi Chaim Block. This performance showcased the talents of the students, charming the attendees with their chein and enthusiasm.

Yeshiva Toras Emes Kamenitz is growing by leaps and bounds, a testament to the dedication of its talented Hanhala, Rebbeim, and teachers. Their commitment to making a mark in the effort they put into every single talmid is evident. This growth is undoubtedly a result of their unwavering dedication, as they strive to provide a nurturing and

enriching environment for each talmid.

Everyone who attended was much appreciated for showing their support for such an important institution.

Above all, this event added yet another dimension to the connection the Yeshiva has forged with everyone affiliated with it, past, present, and future.

It bridged the gap between generations, linking the legacy of those who built this wonderful institution with the vibrant energy of those who will lead our Jewish community forward. It was a moving reminder of how every individual connected to Yeshiva Toras Emes Kamenitz contributes to its ongoing story, shaping a legacy that transcends time.

The “Connected” event was not just a celebration but a reaffirmation of Yeshiva Toras Emes Kamenitz’s role in the Jewish community. It highlighted the Yeshiva’s commitment to fostering relationships that extend beyond the classroom, impacting the lives of Talmidim and alumni long after they leave its halls. The “Connected” event was more than just a gathering; it was a testament to the enduring legacy and the vibrant spirit of Yeshiva Toras Emes Kamenitz.

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Around the Community

Yeshiva Darchei Torah’s Robotics Teams Win Big

Pictured here are the first place winners: Ovadyah Boruch Davis, Dovid Pinchas Hauben, and Ovadyah Zucker, and the second-place winners: Gedaliah Beim and Simcha Shlomo Ringel. At left, Rabbi Moshe Leff, principal; at right, Rabbi Nachum Dinowitz, project coordinator

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azal tov to Morah Foular’s (2-204 and 2-207) Morah Reut’s (2-205 and 2-206) students at YCQ on receiving their first Chumashim! Each class put on a spectacular performance at their respective

Chagigot HaChumash. Students learned pasuk aleph of Bereishis inside the Chumash together for the very first time. It was truly a meaningful and special occasion, and everyone should be blessed with much hatzlacha in their continued Torah studies.

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eshiva Darchei Torah is proud of all its talmidim and in particular the middle school boys who comprise the five teams of its celebrated, extra-curricular robotics course. The robotics program is a science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) project founded and funded by the Center for

Initiatives in Jewish Education (CIJE).

Last Thursday, the students competed in a regional tournament against five yeshivos and day schools to design and build functioning robots that can complete specific tasks. Two of the Darchei Torah teams won, placing in first and second place, respectively.

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Chagigot HaChumash at YCQ

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1. *

TJH

Centerfold

2023 Sports Trivia 1. Who was the 2023 NBA MVP? a. Joel Embiid b. LeBron James c. Giannis Antetokounmpo d. Stephen Curry 2. Which team won the 2023 Super Bowl? a. Tampa Bay Buccaneers b. Kansas City Chiefs c. Los Angeles Rams d. Green Bay Packers 3. Which team won the 2023 NHL Stanley Cup? a. Tampa Bay Lightning b. Colorado Avalanche c. Pittsburgh Penguins d. Vegas Golden Knights 4. Which team won the 2023 World Series? a. Mets (I know that’s not nice – sorry) b. Arizona Diamondbacks c. Texas Rangers d. Phillies 5. Who was the American League MVP in 2023? a. Mike Trout b. Shohei

Ohtani c. Mookie Betts d. Fernando Tatis Jr. 6. Who was the National League MVP in 2023? a. Ronald Acuña Jr. b. Yandy Díaz c. Julio Rodríguez d. Pete Aloñzo 7. Which team won the 2023 NBA Championship? a. Milwaukee Bucks b. Lakers c. Denver Nuggets d. Warriors 8. Which horse won the 2023 Kentucky Derby? a. Mage b. Essential Quality c. Hot Rod Charlie d. Known Agenda 9. Lionel Messi’s $12 million base salary with Inter Miami makes him the highestpaid MLS player ever, but how much of a pay cut did he take compared with his

2022 deal at Paris Saint-Germain? a. $14 million b. $37 million c. $42 million d. $56 million 10. For the 16th time, Uncle Joey Chestnut won the July 4th Hot Dog Eating Contest. How many dogs did he down in 10 minutes? a. 24 b. 48 c. 62 d. 112 Answers: 1-A 2-B 3-D 4-C 5-B 6-A 7-C 8-A 9-D 10-C Wisdom Key 8-10 correct: You should really follow through on your dreams of starting a sports podcast.

4-7 correct: You understand what sports is – an outlet, not life itself.

0-3 correct: You are not that great, but still better than the Mets!

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Each of the following is an actual Guiness World Record that was set in 2023, except for one. Can you spot the one that is made up?

Excuse You!: Kimberly “Kimycola” Winter from Maryland, USA, broke the record for the world’s loudest burp for a female. Her bellowing belch was 107.3 decibels loud. (The male record is 112.7 dB…yep, men will always be better at some things!) Kimberly’s record-breaking burp is louder than a blender (70-80 dB), an electric handheld drill (9095 dB), and even some motorcycles at full throttle (100-110 dB). This is one of those rare talents that probably should be left off of the shidduch resume.

Serious ‘Stach: Paul Slosar of Summerville, South Carolina, USA, broke the record for longest moustache in the world, with a span of 2 feet, 1 inch.

Asked if he would shave or trim his moustache for employment, his answer has always been no. “In addition, my wife has told me that if I were to come home with the moustache trimmed or removed, she would serve me with divorce papers,” said Paul. “Until mustache trim do us part…”

Oh My Gosh: Actor Akshay Kumar of India achieved the world record for most selfies in three minutes, tallying up a total of 184 selfies.

Wait, I do that every time I’m out with my friends?! These selfies were different— each selfie was with another person. 184 people lined up and coordinated to come in and out of the shot without “selfie bombing” the next shot. Try that next time you go for pizza with your friends. Actually, NOOOOOOOO! Please don’t!

Quick Potatoes: Andre Ortolf of Germany broke the world record by assembling Mr. Potato Head in 11.51 seconds while blindfolded. Takes me less time to do that when my 2-year-old wakes me in middle of my Shabbos nap for some Potato Head help.

Rotton Tomatoes: Andre Ortolf of Germany captured the record for fastest time to drink one liter of tomato sauce when he chugged it down in 55.21 seconds. Don’t pass the ketchup, please.

Many Balls In the Air: James Cozens of England became a juggling world record holder with most objects juggled while riding a unicycle – juggling seven balls for 16.77 seconds while riding his unicycle. How about he try juggling 2 PTAs, preparing dinner, 4 carpools, art lessons, a math tutor, Zoom shiur, get-together for your 4th grade reunion, and preparing for Shabbos. Let him try that for 16.77 seconds!

Squeaking By: Stunt driver, Paul Swift, 44, from England, claimed the Guiness World Record by completing the tightest gap driven through by a pick-up truck on two wheels. I should learn how to do that to get by all the double-parked cars on Central Ave. Right to Left: Deloof Neebevahouy of the Netherlands achieved the World Record for quickest to spell people’s names backwards, when he spelled 7 people’s names backwards in 1 minute and 4 seconds. Seems easy to do, but it’s not. Start by trying to spell Deloof Neebehavouy’s name backwards.

DECEMBER 28, 2023 | The Jewish Home

What a Record!

Answer: You obviously weren’t able to spell Deloof Neebehavouy’s name backwards.

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Torah Thought

Parshas Vayechi

By Rabbi Berel Wein

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he conclusion of the book of Bereshis reaches its climax this week with the recording for us of the death of our father Yaakov and of Yosef. The era of the founders of our people ended in relative tranquility and contentment, albeit on foreign soil. It will be a long and arduous journey for the descendants of Yaakov to return home to the Land of Israel.

A dark and forbidding era is about to begin, but, though still in the future, it was foretold already many years earlier

to our father Avraham. From the simple meaning of the words of the Torah, it is apparent that the family of Yaakov found themselves comfortable and well settled in their home in Goshen.

The promise of Yosef that the L-rd would take them forth from Egypt was certainly remembered and passed on from one generation to the next. Nevertheless, there was no sense of immediacy regarding this promise and its fulfillment, and the Jews would view Egypt as their home rather than the Land of

Israel for a long time.

They hastened to return home after burying Yaakov in the Cave of Machpela, seeing Egypt as their home and the Land of Israel as a far distant goal and dream that would somehow eventually be realized but that had no immediate bearing on their day-to-day living.

This attitude remained constant throughout the long history of the Jewish people and of its various exiles, in

under the circumstances.

However, as Maimonides points out, regarding the Egyptian enslavement of the Jewish people, Egypt was not preordained to be the oppressor and enslaver of Israel. And, it was also apparently not preordained that those early generations of Jews living in Egypt were to fulfill the vision of Avraham to be strangers and slaves in a land that did not belong to them.

There was no sense of immediacy regarding this promise and its fulfillment.

Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, Europe and today the entire world, outposts that have hosted and still host the Jewish people in our far-flung diaspora. The Jewish people were never in a hurry to leave any of these places and to return to the Land of Israel. This still seems to be the case in our time as well.

It is difficult to understand why the holy family of Yaakov seems so passive and unresponsive in relation to the Land of Israel. There are commentators who state that they were aware of the heavenly decree that they would have to be strangers in a strange land for many centuries and that they accepted their lot and decided to make the best of it

Apparently, according to Maimonides, the Egyptians had a choice as to whether to enslave the Jews, and the Jews before their enslavement occurred had an equal choice of leaving Egypt and returning to their ancestral home in the Land of Israel However we will deal with this baffling issue, there is no question that this represents a template for all later Jewish exiles and for Diaspora Jewry in all times and places. Apparently, only tragedy moves the Jewish people…and throughout our history, tragedies abound. Let us hope that somehow history does not repeat itself in our time as well.

Shabbat shalom.

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From the Fire

Parshas Vayechi The Chizuk of Parshas Vayechi

By Rav Moshe Weinberger Adapted for publication by Binyomin Wolf

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hen Yaakov blesses his children in this week’s parsha, it says (Bereishis 49:28, “All of the tribes of Yisroel are twelve, and this is what their father said to them and blessed them; each man was blessed according to his blessing.” According to the meforshim, the commentaries, Yaakov gave each one the bracha, the blessing that was coming to him, each one according to his own nature and his own character traits. That is why, with regard to Yaakov’s bracha for Ephraim and Menashe, Yaakov told Yosef (Bereishis 48:19), “Yadati b’ni, yadati, I know, my son, I know.” In other words, Yaakov was telling Yosef, “I know the nature of each child and I cannot switch one bracha for another. Each one must receive the exact blessing which is fitting for him based on his particular nature.” A particular blessing can only take effect in one whose nature fits that blessing, “each man according to his blessing.”

This means that each of the blessings were already natural to each person. Yosef inherited his tzidkus, his righteous ability to separate from immorality, from his mother Rochel, who was a tzadekes, a righteous woman. Yehuda’s ability to

admit, which made him fitting to be the father of Jewish kingship, was natural to him because he inherited it from his mother Leah, who said (Bereishis 29:35), “Ha’pa’am odeh es Hashem, This time I give thanks [lit. ‘admit’] to G-d.” According to Esther Raba 6:12, Binyomin’s inherited his ability to stay silent about what really happened to Yosef from his mother Rochel who stayed silent in order to avoid embarrassing her sister Leah. That is why Binyomin’s stone in the Choshen is the yishpeh, which stands for the words “yeish peh, he has a mouth,” as if to say that he has a mouth but he keeps silent about the sale of Yosef. Mordechai and Esther, also descendants of Binyomin, similarly inherited their ability to stay silent by not revealing the fact that Esther was Jewish from Rochel. Shaul also inherited his ability to be silent about being appointed king from his great-grandmother Rochel.

Why then is it so great that Yehuda merited kingship because he confessed publicly in the story of Tamar? That trait was natural to him because he inherited it from his mother! One can ask the same question about Binyomin, Yosef, and the other sons of Yaakov as well. They were

blessed according to traits they possessed naturally, so why all the fuss over accomplishments which came naturally to them?

Reb Yerucham Levovitz of Mir explains the meaning and essence of chizuk, encouragement, and his explanation will resolve all of the foregoing questions and teach us what we need to know to become great and reach shleimus, the fulfillment of our personal potential. According to Reb Yerucham, chizuk means that a person takes the natural strengths Hashem planted within him and then guards and strengthens them. If a person does not abandon those strengths, but instead strengthens and increases them, then he will attain greatness. If he does that, then even his natural negative character traits will be transformed for the good.

The area in which a person is strong has a special chein, a charm, in that person’s eyes to the extent that he cannot see how other people, who weak in his area of strength, can be so weak in that area. If two people are talking, and one of them is very talkative and the other is more inwardly focused, the quiet one will think, “How can this guy talk so much?” and the talkative one will think, “Doesn’t he have

anything worthwhile to say?”

It is Hashem’s will, however, that each person embrace and strengthen his natural strengths and build his entire life around them, because if he does so, he will become great in those areas. “V’chazakta v’hayisa l’ish, strengthen yourself and be a man.”

Ostensibly, it sounds very easy to embrace what you are naturally inclined to do anyway and strengthen that. But this is not so, especially for young teens. One’s friends, other people, and even certain inclinations within oneself try to pull him away from his inner nature and compel him to do things that are against his nature. Avoiding that requires tremendous chizuk, encouragement and strength. One experiences many tests in life which are designed to tempt a person to rebel against his own nature.

When one strengthens himself in the areas where his natural talents and inclinations lie, he will become great. It is very tempting to dismiss the things which come easily to a person precisely because they are easy and come naturally. That is why one must strengthen himself by realizing that he does not need to seek out new and novel things to focus on. Rather, if he

ly understood the difference between good and evil, between holy and the profane, and between the Jewish people and the nations of the world. Because he strengthened that trait, guarded it, and increased it, he was able to build up a life around that trait and make himself into a Reb Yehoshua ben Karcha.

Reb Tzadik Hakohen in Tzidkas Hatzadik 213 quoted Divrei Hayamim 2:4:10,

natural inclination like Rabi Yehoshua ben Karcha’s, to turn away from anything evil, can be used to build a truly great person and build Yiddishkeit, or a person could use that inclination the wrong way, and spit on little children in Beit Shemesh chas v’shalom and destroy Yiddishkeit.

I will share with you the following story, the message of which is essential to successfully implement Reb Yerucham’s

He must become great in who he already is.

where the judge Yaavetz asked Hashem, “Expand my borders.” On a simple level, Yaavetz was asking Hashem to expand the borders of Eretz Yisroel. But Reb Tzadik explains on a deeper level that he was asking Hashem to take who he was and help him grow and expand that aspect of himself so that he could build an even greater self on the foundation of his own inner strengths.

One must be very careful, however, to use his natural inclinations for good. A

principle. If one does not understand this, everything said before will not amount to anything.

I recently read a story about the first meeting between Rav Moshe Shternbuch, one of the foremost poskim today in the Beis Din of Yerushalayim, and the Tchibiner Rav, the Gadol Hador in Eretz Yisroel at the time. People were excited about the meeting because the Tchibiner Rav was going to talk in learning with the up-and-coming young ilui, genius, Rav

Shternbuch. At the meeting, the Tchibiner Rav asked Rav Shternbuch an extremely difficult question. None of those present knew the answer, but Rav Shternubch immediately gave a brilliant answer which resolved the difficulty.

All of those present were amazed at the answer, but the Tchibiner Rav pointed accusingly at Rav Shternbuch and told him, “That’s not your answer!” as if to imply that he had seen the answer somewhere before but presented it as if it were his own. Rav Shternbuch remained silent because he knew that he had just thought of the answer on the spot. After a short while, the Tchibiner Rav explained to Rav Shternbuch, that he was only able to give such a brilliant answer because of his mother’s tefillos for him during candle lighting on Friday nights.

We should all merit to embrace and strengthen our own natural kochos, strengths, that Hashem gave us, so that we will become great people and merit the geulah shleimah, b’mheira b’yameinu.

Rav Moshe Weinberger, shlita, is the founding Morah d’Asrah of Congregation Aish Kodesh in Woodmere, NY, and serves as leader of the new mechina Emek HaMelech.

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guards, develops, and strengthens his natural strengths and talents, he will become truly great. One does not need to become someone else to become great. Rather, he must become great in who he already is.

Perhaps this principle can also explain the Gemara in Megila 28a, where a number of Amora’im are asked to explain what they did to merit a long life. One of the exchanges went as follows: “He asked Rabi Yehoshua ben Karcha, ‘With what did you merit length of days?’ He answered him, ‘In all of my days, I never gazed into the face of an evil person.” Each one of the Amora’im cite one specific detail of halacha that they observed very carefully as the reason for their old age. For Rabi Yehoshua ben Karcha, it was the fact that he never stared intently at the face of a wicked person.

Superficially, it is a difficult Gemara to understand. These sages spent their entire lives immersed in Torah and tefilla. Why would anyone wonder how they attained their long life? They were righteous people who lived every moment in the service of Hashem. Of course, they lived a long life.

With Reb Yerucham’s teaching, however, we can understand the Gemara. Rabi Yehoshua ben Karcha, for example, must have seen from a very young age that he had a natural aversion to evil. He natural-

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Delving into the Daf

Do We Need to Suffer for Torah?

By Rabbi Avrohom Sebrow

T

he Gemara (Bava Kama 61b) expounds a story recorded in Shmuel and Divrei Hayamim.

Dovid HaMelech was fighting the Philistines. A halachic question arose whether his army was permitted to destroy an individual’s property to save the lives of his men. The Philistines were taking cover in a privately owned field.

Dovid HaMelech wanted to destroy the field and its produce. He was unsure whether or not he was permitted to do so. (This interpretation of the Gemara is preferred by the Raavad.) He lamented the fact that due to his proximity to his enemies, he was unable to seek guidance from the Sanhedrin.

Unbelievably, Dovid HaMelech expressed out loud a related question that was bothering him. Suppose someone lights a fire on his own property and it spreads to his neighbor’s property. The fire consumes his neighbor’s haystack.

It is clear that the igniter is responsible for the damages caused to the haystack, but must he pay for items the owner hid in there as well? The owner may have hidden his tools in the haystack to prevent thievery, while at the same time enabling easy access. According to Tosfos, this query was not in any way relevant to his dangerous predicament. But what else would Dovid HaMelech be doing in the middle of a war besides having Torah discussions?

Three powerful warriors, upon hearing the King’s queries, took upon themselves to risk their lives to go through enemy territory to reach the Sanhedrin to find answers for the unresolved questions. They returned unharmed with the rulings of the Sanhedrin. The Gemara records the answer to the first question.

Unfortunately, the answer to the second question has been lost to history, and the answer remains the subject of dispute until today.

Dovid HaMelech was not pleased with the actions of the three mighty men.

Rav Meir Shapiro

The dining room of Yeshiva Chachmei Lublin

He reasoned that they were not allowed to put themselves in danger for the sake of finding answers to the Torah questions. He therefore decreed that the men not be afforded the honor of having the answers repeated in their names. This, he explained, was based on a tradition he received from Shumel Hanavi that scholars who needlessly put themselves in danger should not have their Torah rulings credited to them.

We find that great sages such as Rebbe Akiva endangered their lives to teach Torah. The Romans forbade the public dissemination of Torah on the penalty of death. Rebbe Akiva defied that ban and was ultimately killed for ignoring the Roman decree. Yet Rebbe Akiva is lauded for his actions. Why are these three mighty warriors derided for risking their lives for Torah? The answer is that Rebbe Akiva risked his life to teach Torah publicly. Such selflessness is praiseworthy.

Here, the three men risked their lives to discover answers to Torah questions.

Dovid HaMelech and the other Jews continued studying Torah even without these answers. Hence, their goal was to help a few individuals discover a new aspect of Torah. One should not risk his life for the benefit of few individuals learning a new aspect of Torah.

Still, the Maharal points to a discrepancy between the above and a Gemara

in Berachos (63b). “Reish Lakish stated: Torah only endures in one who kills himself for it.” Doesn’t that mean that one should be ready to sacrifice his life to be able to learn Torah? The Maharal explains that the Gemara in Berachos is just figurative. A person should be willing to learn Torah even under dire conditions if need be.

Rav Meir Shapiro, the founder of Yeshiva Chachmei Lublin, was fundraising for his Yeshiva. The Yeshiva was based on an innovative idea at that time, that there should be a communal dining room and dormitory. Torah students shouldn’t have to search daily to find meals and lodgings. One donor was skeptical of this idea. He challenged, “The Gemara says that Torah only endures in one who kills himself for it.” Part of “killing oneself” should include finding lodging. Rav Shapiro retorted, “The Gemara says that one should kill himself for ‘it,’ meaning the Torah. He should expend all his energy and time focused on the study of Torah. He does not and should not have to spend his time ‘killing himself’ to find meals and lodgings!”

On another occasion, Rav Meir Shapiro encountered another skeptical donor.

The donor argued that it is stated in Avos 6:4, “This is the way of the Torah: Bread and salt you will eat, measured water you will drink, on the ground you will sleep,

a life of suffering you will live, and in the Torah you will labor.” “Yet,” the donor argued, “you want to boys to study Torah in comfort!”

Rav Meir Shapiro responded with a story that took place with the Baal HaTanya. The Baal HaTanya was once traveling. He stopped for Pesach in a Jewish community. On the first night of Pesach, the congregation did not recite Hallel in shul. The Baal HaTanya waited until everyone left and recited Hallel.

The rav of the town somehow got wind of this and went straightaway to where the Baal HaTanya was having his seder.

The Rav challenged him, “Why did you recite Hallel tonight in shul?”

The Baal HaTanya responded, “The Beis Yosef clearly says that one should recite Hallel on the first night of Pesach in shul.”

But the rav retorted while banging on the table, “But the Rema says that is not our minhag!”

The Baal HaTanya asked the Rav “Did you hear the Rema say it?” “ “No, but it is clearly in his sefer!”

“Then how do you know the Rema said it while banging on the table? Maybe the Rema was lamenting, Too bad that nowadays we are not accustomed to saying Hallel?””

Similarly, Rav Shapiro argued, “The Tanna is lamenting, too bad that this is usually the way of those that learn Torah. They barely have what to live on, yet they persevere! But why not give those young men who toil in Torah optimal conditions? Hopefully, they will persevere regardless. But why make them suffer?”

Rabbi Avrohom Sebrow is a rebbe at Yeshiva Ateres Shimon in Far Rockaway. In addition, Rabbi Sebrow leads a daf yomi chaburah at Eitz Chayim of Dogwood Park in West Hempstead, NY. He can be contacted at ASebrow@ gmail.com.

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Headlines

Halacha

The Shalom Zachar – An Overview

By Rabbi Yair Hoffman

T

he Klausenberger Rebbe, zt”l, was once shot in the arm, r”l, by a Nazi while he was in Auschwitz.

He was afraid to go to the Nazi infirmary, even though there were doctors there. He knew that if he entered that building, it was true sakanas nefashos, and he might never come out alive.

Instead, the Rebbe plucked a leaf from a tree to staunch the bleeding. The Rebbe then cut off a branch and tied it around his wound to hold it in place. It healed in three days. He then promised himself that if he would survive the horrible evil that was Auschwitz, he would build a hospital in Eretz Yisrael where every human being would be cared for with dignity. And the basis of that future hospital would be that the doctors and nurses would believe that there is a Creator in this world and that when they treat a patient, they are fulfilling the greatest mitzvah in the Torah.

Fast forward 32 years. The Rebbe did survive. We are in Union City, New Jersey, in the Yeshiva’s building. It is now 1976, slightly after Purim, and the Rebbe is conducting a Shalom Zachar, but it is not for his child nor a grandchild. Nor is it for any child of one of his chassidim.

Who was it for?

In 1976, the maternity ward of the Klausenberger Rebbe’s Laniado hospital in Netanya had just opened up. Its first baby was born. It was a boy. The Rebbe was called, and the phone was taken in the nursery where the Rebbe could hear the child cry.

The Rebbe was overcome with emotion. The Nazis had been defeated, and Klal Yisroel had survived.

A new child had entered Klal Yisroel.

How could he not make a Shalom Zachar? How could he not make a seudas mitzvah of thanks? And so, he did.

On Shabbos After Maariv After Maariv on Friday night, in

all that Hashem gives us. We should also have this appreciation for all that others do for us as well. This is a critical component in our development as ovdei Hashem.

Appreciating Torah

thousands of shuls across the world, the gabbai will announce that a Shalom Zachar will take place at the house of So and So. We are all tired after a hard week. But the emotion felt by the Klausenberger Rebbe in seeing the continuity of Klal Yisroel should be felt by all of us.

How can we not go?

The Minhag It is a minhag in Ashkenazic Jewish circles to host a Shalom Zachar where the baby is found on the Shabbos after a baby boy is born. It is generally held after the Shabbos evening meal. It is not a meal where people wash.

The Rambam (Hilchos Me’ilah 8:8) tells us that it is important to understand the reason why we do our mitzvos.

He also writes this in Moreh Nevuchim (3:31). It is also the view of the Zohar (Parshas Yisro p. 93b) and Rabbeinu Yonah Shaarei HaAvodah #54. This is also true for understanding why we perform our customs. There are three main reasons cited for the custom of the Shalom Zachar.

For Gratitude The Terumas HaDeshen (Siman 269) explains that it is a Seudas Hoda’ah, a meal of thanksgiving. It is held in thanks that the child was saved from the travails and dangers involved in the birth. This is how the Terumas HaDeshen understands the view of Rabbeinu Tam cited in Tosfos in Bava Kamma (80a, “Yeshua HaBen”).

A New Spin Perhaps the incident cited above gives us a new reason for the Shalom Zachar.

Perhaps, in the eyes of the Klausenberger, the baby represents Klal Yisroel. This baby, Klal Yisroel, was saved from the travails and dangers of Jewish history. Infant Klal Yisroel had survived the Rindfleish massacres, the Crusades, the Gzeiras Tach vetat of Chmelnieki, the pogroms of Russia, and the Holocaust itself!

This baby represents the very continuity of the Jewish people itself.

This reason of hakaras hatov for the Shalom Zachar highlights to us the idea that we should always have and develop a feeling of gratitude and appreciation for

The Taz cites another reason in the name of the Drisha. The Drisha was written by Rav Yehoshua Falk (1555-1614), a great posek from Poland. He writes that is based upon the Gemara in Niddah 30b that states that when the child is born, a malach, an angel, strikes the baby on his mouth and causes the child to forget all of the Torah he had learned while in his mother’s womb. This meal, according to the Drisha, is to mourn the Torah that was lost.

According to this reason, we highlight our appreciation for Torah study. The Torah must always be central to our lives.

Every day in Maariv we recite, “Ki haim chayeinu.” Torah is our life itself.

Appreciating Shabbos The Taz provides his own reason based upon a Midrash found in chapter 27 of VaYikra Rabba. There, the Midrash explains why the bris milah is held on the eighth day. It draws a comparison between a king who tells his subjects that he will only grant them an audience after they first appear before a matronisa – a hostess. The Taz writes that this is the reason we hold the Shalom Zachar on Shabbos.

From the Taz, we gain an appreciation of the gift that Hashem gave us in the Shabbos. It is important to remember that more than the Jew has kept Shabbos, Shabbos has kept the Jew. Although it is somewhat ironic that the person who coined this expression was not observant, it is, nonetheless, a truism.

Why Not For Girls?

Rav Yechezkel Landau of Prague is

Reason For the Name The Yaavetz writes in his Sefer Migdol Oz that the reason it is called a Shalom

Zachar is on account of the fact that it is to remember or commemorate the Torah that was lost. While the baby was in the womb, he was studying Torah with a malach. That Torah is now no longer; it is lost. This meal commemorates it.

Is It a Seudas Mitzvah?

The Trumas HaDeshen rules that, in fact, the Shalom Zachar is a seudas mitzvah. He cites as a proof that the

He states (Siman 70) that it is possible that Rav had just popped in and did not partake of the actual meal itself.

Delayed Bris If the child is jaundiced or otherwise ill and the bris will not be held within the next week, there is a debate among authorities as to when the Shalom Zachar is to be held. Some hold that it should be held on the Shabbos before the Bris

This baby represents the very continuity of the Jewish people itself.

Gemara in Bava Kamma tells us that Rav entered the meal of Yeshua HaBen (as it was called then, according to the Trumas HaDeshen). We know from elsewhere (Chullin 95b) that Rav never ate at a Seudas Reshus – a festive meal that was not a seudas mitzvah. Therefore, the Trumas HaDeshen concludes that it is a seudas mitzvah.

The Chavos Yair, however, disagrees.

(Yaavetz and Chochmas Adam 149:24), while others (Zocher Habris) hold that it is always the Shabbos after the baby is born. The language of the Rama seems to indicate that he held to this view. The prevailing custom seems to be that it is held after the birth.

A Friday Night Birth What happens when the baby is born

on Friday night? In such circumstances, it is often logistically difficult to arrange a Shalom Zachar. The Pri MaGadim (MZ YD 444:9) writes that one does it as close to the birth as possible. The Chayei Adaam, however, disagrees and writes that it should be done as close to the bris milah as possible. Each person should ask his own rav.

What is being suggested here is that there may be a fourth reason for the Shalom Zachar seudah. There is the general idea of it being an expression of hakaras hatov found in the Trumas HaDeshen. There is the reason proposed by the author of the Drisha that it is to enhance our appreciation of Torah.

There is the reason further suggested by the Taz that it is to enhance our appreciation of Shabbos. The fourth reason – suggested by this author but alluded to in the actions of the Klausenberger Rebbe – is that it also enhances our appreciation for Jewish continuity.

This article should be viewed as a halachic discussion and not practical advice. The author can be reached at yairhoffman2@ gmail.com.

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noted to have asked the question on the reason cited by the Terumas HaDeshen (in his Dagul Mervavah sefer on Yoreh Deah). If this is, in fact, the reason for the seudah to express our appreciation for the salvation of the baby, how come we do not hold this meal when a girl is born?

This author would like to answer that question with a shocking find. In Meseches Smachos Aivel Rabbasi (2:3), we do find such a meal!

The meal is called “Shavuah HaBas,” and it parallels the name found in Bava Kamma called Shavuah HaBen. It is also likely that the Kiddush that we have in shul on Shabbos when a girl is born is in order to fulfill this idea, too.

Some relate that Rav Chaim Kanievsky, zt”l, consistently advised young women who are still in search of a shidduch to hold a Kiddush in shul – even if the girl is now in her twenties!

It could very well be that the Shabbos Kiddush is a fulfillment of the “Shavuah HaBas” that is referenced in Aivel Rabbasi. Others, however, relate that this is not Rav Chaim’s position.

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My Israel Home

The Garden of Eden

By Gedaliah Borvick

E

den Hills is an exciting new yishuv that is finally welcoming its first residents. The opportunity to live in a small-town setting in nature, yet close to the communal infrastructure of Beit Shemesh, has made Eden Hills a destination for many families.

Eden Hills’ history is fascinating. Back in 1990, the original developer fell in love with this picturesque region surrounded by nature preserves and aptly dubbed “the Napa Valley of Israel.” After battling bureaucracy and environmentalists for decades, he brought in an excellent partner with a strong track record of building new communities across Israel.

A little background: For years, we have been on the lookout for houses being built in central communities, as many clients have dreamed of buying a private home in a small, well-located community. Unfortunately, though, this dream is, by and large, a relic of a bygone era, and presently there is precious little construction of private home projects in central Israel. As Israel’s population is expected to double within the next 50 years, the government has understandably rezoned the center of the country. Consequently, new communities being developed in the center of the county consist almost exclusively of apartment buildings, often up to 20 stories or higher.

Accordingly, the ability to purchase a house in a new project is challenging. Op-

tions include moving to underpopulated areas – like the north, the south, and the Shomron – where low-rise housing is still being built, or to purchase in new projects whose plans were grandfathered prior to the revised zoning rules, which were implemented around 10 years ago.

We were searching for that last option: old projects with grandfathered zoning, that were mothballed for various reasons.

to do pre-sales before the sales campaign began in Israel.

Picture us galivanting around NY and NJ for 12 days in early 2020, immediately before Covid-19 shut down the world.

There we were, running a meeting in the Young Israel of New Rochelle the night before the building was shuttered and coined the “epicenter of the novel coronavirus pandemic.” It was a crazy and memorable

It was a crazy and memorable trip, in which we sidestepped corona and signed up the first two dozen buyers for this new rustic community.

Thankfully, we unearthed the perfect solution: Eden Hills. By early 2020, the new partner received permits to develop the first phase of 270 mostly semi-attached homes, ranging from 1,500 to 2,200 square feet, and they were ready to commence sales. Situated within the Green Line, under 10 minutes from Beit Shemesh and half an hour from Jerusalem, the developer was preparing to begin construction of Eden Hills and offered us the opportunity

trip, in which we sidestepped corona and signed up the first two dozen buyers for this new rustic community.

A few weeks later, the developer opened sales via Zoom. Although the world was turned upside down and in a state of flux, Israelis flocked to buy homes, prices kept on climbing, and the 270-home project, which attracted many wonderful Israeli and Anglo families, sold out.

We felt fortunate to help dozens of fam-

ilies buy homes in this beautiful new community, and that was the end of the story – until another developer, who bought two plots of land adjoining the project, reached out to us and asked: “What type of buyers didn’t buy the initial 270 homes, and why?” We shared the reasons of those who passed: some wanted larger houses, others wanted stand-alone houses, while others wanted basements. Lastly, others passed because we couldn’t guarantee the demographics of a not-yet-sold project. Although we had shared our expectations of the future community – and we happened to be right, although it wasn’t rocket science to expect a community under 10 minutes from Ramat Beit Shemesh to be religious – some people were uncomfortable taking that risk.

Based on our feedback and guidance, the new developer is building large, standalone homes, with very high technical specifications. Looking at the past to get a glimpse of the future, we expect this project will be Part Two of the Eden Hills success story.

Gedaliah Borvick is the founder of My Israel Home (www.myisraelhome.com), a real estate agency focused on helping people from abroad buy and sell homes in Israel. To sign up for his monthly market updates, contact him at gborvick@gmail.com.

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Jewish History

By Uri Kaufman

I

n March 1982, Rav Yisroel Singer received a strange phone call from his old White House superior, Henry Kissinger. Kissinger’s 95-year-old father Louis was lying on his deathbed and, to the surprise of his family, had asked to see Singer before he passed. Singer – probably the first person in American history to work in the West Wing of the White House while wearing a yarmulke every day – was equally surprised, having only met the senior Kissinger briefly at one of the many events honoring his son.

But he learned the reason for the request when he arrived.

“There is something I must ask you,” the old man said, once they were alone.

“Was Henry good to the Jews?”

It was a question that would have caused his son to cringe. Henry Kissinger often said that he was an American first, secretary of state second, and a Jew only third (in the oft-repeated joke, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir shot back, “We Jews read from right to left.”) The record seems to back up that sentiment.

In his memoir, Kissinger writes that he would have resigned had Washington turned on Israel. But a March 1973 Nixon tape, released in 2010, caused a stir because it recorded Kissinger telling the president that “the emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy, and if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern.

Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Kissinger’s conflicted loyalties were all put to the test on October 6, 1973, when the armies of Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. The war began badly for the Jewish state, consuming weapons and ammunition at a pace that was unsustainable. Yet Kissinger blocked resupply until October 12, opening the spigot only after Anwar Sadat turned down a ceasefire proposal.

To state the obvious, no one ever expected Kissinger to place Israel’s interests ahead of America’s. But his questionable decision-making during the crisis

advanced neither. At the urging of the Soviets, Kissinger flew to Moscow on October 20 to negotiate a ceasefire before the Israelis could surround the Egyptian army. Upon landing, he learned that the Saudi-led OPEC cartel had imposed an

army to surround the Egyptians in defiance of Kissinger, Moscow, and the rest of the international community. This led to some of the most acrimonious meetings ever between an American secretary of state and an Israeli prime minister.

“There is something I must ask you,” the old man said, once they were alone.

“Was Henry good to the Jews?”

oil embargo on the United States. This was the moment when Kissinger held all the cards. He could have called Saudi Arabia’s King Feisal from Moscow and conditioned any rescue of the Egyptian army on a similar rescue for American consumers. Yet he agreed to impose a ceasefire and stop the Israelis short of victory, without demanding that OPEC lift the embargo.

What saved the day was Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. She ordered her

An outraged Kissinger demanded that Golda pull her army back and release its grip on the Egyptian army. Golda dug in the heels of her orthopedic shoes and refused to budge.

The standoff dragged on for over a week. Finally, on November 3, Kissinger lost patience and told Golda that if fighting broke out again, the Israelis could not count on resupply from Washington. This doomsday threat fell on deaf ears. Golda said that the Israeli army would not

budge and that she would only agree to supply the beleaguered Egyptians if they agreed to a prisoner of war exchange.

In the end, the Egyptians gave in, and Israel won the Yom Kippur War. Kissinger then used his creativity and mastery of detail to hammer out separation agreements that forced Arab armies to withdraw far from any future battlefield, thereby rendering surprise attacks impossible. Thus deprived of any military option, the Arabs were faced with a stark choice: make peace with losing the 1967 lands or make peace with Israel. Sadat made peace and received the return of the Sinai Peninsula. Syria refused to make peace and lost the Golan Heights.

In later years, Kissinger’s supporters would argue that he choreographed the whole thing, setting the stage for the peace treaties that followed. There is a kernel of truth in this, at least insofar as Kissinger helped bring about the separation agreements after the war. But if Golda had caved to Kissinger’s pressure, the Egyptians would have won the war, and instead of land for peace, there would have been land for nothing.

Rabbi Singer knew all these things.

But he took pity on the old man and told him that his son had indeed done great things for the Jewish people. Louis Kissinger passed away the next day. As he escorted him out, the junior Kissinger asked Singer why his father had wanted to see him. Singer told him that he merely wanted to relive old times.

Mr. Kaufman will be speaking on Motzei Shabbos, December 30, at the Young Israel of Lawrence-Cedarhurst. The topic is the Yom Kippur War and What it Teaches Us About the Current Crisis.

Uri Kaufman is a real estate developer and graduate of NYU School of Law. He is the author of a history book entitled “Eighteen Days in October: the Yom Kippur War and How it Created the Modern Middle East.” The book was named by the Financial Times as one of the eight best history books of 2023.

DECEMBER 28, 2023 | The Jewish Home

Kissinger and the Jews

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The Jewish Home | DECEMBER 28, 2023

The Wandering

Jew

Journey to Spain Part II

By Hershel Lieber

Alhambra in Granada

T

uesday, November 7, 2000, was our final morning in Madrid. Before traveling to Seville, we went to see two prominent sights that contribute to this city’s fame. The Prado Museum is on the list of the world’s ten top museums. It is well known for its vast collection of paintings from Francisco Goya to El Greco, Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, and Diego Valezquez. To Pesi and

me, visiting this museum was a special treat; to Shlomo, Miriam and Esther, it was bearable; but to Beryl, it was extreme torture –and he let me know. To compensate for our friends’ lack of enthusiasm, we made our visit short and crossed the street to Madrid’s largest and most beautiful park, El Retiro. It was originally used exclusively by the royal family, and its features included

View of Granada from Alhambra

the Crystal Palace, botanical gardens, an artificial lake, statues, monuments, and miles of immaculate walking paths within 350 acres. We walked, talked, took photos, and had our lunches within this paradise-like setting for over two hours.

Then it was time to leave. We rushed back to our hotel to retrieve our luggage and headed to the train station. We took the AVE Express train to Seville, a dis-

With Beryl and Esther and Miriam and Shlomo in Cordova

tance of 250 miles, which took just two hours and twenty minutes. Upon arrival, we had to take three taxis to get us to the perimeter of the Barrio Santa Cruz section, where our hotel was located. The taxi could not go further as most of this neighborhood’s streets were pedestrian only. We struggled to wheel our heavy suitcases on the cobblestone streets and were completely exhausted when we fi-

At Alhambra in Granada

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At a house designed by the famous architect Antoni Gaudi

nally arrived. The hotel was a bit shabby and was decorated with a distinct Spanish motif consisting of wooden beams, wrought iron railings, and mosaic tiles.

The paintings and artifacts accompanying the heavy ornate furniture were all Spanish traditional. To Pesi and me, the place had charm, but to our friends, their mantra was “Where is the nearest Sheraton?” We went on a short walk around the quaint winding streets before retiring for the evening.

In the morning, we took a guided walking tour of this adorable city and the Juderia, the former Jewish section.

We saw a lot and learned much. Then we headed to Seville’s main attraction, the Alcazar. This palace had its beginnings during the 10th century and was continuously enlarged and beautified by the succussive rulers of Seville, the Abbadid dynasty, the Almohad, and finally under the Castilian Crown. I will not attempt to give a description of that magnificent palace; it is beyond words.

The most notable feature is the significant use of glazed tiles throughout the halls and chambers. The Moorish-styled archways, the columns along the porticoes, and a dome-style ceiling were some of the exciting attractions. The lush and peaceful gardens provided a great hideaway for a moment of serenity. Although we did not do much the rest of the day, we were delightfully gratified with our visit to Seville.

On Thursday, we took a train to Cordoba. The main sight is the Alcazar of Cordoba, the Castle of the Christian Monarchs. Though the large exterior of the building is somewhat dull, the inte-

Alhambra in Granada

riors and even more so the gardens and pools compensate with their beauty and tranquility. Later that afternoon, we walked the streets of the former Juderia (Jewish section) for hours admiring the narrow streets; its windowsills laden with flowerboxes in full bloom. We also took a buggy ride around the center of town and stopped at the full-size statue of the Rambam who was born and lived there until he was thirteen years old. We watched tourists kiss the statue’s bronze shoe, which folklore says brings them good luck. The synagogue, which was supposedly used by the Rambam and his family, was regrettably closed. We also toured the Vianna Palace with its twelve courtyards, each displaying their own personality. Then we went to shop for some souvenirs. We bought some ornate pewter frames which we still use for photos of our deceased grandparents. By the time we returned to our hotel, it was close to 10 p.m. We ate supper and started to pack for Friday’s trip to Gibraltar.

We were in Gibraltar from Friday morning through Sunday morning. I had written about our fascinating experiences there in a previous article.

On Sunday morning, the Sterns left for home. Beryl, Esther, and the two of us squashed into a small van with our assorted luggage tied onto its roof. We pulled into Granada at 1:30 p.m. After settling into our hotel rooms and eating lunch, we strolled around the Albaicin section of the city. The massive city walls, the impressive gateways, the grand monuments, and many significant houses are a perfect reason to explore this century-old district. Regrettably,

we only had a two-hour window to enjoy this historical neighborhood. Nevertheless, we were thankful that we did not miss out on this experience. We came back to our rooms and ate dinner from food that we bought in Gibraltar.

The next pursuit was to learn the Daf Yomi. Besides the pleasure of having the

At the entranceway of Alcazar in Seville

company of our friends, this trip gave me the opportunity to learn daily with Beryl, my chavrusa since the mid-seventies.

Every evening, we dedicated time for the Daf, and it gave our pleasure trip an extra dimension of spirituality.

We had a big program planned for Monday. We went to the famous Alham-

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Alcazar in Seville

Park Guell in Barcelona

courtyards, water fountains, gardens, arches buttressed by slender columns, and intricately sculpted stucco and tile decoration creates architectural qualities that are intimate and ethereal. The techniques that this palace utilized for cooling, heating and ventilation were so advanced that it is hard to believe that the structure is between 700 and 800 years old. The decorative features include geometric design and inscriptions of arabesque poetry. The fact that we spent six hours at the Alhambra indicates how we were mesmerized and overwhelmed by this gorgeous edifice.

Gardens of Alcazar in Seville

Alcazar in Cordoba

bra palace and fortress, which was constructed between 1238 and 1358 by the Moorish monarchs. It is one of the best preserved palaces of the Islamic world.

The combination of well-proportioned

took a double-decker tourist bus with an English narrator, which went around the city making stops at all the famous sights. We disembarked at Pablo Espanol, a Spanish Village featuring shops and craft demonstrations. We made another stop at the city’s beautiful botanic gardens. It was already dark when we finished touring.

Wednesday was our last full day in Spain. We decided that each couple would do their own thing. I do not recall what Beryl and Esther did that day. We went to the Barri Gothic Quarter, an area teeming with alleyways and squares in the

We watched tourists kiss the statue’s bronze shoe, which folklore says brings them good luck.

Nevertheless, the palace also had a tragic meaning for us as Jews. It was here, on March 31, 1492, that King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella signed the infamous Alhambra Decree ordering the expulsion of all Jews in Spain unless they converted to Christianity. While marveling about the beauty of this place, we felt the pain of our people as they faced this challenging choice and the life-altering decisions that they eventually accepted.

Some people who remained and practiced Judaism in secrecy were ultimate exposed and burned by the auto-da-fe.

Most others eventually lost their Jewish identity forever. We were definitely glad that we came to the Alhambra, but the plight of our brothers and sisters was at the forefront of our consciousness.

Tuesday morning, we flew to Barcelona. After checking into our hotel, we

center of the city, where the presence of palaces, houses, and Gothic churches exposes the city’s medieval past. We went to the square where the Holy Office of the Inquisition carried out public executions of Marranos (secret Jews) and said a number of kapitlach Tehillim there.

Then, we went to the home of the famous artist Pablo Picasso where many of his early works are displayed before Cubism and Surrealism became his signature style. After that, we walked over to Passieg de Gracia to see three houses designed by the famous architect and designer Antoni Gaudi. We followed this with a visit to Park Guell, where all the structures were created by Gaudi. This park was so much fun to see as every building and object has the Gaudi touch. They exude a feeling of entertainment and adventure and generate great photo opportunities.

The statue of the Rambam in Cordova

After eating dinner with Beryl and Esther, we went out for a last minute “shopping spree.” Our trip to Spain was truly exhilarating, but tomorrow we were flying back to reality!

Hershel Lieber has been involved in kiruv activities for over 30 years. As a founding member of the Vaad L’Hatzolas Nidchei Yisroel he has traveled with his wife, Pesi, to the Soviet Union during the harsh years of the Communist regimes to advance Yiddishkeit. He has spearheaded a yeshiva in the city of Kishinev that had 12 successful years with many students making Torah their way of life. In Poland, he lectured in the summers at the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation camp for nearly 30 years. He still travels to Warsaw every year – since 1979 – to be the chazzan for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur for the Jews there. Together with Pesi, he organized and led trips to Europe on behalf of Gateways and Aish Hatorah for college students finding their paths to Jewish identity. His passion for travel has taken them to many interesting places and afforded them unique experiences. Their open home gave them opportunities to meet and develop relationships with a variety of people.

Hershel’s column will appear in The Jewish Home on a bi-weekly basis.

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nspiration Nation

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Rabbi Tovia Singer A Mission Against Missionaries

By Eliyahu RosEnBERg

T

he story you are about to read is a surprising one; a story which is as true, and sadly, as common as it is frightening.

It all started quite a few years ago on the vibrant campus of Boston University. A non-affiliated Jewish girl, who just started her first semester at the school, was to meet her roommate, a nice, young woman such as herself. The two certainly had a lot in common, but from the moment they met, it was clear that there was one thing that set the two very much apart: one was a Jew, and the other, an evangelical Christian.

Of course, that didn’t faze the roommate one bit, and presented with this oncein-a-lifetime opportunity, handed the Jewish girl a copy of the New Testament as a “present”. The girl, faced with this awkward situation, accepted the gift so as to not insult the giver but resolved to never read it.

Two weeks passed, and out of the blue, a personal tragedy befell the Jewish girl; shook her to her core. There she was, feeling as though her life had come to an end.

The poor girl cried, and as her tears washed away any remaining signs of hope, she suddenly thought of a solution; an idea borne of desperation, but an idea nonetheless: maybe the text of the Christian Bible held the answer to her problems.

Anyway, she reasoned, what else did she have to lose? And so, the girl read through the book until she stumbled upon a verse so “beautiful” that it, according to her, instantly changed her life. She wiped her tears away, her eyes now open to the “truth” of the Church.

Fast forward some time, and the girl’s back at home. Her mother looks around her daughter’s room, and an awful discovery is made – a New Testament found right under her daughter’s mattress! It goes without saying that her mother was absolutely devastated. The fight that ensued thereafter quickly proved futile in convincing the girl to come back to Judaism.

And so, with nowhere else to turn, her mother contacted Rabbi Tovia Singer, an expert anti-missionary, and begged him to help her daughter. The rabbi agreed to meet the girl, and soon after, the two sat down to have a discussion.

The girl told Rabbi Singer the whole story from start to finish. She went on to speak of the verse that transformed her life.

“Rabbi,” the girl asked, “would you like me to read it for you?”

She then opened up the Christian Bible, and read the passage out loud: “You shall love the L-rd, your G-d, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might…”

In His Words…

My life is devoted to helping them return back to the truth, to the beauty of the Jewish faith.

”

it was like a bomb went off in my heart. They’re still trying to destroy us?

”

There’s nothing more special than telling a Jew, ‘Welcome home.’

”

Now, doesn’t that sound familiar?

Most readers will instantly recognize that those words come from Shema. As it turns out, the New Testament quoted the pasuk from Devarim, but the girl, who didn’t have much of a Torah education, was unaware of this fact. In reality, it demonstrates the beauty, not of Christianity, but of Judaism.

Once the girl understood the origin of the verse, she booked an El Al flight to Neve Yerushalayim for the following Tuesday.

Baruch Hashem, she became religious.

“Now, she has a beautiful family and children,” said Rabbi Singer.

As stated in the first sentence of this article, this case is no anomaly. Hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting Jews have been stolen away from our religion, indoctrinated with the poisonous lies of the Church. What’s even sadder is that this story does, in fact, deviate from the norm, but in only one way: in many cases, there’s no happy ending.

But that doesn’t stop Rabbi Singer, a world-renowned anti-missionary expert, radio show host, and debater, as well as founder of Outreach Judaism, an organization aimed at bringing Jews home.

“My life is devoted to helping them return back to the truth, to the beauty of the Jewish faith,” says Rabbi Singer.

Rabbi Singer’s mission started when he was only sixteen years old. Walking down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan one Saturday night, a young Tovia Singer saw three kids putting up fliers that read: “Come this Tuesday night to Jews for J— and learn more about your Jewish Messiah.”

“It was like a bomb went off in my heart,” Rabbi Singer said of that night. It was outrageous. “They’re still trying to destroy us?”

From that day on, Rabbi Singer ded-

icated his life to exposing the lies of the Church. Included in that mission are several responsibilities which he has taken upon himself, the most important of which is his commitment to equipping Jews with the ability to protect themselves against conversion tactics.

But before we kvnow how to defend ourselves, we must first know who actually presents a threat to our spiritual wellbeing.

As it turns out, explains Rabbi Singer, not all Christians are the same: Catholics and Liberal Protestants, for example, have little interest in converting Jews.

“The people we’re going to be speaking about,” Rabbi Singer explains, “are fundamentalist, evangelical, born-again Christians.”

But why do they so desperately want to convert us?

You see, Christianity swept through the world overnight. In the beginning, everyone was converting; that’s why Christians have been so confused as to why the Jews, of all people, refuse to subscribe to the teachings of the New Testament. Why would the Jews reject “Yashka”? After all, don’t they know the Bible better than anyone?

“Therefore, it’s only the conversion of a Jew to Christianity that can lend any credibility to that cross, never the conversion of a gentile.” Rabbi Singer went on to explain.

“And that’s why there’s such a huge effort today on evangelizing the Jewish people.”

In 1972, the Church had a meeting and asked the question: why have we been unsuccessful in converting Jews in the past?

Eventually, the Church made a phenomenal discovery: there were two major reasons why Jews could not tolerate Christianity.

After two thousand years of oppression by the Church, the Jewish people had it ingrained in their minds that Christianity

95 Jews are our brothers!” And so, a sort of philo-semitism, an admiration of the Jews, appears to be present in many Christians, although often for ulterior motives.

As for the second issue – that the majority of Jews do not want to change their religion – the missionaries devised an even more sinister plan.

As Rabbi Singer explains, a subtle paradigm shift was created with the introduction of “Messianic Judaism,” a group of Christians who keep certain Jewish traditions.

What these Christians say, according to Rabbi Singer, is “if you’re becoming a believer in J—, you’re not converting to another religion. No, you’re becoming a completed Jew, a fulfilled Jew, a Messianic Jew. It’s the most Jewish thing you can do.”

And so, instead of a Church, they call it a “Messianic Synagogue,” and instead of the New Testament, they call it the “Brit Chadasha.”

And then they take Jewish traditions and distort them. They take lighting Shabbos candles, and they say they do it because “Yashka” brought light into the world. They have Pesach seders and they say the wine is symbolic of their “messiah’s blood,” and they go on and on, twisting every Jewish tradition to fit the Christian narrative.

But far worse than that are the endless ways that Christians blatantly manipulate the holy words of Tanach. The issue is that very few Christians know Hebrew, and so clear mistranslations are scattered throughout the Christian edition of the Bible. Additionally, random, out-of-context

verses are referenced as supposed “proof.”

Like the Christians who wouldn’t know a right translation from a wrong one, the Jews who fall victim to these traps are those who don’t have a Torah education.

And this, teaches Rabbi Singer, is the way to defend ourselves against missionaries: Have an understanding of Lashon HaKodesh, and you won’t believe the Christians when they translate “ari” as “pierced” instead of “lion.” Learn the Tanach, and you won’t fall for an out of context passage from Yeshaya. This is a matter of our nation’s survival.

And if we can speak the truth, we can convince our lost brothers to return as well.

As Rabbi Tovia Singer says, “there’s nothing more special than telling a Jew, ‘Welcome home.’”

This article is based on a podcast, “Inspiration For the Nation,” hosted by Yaakov Langer. To catch more of this conversation, you can watch it on LivingLchaim. com or YouTube.com/LivingLchaim or listen wherever you listen to podcasts (just search for “Inspiration For The Nation”) or call our free hotline: 605-477-2100.

DECEMBER 28, 2023 | The Jewish Home

equals “Persecution.” After all, how many Jews died because of missionaries?

Jews want to be Jews. Regardless of their level of observance, Jews do not want to give up their Jewish identity for a Christian one.

Moving forward, the Church’s main priority was to uproot these two reasons from within the minds of Jews; a task which actually proved to not be as difficult as you’d think.

These people addressed the “PR” issue with relative ease. They did so by “distancing themselves from the reckless behavior of the Church in the past. They do that by saying, ‘we’re pro-Israel’, ‘we’re Zionists!’” explains Rabbi Singer.

Additionally, they say, “We love Jews! The

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By TJH Staff Many hoped that 2023 would usher in a year filled with clarity and calmness. But as we close out the calendar, we are filled with more uncertainty than ever. The events of October 7 overshadowed any other events that took place this year, and since that infamous day, our lives are still reeling.

And yet, if you look through these pages and take a walk down memory lane, you’ll remember that there were glimpses of lightness that filled this past year. In this section, we tried to give you a brief overview, TJH-style, of what took place the past 12 months – and perhaps bring a smile to your face as you remember that there were some interesting, exhilarating, momentous, and fascinating events that made up 2023.

It is our hope that the new secular year will bring good news, joy, and clarity for us all.

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2023 | by the numbers

$245 billion

1,434,555,583 Population of India, which in April became the world’s most populated country, skipping ahead of China, which has a population of 1,425,671,352.

$6.4 trillion The federal government’s budget in 2023. By comparison, in 1980, the entire federal budget was $579 billion. The largest expenditure this year was Social Security, at 22%.

Nat iona l defense was the second largest expense, at 15% of the total budget. In 2023, the federal government brought in “revenue” (i.e. taxes) of $4.8 trillion. Thus, $1.5 trillion was added to the deficit, which is now $25.8 trillion.

The financial worth of Elon Musk, who, in the second half of 2023, snagged the title of richest person in the world from Bernard Arnault, who is only worth $200.6 billion.

148 days Length of the Hollywood writer’s strike. The strike ended on September 27, after the Writers Guild of America (WGA) union negotiated for writers to get better residuals from streaming services and all sides agreed to a ban on using AI to write scripts.

23

Number of seasons that Tom Brady played in the NFL before retiring on February 1. His stats scream G.O.A.T. He threw 649 touchdowns, was selected to 15 Pro Bowls, was league MVP 3 times, won 7 Super Bowls in five of which he was the Super Bowl MVP, and played until age 45.

$787.5 million The amount paid by Fox News to Dominion Voting Systems, settling the voting machine company’s defamation lawsuit against the news network.

The settlement on April 18 came on the eve of trial, at which Fox News could have faced a larger verdict for its false claims about Dominion in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential elections.

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2023 | by the numbers

110 years The possible sentence facing Sam Bankman-Fried, 37, who was found guilty of fraud and money laundering, involving his now-collapsed crypto exchange FTX. In January of 2022, FTX was worth $32 billion. The company went bankrupt in December 2022, when customers suddenly panicked and withdrew billions of dollars upon hearing that the CEO of Binance had decided to sell all of his stock in FTX’s digital currency, FTT, “due to recent revelations that have come to light.”

At his trial, Bankman-Fried testified that despite being called the “crypto king,” he actually knew “basically nothing” about digital currencies. “I had absolutely no idea how they worked…. I just knew they were things you could trade,” SBF said. A jury of nine women and three men found him guilty on November 2. The former golden boy of Democratic donors will be sentenced on March 28, 2024.

Amount of cash found stuffed in various envelopes around Sen. Bob Menendez’s home when it was raided by federal agents in June.

In addition, several gold bars which were recovered in the home were traced back to a 2013 heist. Sen. Menendez, who in September was indicted on bribery charges alleging that he acted as a foreign agent for Egypt, is refusing to resign from the Senate.

His reason for having so much cash lying around? “For 30 years, I have withdrawn thousands of dollars in cash from my personal savings accounts, which I have kept for emergencies and because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba.”

$1.4 million The amount of money that Hunter Biden is alleged not to have paid taxes on from money paid to him by foreign entities, resulting in a December 7 indictment on nine tax-related charges. This comes in addition to his September indictment on two federal gun charges. All this may be the tip of the iceberg. According to the Republican-led House Oversight Committee, since 2015, the Biden family has been bribed to the tune of over $20 million, with some of the money going to the “big man,” Joe Biden.

$1.765 billion Amount of the largest Powerball in 2023, won by an unidentified winner in California on October 11. The one-time cash payout? $774.1 million. The winner has one year to claim the prize; once the prize is claimed, the newly minted almost-billionaire’s name will be made public.

91 counts

If you are a Democrat who wants Trump to be the 2024 Republican nominee because he is “the gift that keeps on giving,” the surest way to bait Republicans to nominate him is to indict him on 91 federal and state felony counts.

Trump was first indicted in March 2023 by the Manhattan district attorney on state charges related to a hush-money payment in 2016.

In June 2023, he was indicted by a federal grand jury in Miami for taking classified documents with him to Mar-a-Lago. In August 2023, he was indicted in Georgia for election interference and also indicted in Washington for his alleged role in the January 6th events.

Although Trump’s Washington, D.C., case is scheduled for trial on March 4, 2024, one day before Super-Tuesday (on which many states decide on a presidential nominee), the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments on the Constitutionality of the Washington case. Therefore, the charges may be dismissed before the trial date, or the case may be delayed pending a Supreme Court decision.

DECEMBER 28, 2023 | The Jewish Home

$480,000

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2023 | Came & Went

Things ThaT Came …

AI - Although it’s been a theme in dystopian novels for decades, artificial intelligence had a breakout year in 2023. ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched on November 30, 2022, was used by millions by January 2023. On March 14, OpenAI released GPT-4, an upgraded version of their popular artificial intelligence chatbot, setting off an AI frenzy. On May 1, Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI,” who earned his nickname for his pioneering work in the AI field, resigned from his role at Google to help spread the word about the dangers of the emerging technology. According to Forbes, 64% of businesses expect AI to increase productivity, while 77% are concerned that AI will cause job loss in the next year.

Chinese Spy Balloon - From

Orange Haze - New York-

January 28 until February 4, 2023, a highly advanced Chinese spy balloon flew over the U.S. At the time, the Pentagon claimed that the balloon “did not collect intelligence while it was transiting the United States or overflying the United States.” However, it was later disclosed that the balloon gathered intelligence from several sensitive American military sites and transmitted that information back to Beijing in real time.

After much pressure on President Biden to do something about the spy ballon, the U.S. military shot it down on February 4 just off the coast of South Carolina. The balloon itself was massive, about 200 feet tall, and the payload attached to it was similar in size to a regional jetliner, weighing more than 2,000 pounds.

ers wait all year for the bright lateJune weather. But this year, on more than one occasion, we awoke to an orange haze caused by the Canadian wildfires. The toxic smoke resulted in unhealthy air quality, causing many to stay indoors. Over 45.7 million acres were burnt in the Canadian wildfire season this year, which finally ended in October.

X - On July 3, Facebook unveiled Threads to compete with Twitter. Within five days, Threads had 100 million users.

That must have scared Twitter’s owner Elon Musk, you’d think. Well, at least his company has been around for more than a decade and its iconic bird logo and name would keep him ahead of the competition. But, Musk wasn’t sweating it at all.

On July 23, he rebranded “the company formerly known as Twitter” and named it X. The bird logo was dismissed from duty as well.

Today, X has 353 million users, and Threads is unraveling like a cheap suit.

Musk is clearly having fun with X. In April, Musk swapped out the Twitter logo with the Shiba Inu dog emoji, much to the consternation of social media purists who couldn’t understand what nerve Musk must have. Answer? A lot.

Ozempic - Weight loss drugs Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro became all the rage in 2023, leading to a major supply shortage. In October, Elon Musk attributed his weight loss to Wegovy.

Shares of Novo Nordisk, maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, climbed 40% since the beginning of 2023.

Things ThaT WenT …

Yevgeny Prigozhin - The 62-year-old tough man had a long history with President Vladimir Putin. He started out as Putin’s chef and ended up leading the Wagner Group, a mercenary military group. In May, his soldiers captured the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut in a rare victory for Russia. But Prigozhin had gripes with how Russia was carrying out the war, and on June 23, he launched a rebellion, during which his soldiers seized the military headquarters in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and began rolling toward Moscow, in what Prigozhin said was “not a military coup, but a march of justice.”

Within two days, Prigozhin agreed to back down. He made peace with Putin and was even photographed in the Kremlin at a state dinner several weeks later. Several prominent Russian journalists, though, declared that Prigozhin was a dead man walking, and Putin was just waiting for the opportune time to take him out. That time came on August 23 when a plane carrying Prigozhin, his righthand man, and ten others spiraled out of the sky and crashed near Moscow. Putin denied involvement and suggested that alcohol, drugs, and hand grenades onboard may have been to blame.

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2023 | Came & Went

Affirmative Action - On June 29, the U.S. Supreme Court in a 6-3 vote ruled that race can no longer be a consideration in the college admissions process. The court held that this practice, which supposedly seeks to correct historical racial wrongs, is itself racially discriminatory. Harvard and the University of North Carolina, who were parties in the case, argued that affirmative action is necessary to make sure that enough minority students are getting into their schools. Justice Clarence Thomas declared that programs that admit one race over the other “fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution and our nation’s equality ideal.”

for the weekend on Friday, April 21 by wishing viewers the “best weekend” and telling them he’d be back on Monday. By Monday morning, he was fired.

“FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways,” the network said in a statement released by a spokesperson. “We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor.”

Tucker moved his show to X before starting the Tucker Carlson Network in mid-December. The streaming service costs $9 a month, a small price to pay for his millions of loyal fans.

WeWork - On November 7, the preeminent coworking space company, WeWork, filed for bankruptcy, marking a stunning downfall for what was once the world’s most valuable startup.

After a botched attempt to go public back in 2019, with a valuation of $40 billion, WeWork co-founder and CEO Adam Neumann, who led the company in an unorthodox manner, stepped down. WeWork regrouped and went public roughly two years later at a much-reduced valuation of $9 billion. Despite high hopes, WeWork announced that it was struggling to pay back its debt. The pandemic was probably the biggest nail in its financial coffin, as people began working more from home than commuting to office spaces. Shares for WeWork plunged roughly 98% in 2023 alone. WeWork will remain in business as it seeks to restructure its debt.

Came and WenT in Congress …

George Santos - On January 4, George Santos was sworn into the House after winning the seat to represent New York’s 3rd Congressional district. The 34-year-old Republican was quickly exposed as a degenerate liar. His entertainment value kept growing as each new lie was exposed and explained away by him. Regarding his false claim that he is Jewish, Santos explained that he meant he was “Jew-ish,” meaning like a Jew. But it was not all good ol’ clean lying. In October, Santos was indicted for numerous crimes, including claims that he stole the identities of donors to his campaign and then used their credit cards to ring up tens of thousands of dollars in unauthorized charges.

On December 1, Santos was expelled from the House of Representatives by a vote of 311-114, making him the sixth House member ever to be expelled from Congress. Santos did not waste any time getting back to work. His new job? Selling personalized Cameo videos for $200 a pop. His Cameo account bio refers to him as “former congressional ‘Icon’!” Yes, he still has much pride. “Look, they can boot me out of Congress,” he declares in a video, “but they can’t take away my good humor or my larger-than-life personality.”

Kevin McCarthy - It took 15

Shorts and Sweatshirts - In early September, Senate Majority

ballots over four days for Rep. Kevin McCarthy to finally get the 216 votes he needed to become Speaker of the House. That was on January 7. But on October 2, his nemesis Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) filed a motion to have a vote taken on whether or not to oust McCarthy. McCarthy responded minutes later on social media, “Bring it on.” Gaetz replied, “Just did.” With the battle lines drawn, Gaetz was able to get seven other Republicans to join him and the entire Democrat caucus who all voted to give McCarthy the boot.

What followed was a Republican dumpster fire as the caucus spent 22 days trying to elect a new leader. Capping a process that involved four nominees for Speaker, on October 25, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) nabbed the 215 votes needed and finally became the new Speaker of the House.

On December 7, Rep. Kevin McCarthy announced that he is retiring from Congress by year’s end.

Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) directed the Senate’s Sergeant at Arms to no longer enforce the chamber’s formal dress code for its members. This was clearly aimed at allowing Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) to operate on the Senate floor in his signature gym shorts and hoody. The move drew quick criticism. Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) told Fox News, “I’ve never seen civility enhanced or a sense of decorum enhanced by dressing like a slob.” Sen. Fetterman replied on NBC, “Aren’t there more important things we should be talking about rather than if I dress like a slob?”

After severe pushback from senators on both sides of the aisle, the Senate by unanimous consent passed a resolution formalizing business attire as the proper dress code for the floor of the chamber.

DECEMBER 28, 2023 | The Jewish Home

Tucker Carlson - The popular primetime Fox News host signed off

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2023 | World MAP

Finland Happy For the sixth year in a row, Finland has been ranked the world’s happiest country, according to the 2023 World Happiness Report, which is published by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Israel moved up to No. 4 this year from its No. 9 ranking last year. The Netherlands (No. 5), Switzerland (No. 8), Luxembourg (No. 9) and New Zealand (No. 10) rounded out the top 10.

The United States earned the 15th spot. Afghanistan came in last on the list at No. 137.

argentina Jew-ish New President On November 19, libertarian Javier Milei, a 53-year-old economist and former band leader, won a stunning come-from-behind victory in Argentina’s presidential election. During his campaign, he suggested that he would replace the Argentine peso, which has lost most of its value amid 143% inflation, with the U.S. dollar as the country’s national currency, and would eliminate the central bank. Milei, who is a huge supporter of Israel, has a particularly close relationship with the Jewish community. He expressed that the only thing stopping him from converting right now is the difficulty of observing Shabbos, but once he is out of office, he will consider converting.

Before being sworn in on December 11, Milei made a special trip to New York, to daven at the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s Ohel in Rosedale, NY.

iSrael October 7th Massacre While the Jewish nation was celebrating their Simchas Torah holiday, thousands of murderous Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel from Gaza, slaughtering more than 1,200 people, injuring thousands more, and kidnapping at least 240 others. The heinous acts of terror perpetrated against the elderly, families, women and children shocked the world, as Hamas proudly circulated photos and videos of their sadism. Since the surprise massacre, Israel has invaded Gaza with the purpose of eradicating Hamas and ridding the Gaza Strip of the terror group.

Across major cities around the world and in particular on college campuses, antisemitic groups have pledged their support for Hamas at pro-Palestinian rallies and events. A hostage exchange with Hamas allowed for the release of many of the hostages; still, there are at least 129 people still being held in captivity in Gaza. At least 154 IDF soldiers have been killed in the ground operations in Gaza.

north Korea

China

A Unique Name

Xi Holds Power

If you live in North Korea and your name is Ju-ae, change it fast. In November, North Korean media introduced North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s daughter, Ju-ae, as an “adorable” and “noble daughter.” Being that North Korea historically has banned people from using the same names as its leaders, North Korean authorities are forcing residents who share the same name as Ju-ae to change their names to something else. Pyongsong City Security Department issued an internal order from the central government to change the name of women who use the name Ju-ae “within a week.” This has led to speculation that Ju-ae is being groomed to eventually be her father’s successor.

On March 10, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, 69, was awarded a third five-year term. Despite his cerebral demeanor, Xi has rid the ruling Communist party of rivals and filled its top ranks with his supporters. He broke with the Chinese tradition of leaders handing over power after a decade. The vote by the National People’s Congress was unanimous for Xi: 2,952 to 0. Upon meeting with Xi in San Francisco for a China- U.S. Summit in November, Pres. Biden called Xi a dictator, eliciting a now-famous meme of a dreadful grimace from U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who was seated in the first row at the press conference.

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2023 | World MAP

Tragic Wildfire A fast-moving wildfire broke out in Maui on August 8, resulting in the death of 97 people, making it the deadliest fire in the U.S. in over a century. The fire, which burned for 3 days, decimated the town of Lahaina, destroying more than 2,200 homes. Although Hawaii’s electric utility acknowledged that its power lines started the blaze, they faulted county firefighters for declaring the blaze contained and leaving the scene.

Saudi arabia & iran Diplomatic Ties In a surprise development, Saudi Arabia and Iran announced an agreement on March 10 to reestablish diplomatic ties after years of hostilities. The agreement was mediated by China. In an apparent dig at the West, China’s top diplomat Wang Yi stated that “the world is not limited to the Ukraine issue.”

The two countries reopened their respective embassies in Tehran and Riyadh.

turKey & Syria Earthquake

ruSSia/uKraine Stalled Counteroffensive In early June, Ukraine’s military launched its long-awaited counteroffensive against Russian forces, with the goal of reaching the Sea of Azov. This show of strength was not only for the purpose of reclaiming occupied territory on the war’s southeastern front but also to prove to the Western world that its support of Ukraine was worth the price. However, by November, it was clear that despite high hopes, the counteroffensive had failed, with Ukraine only making incremental gains in south Ukraine.

Ukrainian Pres. Zelensky spun the failed counteroffensive to highlight the need for more international support. “We wanted faster results,” he said. “From that perspective, unfortunately, we did not achieve the desired results. And this is a fact. There is not enough power to achieve the desired results faster.” He bemoaned that the October 7 massacre in Israel was taking attention away from his war. “We can see the consequences of global society switching [its attention] because of the tragedy in the Middle East; only the blind could not recognize this. We must not allow people to forget about the war here. Attention equals help.”

More than 50,000 people were killed and tens of thousands were injured after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Turkey and Syria on February 6. Israeli search-and-rescue group United Hatzalah spent six days on the ground in Turkey and rescued tens of victims. However, they were forced to flee the country when they received intelligence of a concrete and immediate threat of an attack on them. Other Israeli aide groups continued to assist on the ground in various capacities in the ensuing months.

england Coronation of a King King Charles III was crowned King at Westminster Abbey on May 6. Although the coronation was steeped in ancient rituals, with St. Edward’s Crown placed atop King Charles’ head as he sat upon a 700-year-old oak chair, there was an undertone of new age drama — Prince Harry, who has been at odds with the Royals, did not have much of an official role and appeared without his wife Meghan Markle who had to stay home in California “to watch the children.”

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hawaii, u.S.

2023 | Notable Deaths

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Justice sandra day O’cOnnOr Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan and served from 1981 until 2006.

Despite being the first woman to sit on the highest court in the land, she often said, “The power I exert on the court depends on the power of my arguments, not on my gender.” She was known as a moderate conservative. She died on December 1 at age 93.

Henry a.

Kissinger

Jimmy Buffett

Henry A. Kissinger, whose family escaped German antisemitism in 1938, served as the 56th Secretary of State, from 1973 to 1977, under Presidents Nixon and Ford. In addition, he simultaneously served as Nixon’s National Security Advisor, a position he received when President Nixon was sworn into office on January 20, 1969. In 1975, President Gerald R. Ford removed him from his National Security Advisor position while keeping him as Secretary of State.

Kissinger had supreme confidence and is noted to have said, “Accept everything about yourself – I mean everything, you are you and that is the beginning and the end – no apologies, no regrets.” Kissinger was instrumental in opening China to the Western world and advocated for compromise with the Soviet Union. He remained an active voice in foreign policy until his death at the age of 100, on November 29.

Not everyone liked his policies, though.

Upon his death, left-wing Rolling Stone magazine’s spiteful headline read: “Good Riddance: Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies.”

Folk singer Jimmy Buffett’s only Top 10 song was “Margaritaville.” Even so, his fans, known as “Parrotheads,” were not only drawn to his music but also to his chilled vibes and visions of flip-flops, hammocks, and sunshine. As to why he was so relaxed, he said, “Is it ignorance or apathy? Hey, I don’t know, and I don’t care.” People were drawn to his different way of looking at things. “If we weren’t all crazy, we’d just go insane,” he quipped.

Buffett sold over 20 million albums and played at almost 2,000 concerts. Despite his longevity in the music industry, he was not a fan of modern day music. “There’s something missing in the music industry today... and it’s music.” He parlayed his persona into a lucrative brand, consisting of restaurants, casinos, retirement communities, and bestselling books. With over 500 employees, his worth was an estimated $1 billion, according to Forbes. Buffett died on September 1, 2023, at age 76.

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rOsalynn carter Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter was married to Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States. Their 77-year marriage, during which they had four children and 22 grandchildren and great-grandchildren, was seen as a model marriage. Rosalynn would often talk about how a lot of work was required to achieve that.

When Rosalynn married Jimmy at the age of 18, she left Plains, Georgia, a tiny little town of 668 people. For the next six years, they moved around various Naval bases throughout the country. But one day, Jimmy decided to quit the Navy and move back to Plains. On the long car ride back to Georgia from Massachusetts, Rosalynn did not say one word in the car. Jimmy often quipped that on that car ride, he decided that he would never make another decision without consulting with his wife first.

During the Carter presidency, Rosalynn was an ever-present fixture in cabinet meetings and at other presidential engagements. She died on November 19, at the age of 96.

BOB BarKer For 35 years, Bob Barker hosted “The Price Is Right,” welcoming contestants to vie for prizes by correctly guessing prices…and urging them to “spin that wheel!” Barker, who hosted over 5,000 shows, quipped that “it takes many years of hard work to become an overnight success.”

He hosted the show until the age of 83.

“I think that age as a number is not nearly as important as health,” he said. “You can be in poor health and be pretty miserable at 40 or 50. If you’re in good health, you can enjoy things into your 80s.” Barker died on August 26, at the age of 99.

cHarlie munger Billionaire Charlie Munger was Warren Buffett’s partner at Berkshire Hathaway for 60 years. “We think so much alike that it’s spooky,” Buffett said about his partner.

“Charlie and I have never argued,” Buffett said in 2014.

Munger’s business strategy? “The first rule of fishing is to fish where the fish are,” he quipped at a 2017 Berkshire meeting. “The second rule of fishing is to never forget the first rule. We’ve gotten good at fishing where the fish are.” Ever practical, one of his conditions for donating to universities was that he should have a say in building construction on campus. He explained, “Any time you go to a football game or a function, there’s a huge line outside the women’s bathroom…What kind of idiot would make the men’s bathroom and the women’s bathroom the same size? The answer is: a normal architect!”

2023 | You Paid What?

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$63K Louisiana-based auction house LCG Auctions, which specializes in pop culture collectibles, described this product as having “magnificently, showcasing sharp corners front and back, rich color, and ‘case fresh’ features.” What was it? A first-generation 2007 iPhone.

On February 20, an anonymous buyer dished out $63,000 for the clunker, more than 100 times its original cost. Know where your original iPhone is?

$32,408.10 The price paid at an August 30th auction for a 4.8-pound wheel of Spanish cheese. The record-breaking delicacy consists of cow, sheep and goat milk and was left to mature for a minimum of eight months at 44°F in a cave at an altitude of 1,400 meters. Pass the TamTams.

$63,750 $566 Million Amount paid by LIV Golf to poach golfer Jon Rahm from the PGA Tour, blowing past the $200 million deal that Phil Mickelson made with LIV Golf. Rahm, who is the No. 3 golfer in the world, signed the four-year deal despite previously being outspoken against the Saudi Arabian-backed golf organization. The 29-year-old had at one point declared that the only reason anyone would join LIV Golf was for money.

He was singing a different tune after signing his mammoth contract on December 8. “Would my lifestyle change if I got $400 million? It would not change one bit,” he said. “Truth be told, I could retire now with what I have made and live a very happy life and not play golf again.” Rahm claimed that the reason for his switch was that there are opportunities “that LIV Golf has to offer that were very enticing.”

No problem, Rahm, if it ain’t about the money, how about you give me some of it?

The amount fetched at a June 29th auction

by Brooklyn-based group MSCHF for a “Microscopic Handbag,” measuring just 657 by 222 by 700 microns (or less than 0.03 inches wide). The fluorescent yellowish-green bag is based on a popular Louis Vuitton design — though it is the work of a New York art collective, not the luxury label itself. It was sold alongside a microscope equipped with a digital display through which the bag can be viewed.

No, your $63K first-generation iPhone will not fit in it.

$2,006,000 We know that the price of postal stamps is increasing way too often. But no stamp has cost as much as the “Inverted Jenny” stamp that sold this year for more than $2 million.

The stamp was originally released in 1918 to commemorate the first regular airmail service in the United States. A printing error led to the plane, called a “Jenny,” on the stamp being printed upside-down. One single sheet of 100 misprinted stamps slipped past quality control. At the time, a clerk bought the sheet for $24. The “Jenny” stamp that sold this year was graded “Mint Never Hinged, Extremely Fine-Superb 95” and was considered the finest Inverted Jenny in existence with no equal. It was sold to Charles Hack, a 76-year-old real estate developer, on November 8. “This is the premium copy,” he said. “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

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$700 Drury Beer Garden in Philly opened with a bang on May 19. On the menu? A $700 Wagyu meat burger with caviar, fresh black truffle, lobster flambeed with cognac, topped with aged Irish cheddar and drizzled with honey. According to owner George Tsiouris, “We are excited to provide our guests some amazing, creative and tasty options with our new menu concept.”

Think they serve Heinz ketchup with that?

$6,380 $480,000

The cost per scoop of the newly available white night, a gelato offered by Japanese ice cream brand Cellato. The ice cream has white truffles from Italy that are sourced from the city of Alba and that cost as much as $14,500 per kilogram. It’s also topped off by an edible gold leaf, two types of cheese, and “Sakekasu,” a paste-like ingredient derived from the process of sake-making.

“It took us over 1.5 years to develop, with a lot of trials and errors to get the taste right,” a representative from the company told Guinness World Records.

Would you like rainbow sprinkles or cookie crunch with that?

Amount paid for a $10,000 bill at a September 18th auction. The bill, dating back to the Great Depression, was issued in 1934 and features the face of President Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase.

And you thought inflation was bad.

$2.238 Million

$6 billion The amount the Biden administration agreed to send to Iran in August in return for the release of five American citizens detained by Tehran. As a sweetener, the Biden administration also agreed to release five Iranian citizens held in the United States. No, Mr. Biden has not read The Art of the Deal.

$15,000,000 The amount paid at an April 20th Dubai charity auction for a license plate (car not included). What does the license plate say? P 7.

Why is driving around with the license plate P 7 so meaningful in Dubai? Well, because it means you paid $15,000,000 for it.

Rumor has it that Michael Jordan gave his famous “Last Dance” sneakers to a ball boy after game two of the 1998 NBA finals. This year, on April 11, the black and red Bred Air Jordan 13s were sold at auction for a jaw-dropping $2.238 million – the highest price ever for sneakers sold at auction. The previous highest amount – $1.472 million at Sotheby’s in 2021 – was spent on a pair of Nike Air Ships that are the oldest-known pair worn

by Jordan during a regular-season game.

The “Breds” sneakers are pretty lucky footwear.

When Jordan wore his “Breds” in Game 2 en route to his sixth NBA title, he recorded 37 points, five rebounds, and three assists with no turnovers in the Bulls’ 93-88 victory against the Jazz. It also marked the last time he wore a pair of Breds in a game.

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2023 | The Year in Travel

3 DaYS, 1 hour, 5 minuteS, anD 4 SeConDS Amount of time that it took Ali Irani and Sujoy Kumar Mitra of India to visit all seven continents.

“Today, we might be successful in breaking a record; tomorrow, someone else will break our record,” Mitra told Guinness World Records, after accomplishing the feat on December 7.

203 CountrieS bY boat, buS, anD foot On July 26, Torbjorn “Thor” Pedersen, 44, finally made it back home – after ten years of visiting every country in the world without flying.

Thor set out on his epic journey on October 10, 2013. Along the way, he made sure to spend at least 24 hours in each nation and kept his costs low by living off around $20 a day.

Along the journey, Thor crossed more than 223,000 miles. His trek took 3,576 days. And because he shunned air travel, Thor used 37 container ships, 158 trains, 351 buses, 219 taxes, 33 boats, and 43 rickshaws. In the process, he married his wife through a virtual wedding service.

SurvivinG on KetChup Elvis Francois, 47, from the island nation of Dominica, was making repairs to his boat when adverse weather conditions pulled his boat out to sea. “I called my friends, they tried to contact me, but I lost the signal. There was nothing else to do but sit and wait,” he said. For the next 24 days, he was adrift in the sea.

Francois managed to survive by eating ketchup, garlic powder, and soup cubes. He collected rainwater with a cloth to drink. Francois was found 120 nautical miles offshore on January 16, after a plane saw the word “help” engraved on the hull of his sailboat.

Upon hearing about this story, the Kraft Heinz Company gifted Francois a new boat.

SubmerSible GoeS Down On June 18, 2023, tragedy struck as the submersible named Titan, operated by OceanGate, an American tourism and expeditions company, imploded during an expedition to explore the Titanic wreck, approximately 13,000 feet, nearly 2.5 miles, below the ocean’s surface. Onboard were Stockton Rush, OceanGate’s American CEO; Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French deep-sea explorer and Titanic expert; Hamish Harding, a British businessman; Shahzada Dawood, a Pakistani-British businessman; and Dawood’s son Suleman. Communication with Titan was lost 1 hour and 45 minutes into the dive, prompting an alert when it failed to resurface as scheduled.

After four days of searching, a debris field containing parts of Titan was found about 500 meters from the Titanic’s bow by a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV). Questions quickly arose about the Titan, which was operated by a video game controller.

31.1 for 23 Megan Cassidy, 41, set the Guinness World Record for the most consecutive days running an ultramarathon for a woman with 23 days of pounding the pavement. From December 17, 2022 to January 8, 2023, Cassidy ran 31.1 miles per day. Run, Cassidy, run.

3-Year CruiSe runS aGrounD In early 2023, Life at Sea Cruises announced a threeyear, 130,000-mile voyage, which would set sail from Istanbul on November 1. For a cost of $30,000 per person, per year, the never-ending cruise was scheduled to hit 375 ports around the world, visit 135 countries, and dock at all seven continents. 111 cabins were booked for the cruise, but after several delays, the company informed its customers that they were unable to secure a ship. Instead of embarking on the journey of a lifetime, disappointed “check-out-of-life” folks were left waiting for a refund as they returned to their routine lives back home.

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Dating Dialogue

What Would You Do If… Moderated by Jennifer Mann, LCSW of The Navidaters

Dear Navidaters,

I have gone out with this guy, Shlomo*, four times. We get along great! He is personable and kind. He listens to me, and we truly understand each other. I have one concern. It seems that his family is a

bit more “well-to-do” than my family. I come from a home where we never worried about money, but we weren’t rich and never went on grand vacations or to hotels for Pesach. I see that Shlomo comes from a very different home. He talks a lot about his vacations with his family and what they do on Pesach and the brand of shoes that all his family members buy (!). I don’t see him as a shallow person. It’s not like this is a focus for him. I just see that we are coming from very different places and when he talks about these things, I’m slightly uncomfortable. I am sure that is part of my insecurity.

But in any case, it does make me uncomfortable when he mentions these things. Also, I am wondering if this could be a problem if we get married. Does it mean that we have different priorities when it comes to money? Will we have to live on a certain level because that’s what he and his family expect?

Disclaimer: This column is not intended to diagnose or otherwise conclude resolutions to any questions. Our intention is not to offer any definitive conclusions to any particular question, rather offer areas of exploration for the author and reader. Due to the nature of the column receiving only a short snapshot of an issue, without the benefit of an actual discussion, the panel’s role is to offer a range of possibilities. We hope to open up meaningful dialogue and individual exploration.

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The Panel The Rebbetzin Rebbetzin Faigie Horowitz, M.S. ou and Shlomo may have different values besides differences in the socio-economic status of your respective families.

Why is he talking about shoe labels?

This is not something that normally comes up in conversation. This seems to be an indicator of his value of status labels.

You need to also examine why you feel uncomfortable and you made need to talk this out with someone as you date. You don’t seem to be clear about what your head is telling you and you are putting this on the family differences and insecurity. These things are clearly troubling you, and you are struggling to sort them out even as you have made some connection with Shlomo.

You suspect that he is shallow. Talk with a trusted mentor/professional who knows

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you well. You need to understand yourself, your interpretation of things that have come up between the two of you.

Yes, coming from families of different statuses may make for adjustments on the part of members of a couple. But you are nowhere near that point. Understand yourself, your feelings, and what makes you uncomfortable and anxious first. Learn to sort out what you are hearing and seeing and articulate your reactions. You will be a more successful dater as a result.

The Shadchan Michelle Mond hank you so much for writing in with this important question! I think the most important thing you need to ask yourself is, do you and Shlomo align based on our standards of living. You absolutely

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don’t need to be in the same place where you start out, but you need to have the same goals and certainly need to have similar priorities when it comes to spending. For example, you mentioned he grew up taking vacations. This is something he is going to certainly want to do with his family iy”H. Regardless of whether or not you have the money for it, are you the kind of girl who is going to enjoy going on vacations? Or are you going to be giving him a hard time about spending the money on such “trivial” pursuits? Make no mistake, I am not calling vacations trivial, however, I am pointing out that if you feel that way, then part of your mindset and priority does not align.

You specifically mentioned in your question that he comments on brands; this connotates that he will typically be someone who is going to focus on name brands.

People owning and discussing name brand clothing has nothing to do with money. A person can be extremely wealthy and have no interest in wasting cash just because

something has a large C on it. On the flip side, someone could be drowning in debt and decide to take out another credit card because they want to buy the newest Louis Vuitton bag.

Money is not the heart of the issue; priorities is. Does it make you respect him less? These are all questions you should ask yourself, as well as him, to come to a conclusion if you respect his values.

The Single Tzipora Grodko wish this was my dating problem. LOL. Girl. You’re dating someone you like who is financially successful and comfortable?!

That’s a huge bracha!

I don’t want to invalidate your concern, but I also want to put things into perspective for you. Just because something is un-

I

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The Zaidy Dr. Jeffrey Galler pike Milligan famously said, “Money can’t buy you happiness… But it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.”

Yes, I know, you’re not looking for clever quips, but I couldn’t resist. Anyway, here are some thoughts for you to consider: First, whether a person should marry “above one’s station” is a theme that has been explored for thousands of years. It is a timeless and universal concern. Our Talmud (Kiddushim 49a) discusses how a young woman might be justified in not wishing to marry a very wealthy husband, because “I do not need a shoe that is too big for my foot.”

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It is often true that art imitates life, and this same question is frequently explored in print and in film. I know that many of our readers do not watch movies, but note how in Fiddler on the Roof, Tzeitel’s mother wants her to marry a wealthy man but she chooses love over money and marries the poor tailor.

A more recent film explores the story of a young, sincere, professional woman whose boyfriend turns out to be incredibly wealthy. Some of the young man’s friends and family are very mean to her, because they assume that she is solely attracted to the guy because of his money and that her modest upbringing would make her unsuitable for a man of his station and wealth.

So, if you marry this boyfriend, many friends and relatives will be happy for you.

But many might jealously or spitefully assume that you are marrying him for his money. Are you prepared to handle that possible consequence?

Second, back in my college years, I distinctly remember some cynical friends who made it very clear that they would only date girls who had a Ph.D. And, no, they were not referring to her educational achievements, but rather to her, “Pop Has Dough.”

In like manner, I remember being surprised and amused when a beloved uncle took me aside and counseled, “Jeffrey, never marry for money. Marry for love. But, if you fall in love with a rich girl, it’s not so bad…”

By contrast, some of my friends avoided dating “spoiled rich girls,” fearing that those girls would expect to be supported in the style in which they had become accustomed.

I, personally, followed my mother’s guidance when she advised, “Jeffrey, you are going to be very successful in life. You don’t want people to say that your success came from marrying a rich girl.”

Only you can decide how you might feel about all these issues.

Third, we can probably assume that the boy’s family checked you out thoroughly.

Perhaps they like the idea that you come from modest means and are a practical, well-grounded individual.

But, has your family checked out his family? If the women in his family never leave home without Fendi handbags and Jimmy Choo shoes, that could be a major red flag for you. Likewise, do the men show up in shul wearing hand-tailored Brioni suits?

Your concerns would be somewhat alleviated, I think, if you found, instead, that his family members live modest, unpretentious lives.

Fourth, does the war in Israel cause your boyfriend to mainly worry how it will affect his family’s vacation plans? Is he worried that they might, regrettably, have to cancel plans for celebrating Pesach in the King David Hotel?

Or is he more interested in exploring how he can help the war effort? Has he, and/or his family, been contributing to programs that supply new combat boots to Israeli troops in Gaza and cold weath-

er gear to Israeli troops on the Lebanese border?

For your next date with him, perhaps you might wish to suggest that instead of going to an expensive restaurant, the two of you volunteer at one of the warehouses helping pack duffel bags and cartons with supplies for displaced Israeli families. See how he reacts to that suggestion.

Fifth, if you were to become affluent, you probably realize that it will be less challenging to pay for your monthly mortgage and children’s yeshiva tuition. But, if you were to become affluent, you must also realize that you will probably live in a bigger house with a bigger mortgage and “need” more expensive cars and vacations.

Finally, are affluent people happier in life? Not necessarily. Nevertheless, Françoise Sagan remarked, “Money may not buy happiness, but I’d rather cry in a Jaguar than on a bus.”

However, please remember that late at night, when a husband and wife are discussing serious life issues and concerns, sharing a large bank balance is not nearly as important as sharing the same goals, hopes, and aspirations.

one another through these differences.

If Shlomo is someone you can potentially see yourself with, it is completely appropriate and necessary to speak about this concern with him. Tell him about the way you were raised and ask him about the way he was raised. A healthy dialogue should follow. I believe that based on this conversation, you may find the clarity you seek.

I am going to present two different truths. The first truth is it feels nice and comfortable to be with someone from a

similar background. The second truth is that we can grow and be very happy with someone who is very different from us.

You don’t have to pick which one you want.

What we need to do is express ourselves and to then have our expression welcomed by our partner. When two people from different backgrounds have respect for each other and where the other comes from, they can enjoy a beautiful relationship.

Sincerely, Jennifer

Are you going to be giving him a hard time about spending the money on such “trivial” pursuits?

Pulling It All Together The Navidaters Dating and Relationship Coaches and Therapists

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hank you for writing! When dating and getting serious with someone, it is completely normal and expected to run into differences – differences in the way we were raised, our finances, our emotional natures, our needs, etc.

Dating is about getting to know someone. Having a relationship is about deepening and strengthening our connection and bond by way of communicating and supporting

Jennifer Mann, LCSW is a licensed psychotherapist and certified trauma healing life coach, as well as a dating and relationship coach working with individuals, couples, and families in private practice at 123 Maple Avenue in Cedarhurst, NY. To set up a consultation or to ask questions, please call 718-908-0512. Visit www.thenavidaters.com for more information. If you would like to submit a dating or relationship question to the panel anonymously, please email JenniferMannLCSW@gmail.com. You can follow The Navidaters on FB and Instagram for dating and relationship advice.

DECEMBER 28, 2023 | The Jewish Home

familiar to you, doesn’t mean it’s a problem.

I would explore your feelings of insecurity with money in therapy since it sounds like you’re not sure what’s making you feel uncomfortable about the subject matter. After gaining clarity. I would encourage you to explore his financial habits and goals the same way anyone would in a relationship.

Please take caution in knowing that if he doesn’t have a budget due to his upbringing, then there is nothing wrong with that. You’re just unfamiliar with that lifestyle, and I give you a bracha that it should be the most challenging thing to adjust to.

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Parenting Pearls

Switching Our Mindset

By Sara Rayvych, MSEd

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wo weeks ago, the important topic of helping children develop a positive self-image was discussed. As I wrote that article, there was something niggling in my brain. I know I’m not the only one who gets frustrated by brain niggles. My sister-in-law, an experienced psychologist, reviewed my article, and her comments put words to those niggles.

The article mostly focused on encouraging the many natural qualities of our children. There is nothing wrong with valuing the many gifts Hashem has bestowed on our beloved progeny. But, this approach has some limitations. One issue is what if our child doesn’t have that particular talent or natural gift.

Another problem is that no matter how smart, talented or any other adjective we use, our children can always find someone who is better than themselves in that area. Additionally, irrelevant of their brilliance in a particular field, they can have a situation where their capabilities still aren’t enough. For example, the brightest child can discover a subject or topic they can’t tackle. A funny child can be in a crowd that doesn’t enjoy their

humor.

My sister-in-law introduced me to the research of Dr. Carol Dweck, an American psychologist, that stressed the importance of a growth mindset over a fixed one. While I haven’t had the opportunity to fully delve into Dr. Dweck’s writings, she discusses shifting our focus from a “fixed mindset” (natural talents and capabilities) to that of a “growth mindset.”

Those who want a full understanding of Dr. Dweck’s approach can look into her writings more in-depth. What follows are my own thoughts based on a superficial understanding of her idea.

For the rest of the article, I will be using the term “fixed” and “growth” mindset but with my own definition, not hers.

Fixed vs. Growth When we have a fixed mindset, we limit ourselves to what we view as our in-born talents. We think that if we don’t have it naturally, then we can’t develop it. We can quickly see the limitations of this thought pattern. We’re restricted to that which we have from birth.

Even more than limiting ourselves to our natural gifts, we only pursue that which we already think we possess. With a fixed mindset, we can be great at math, but if we don’t realize it, then we will never sign up for that advanced calculus class.

When we have a growth mindset, we are focused not exclusively on our children’s accomplishments but also on the effort they’ve put into the task. Even if they didn’t succeed, the time and devotion they’ve invested is worth appreciating. “Wow, I can see how hard you studied for spelling.” “You really practiced your pitching before the big game.”

Imagine how frustrating it must be for a child to have their work and efforts go unnoticed! There are many stories of a teacher who praised a child for the time they invested in their work, even if their grade didn’t reflect it.

We can’t control what we’re born with, but we can certainly master a skill based on sincere effort. As opposed to a child raised with a fixed mindset, a child trained to appreciate growth will take that advanced calculus class. They know it may take extra work, but they realize

they have a high chance of success.

Ultimately, their ability to succeed is determined based on the work they’re willing to invest, more than what they possess naturally. The most successful people we see aren’t the most gifted but the hardest working. Encouraging our children to expand themselves, and make the effort in whatever they do, is giving them a real gift towards accomplishing their future goals.

We could even say that assuming everything is in-born not only limits our child but also degrades the hard work of others in that field. For example, there are many individuals gifted with a beautiful voice. Yes, they were born with talent, but we can’t ignore the many years they invested in voice lessons and perfecting their technique. That inspiring Yomim Noraim davening you hear comes from years of learning and practicing the tunes. It takes tremendous effort to provide us with a flawless davening, megilla reading or leining. Imagine how insulting it would be to say to that person, “Well, you didn’t have to do anything – it came naturally to you.”

Like everything else, success is ul-

and will be more motivated to try the next time they encounter a challenge.

A Chinuch Focus This approach easily lends itself towards our views of chinuch and what we want to stress with our children and students.

It’s often stressed in kiruv that a To-

to have kavana while saying a bracha, but that doesn’t take away from their efforts in shmiras Shabbos. This is often stressed in kiruv since it can be overwhelming for someone to take on everything at once, and they can easily feel disheartened by how much they still don’t know.

We can also apply this to our children, who are themselves young and still

Encouraging Growth Encouraging a growth mindset is similar to a fixed one, but the target is a bit different. Rather than praise exclusively on the result, we focus on their efforts to get there – whether or not their goal was accomplished. They don’t need to succeed at the task to appreciate their growth in the challenge. Results come from hard work and devoting time to the task. For example, the most gifted student can still fail from laziness. When we teach our children to value their efforts, we are giving them a lesson in using their potential.

“You pushed through even when it got difficult.” “I noticed how hard you worked.” There are so many opportunities for us to acknowledge our child’s efforts. Children thrive on parental praise

When we teach our children to value their efforts, we are giving them a lesson in using their potential.

rah lifestyle isn’t “all or nothing.” This does not mean we can pick and choose mitzvos, as one may erroneously think.

The Torah and mitzvos are eternal, and the Torah will always be our guide. What it does acknowledge is that we are all on our personal path of avodas Hashem, and our Creator knows how hard we work. Someone may find it challenging

learning. We can appreciate each step they take and the efforts they are putting into their mitzvah observance. It helps to remember that something seemingly simple, like wearing tzitzis, can seem overwhelming to a child.

Torah learning, too, is judged based on our efforts and not solely on our results. It’s the person who spends extra

time learning that we praise over and above the natural talent that quits after a few minutes – we’re meant to toil in Torah. The young man who adds an extra seder of learning – even just five minutes – should feel proud of his achievements and not frustrated that he’s learning Mishnayos instead of Gemara We can use this technique on ourselves, as even adults need chizuk. We can appreciate the strong efforts we’ve made and not feel like a failure because of how much more we need to do.

Teaching children to appreciate their efforts is one step in creating adults that will value their hard work and want to invest themselves in each task. Our success is in Hashem’s hands, but we can help our children to appreciate that which they can do: work their hardest and do their best.

Sara Rayvych, MSEd, has her master’s in general and special education. She has been homeschooling for over 10 years in Far Rockaway. She can be contacted at RayvychHomeschool@gmail.com.

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timately in Hashem’s hands. Since our children can’t control whether they accomplish a particular goal, it’s pointless to focus exclusively on the end result.

Rather, it’s the effort they exerted that we should stress. Because, whether or not they succeeded, nothing can take away their sense of accomplishment when they learn to value their efforts.

The Jewish Home | DECEMBER 28, 2023

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School of

Thought

By Etti Siegel

Q:

Dear Editor, My wife and I were shocked when we went to PTA last week.

Our child had been coming home since the beginning of the year with good grades. We never thought there was anything wrong. We never heard from the teacher or rebbi. Now, four months into the year, when we went to PTA, the teacher blasted our son and told us that he consistently gets kicked out at least once a week to the principal to “cool off.” Why am I just hearing about this now? If the teacher is having a problem, then we need to know right away.

There is no reason to hide this stuff – and then bring it out at PTA. Why? If you wanted to fix the situation, you could have called us, and we would have addressed the issue earlier. Now, months later, it’s almost as if it’s become routine for my son to get kicked out. And what about his self-esteem? It can’t be a good feeling to think that he is not wanted in class so many times. And what about the principal? If you are seeing my son even once, you should call us to let us know what is going on.

I am so steamed right now – at the teacher and at the school. I always heard that chinuch is a partnership between parents and teachers. Now, I see that there’s really no communication or connection. Really bad.

Something must be done.

-A Reader

A:

Dear Reader, The editor passed on your letter.

It deserves a response.

We know so little from our sons as to what they do all day, and we get our information from grades and any communication from the school. You assumed that no news was good news, and that makes sense.

You are rightly upset that you have not been called and that your son has become a habitual “principal’s office kid,” possibly affecting his self-esteem.

I taught in a boys’ junior high school for a few years and currently coach teachers who teach in boys’ schools as well.

Once boys get past elementary school (grades K-5th), there is a different way of thinking about education and behavior issues. A teacher will often send out a child to cool off, if need be, and often doesn’t believe a parent needs to be called, as it can be dealt with in-house. For many boys, this approach is so helpful, as middle school/ junior high is a tumultuous time and kids will sometimes need to unwind and this does not mean they are troubled or “bad.” If a parent is called, it can magnify the incident

and make the matter more Accept consequences. There serious than it has to be. might need to be a cause-and-efHe might not fect system in place for your son.

It seems to me that the If it does not seem fair, help think teacher/principal tried this show it, but your of a better one. approach, but then it began happening weekly, putting Regardless of how the meeting son will appreciate them in an uncomfortable goes (hopefully it will be amicable, that you have his position. At which point but it might not produce solutions), should they reach out? How mark your calendar and reach out back, even if it do they explain the fact that once every week or every other this has been going on? week to check in on how your son means suffering Another important point is doing. This will make the teachto understand is that some er keep caring for your son front consequences. excellent teachers are not that and center, as you will be calling to great with parent communinicely check in. Maintaining open cation (I even give courses to lines of communication is importteachers on this topic, for this very reason). They know how ant for your son to see and to repair the miscommunication to deal with kids, but not necessarily adults. that PTA uncovered. You will probably discover that the You state that “something must be done.” I agree. teacher really cares and is actually doing a good job!

And the place to begin is within ourselves.

Meet with your son again and ask him what solutions he I suggest that you understand that schools make mis- has come up with since your last talk. Tell him that being takes. They made a big mistake with you and your son. kicked out is not acceptable.

Make a point of being in touch with your son’s teachers Forgive them, because that is not the important issue within the first month of school. Let them know you like right now.

Sit down with your son. Be open and understanding being kept in the loop.

– not upset or accusatory – and ask him what has been He might not show it, but your son will appreciate that going on. Try not to give him answers or lead him towards you have his back, even if it means suffering consequencan answer. It will be interesting to hear why he needs to es. Sitting down and really listening to him talk about cool off. Whatever he says, decide beforehand that you and school might be something you could incorporate into your spouse will thank him for sharing and explain that your routine; not too often, of course, but enough that he you need time to think about the situation. feels cared for (but not stifled or interrogated). Boys are Make an appointment and sit down with the school; not girls, and many do not like to sit and discuss/analyze rebbi, teacher, principal…. Be gracious. Be grateful. The a personal situation. more you are on the same team, the more you will be able I hope you will look back at this upsetting event and see to help your son. Share what you heard from your son in a it as a wonderful catalyst that brought you closer to your neutral manner and ask if they have any ideas. son’s yeshiva, and of course, to your son.

Don’t get defensive. Stay curious and open. Jot down Hatzlacha. what they say. Ask questions.

- Etti

Mrs. Etti Siegel holds an MS in Teaching and Learning/Educational Leadership and brings sound teaching advice to her audiences culled from her over 35 years of teaching and administrative experience. She is an Adjunct at the College of Mount Saint Vincent/Sara Shenirer. She is a coach and educational consultant for Catapult Learning, is a sought-after mentor and workshop presenter around the country, and a popular presenter for Sayan (a teacher-mentoring program), Hidden Sparks, and the Consortium of Jewish Day Schools. She is a frequent contributor to Hamechanech Magazine and The Journal for Jewish Day School leaders. She will be answering your education-based questions and writing articles weekly for The Jewish Home. Mrs. Siegel can be reached at ettisiegel@gmail.com.

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Health & F tness

First Responder What Do You Advise?

By Rabbi Dr. Dovid Fox

“I keep waking up at night with scary images. What do you advise?”

“My spouse is not handling this war well. What do you advise?”

“My son is getting very aggressive since the war began. What do you advise?”

A

significant percentage of the crisis calls coming in present a dilemma and ask for advice.

Whether a professional, a first responder, a friend or a relative, be careful about advice giving. Many years ago, an article appeared in an archeological journal which described discovery of the first intact specimen of ancient cuneiform writing found in Egypt. The scientists were able to decipher it, determining that it was a note sent by a man to his enemy. The translation was, “Why do you hate me? I never gave you advice.”

When someone opens up to us, describing their plight or their feelings, a compassionate side of us wants to make it better, to help the person feel relief, and for their problem to go away. Our practical side activates, and we advise them to do exactly what we think we would do if that situation happened to us.

The problem here is that most struggles which others share with us do not respond to our logic. There is generally an emotional component to their distress or confusion, for which practical solutions may not suffice. For that matter, our finest advice might be way off target, and instead of our friend or family member feeling supported and understood, they are likely to feel dismissed, or even deprecated because our well-intended suggestion trivialized their dilemma. Few people enjoy the implication that if they were more logical, their problems would be solved. Thus, our ancient anonymous

Egyptian writer puzzled over why his enemy hated him: he had always avoided offering that man advice!

What do people seek when they unload their burden? For many, it is the

an empathy failure. An empathic friend leaves him or herself out of the situation and responds instead to the one who struggles, validating their feelings of anxiety, or sadness or confusion and

Your empathy, your warmth and your respect for each individual are the tools for connecting with them during their plight.

wish to be heard, to be accepted, and to feel your support and caring. They are not asking for you to solve or resolve their struggle. What most people do not seek is your own solution. When I end up talking to them about myself, that is

acknowledging with them that their situation is generating those feelings. For example, if someone says, “I keep waking up with scary images,” responding with a suggestion such as “I’d take melatonin” or “stop looking at those images”

or “try saying Krias Shema one hundred times” will not feel empathic. In turn, responding with “that is rough. Scary images disturb your sleep, and you wake up” may seem like an echoing of what they have just told you, but you have demonstrated to them that you took time to listen, you “get it” and you signify that their reaction is likely a valid one under the circumstances, and a normal one at that.

In responding further, you might prompt the person to share what they have tried up until now to cope. You may discover that the advice you were about to give them has been tried already and was not effective. Once most people – and we can include children as well as adults here – feel that you have heard them and care and are available for further discussion, they may be more receptive to collaborative problem solving together with you. On the other hand, you will also discover that there are those who are content with having been able to open up to you, the receptive supportive listener, and that in itself was the only response they sought from you.

The Torah declares that one must not cause others to stumble, and the Talmud derives from there an adage: we offer only recommendations which befit that specific person – eitzah hogenes lo. Your empathy, your warmth and your respect for each individual are the tools for connecting with them during their plight. Hold off on the advice giving until you really know what they seek and until they are primed for that eitzah hogenes.

Rabbi Dr. Dovid Fox is the director of Chai Lifeline Crisis and Trauma Services. For Israel crisis resources and support, visit chailifeline.org/Israel or call 855-3-CRISIS.

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DECEMBER 28, 2023 | The Jewish Home

Report Cards

By Barbara Deutsch

T

his week, we are drowning in grades and comments. When I was a classroom teacher, I spent hours and days figuring out averages, checking all assessments that I needed to include – homework, class participation, behavior; rows and rows of numbers and comments.

A very long time ago, my high school sophomore son came home with an 80 on a social studies test; his grades were usually better. The paper was pristine; there was not a single correction or comment made about any of his answers on it. As a social studies teacher myself, I could not for the life of me figure out the loss of points.

When I strongly encouraged my reluctant son to find out the reason for this score, the teacher responded, “It’s a generic grade; that’s what your test felt like to me.”

To this very day, almost 36 years later, that grade, that test, that response, haunts me.

During my teaching and assessment days with deadlines looming, I would force myself to sit down with all of my papers, grades and lists to work on my class’s report cards. I would make sure that I had amassed enough data, all of the child’s work product, to determine my student’s grade.

My data was anything but “generic.”

For the past 23 years, I no longer actually write the report cards; I review them. The process takes hours and hours of reading and editing. The process, more often than not, mandates follow-up conversations with teachers.

“How come I am always talking to you about Jane’s weak reading scores and poor work habits, when her report card says she is doing fine?”

More on that later.

It’s amazing that despite how much everything has evolved, nothing has really changed.

I’m sure that you remember from your own experience; in the old days, report cards were made of hard stock paper that folded like a book; they were usually a muddy light yellow for General Studies and

dirty blue for Judaic Studies. There was a rubric at the top that explained the “Es,” “Ss,” “Ns,” and “Fs,” or “Gs,” “VGs,” and “Es,” or 70, 75, 80, 90 and more for middle and high school.

At the bottom or the side, there were comments; some drop down and especially in the lower grades, robust. I still see some of those old timers attached to transfer students’ applications.

To save money, report cards were not mailed but, rather, sent home in a child’s backpack. Even strongly admonished students did not wait until they got home to show Mom. For sure, the second a child (me) could find a private place (usually on the bus) that the report card would be out of the bag and read.

Looking at the grades and comments, a child would feel like he was looking into a mirror and whatever the teacher wrote was who he or she became from that moment on. If the report was bad, as it was for me a lot of the time, this young girl was ugly and deficient, and if it was a good report, she became taller and stronger.

That’s the way it was.

No way did an unsuccessful report card make it home to my house. “Report card?” “No Mom, I never got one!” My immigrant unsuspecting mom bought it.

That is, until she went to parent conferences; I was usually hiding under the bed when she got home.

Today, we use the number system in Elementary Schools, 1, 2, 3, 4, drop down comments written on computers that note the grades and comments that are then emailed home; neat and efficient.

One would suspect that this would result in a flawless system for grading. When reviewing the report cards, principals look for grammatical errors, correct names and matching pronouns; grades and comments that reflect what is really going on in the student’s full educational profile.

A bonus benefit you get when you read the comments and see the grades of the student is the joy you feel knowing that a child has made progress and is maturing

into their best selves. We assess based on a child’s personal benchmarks and not by comparing to others. We take pride in small steps that build to great achievements.

Especially since Covid, schools have found that parents have changed. In the olden days, a teacher was a guidepost; what a teacher wrote was gold. A parent took a teacher’s word and went right to work following the suggestions and putting them into place.

Today, parents are sad and sometimes even get angry when they get a report that indicates gaps and concerns. They don’t want to hear that their child may need more than a school can offer. Some parents don’t or can’t go the extra mile to pay for after-school help.

Even if they see the very same concerns at home, they act surprised.

When instructed to be transparent and honest, teachers, afraid to be chastised and upset, try to find words that share the information while not sounding strong. This can result in a lack of clarity. When this happens and the situation becomes worse, the parent will demand to be told why no one told them; it’s news to them.

When I was a fledgling principal, I thought that “I got this.” I had been a knowit-all teacher, and I promised to remember what made me feel frustrated; I would change it all when I was the one in charge.

I was wrong!

Sitting at my desk in my palatial office at my former school, Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy in Livingston, New Jersey, an angry parent confronted me about the math placement of her struggling daughter. I asked, “Why is your daughter in this class?” It was before my time, and I was unfamiliar. The parent quickly responded, “I demanded it of her former teacher. It’s not my fault she listened to me!”

Welcome to my world of principal.

Less and less of the best and the brightest are choosing to go into teaching. The years of education and hard work no longer seem worth the rewards. Even long summer breaks and compatible vacations with

our children don’t seem as important as checking out at 5:00.

Today, a teacher works long hours in preparation of the materials and lessons that must be in place in order to meet the needs of each child. During the school day, there are, of course, the lessons but there are also all of the charts and accommodations. At night and on weekends, there are emails and phone calls.

The teachers today teach because of their calling and passion to make a difference in their students and the world. The world is crazy and getting crazier every day. You don’t have to look far to see what is coming out of the mouths of those with bad teaching and no knowledge of history and truth.

Look at our college campuses; look and listen to the next generation of ignorance.

I have been thinking that we don’t need report cards – they take up too much time and for what purpose? They put kids into categories and give brief snapshots of the educational journey.

What we do need is real time transparent conversations with our children and their teachers. The best way to understand each other is to make the most of the opportunity to “see” each other.

We need it now!

Mrs. Barbara Deutsch is currently the associate principal at HANC 609 and a longtime reflective educator, parent, grandparent, and new great-grandparent. Even after all these years, she still loves what she does and looks forward to working with kids every single day.

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Health & F tness

Skip the Snooze Button: How to Achieve Healthy Sleep

By Aliza Beer MS, RD, CDN

A

fter a long day, we all look forward to a good night’s rest.

Unfortunately, getting enough sleep can be tough for many of us, especially with high stress from personal issues or global problems. Since sleep is important for our health, we must find ways to help ourselves achieve a proper night’s sleep.

Sleep provides us with many benefits for our immune and brain health, weight management, and can help improve our mood. There are many factors that contribute to bad sleep that we can fix to ensure we sleep better at night. In this article, we will discuss the benefits of sleep, the connection between weight and sleep, what causes poor sleep, and how to improve our sleep quality.

How Much Sleep To Get? It’s recommended that adults sleep

between 7 and 9 hours at night. Research shows that sleeping less than 7 hours is linked to poor health, weight gain, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, depression, and having a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or higher.

Here are a few of the many benefits of getting an adequate amount of sleep each night:

Benefits of Sleep • I mprove d Mood- Feeling well-rested can help improve our energy levels and our overall mental well-being. If we don’t get enough sleep, it can increase our anxiety and depression levels and make us more irritable. You have probably noticed that when you sleep well, you feel better in the morning.

When we have bad sleep, we are more groggy, impatient, and don’t feel as good.

• Enhanced Memory and Cog-

nitive Function- The brain plasticity theory explains that sleep is necessary for the brain to grow, restructure, reorganize, and make new neural connections. During sleep, the brain learns new information and forms memories which can contribute to better decision-making skills and problem-solving. Inadequate sleep can make our problem-solving skills slow down and perform poorly in our daily activities. For example, research shows that sleep deprivation can cause dangerous impairments to our driving skills!

• Supports our Immune System- When we sleep, the body repairs itself and makes growth hormones that restore cells and tissues that are involved in fighting infections. Lack of sleep can make us more susceptible to illnesses like the common cold. Prolonged chronic sleep loss can contribute to a greater risk of immunodeficiency.

• Improves Heart Health- Sleeping slows our heart rate and decreases our blood pressure. This is essential for heart health because poor sleep quality is linked to high blood pressure which can cause heart disease, heart attacks, and heart failure.

• Blood Sugar Regulation- The hormone insulin is responsible for removing glucose from the blood. When we sleep, our blood sugar levels rise and insulin tells our body to absorb the glucose from the blood to keep our blood sugar levels stable. This is essential for blood sugar level maintenance and poor sleep can impair insulin’s ability to do its job well. As a result, our blood sugar levels can rise and that can lead to the development of type II diabetes.

Weight and Sleep Another benefit of a good night’s

What Contributes to Bad Sleep?

Common sources of bad sleep include stress, anxiety, medications, blue light from our phones and TV, caffeine, and possible sleep disorders like insomnia.

How to Improve Our Sleep • Exercise daily- Exercise can make it easier to fall asleep since it increases your body’s need for sleep. Exercise is also shown to decrease stress, which is a big reason why people struggle to fall asleep.

• A Consistent Bedtime Schedule- Go to sleep at the same time each night and wake up at the same time each morning. You can do this by setting an alarm at night to remind you to get ready for bed and setting one for the next morning. Both alarms should be set at the same time every day and night to keep a consistent routine.

• Create a Comfortable Sleep Environment- Your bedroom should be dark, quiet, and at a comfortable temperature. You can buy blackout curtains or use an eye mask to block light that may keep you awake. A fan, white noise machine, or earplugs can help with blocking sounds during sleep. For bedroom temperature, feeling too cold or hot can make you uncomfortable and contribute to poor sleep. Research says

that maintaining a room temperature of 65-68 degrees is shown to support good sleep.

• Limit Electronics Before BedTry to stop watching TV and using your phone an hour before bed since it can affect your production of melatonin that helps you sleep. Instead, create a relaxing bedtime routine at least 30 minutes before you go to bed. This can involve

incorporate into your diet that can help you sleep better. There have been studies on tart cherries, kiwis, walnuts, fatty fish like salmon and tuna, turkey, and warm milk. Milk and turkey contain the amino acid tryptophan, which essentially makes you feel sleepy. It plays a role in producing melatonin, which is a hormone that helps you sleep at night.

If you’re looking to improve your sleep

Go to sleep at the same time each night and wake up at the same time each morning.

reading, meditating, listening to soothing music, and doing some low-impact stretching.

• Avoid Large Meals Before Bed- If your body is trying to digest a large meal before bedtime, it can cause you to have a hard time falling asleep.

Try to eat dinner at least three hours or more before bedtime. If you’re hungry at night, stick to a light snack instead.

• Limit Caffeine Intake- Avoid drinking caffeinated drinks by 2pm.

Caffeine increases our energy levels to keep us awake during the day. If we drink it too late, it can cause us to stay up later in the night.

• See a Professional- If any of these tips don’t work, you may want to consider talking to your doctor about your sleep schedule. If anxiety levels are high, talking to a therapist or other mental health professional can help you cope better with your mental health.

Foods that Help You Sleep There are foods that can be incorporated into your diet that promote better sleep. A mineral that is receiving a lot of attention is magnesium, because it has been shown to help you relax and fall asleep. You can find magnesium in seeds (chia and pumpkin seeds), nuts (almonds and cashews), legumes (edamame and peanuts), fruits and vegetables (spinach, avocados, bananas, and potatoes), and supplements (magnesium glycinate promotes better sleep, improves anxiety and stress).

There are other foods you can also

quality, consider eating these options to see if it can help you sleep better at night.

Getting enough sleep is critical for our weight, immune and heart health, mood, and more. Aiming for 7-9 hours of sleep at night will help with achiev-

ing the numerous benefits that proper sleep can offer. If you’re looking to lose or maintain your weight, sleep is an essential part of your daily routine; you should prioritize since lack of sleep is associated with weight gain, higher BMI, and obesity. Managing our stress levels, limiting caffeine, avoiding blue light and large meals before bedtime, exercising daily, and having a consistent bedtime routine are a few ways to promote better sleep. Incorporating magnesium-rich foods, magnesium glycinate, and other foods into your diet are shown to improve sleep as well.

If these strategies don’t work, speak to your physician about your sleep in order to get back into a consistent routine.

Aliza Beer is a registered dietitian with a master’s degree in nutrition. She has a private practice in Cedarhurst, NY. Patients’ success has been featured on the Dr. Oz show.

Aliza can be reached at alizabeer@gmail. com, and you can follow her on Instagram at @alizabeer

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sleep is weight management. Those who get little sleep have a higher risk of gaining weight and becoming obese.

This can be due to the fact that lack of sleep can increase our energy intake.

Sleep deprivation can increase our hunger and appetite levels by stimulating ghrelin, our “hunger hormone.” When this happens, we will eat more, especially foods higher in unhealthy fat and carbs. Those who stay up late are more likely to overeat at night, and lack of sleep can also increase our stress levels and make us eat more to cope with our negative emotions.

Another reason why weight gain occurs is due to decreased physical activity. If we don’t sleep enough, we will be less likely to exercise so we won’t be able to burn off any excess calories.

Getting adequate sleep can aid with weight loss. We will be more likely to make healthier food choices, engage in physical activity, and keep our hunger hormones in check.

The Jewish Home | DECEMBER 28, 2023

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d for Thought

REN

By Nati Burnside

K

osher dining has taken many steps forward over the years. In the beginning, even having a place to eat outside your kosher kitchen was an accomplishment. After that, a proliferation of delis and bagel places cemented the idea of Jewish food into the American palate. Then we discovered pizza. Who doesn’t love pizza?

From there, the first Israeli restaurants started popping up, followed by Chinese food (well, our version of it anyway). Then came the first steakhouses and more types of ethnic cuisine (we can’t live without our sushi). The most recent level is restaurants adding real ambiance, and the higher end places moving closer to their non-kosher counterparts.

And yet, kosher restaurants are still fairly familiar if you sit down and look at a menu. That is, until you sit down at REN. As the waiter explains the menu (don’t worry, it’s not a long one), you’ll notice that you probably don’t recognize much of it. At the very least, you likely have never had anything like most of the options offered.

But unlike many other kosher restaurants, this isn’t a situation where the chef is applying new techniques to dishes you’ve had at other places. It’s not even a case of a chef making something kosher that hasn’t been made kosher before.

At REN, Chef Ronen Morad has curated an experience where he’s invented many of the dishes himself. Coming from multiple Michelin-starred restaurants in France and Italy, Morad also worked at some of his native Israel’s finest establishments including Rooftop at the Mamilla Hotel.

The menu at REN is an accomplishment that many kosher diners won’t be able to appreciate. But the same would be true of a non-kosher patron as well. The difference is that those who don’t keep kosher have long had the opportunity to go to a restaurant like REN and most choose not to. For the kosher consumer, REN is the first doorway into another type of din-

ing. Whereas normally there might be a big rush to try the newest thing, prospective guests should be aware that not everything is for everyone.

When I was invited to REN and confronted with the menu, it was hard to choose what to start with. If it’s a true chef invention you’re looking for, try the Yafa Kalvana. These are dumplings made of kohlrabi, filled with almond cheese and pistachio, topped with white winter truffle and fennel seeds, and served with a smoked kohlrabi reduction with drops of chive infused oil. Using the kohlrabi as both the wrapper and the sauce is brilliant, and the filling being made of some of the best imitation cheese I’ve ever had combined with the slight crunch from the pistachio establishes a perfect texture.

There’s another appetizer that is simply known as “Tomato.” The main plate includes a multi-color tomato and strawberry salad served overtop a tomato consomme gel. The dressing is made of herbs, chili, pickled lemon, basil infused vinegar, and fish sauce. It comes with a cigar filled with sundried tomato, tabasco, yuzu, and crispy rice and dusted on the outside with powdered cherry tomato. Last but not least is a clarified tomato iced tea that is extremely potent and takes three days to achieve. The salad is light and has a great balance of acid and sweetness, and the cigar is crunchy and spicy and pairs nicely with the tea. Eating something like this is why you go to REN. The Lamb Bolognese Raviolo is much more simple yet just as tasty. The large single piece of pasta rests in a stock made of morel mushrooms while a few whole specimens of the exotic fungi also populate the bowl. On the inside, lamb is mixed with a celery cream to imitate that dairy/ meat combination that’s a Torah taboo. As somebody who loves mushrooms, getting to taste this use of the famous breed that grows mostly on scorched earth was really something. The depth of flavor in the stock,

as well as the texture of the mushroom itself, made this dish worth it.

Beef Tataki can be found on menus in the kosher world, but REN’s version is extraordinary. The thin slices of beef are wrapped around a mound of tomato, shallot, and parsley. This plate is a paradise for those who love variable textures.

Not only is it topped with garlic chips and pita crunch, but it is accompanied by a dried piece of raw black tapioca plant. Get everything on one scoop for a truly balanced bite. The beef is perfectly torched on the outside and is extra flavorful due to being marinated in oil, thyme, and rosemary for 45 hours prior.

The entrees might be less out there, but they still feature some real care and craft. The Aged Duck Long Island is slices of skin-on duck breast served with a confit of apple and pickled mustard seeds and whole baby bok choy. Whereas almost all duck used in restaurants is frozen (as suppliers only do two runs per year), REN has their own supplier which allows them to age the meat after receiving it fresh.

Between the aging process and not removing the skin, the texture and flavor make this the best duck I’ve ever had. The apple and bok choy are a great pairing for sweetness and crunch, even if the duck is the real star of the show.

If duck isn’t your favorite, try the Rack

of Lamb. Using a sous vide makes the lamb taste slightly less gamey than other methods, and each of the pieces also develops a great mouthfeel that you’ll enjoy while you taste the oyster mushroom reduction that comes as a kind of gravy. An ingenious addition to the plate is what looks to be some multi-colored carrots. In fact, the orange occupants are carrots while the more yellow ones are actually carrot fennel puree that is delicately laid in the shape of a carrot. This is a great example of the chef using the plate as a canvas and utilizing the food as a way to surprise and delight the eater.

REN is an amazing experience, a beautiful atmosphere, and unlike anything the kosher restaurant world has seen before.

If it sounds like something you need to see and taste for yourself, make your way there. If not, that’s fine, too. There are plenty of other places out there. One of the luxuries of kosher restaurants today is that there are choices.

REN might be the only choice in its category. But maybe that’s just because it’s the first.

Meat - Chef Experience - Waiter Service (917)-456-1077 RENKosher.com 1571 McDonald Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11230 Chizuk Hadas Kashrus - Rav Dovid Gornish

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In The K tchen

Ceviche

By Naomi Nachman

I colla borated with Kosher River Cruises for this recipe in connection with their upcoming Mega Y acht Luxury cruise leaving from Costa Rica to Pana ma leaving in a few weeks.

Ceviche is a delightful dish that originates from the coastal regions of Latin America, particularly Peru. This refreshing and vibrant recipe showcases the perfect balance of flavors and textures. It typically consists of raw fish marinated in citrus juices, such as lime or lemon, which effectively “cooks” the proteins. The citrus juices impart a tangy and zesty flavor, while the addition of various herbs, vegetables, and seasonings further enhances the taste. Ceviche is often served chilled and makes for a fantastic appetizer or a light meal on a warm day. Its combination of acidity, freshness, and the natural sweetness of the seafood creates a truly mouthwatering experience. So, let’s dive into the world of ceviche and explore its tantalizing flavors!

Ingredients

◦ 1½ pounds salmon fillet, finely chopped ◦ ½ pound tuna fillet, finely chopped ◦ ½ cup lemon juice ◦ ½ cup lime juice ◦ 1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and finely chopped ◦ 2 tablespoons olive oil ◦ ½ teaspoon kosher salt ◦ ½ teaspoon fresh ground pepper

◦ ½ medium red onion, thinly sliced ◦ 2 ripe avocados, peeled, pitted and finely chopped ◦ ¼ cup fresh cilantro, chopped (optional)

Preparation

1. Combine salmon, tuna, lemon juice, lime juice, jalapeno, olive oil, salt, pepper,

and onion in a medium bowl. Marinate, covered, in refrigerator for 2-4 hours.

2. Just before serving, add avocado to the fish mixture; sprinkle with cilantro.

Naomi Nachman, the owner of The Aussie Gourmet, caters weekly and Shabbat/ Yom Tov meals for families and individuals within The Five Towns and neighboring communities, with a specialty in Pesach catering. Naomi is a contributing editor to this paper and also produces and hosts her own weekly radio show on the Nachum Segal Network stream called “A Table for Two with Naomi Nachman.” Naomi gives cooking presentations for organizations and private groups throughout the New York/New Jersey Metropolitan area. In addition, Naomi has been a guest host on the QVC TV network and has been featured in cookbooks, magazines as well as other media covering topics related to cuisine preparation and personal chefs. To obtain additional recipes, join The Aussie Gourmet on Facebook or visit Naomi’s blog. Naomi can be reached through her website, www.theaussiegourmet.com or at (516) 295-9669.

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Mind Y

ur Business

Unlocking Longevity with Marcus Mackay

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his column features business insights from a recent “Mind Your Business with Yitzchok Saftlas” radio show. The weekly “Mind Your Business” show – broadcasting since 2015 – features interviews with Fortune 500 executives, business leaders and marketing gurus. Prominent guests include John Sculley, former CEO of Apple and Pepsi; Dick Schulze, founder and Chairman Emeritus of Best Buy; and Beth Comstock, former Vice Chair of GE; among over

400+ senior-level executives and business celebrities. Yitzchok Saftlas, president of Bottom Line Marketing Group, hosts the weekly “Mind Your Business” show, which airs at 10pm every Sunday night on 710 WOR and throughout America on the iHeartRadio Network.

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n a recent 710 WOR “Mind Your Business” broadcast, Yitzchok Saftlas spoke with guest, CEO of M Perform, Marcus Mackay. Mackay drew from his experience as a health and lifestyle trainer to share his best insights for transforming your lifestyle to build a body for longevity. Read on for his top 5 tips.

* * * Building a body for longevity means so much more than losing a few pounds so that you look good in the mirror. It means transforming your lifestyle so that you always look and feel 10 years younger than you actually are. It means coming back from work each day with the health and energy to play with your grandkids.

The unfortunate reality is that one or more of the four horsemen of health are likely to reach us: Alzheimer’s, cancer, dementia, and diabetes. There’s little we can do to prevent them all forever. Achieving longevity is all about transforming our lifestyle to ensure that we remain healthy and prevent these diseases from reaching us for as long as possible. By building a body for longevity, we can boost our resiliency to disease while living our lives to the fullest.

1. Developing good lifestyle habits Our lifestyle habits play the number one role in our longevity. Kids who grow up with parents who are obese are 80%

more likely to become obese themselves.

You may think this is solely due to genetics, but it is actually because of the prevailing lifestyle habits of their households. David Goggins is known for saying, “Discipline is the best way to change your DNA.” If you have a history of heart disease, high blood pressure, or other health issues in your family that you want to prevent, it’s all about developing good lifestyle habits. Genetics load the gun, but lifestyle habits pull the trigger.

So, if we discipline ourselves to develop better habits, we’ll not only find ourselves healthier but also performing far better than before.

If I’m a leader in my business, and my people see me show up to work just after a training session, they will see that I am energized and excited to be there. That’s going to motivate them to follow suit. I know of a sales company that grew from 7 figures to 9 figures in just one year. How? The whole team trains at 8:00 A.M., and then, after lunch, they do another light training session to get their brains going for their afternoon sales pitches. The full impact of healthy lifestyle habits on our work output is just not measurable.

2. Getting proper sleep When it comes to developing good lifestyle habits, there is perhaps no habit more important to start with than sleep.

We need to start setting a reverse alarm that tells us when to get into bed, instead of when to get out. Instead of staying up late to binge four episodes of your favorite show, you really need to try and get to bed by 10:00 P.M., because any sleep you get before midnight counts as double. This lifestyle change can have a tremendous impact on our health, energy, and performance.

Think of sleep like a dishwasher. If you don’t run it for long enough, your dishes will come out looking crusty and gross. The same thing happens if you don’t get enough sleep. Your brain won’t be functioning at a high level, and you’ll experience significant hunger cravings, because your body won’t be using nutrients properly and your insulin sensitivity won’t absorb carbohydrates as well as it should. On top of all that, your work productivity will drop significantly. Try to do creative thinking and high output tasks with minimal sleep. Coffee won’t help you much. It doesn’t give you more

energy, it actually just reduces fatigue.

Nothing can replace the power of a proper night of sleep.

4. Setting up small wins

Building a body for longevity isn’t all about physicality. It’s also about changing the way we see ourselves. An identity shift of viewing yourself as a healthy person is the most important thing for sustainable long-term success. You may already identify as an entrepreneur, business leader, or parent, and all those identities help guide what’s important to us. Our identities dictate our values, which is where we spend our time and money. Our values dictate our priorities.

So, by identifying as a healthy person, we prioritize our own self and health first. This is just like when you go on a plane, and they tell you to put an oxygen mask on yourself before your infant. You can’t pour from an empty cup. So, self and health must be prioritized first.

Second, you need to prioritize relationships. This could be date night with your significant other, time with your kids, and time with your friends. These are all important to maintain, especially if those relationships are your primary

A business coach once told me, “Goals aren’t meant to be hit, but targets are.” When it comes to building a body for longevity, thinking of our health so far down the line can feel overwhelming.

into weekly goals? I would suggest as a healthy, fat loss percentage, you should be looking, at most, to lose 1% of your body weight each week. I believe that setting proper expectations and realistic goals is what people need to do to stay on track. Let’s get committed to the process, not the end result. Because if we’re looking for a lifestyle transformation that’s going to last into our 60s, 70s, 80s, or even 90s, we need to be able to

Genetics load the gun, but lifestyle habits pull the trigger.

But, if we set up small goals to work towards, so that we feel like we’re winning every single day, it will help us remain committed and on track. Eventually, we’ll be able to look back a year later and see how all of those small wins added up over time.

If you have a long-term goal of losing 25 pounds, how can you chunk that

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commit for life. If the effort is sustainable, the results will be attainable.

5. Bringing activity to your work If you’re spending every hour at work, sitting at your desk, and hunched over a computer, it’s going to have a longterm negative effect on your health. This

kind of posture leads to internal rotation in our shoulders, chronic neck pain that’s often referred to as “tech neck,” tight hip flexors, weak core, and weak glutes because you’re sitting on them all day. Eighty percent of people experience back pathology (low back). So, those are the physical problems of sitting all day and being hunched in our position.

This isn’t how we evolved to be, and this will prevent us from remaining healthy down the line.

Throughout your day, you need to give yourself what I like to call little “movement snacks.” These are scheduled times in which you commit to being active. For example, you can get off of Zoom in the afternoon and take the rest of your meetings walking outside.

Steve Jobs, who was probably one of the best ever innovators in business, only did these walk-and-talk style meetings.

And the reason for that is because activity improves our brain performance and communication skills. Another great way to stay active is to use standing desks.

Anything you can do to add small little movements throughout your day will add up and help keep your body healthy for a long time.

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3. Establishing your priorities

motivators for achieving longevity.

Third, you need to prioritize work.

When you’re fulfilled on those first two levels, you will feel a lot better at work.

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Notable Quotes “Say What?!”

I very much judge anyone who participates in the social murder of disabled people just because it’s “the holidays.” Many of us who are high risk are missing our FOURTH [X-mas] because other selfish people can’t be bothered to mask and take basic precautions that allow us to safely participate in public life.

- Washington Post journalist and Covid-activist Taylor Lorenz, in a social media post

I think people put so much stress on themselves.

They worry about things that are not important to them… You have to avoid the stress.

- 103-year-old Angie Torrisi, in an interview with Fox News

If you sit around [and] do nothing, stupid thoughts will go through your mind. You have to keep busy doing other things. I bake. I eat.

Let’s not forget the White House giving Tesla the cold shoulder, excluding us from the EV summit and crediting GM with “leading the electric car revolution” in the same quarter that they delivered 26 electric cars (not a typo) and Tesla delivered 300 thousand.

- Tweet by Elon Musk

Most of the Democratic Party is controlled by the unions — they carry far more weight than the environmentalists — and Biden particularly so (he gladly admits it).

- Ibid.

In Biden’s speech, posted on WhiteHouse.gov, he literally says, “The UAW elected me.” The White House cold shoulder started well before I said controversial things.

- Ibid.

Some people who have children and families decide they want to go to a place where their children can play outdoors, larger green spaces, you want to see animals — you don’t see animals except for rats in New York.

So there’s a combination of things. And we are getting rid of those rats, by the way.

- New York City Mayor Eric Adams, when asked why over 100,000 people left New York over the past year

- Ibid.

The [New York] Times’s problem has metastasized from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favor one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether.

- James Bennet — who resigned as editorial page editor of the New York Times in 2020 amid internal fury over an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), writing in the Economist about how the New York Times is warped

I prayed, and I prayed. And I 100% believe that that was a big impact, too.

- Bailey Davis, of Ohio, who lost her engagement ring at a rest stop and had it returned to her the next day, in an interview with USA Today

I feel what goes around comes around and you do good deeds upon others, it’ll come back to you tenfold.

- Truck driver Coty Warren, who found and returned the ring, explaining why he refused to accept the $1,000 reward

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This was my fifth visit to Israel, and I have never seen a more unified country. Among people of all walks of life, from wounded soldiers to families of peace activists, whose mothers, fathers or siblings were murdered or are still held captive in Gaza, the horror of October 7th has erased divisions within Israel. Everyone has come together for a greater cause – to defeat Hamas, to build a better and safer Israel, and a better, safer world.

- From a social media post by Jessica Seinfeld, wife of Jerry Seinfeld, upon her return from Israel

During World War II, Churchill said, “There’s no innocent German,” and the Americans did not leave a humanitarian path for the babies of Nagasaki or Hiroshima, and they burned all the German cities and all the Japanese cities to ashes.

- Israeli politician and activist Moshe Feiglin, in an interview with Arutz Sheva

The definition of victory is to conquer the land, evacuate all the people from Gaza, and rebuild the whole Gaza Strip as the new greater Tel Aviv; Gaza should be a big city like Tel Aviv. Of course, Gush Katif must be built again. We should have an airport over there. We should have hotels.

This should be the new Israeli Riviera. That should be the vision; nothing less than that.

That’s a victory. When you talk about sacrificing our heroes, our children, in Gaza and then giving it back to the Gaza people, they are the enemy.

- Ibid.

I wonder, would NYT also publish an op-ed from Al-Qaeda justifying 9-11? Of course not, but there is no red line to this paper’s Jew-hatred.

- Tweet by Arsen Ostrovsky, an International Human Rights lawyer, in response to the New York Times publishing an op-ed by the Hamas appointed mayor of Gaza City

We gave Zelensky $75 billion in aid, and he can’t even buy a sports jacket? Out of respect for the Oval Office, Presidebt Reagan wouldn’t even take his jacket off in it, and this guy goes in for his meeting dressed like a slob.

- Mark Simone, 710 WOR

What is striking to me is that even as, again, we hear many countries urging the end to this conflict, which we would all like to see, I hear virtually no one saying, demanding, of Hamas that it stop hiding behind civilians, that it lay down its arms, that it surrender. This is over tomorrow if Hamas does that. This would have been over a month ago, six weeks ago, if Hamas had done that.

– Sec. of State Anthony Blinken

How can it be that there are no demands made of the aggressor and only demands made of the victim?

- Ibid.

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Every morning, I’d sing Bocelli to myself and say, “G-d, maybe this will bring a good day. Maybe today will bring [my release].”

- Freed hostage Yaffa Adar, 85, in a television interview

There is no award, no applause, no honor or recognition, that is worth as much as your words, which I assure you, I shall never forget.

- From a letter that Italian opera singer Andrea Bocelli wrote to freed hostage Yaffa Adar after hearing what she said

I truly would never have thought that my humble voice, this great gift I undeservedly received from the heavens, could one day turn out to be so important! ... Thanks to you, from now on, I shall sing with renewed enthusiasm, with renewed faith, with new energy.

- Ibid.

I hope to be able to meet you one day and sing, just for you, whatever you may wish, so as to erase, as much as possible, the painful memory of terrible days, which I cannot even imagine.

I kind of like religious people of a lot of different faiths. And when I saw the chassids in Brooklyn during Covid and they were like, “We are going to our weddings because we are Orthodox and that’s what we do,”… I was like: You go chassids!

- Ibid.

- Tucker Carlson at the Turning Point USA conference

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Political Crossfire

The 10 Best Things President Biden Did in 2023

By Marc A. Thiessen

PHOTO CREDIT: DEMETRIUS FREEMAN/THE WASHINGTON POST

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his week, I once again offer my annual lists of the 10 best and 10 worst things President Biden did this year. In the spirit of the season, we’ll start with the best things: 10. He killed a top Islamic State leader in Syria. In April, U.S. forces launched a strike that took out Khalid Aydd al-Jabouri, an Islamic State leader involved in planning attacks in Europe.

9. He further strengthened restrictions on China’s access to advanced technology.

Last year, the administration blocked U.S. companies from selling chips or semiconductor equipment to China. This year, the president further tightened the tech noose, banning Americans from investing in Chinese companies developing advanced semiconductors and quantum computers.

8. He hosted the first trilateral summit with South Korea, Japan and the United States. The Camp David meeting of the three allies was a watershed moment for security in East Asia. As one George W. Bush administration official put it: “We could barely get South Korean and Japanese leaders to meet with us in the same room.” Biden continued to strengthen U.S. alliances to counter China in other ways, as well, conducting joint military drills with Japan and Australia in Chinese-claimed areas of the South China Sea; launching the second pillar of his historic agreement with Britain and Australia (known as AUKUS) to jointly develop advanced military capabilities to counter Beijing; holding his third leader-level summit of the Indo-Pacific Quad (Japan, Australia, India and the United States); and conducting a state visit to Hanoi to strengthen our partnership with Vietnam.

7. He launched the “Replicator Initiative” to better compete with China. It can take a decade or more to put a new weapons system in the hands of warfighters. This project aims to fast-track weapons development and production so

the Defense Department can rapidly field thousands of inexpensive, disposable unmanned systems (such as “swarm drones”) with the goal of delivering new capabilities to U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific region in 18 to 24 months to help counter China’s military buildup.

6. He provided military aid to Taiwan under a program reserved for sovereign states. The $80 million arms sale was unprecedented – the first ever approved for Taiwan using the Foreign Military Financing program that allows partner nations to purchase U.S. defense articles, services and training through grants or loans – a move that angered Beijing.

5. He called Xi Jinping a dictator … twice. In June, Biden called the Chinese leader a “dictator,” drawing a stinging rebuke from China. In November, following a summit in San Francisco, Biden repeated the charge, calling Xi “a dictator … who runs a country that is a communist country that’s based on a form of government totally different than ours” while U.S. officials visibly cringed. Good for him.

4. He signed a GOP bill overturning D.C.’s disastrous changes to its crime code.

At a time when carjackings, burglaries and homicides are out of control in the nation’s capital, the D.C. Council decided to reduce punishments for such crimes. Despite his support for home rule, Biden signed a GOP-led resolution to block the disastrous D.C. law from taking effect.

3. He reached a debt ceiling deal with House Republicans that reduced spending. In his first two years in office, Biden unleashed an unprecedented $4.8 trillion miasma of new spending. After first refusing to negotiate with the new GOP House majority, he relented and signed a debt limit deal that reduced discretionary spending, added welfare work requirements, pared back his IRS expansion and ended the pandemic pause on student loan repayments.

2. He continued to stand with Ukraine.

Despite the slow-rolling of weapons, Biden has provided Ukraine with $68 billion in military assistance so far – without which Russia would have conquered the country.

This aid is not only decimating the Russian military threat to NATO; it is also creating jobs and revitalizing manufacturing communities across the United States and restoring U.S. capacity to produce weapons for our own national defense. And, as one senior U.S. official told me, “Biden is responsible for killing more Russians than Ronald Reagan.”

1. He stood with Israel after the Oct. 7 terrorist attack. Biden has strongly backed Israel in its battle with Hamas despite pressure from allies and his political base (a Gallup poll in March found that a 49 percent plurality of Democrats side with Palestinians, while just 38 percent support Israel). Biden could face a backlash from Arab American voters he needs to win in states such as Michigan; Harvard-Harris polling in October pointed out a risk with younger voters, a majority of whom say Hamas attacks are “justified.” In December, its polling found a majority of younger voters saying that “Israel [should] be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.” Biden is supporting Israel anyway.

That takes courage.

One near-achievement gets an honorable mention: Biden brought us tantalizingly close to a Saudi-Israeli peace deal, only to see it disrupted by Hamas’s attack.

But that assault by Iran’s terrorist proxy will only serve to increase Arab resolve to make peace with Israel as a military bulwark against Iran once conditions in the region permit.

And one achievement should be on this list but is not: We reached the end of the year without a deal on fundamental changes to border security policy in exchange for new military aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. Hopefully, one will be reached immediately in the new year.

In my next column, I will review the 10 worst things Biden has done this year. (c) 2023, Washington Post Writers Group

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Political Crossfire

By Bret Stephens

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his will be my last column for the year, and it will be more personal than most. It’s an effort to explain, to myself as much as to readers, why I can’t stop writing about Oct. 7 and its aftermath.

A few weeks ago, my mother was watching footage of a Jewish student being taunted and mobbed by anti-Israel demonstrators at Harvard after he tried to film them. “I was born in hiding,” she said. “I don’t want to die in hiding.”

My mother was born in Milan in 1940, to a family that had fled the Bolsheviks in Moscow and then, a few years later, the Nazis in Berlin. She was baptized to avoid suspicion; one of her earliest memories is of being abruptly hidden under a nun’s habit. It was only after the war, after she arrived in New York as a refugee, that she learned she was Jewish.

America, to her, was the land in which you didn’t have to hide.

That’s no longer true. Well before Oct. 7, Jews were tucking their Stars of David under their collars or hiding their kippas under baseball caps to avoid being shunned or harassed. Synagogues and Jewish community centers were under constant armed guard. The ultra-Orthodox — who, courageously, do not hide their identity from anyone — were routinely assaulted in their communities by bullies who think it’s fun to sucker-punch a Jew. But that reality was shamefully underreported by news organizations that otherwise see themselves as champions of the marginalized and oppressed.

Everything that was true before Oct. 7 became more so after it. Hate crimes against Jews, which had nearly quintupled in the previous 10 years, also quintupled from Oct. 7 to Dec. 7 compared to the same period in 2022. Subtext became text: “Gas the Jews” was the chant heard from protesters at the Sydney Op-

era House, “From the river to the sea” from the quads of once-great American universities. The same students who had been carefully instructed in the nuances of microaggressions suddenly went very macro when it came to making Jews feel despised. The same progressives who erupted in righteous rage during #MeToo became somnambulant in the face of abundant evidence that Israeli women had been mutilated, [assaulted], and murdered

by Hamas. The same humanitarians who cried foul over migrant “kids in cages” at the southern U.S. border didn’t seem particularly bothered that Israeli kids were being held in tunnels or that posters with their names and faces were routinely torn down on New York street corners.

All this is likely to get worse: A Harvard-Harris poll conducted this month finds that 44% of Americans ages 25 to 34, and a whopping 67% of those ages 18 to 24, agree with the proposition that “Jews as a class are oppressors.” By contrast, only 9% of Americans older than 65 feel that way. The same generation that re-

ceived the most instruction in the virtues of tolerance is now the most antisemitic in recent memory.

Where does all this hatred come from?

If your answer is Israel, then, to borrow a line I once heard from Leon Wieseltier, you aren’t explaining antisemitism; you’re replicating it. No self-respecting liberal would argue that Islamophobia is understandable because Muslims perpetrated the attacks of 9/11 and other atrocities.

But somehow the types of excuses that are unthinkable when it comes to some minorities become “essential context” when it comes to Jews.

As it is, the single-minded loathing of Israel is another expression of antisemitism. Turkey flies F-16s in bombing runs against Kurds — while relying on U.S. security guarantees backed up by nuclear weapons — and progressives shrug. But after Israel experienced the equivalent of more than a dozen 9/11s on a single day, some progressives instantly cheered it as an act of justified “resistance.”

This side of the left, perhaps larger in

cultural influence than it is in number, has the moral credibility of David Duke.

Much of the right, with its dog-whistling obsession with “replacement theory” and its conspiracy theories about nefarious “globalists,” is no better. The fact that each side is in denial about its bigotry makes it that much more pernicious and pervasive.

When progressives think the most despicable name in the world is Benjamin Netanyahu and the far-right thinks it’s George Soros, we have a problem.

There’s a historical pattern. In the early 1920s, the most important scientist in Germany was Albert Einstein, the most important politician was Walther Rathenau, and the most important philosopher was Edmund Husserl — all Jews. They wound up exiled, murdered or shunned.

Today, the U.S. secretaries of state, Treasury and homeland security are Jewish, as is the majority leader in the Senate and the president’s chief of staff.

Too often in Jewish history, our zenith turns out to be our precipice. Too often in world history, that precipice is also the end of free society itself. Antisemitism is a problem for democracy because hatred for Jews, whatever name or cause it travels under, is never a hatred for Jews only. It’s a hatred for distinctiveness: Jews as Jews in Christian lands; Israel as a Jewish state in Muslim lands. Authoritarians seek uniformity. Jews represent difference.

I don’t think my mom will die in hiding. I wonder about my kids. America has been good to Jews since 1655, when the Dutch West India Co. rebuked Peter Stuyvesant for refusing trade permits to some Jewish newcomers in what was then New Amsterdam. But if there’s one lesson of Jewish history, it’s that nothing good stays — and why we still say, at the end of every Passover Seder, “Next year in Jerusalem.” (© The New York Times)

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Why I Can’t Stop Writing About Oct. 7

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Forgotten Her es

2023’s Military Stories

By Avi Heiligman

Members of Shayetet 13 in the Sufa army base

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ike 2022, the biggest military story of the year 2023 was a war thousands of miles away. However, the Israel-Hamas War hits much closer to home for the Jewish community as 1,400 of our brethren were brutally murdered on October 7. The ensuing air, ground and underground war in Gaza have many of us fixated on the latest developments as Israel seeks to completely destroy Hamas and those responsible for the attack. The conflict also has implications for other Middle East hotspots like Yemen, Syria and Lebanon. Aside from the war, there have been many other military stories that have made the news in 2023, and here are three of those stories.

We have covered many areas of the Israel-Hamas War in previous articles.

One of the battles we haven’t discussed yet was the retaking of the Sufa outpost located on the border with Gaza. Hamas terrorists stormed the area and entered the kibbutz. Dozens of other terrorists attacked the outpost, which was almost empty of soldiers. Many of the IDF soldiers had left the outpost upon hearing of the attacks. Most of the rest of the soldiers barricaded themselves in the dining room and fought for hours until reinforcements arrived. At first, two jeeps with a total of twelve soldiers arrived, and they began to repel the terrorists with machine guns and other infantry

weapons. Shayetet 13 naval commandos then arrived from their base near Haifa and, after an intense battle, killed 40 terrorists. Another fifteen terrorists were killed by the other IDF soldiers. Nine IDF soldiers were killed in the battle. About 250 hostages were rescued by Shayetet 13, and they also captured a high-ranking Hamas naval officer.

In response to the Hamas attacks,

Houthi terrorists storming a cargo ship in the Red Sea

ships that have no connection to Israel.

In response, ships like the destroyer USS Mason (DDG-87) have been deployed to the area and are actively defending against attacks on commercial ships.

The USS Mason is an Arleigh Burkeclass guided missile destroyer and was commissioned in 2003. It is heavily armed with several weapons systems including Tomahawk missiles and the

This allowed the patrol team to climb aboard the skids and rocket pods, and Taylor then flew the unit to safety.

the United States deployed several combat ships to the area including two aircraft carriers. However, it was the smaller ships stationed in and near the Red Sea that are seeing the most action.

Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen have instigated dozens of attacks since the start of the conflict. The rebels say they are attacking commercial ships with connections to Israel, but several attacks have been made against foreign owned

automated Phalanx CIWS that can defend against aircraft, small boats and incoming missiles. Over the years, she has served in several theaters including in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and in the Mediterranean in response to the Libyan Civil War. Fighting against pirates is nothing new to the Mason.

In 2011, she liberated a ship that had been attacked by eleven Somali pirates and freed the crew. Five years later, she

was off the coast of Yemen and was targeted unsuccessfully three times with missiles fired by the Houthis. After the Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel, the Mason was again sent to the region to protect shipping lanes.

A commercial tanker called Central Park, owned by an Israeli businessman, sent out a distress call on November 26 that it was being attacked. The ship was in the Gulf of Aden, and five terrorists/pirates had boarded the ship. The USS Mason was alerted to the signal, and when the pirates tried to escape, a search and seizure team from the destroyer chased them down in a small boat and captured the pirates. Two missiles were then fired at the Mason and Central Park from Yemen but landed harmlessly in the sea.

The Mason was involved in rendering assistance to another commercial ship that was hit by a cruise missile. The destroyer also intercepted a drone coming from Yemen on December 13 and was the target of more missiles coming from Yemen. Currently, there are several other warships in the area as a better solution to the Houthi attacks is being sought.

In other military news, a Medal of Honor was awarded in September for a helicopter pilot who served during the Vietnam War. Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Captain Larry Taylor graduated

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the U.S. Army Armor School at Fort Knox before switching to flying rotary wing aircraft. He completed training as a pilot and in 1967 flew a Bell AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter. Captain Taylor flew with D Troop (Air), 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry, 1st Infantry Division and earned many medals including the Silver Star and two Distinguished Flying Crosses. He flew in over 2,000 combat missions, was shot at hundreds of times, and was shot down on five separate occasions.

Captain Larry Taylor receiving his Medal of Honor

On June 18, 1968, near Ap Go Cong, Taylor was flying one of two gunships that were responding to a four-man long-range reconnaissance patrol unit that had been surrounded. For the next 45 minutes, the two helicopters made many strafing runs at the enemy to back them off from the American troops. These runs were done at night and in the face of intense enemy fire.

When they exhausted their ammunition, Taylor looked for an escape route

for the ground troops, but their way was blocked by the enemy. A rescue helicopter mission had been canceled so Taylor decided to do something that had never before been tried. He landed his two-man Cobra, which had no room for passengers, under heavy fire.

This allowed the patrol team to climb aboard the skids and rocket pods, and Taylor then flew the unit to safety. For his actions that night, he was originally awarded the Silver Star which was up-

graded to the Medal of Honor. He was awarded the medal by President Biden during a ceremony.

These are a few of the many stories and headlines about the military in 2023.

Avi Heiligman is a weekly contributor to The Jewish Home. He welcomes your comments and suggestions for future columns and can be reached at aviheiligman@gmail.com.

DECEMBER 28, 2023 | The Jewish Home

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SERVICES PEACEFUL PRESENCE STUDIO Men’s private yoga, Licensed Massage & Holistic Health Guidance 436 Central Ave, Cedarhurst Info. & free video training www.peacefulpresence.com 516-371-3715 GERBER MOVING FULL SERVICE MOVING Packing Moving Supplies Local Long Distance Licensed Insured 1000’S Of Happy Customers Call Shalom 347-276-7422 HANDYMAN AVAILABLE For big or small jobs, Sheetrock, carpentry, painting, electrical, plumbing, install & repair appliances Call Ephraim at 347-593-4691 VACUUM SALES AND REPAIR All areas call Max Flam 718-444-4904 MANAGEMENT STAFF WILL ASSIST you with: * Obtaining Medicaid and Pooled Income Trust * In-home Assessments, Individual and Family Counseling * Securing reliable home care assistance * Case and Care Management services Dr. S. Sasson, DSW, LCSW (718) 544- 0870 or (646) 284-6242 HAIR COURSE: Learn how to wash & style hair & wigs. Hair and wig cutting, wedding styling Private lessons or in a group Call Chaya 718-715-9009 ZEVIZZ WOODTURNING JUDAICA Challah knifes, batei mezuzah, besamim holder, kiddish cups, havdalah candle holders, yad for sefer torah, pens, stenders, bowls and more 952-356-2228

ISRAEL REAL ESTATE RAMAT BEIT SHEMESH G1 *Available this summer in RBSG1* 5 bedroom/4 bathroom (3 full- 1 half) 1st floor • Building w/ an elevator Quiet street • Close to bussing (local and to Yerushalayim) Across the street from a few different Shuls Walking to G1 Mercaz Available July 12 - Aug 9 with flexibility For more info WhatsApp 347-831-5128 or call 053-412-7194

HOUSES FOR SALE

HOUSES FOR SALE

HOUSES FOR SALE

DON’T GET STUCK WITH A TWO STORY HOUSE YA KNOW, IT’S ONE STORY BEFORE YOU BUY IT BUT A SECOND STORY AFTER YOU OWN IT! Call Dov Herman For An Accurate Unbiased Home Inspection Infrared - Termite Inspection Full Report All Included NYC 718-INSPECT Long Island 516-INSPECT www.nyinspect.com

NORTH WOODMERE Stunning Split , 5 Bedrooms With 3 Full Baths. Custom Features Throughout. Well Maintained Home.

Hardwood Floors, Granite Counters in kitchen, Formal Living Room and Dining Room, Den, Full Finished Basement. Relax in the Private Backyard With Inground Pool. SD#14.

A must see! Close To All Houses of Worship Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com

CAN’T AFFORD YOUR PROPERTY TAXES? MORTGAGE? Must sell for any reason?

Call for FREE Consultation.

Call now 212-470-3856 Cash buyers available!

HEWLETT Exquisitely renovated and modernized residence situated on a picturesque 50x200 lot. 4 bedrooms, 3 full bathrooms. First floor features dining area, huge living room, expansive kitchen with modern cabinetry, two sinks, two ovens, and two islands. Second floor features 4 bedrooms, a nursery, primary suite with WIC. Private backyard with 400 square foot inground pool house/ guest house, cabana with a kitchen and grill, playground, basketball court. Fully paid solar panels. A fully renovated basement featuring a wet bar, separate outside entrance. Close to all houses of worship. Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com LAWRENCE Stunning One of a Kind Mid Century Modern 6 Bedroom, 6.5 Bath, Contemporary Ranch. Resort Style Home on Over an Acre of Property in Back Lawrence. Incredible Views, Regulation Size Tennis Court - Deco Turf. IG-Gunite Pool, Low Taxes, 5318 sq. ft. of Main Floor Living Space. Plus 5000 sq. ft. Basement With Very High Ceilings. Call Mark 516-298-8457 for more details Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com WOODMERE Beautiful, brick, colonial boasting 5 bdr 3.5 Bth in pristine condition.

Excellent location, near all!

Move right in! RCUSA 516-512-9626 CEDARHURST JUST LISTED Magnificent renovated 4 bedroom 3 bathroom in SD#15, new roof, windows, plumbing + electric, gas cooking, new marble bathrooms, marble kitchen with stainless steel appliances, LED lighting, security cameras and speakers throughout the home, custom closets, outdoor patio, 1 car garage, near all. Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com

WOODMERE Charming Colonial on beautiful tree lined street in the heart of Old Woodmere. Home features 3 bedrooms, 1.5 baths, kitchen, dining area, living room, full basement.

Relatively new heating system + hot water tank. Large & beautiful backyard. Great for entertaining.

Close to all. Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com HEWLETT Exquisite contemporary colonial residence boasts a prime location set back from the street, enhancing its striking curb appeal. With 5 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms, this move-inready home is bathed in natural light thanks to its four spacious skylights.

Expansive formal dining room, full basement offers 8-foot ceilings.

Stunning inground gunite pool and a beautifully designed patio in the well-landscaped yard. Located in school district 14 and conveniently close to all amenities, this property is a rare find that won’t stay on the market for long! Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 CEDARHURST New listing 5-bedroom 4 bathroom split level home in school district # 15, hardwood floors, central air conditioning, minutes to all $899k Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 WOODMERE New to the market. 3 bedroom 2 full bathrooms with a full basement.

Ranch home in the heart of Woodmere, SD#15, on a lot sized 90x118, gas heat, garage.

Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com

CEDARHURST Move Right into This Very Spacious & Renovated 6 Bedroom, 3 Full Bath, Colonial on a Lovely Quiet Street.

5 Very Large Bedrooms All on 2nd Floor. Beautiful Den W/Fireplace & Playroom; Both on 1st Floor.

Gorgeous Hardwood & Granite Floors, New Wood & Granite Kitchen With Stainless Steel Appliances. Great Backyard For Entertaining! Very Low Taxes. Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com WOODMERE Woodmere just listed 3 bedroom 2 full bathroom hi-ranch in sd #15 with central air-conditioning , gas heat, 2 car garage, eat-in-kitchen, l/r, d/r, den, hardwood floors, minutes to transportation , shopping, and houses of worship Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com WOODMERE Welcome to this stunning residence situated on a tranquil residential street in Lawrence SD#15. This spacious and flawlessly maintained home boasts 4 to 5 bedrooms.

Bright, airy living room with vaulted ceilings, skylights and wet bar.

Central air conditioning, elegant quartz countertops, eat-in kitchen, formal dining room, main floor den with fireplace, master bedroom with bathroom snd dressing room, Jacuzzi tub, three other bedrooms and two full bathrooms. Inground sprinklers, lush landscaping, alarm system. Spacious playroom. Twocar garage. Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@ bhhslaffey.com

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HOUSES FOR SALE

HOUSES FOR SALE

APT./COOP/CONDO SALE

APT./COOP/CONDO SALE

HEWLETT-WOODMERE School district. New to the market.

4 bedroom 3 full bathroom home features living room with a fireplace, formal dining room leading out to the deck, eat-in-kitchen with granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, 2 dishwashers, double oven, new microwave, primary bedroom with an en-suite bathroom, plus 3 additional bedrooms and 2 full bathrooms, large family room, central air conditioning, gas heat, in-ground sprinklers, hardwood floors, modern high hat lighting, custom window treatments, driveway has recently been done, 2 car garage, beautifully landscaped plus so much more.

Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com

WOODMERE Spacious home within school district 14 with exquisite upgrades and central air conditioning, splendid kitchen with dual sinks, five bedrooms. Main level encompasses a spacious great room, office space, complementing the formal living and dining areas.

Unfinished basement, detached garage. Expansive lot, measuring 80 x 100. Conveniently located near shopping, railroad, restaurants and places of worship. Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com

LAWRENCE New to the market 1 bedroom 1.5-bathroom condo apartment, elevator building, 24 hr doorman, central air conditioning, washer/dryer, u/g parking, terrace, many closets, social room, gym, library minutes to shopping, restaurants, transportation and houses of worship. Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com

CEDARHURST 2 bedroom 2 bathroom apartment, private entrance, washer/dryer, central air conditioning, freshly painted, hardwood floors, recessed lighting, garage parking, stainless steel appliances, great courtyard, minutes to the railroad, shopping, restaurants, park and houses of worship. Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@ bhhslaffey.com

WEST HEMPSTEAD Introducing a stunning new construction home. Nestled in a picturesque neighborhood. Large windows, open-concept layout that merges the various living spaces.

The expansive living room is bathed in natural light, thanks to the windows that offer great views of the surrounding area. Gourmet kitchen with top-of-the-line stainless steel appliances, sleek cabinetry, expansive center island with a breakfast bar.

Ample counter space and a welldesigned layout. Wonderful dining area providing. Large glass doors, spacious patio. Luxurious master suite with a spacious bedroom, a lavish ensuite bathroom and a large walk-in closet. Additional bedrooms.

High-end finishes, premium flooring, and custom details throughout. Call for pricing Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com WOODMERE Spacious home within school district 14 with exquisite upgrades and central air conditioning, splendid kitchen with dual sinks, five bedrooms. Main level encompasses a spacious great room, office space, complementing the formal living and dining areas.

Unfinished basement, detached garage. Expansive lot, measuring 80 x 100. Conveniently located near shopping, railroad, restaurants and places of worship.

Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com

VALLEY STREAM Meticulously cared-for high ranch with four bedrooms and two full baths. Expansive dimensions, measuring 58 x 133. Two-zone, gas-heated system, central airconditioning, and an inground sprinkler system. The upper-level features three inviting bedrooms, accompanied by a full bathroom.

The well-appointed living room, elegant dining room, and an eat-in kitchen complete this level. On the ground floor, you’ll find an additional bedroom and bathroom, a spacious den with sliding doors that lead to the backyard, convenient washer and dryer facilities, and an attached garage. Great access to schools, shops, restaurants, and public transportation. Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com WOODMERE Introducing a stunning 14-side hall colonial home in the Hewlett Woodmere School District.

Formal living room, formal dining room, den with a skylight. Eat in Kitchen, two sinks, a double oven, a warming draw and a microwave.

First floor bedroom, a full bathroom and laundry room. Two-car garage.

Upper level has four bedrooms, two full bathrooms. Finished basement with playroom, storage and utilities.

Well-groomed exterior with porch adjoining the master bedroom.

Hardwood floors and back patio.

Central air conditioning, inground sprinkler system, alarm system. Close proximity to schools, shopping centers, restaurants, and transportation options.

Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com

LAWRENCE New to the market 2 bedroom 2 full bathrooms top floor elevator building, 24 hr doorman, open concept, totally renovated kitchen, granite counter tops, stainless steel appliances, 2 dishwashers, island, 2 new bathrooms, terrace, central air conditioning, u/g parking, high hats throughout, custom closets minutes to shopping, railroad, park, and houses of worship Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-2988457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com

WOODMERE 1 bedroom apartment, elevator building, eat-in kitchen, full bath, hardwood floors, plenty of closet space. Ceiling fan in bedroom & kitchen, laundry room in the basement. Close to the railroad, shopping, and houses of worship. $179k Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com

WOODMERE WOODMERE LAWRENCE WOODMERE WOODMERE LAWRENCE

WOODMERE CEDARHURST CEDARHURST WOODMERE CEDARHURST CEDARHURST

Quality New Construction!!!

Quality New Construction!!!

Spacious Wide Line Expanded Ranch onon Most Prestigious andand Stucco Col. with 2 Story Entry 9 ft Ceilings, ZoneHeat Heat which Spacious Line Expanded Ranch Most Prestigious Stucco with 2 Story Entry 9 ft Ceilings, 1414 Zone which New ToCol. Mkt. Charming Colonial on Beautiful Tree Charming Colonial on Beautiful Tree lined Street, SpaciousWide Split Level Home InInPrestigious Academy Spacious Split Level Home Prestigious Academy Serene Cul-de-Sac , Main FlrFlr Master Bdrm includes Radiant Heat, Anderson Windowswith withLots Lotsof ofNatural Natural Serene Cul-de-SacininVillage VillageofofLawrence Lawrence , Main Master Bdrm includes Radiant Heat, Anderson Windows Features, Large Primary Suite w/WIC, and Bath, FLR, Area.with Lg EIK, w/2 sinks, FLR/FDR, Attic, Lower lvl Den lined Street, Features FLRMagnificent FDR, EIK,Chefs Den and Library OPEN HOUSE 3:00-4:30 223 Hickox Avenue OPEN HOUSE 12:30-1:30 1068 highland Suite Many Closets and Addional Main Flr Flr Bdrm &Den Bath, Area.

Lg EIK, w/2 sinks, FLR/FDR, Attic, Lower lvl OPEN HOUSE 3:00-4:30 223 Hickox Avenue Light Throughout, Flr Fdnr, Eik with High End OPEN HOUSE 12:30-1:30 1068 highland Suite with Many Closets andBthrm, Bthrm, Addional Main Bdrm & Bath, Light Throughout, Flr Fdnr, Magnificent Chefs Eik with High End Totally renovated Colonial.

Like New. High Ceilings, Chefs EIK,55 Center Hall Colonial with Main Level Den 3 BRs 3Bths Baths Finished Lg Flr Fdnr Huge Den, EIK, Mudrm, + 4 Bdrms 2 on Second Flr, Flr, FDR, EIK, Den and Library Fin Bsmt, Playroom & 2 add’l rooms, Oversized Prop.

Appliances, Dble Ovens , 6 Burner Cooktop with Pot Filler, Totally renovated Colonial.

Like New. High Ceilings, Chefs EIK, Large Primary Suite, Finished Basement in Prime Center Hall Colonial with Main Level Den 3 BRs 3 Baths Finished Lg Flr Fdnr Huge Den, EIK, 4 BdrmsOversized 2 Bths on Second Fin Bsmt, Playroom & 2Mudrm, add’l +rooms, Prop.

Appliances, DbleWoodmere Ovens , 6 location!

Burner Cooktop with Pot Filler, Bdrms.

Prime Basment Beautiful Property Beautiful Wrap Around Property, $1.690M 2 Dishwashers, and more.

Master Bdrm Suite with Luxurious Bath Basment Bdrms.

Prime Woodmere location!

Beautiful Property Finished Basement in Prime Location. $1.1M Beautiful Wrap Around Property, $1.690M 2 Dishwashers, and more.

Master Bdrm Suite with Luxurious Bath Location $1.39M $1.659M $1.1M $999K and Walk in closet,+4 Bdrms and 2 Beautiful Bths ,2nd Flr

$1.659M and$1.39M Walk in closet,+4 Bdrms and 2 Beautiful Bths ,2nd Flr Laundry Rm , Full Finished Basement with 10 ft Ceilings Huge Laundry Rm , Full Finished Basement with 10 ft Ceilings Huge Playrm 2 Bdrms and Bth laundry Rm storage, Beautiful Playrm 2 BdrmsGarden. and Bth laundry Rm storage, Beautiful Manicured Manicured Garden.

WOODSBURGH WOODSBURGH CEDARHURST CEDARHURST CEDARHURST N. WOODMERE

$999K

CO-OPS/CONDOS CO-OPS/CONDOS WOODMERE CO-OP WOODMERE CO-OP PROPERTIES FOR RENT

FAR ROCKAWAY

LAWRENCE

LAWRENCE 261 Central Ave 1st Floor, Large Entry Foyer, Open Concept Kitchen.

Lawrence - 291stBayberry Road Charming 5BR Kitchen.

261 Central Floor,the Large Entry Foyer, Large LR/DR Ave Overlooking Courtyard $229KOpen Concept Large LR/DR Overlooking the Courtyard $229K home on beautiful cul-de-sac

This spacious s/h col , in the prestigious village of woodsburgh, sits on 1/2 acre property in a. most serene setting, with beautiful

This spacious s/h col , in the prestigious village of woodsburgh, waterviews, and magnificent sunsets . Flr banquet fdnr , sitsBrick on 1/2C/H acre Colonial property in a. BR, most3 setting, with floors, beautiful 4+ Bths, Hardwood COMMERCIAL RENTAL! 9 serene Dr officesuite Suite, Located breakfast rm, main level NEW! den /fpl ,Room master bdrm with his waterviews, and sunsets .in Flrquiet banquet fdnr , Tree New! Renovated High Ranch, 4BRs, 2 room, Bths, New in the Heart ofmagnificent Cedarhurst, Reception FLR FDR, Finished Basement, Exclusive and her closets and bth + 4Spacious bdrms , waiting new bths, renovated COMMERCIAL RENTAL! NEW! 9 ,Room DrClose officenewly Suite, Located breakfast rm, main level den /fpl master bdrm suite with his Area and Exam Rooms, alllaundry on Main Floor. to Public finished basement with rm, playrm, lots of storage, Kitchen & Bths,3 Zone Heating & CAC, Den FLR, lined area. inand the Heart of Cedarhurst, room, Reception Transportation her closets and bththruout + 4Spacious bdrms , waiting new bths, newly renovated many special details $1.9M+ Area and Exam alllaundry on Main Floor.

Close to of Public FDR, SD# 14Rooms, $6,000 finished basement with rm, playrm, lots storage, Transportation many special details thruout $1.9M+ $1.279M $6,000

LAWRENCE 240 Central Avenue LAWRENCE North Woodmere - 781 Sherwood Street Spacious 1 Bdrm 1 Bth Apt in Well Maintained Elevator Bldg 240 Central Avenue Detached colonial 6BR, 2.5Near bths, FDR, Bldg with Terrace Overlooking Garden, AllElK, $229K Spacious 1 Bdrm 1 Bth Apt in Well Maintained Elevator with Terrace floors, Overlooking Garden, Nearfinished All $229K hardwood finished attic, FAR ROCKAWAY basement, 156 B 9th St Mint 2BR, 2 BTH FAR ROCKAWAY Beachfront 156 B 9th StCondo Mint 2BR, 2 BTH

withRockaway Wraparound Terrace, Magnificent Far Beachfront Condo— Reads Lane Area 4+BR, c/h Sunrise & Sunset with Wraparound Magnificentfin. bsmnt, deck, col., FLR, FDR, Terrace, EIK, den/office, $589K Apt 2B Renovated, Mint, Corner 1 Bdrm Sunrise & Sunset 529 BrWoodmere Home inBlvd Heart of Far Rockaway, 3Bth, EIK, FDR, with 9ft Ceilings. Spacious Eat In Kitchen, 2 Sinks, Granite $589K 29 Woodmere Blvd Apt 2B Renovated, Mint, Corner 1 Bdrm Den, Foyer, Walk in Closets 130’Lvgrm/Dnr Deep Property.

Counter tops and S.S. Appliances.Large and Large with 9ft Ceilings.

Eat In Kitchen, 2 Sinks, Granite Bdrm/BR with LotsSpacious of Windows $1.4+M Counter tops and S.S. Appliances.Large Lvgrm/Dnr and Large REDUCED $299K

Bdrm/BR with Lots of Windows REDUCED $299K

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APT./COOP/CONDO SALE

APT./COOP/CONDO SALE

FOR RENT

FOR RENT

WOODMERE Welcome to this exquisite and expansive 1 Bedroom co-op in the highly sought-after and prestigious Heathcote. Recently renovated, generously sized foyer. Vasr Eat-InKitchen. Situated in a classic pre-war building, this residence features 9-foot ceilings that add an air of elegance and sophistication. The convenience of an elevator ensures easy access to all levels, making everyday living a breeze. Private storage room. Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com

LAWRENCE JUST LISTED This amazing two-bedroom two full bathroom condo Features a luxurious lifestyle in the beautiful city of Lawrence. What more could you ask for? The building has a 24-hour doorman and elevator access, with a social room, library, washer/dryer inside the unit, and terrace. Plus, the added benefit of having a live-in super to ensure maximum safety and security! And don’t forget about your new kitchen complete with a gas stove, refrigerator, microwave, and even two dishwashers! The living room and dining room are spacious and have recessed lighting installed throughout. Both bedrooms feature lots of closet space for storage. To top it off, there’s even garage parking available to make your life just that much easier! Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity. Please call for a private showing Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com

WOODMERE Generously proportioned, first-floor apartment in an elevator-equipped building in the heart of Woodmere.

This Co-op boasts three bedrooms, two full bathrooms. Lofty ceilings, spacious foyer, formal living area and dining space. Expansive kitchen with gas stove, microwave, dishwasher, washer-dryer. Hardwood floors provide an elegant touch, and the comfort of five air-conditioning units ensures year-round climate control. Three bedrooms, with the primary bedroom having en-suite full bathroom. Dedicated storage. Near shopping centers, railroad, dining and places of worship. Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com

WOODMERE Totally renovated bright and sunny 1 bedroom corner unit apartment with a washer/dryer. Features quartz countertops, ss appliances, recessed lighting, bathroom with chrome fixtures, close to the railroads, shopping and houses of worship.

Call for details Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com

HEWLETT Totally renovated 1 and 2 Bedroom, Apartments with washer/dryer, kitchen with quartz countertops, stainless steel appliances. Recessed lighting, hardwood floors, storage in basement. Close to RR, shopping, and houses of worship. Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com

FOR RENT IN HEART OF FAR ROCKAWAY Extra large 2800 Square foot trailer with bathrooms available for rent, suitable for offices, Yeshiva etc Please call 718.327.8007

CEDARHURST 1, 2 and 3 bedroom apartments, totally renovated private entrance , central air conditioning, hardwood floors, washer/dryer, garage parking, dishwasher, recessed lighting, private playground, close to railroad, park, shopping and houses of worship.

Call for more details Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com

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Weekly Classifieds Up to 5 lines and/or 25 words 1 week ................$20 2 weeks .............. $35 4 weeks .............. $60 Email ads to: classifieds@fivetownsjewishhome.com Include valid credit card info and zip code

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FOR RENT

FOR RENT

HELP WANTED

HELP WANTED

LAWRENCE Spacious 2BR, 2 Full Bath Apt with an enclosed terrace in the heart of Lawrence. Well maintained & manicured building. New hardwood floors, updated Eat-in Kitchen with gas stove. warming draw, dishwasher & microwave. New windows on the enclosed terrace & one of the bedrooms. 3 New A/C Units & New Refrigerator. Close to shopping, transportation, library, schools, and houses of worship. $339K Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com

LAWRENCE New to the market Jr. 4 apartment in an elevator building with a terrace and underground parking, laundry on premises. Kitchen with granite countertops, 2 sinks, ss appliances, spacious step down living room with high ceilings, guest room/ office, spacious primary bedroom with 3 closets, full bathroom with full vanity, medicine cabinet, toilet and lighting, custom blinds, near the railroad, shopping and houses of worship.$289K Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com

DELIVERY PERSON NEEDED to deliver Newspaper every Thursday morning to locations in Brooklyn. Must have Minivan or SUV and availability to work consistently every week!

Please e-mail gabe@fivetownsjewishhome.com or call (917) 299-8082

TEACHER/TEACHER MENTOR Join our Collaborative Team at HASC. Looking for an experienced Teacher/Teacher Mentor to help with the administration of a SEIT Program.

Great Pay! Part-time! Flexible hours!

Warm & Caring Environment.

SAS/SBL a plus Email resume: jobswd@hasc.net

WOODMERE Well maintained 1 Bedroom apartment. Elevator Building. Pet Friendly, SD#14, Corner Unit, Bright + Sunny, Hardwood Floors, Eat-in Kitchen, Full Bathroom, 3 Closets, 2 Ceiling Fans, 1 A/C Unit, Full Time Super on Premises. Minutes from the Railroad, Shopping, Houses of Worship, and Laundry Room on Premises. Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 • $179K

WOODMERE New to the market studio co-op apartment, elevator building, high ceilings, low maintenance, laundry room on premises, minutes to the railroad, shopping, restaurants and houses of worship. $ 135K Mark Lipner Associate Broker Berkshire Hathaway Laffey International 516-298-8457 mlipner@bhhslaffey.com

SECRETARY WOODMERE, PART-TIME HASC, a leader in special education, is seeking a part-time SEIT Secretary to add to our Team.

Job includes general office and administrative tasks related to the tracking and maintenance of SEIT student and staff files.

Computer skills required.

Attention to detail a must.

Great pay.

Warm and caring environment.

Room for growth.

Training provided.

JOBSWD@HASC.NET 516-295-1340

5 TOWNS - Offices For Lease and large Parking LOT Utilities & Internet & Parking Included with some Various sizes - starting at $695.

No broker fee Kosher kitchen - Minyan Next to LIRR Call/text/Whatsapp: 516-206-1100 BOOKKEEPER Excellent growth potential, Frum environment, Excellent salary & benefits. Email resume to: resumetfs1@gmail.com

IMMEDIATE OPENING PM Substitute Assistant Teacher for lower grade special ed class, 5 Towns/ Far Rockaway Yeshiva. Great Salary.

Hours: 1:00 - 4:00, Mon. - Thurs.

Email: nnadata@zareinu.org or call 516-316-6633.

SEEKING ELA TEACHER Teaching position for Gr. 6.

Mon.-Thurs., afternoon hours. Far Rockaway/5T area. Great salary, warm, supportive environment. Training in our curriculum is provided.

Teachersearch11@gmail.com

TEACHER/TEACHER MENTOR Join our Collaborative Team at HASC. Looking for an experienced Teacher/ Teacher Mentor to help with the administration of a SEIT Program.

Great Pay! Part-time!

Flexible hours!

Warm & Caring Environment.

SAS/SBL a plus Email resume: jobswd@hasc.net

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HELP WANTED HE LOVES COMPUTERS, animals, and exercise. Can you share his interests? Spend time with a 29-year-old young man with developmental disabilities in Lawrence, NY. Part time, flexible hours, starting salary $27.

Contact: Jobs@hamaspikking.org or 718-387-8400 Ext. 249

BOOKKEEPER/OFFICE ASSISTANT Cedarhurst Office. A/R ,A/P P/R, Quickbooks, data entry, scanning & filing. 25 -30 Hrs,good Pay. 516 404-1802 A YESHIVA IN QUEENS is looking for an experienced part/ full time secretary, 2-year-old morah, kindergarten morah, kindergarten morah assistant and Pre-1A English teacher for the 2022-2023 school year. Nice and timely pay. Please email resume to mshelt613@gmail. com or call/text 718-971-9799.

HELP WANTED

HELP WANTED

HELP WANTED

SECRETARY Woodmere, Part-Time HASC, a leader in special education, is seeking a part-time SEIT Secretary to add to our Team.

Job includes general office and administrative tasks related to the tracking and maintenance of SEIT student and staff files.

Computer skills required.

Attention to detail a must.

Great pay. Room for growth.

Warm and caring environment.

Training provided. jobswd@hasc.net 516-295-1340

5 TOWNS BOYS YESHIVA Seeking Elem Gen Ed Teachers Excellent working environment and pay. Only lic/exp need apply.

Email resume to yeshivalooking@gmail.com

MDS REGIONAL NURSE

DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANT A multi-tasker needed for general office work. The ideal candidate is someone who is detail-oriented, responsible, and can take ownership.

Looking for someone who is eager to learn, and expand his/her skill set while possessing the ability to work independently and as part of a team.

Experience with Excel required. Five Towns location. In-office position only, not remote. Please send resume to 5tpart.timecareer@gmail.com

JOIN OUR TEAM! ABA company located in the 5 Towns looking to fill multiple full-time administrative positions Knowledge of Central Reach a plus, but will train the right candidate Great work environment Call 516-670-5374 or Email your resume to: Careers@supportivecareaba.com SUMMER POSITION: Prominent Girls Day Camp in Brooklyn seeks two admin positions.

1- An experienced admin to oversee and manage the day-today operation in a cohesive and collaborative manner 2- A detailoriented schedule writer/coordinator.

Must be a team player with a flexible personality. A solid camping experience a must. AMAZING SALARY for the right candidate. Text 347.713.2419

5 Towns area Nursing Home management office seeking a Regional/Corporate level MDS Nurse to work in our office.

Must be an RN. Regional experience preferred. 2-3 years MDS experience with good computer skills required.

Position is Full Time but Part Time can be considered.

Great Shomer Shabbos environment with some remote options as well.

Email: officejob2019@gmail.com

MISC. SHMIRAS HALASHON Text 516-303-3868 with a time slot of your choice to be careful on lashon hara. Be a part of the 1,000 people for klal yisroel!

DECEMBER 28, 2023 | The Jewish Home

classifieds@fivetownsjewishhome.com • text 443-929-4003

The Jewish Home | DECEMBER 28, 2023

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Life C ach

Do You See Me?

By Rivki D. Rosenwald Esq., LMFT, CLC, SDS

T

here are three words that we never want to hear. I bet you’re on the edge of your seat wondering what they are.

Well, it could actually be any number of words, maybe one or five or two.

And I’m not even sure what your particular ones are, but we all have them!

Sometimes it’s the word no.

Sometimes, for me, it’s “OK, soon.”

I love when something gets taken off my plate. “Soon” or “in a few minute” leaves it squarely on my plate, front and center. It puts it right back on my ever in-

creasing “to do” list. When someone gets up and takes care of it, right that minute, it’s the most wonderful feeling. It’s not just that the thing gets done, though make no mistake, that does help certainly. It’s bigger and deeper, believe it or not – it’s that I feel loved, heard, supported, and valued.

Can you imagine something like just taking out the garbage can make someone feel all those amazing feelings?

Now, imagine if they did it without even being asked?!

We all have the desire to be seen and

heard, except, of course, before 7 a.m. or after 11 p.m. Then we probably just want to be left alone.

But do we want to be seen or heard when we are out of control? Probably not exactly. That’s when we really want that extra understanding. Don’t see my behavior or hear my words, rather I need you to understand and “get me!”

And not “get me” gifts or presents, though they’re always welcome! I want you to get my underlying feeling. Get that

So what are some other words people dread?

It depends who: For a kid: “It’s bedtime!”

For most wives: “Game’s on tonight.”

For a husband: “I just want to tell you one thing.”

For an employee: “We need to downsize.”

For a traveler: “Plane’s delayed.”

For an Uber user: “Car’s cancelled.”

No matter what the words are that you

Can you imagine something like just taking out the garbage can make someone feel all those amazing feelings?

I’m hurt, frustrated, overwhelmed, sad, or scared.

Don’t see my actions; don’t hear my words. Look for the feeling that drove the behavior or words.

That’s the best you can do for someone.

don’t like hearing, if you can keep your cool for just a little bit, hopefully you can reach out to that someone in your life who gets you and will see your underlying feeling rather than the litany of complaints you may be expressing.

Got it?

Rivki Rosenwald is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist working with both couples and individuals and is a certified relationship counselor. Rivki is a co-founder and creator of an effective Parent Management of Adolescent Years Program. She can be contacted at 917-7052004 or at rivkirosenwald@gmail.com.

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DECEMBER 28, 2023 | The Jewish Home

The Jewish Home | DECEMBER 28, 2023

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