Did any of us think that we would one day have to worry about alcohol and drugs in our midst? About our children behaving in ways we thought our society was immune to? That we would find ourselves scrambling for answers to the questions of how we lost our way and how we can return?

The problems are not new, perhaps, but have increasingly and menacingly surfaced in the last decade. Where did they come from? we wonder. Did they seep in from the outside, or do they signal something within ourselves that needs fixing? In this interview, Dr. Aviva Weisbord

With Excerpts from the Book and an Introduction by Elaine Berkowitz

A welcome new contribution to the genre of frum biography is scheduled to appear in Baltimore bookstores in time for the High Holidays. Written about a Baltimorean, by a Baltimorean, Raphael Blumberg’s They Called Him Rebbe: The Life and Good Works of Rabbi Boruch Milikowsky (Urim Publications) brings to life a personality who had a profound influence on many hundreds of students during his 40-year career at Talmudical Academy. And, after reading about his kindness and wisdom in dealing with teenage boys and, of course, his brilliance in Torah and

by Dr. Nava Miller, as told to Elaine Berkowitz

Living in Houston, we have experienced hurricanes before, but this time, since we were directly in the path of the storm, it was a little bit of a wild ride. We knew it would hit on Friday night, and because we are a little far from the shul, we had a minyan in our house for those who live near us.

Everyone was safely at home when Ike hit, late Friday night. There was a lot of lightening, and the force of the wind was so strong that it drove water into the

“We’re Here for a Reason”

From the Life of Rabbi Binyamin Moshe Dinovitz, zt”l

If anyone in our community epitomizes old-school Baltimore, it has to be Rabbi Binyamin Moshe Dinovitz, zt”l, who was born and raised and spent his entire life in the city. Born in 1920, Rabbi Dinovitz spoke only Yiddish for the first five years of his life. That’s what his immigrant parents spoke, of course, and so did all the children on the streets of East Baltimore. It was only when he started school that he learned the “foreign language,” English.

He had a normal upbringing for the times, but

Imagine growing up in a home where your parent was an alcoholic or mentally ill, where your parents divorced or your father abandoned the family, where domestic abuse or arguments occurred every day, where your brother was a drug addict or your sister was disabled, where your parents lost their jobs and food was scarce, or where you yourself were abused or suffered mental or physical illness.

Children growing up in such a household – and individuals in our community have – spent their early years in a stressful and unhealthy environment, making it very difficult for them to develop or

It’s not one of those urgent problems that insist on being solved immediately. And there’s not a lot of information to help us know what to do. And we’re not sure what criteria to use to make a decision. And we don’t even know what the ideal stance should be!

It’s children and books – or, more specifically, secular books. What can we, what should we, allow our children to read? It’s one of the predicaments of summer, when children have more time to read – although some children are insatiable all year round.

By now, the dilemma plagues a second generation