As we approach this year’s Yomim Nora’im, we cannot forget the horrors that occurred on October 7, 2023, which, last year, coincided with Shemini Atzeres.

A year ago, Jews in Israel were vociferously divided and rigid in their animosity towards one another. This culminated last Yom Kippur, when secular Jews broke up a group of worshippers in Tel Aviv claiming that they – the worshipers – were destroying the city’s secular ambiance. On Motzei Yom Kippur, when I read about the Tel Aviv tragedy, my heart sank. I knew that when there is such extreme animosity among Jews, we become weakened and vulnerable. I felt that something awful was going to occur. Then, just 13 days later, the slaughter happened. Of course, our enemies do not discriminate between secular and religious Jews. In their reptilian eyes, a Jew is a Jew.

Sadly, many of our Israeli (and Diaspora) brothers and sisters are still divided, but this Rosh Hashanah, our enemies in the North have served as the catalyst for some renewed internal unity among the Jewish people. How tragic it is that, for most of Jewish history, our unity has been inspired by those who desire our destruction.

Are you an unmarried Jew and feel like you have been passed over by the Jewish world? Do you feel that your fellow Jews as well as our Father in Heaven have forsaken you? Or perhaps you have a close friend or relative who finds him or herself in such a situation.

To whom can we turn, and what are we to do to free ourselves from despair when trying to find our zivug or any other seemingly hopeless task in life? Dealing with such situations can be very draining emotionally but can also be a source of great satisfaction upon the realization that no situation need be as hopeless as it initially appears. We have a loving Father in Heaven and great rabbis steeped in Torah who can offer us enormous rays of light to make our way through our darkness.

I would love to share with you a wonderful story of hashgacha – one with a twist! I saw this “gem” (pun intended, as you will soon see) on Page 273 of Achas Sha’alti 2, a sefer of halachic queries posed to Rav Zilberstein, shlit”a. Please look it up!

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Yossi, a young baal teshuva, lived in Manhattan. Anyone who has seen pictures of this “city” inside New York City immediately notices the huge high-rise buildings and the lack of private yards. Yes, Manhattan is a place for those who want to live near work. But for those who might want to build a sukkah – well that is not so simple in this concrete jungle!

Our Yossi thought long and hard about how he was going to manage to fulfill this newfound mitzvah of sukkah. Where could he build a sukkah?

After a long while, it dawned on him that the best place was on the roof, at the top of the high-riser where he lived. Yes, the winds might be strong there, but he would have to build it, reinforced, on the roof. The person whom he needed to ask was the person on the top floor, whose roof he would be using. Hmmmm.

Yossi knocked on the door of this non-Jew, and after a few minutes the penthouse owner realised that he could make a quick buck on this request.

I was alerted to a brief article entitled “Destigmatizing Drug Abuse Is a Dopey Idea.” The author, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (apparently a right-wing think tank), calls attention to recent trends in the substance abuse field to change the language of addiction in ways that minimize stigma. We now almost universally employ what is sometimes referred to as “people-centered language.” For instance, instead of using the term “addict” or “substance abuser,” which defines people solely by their disorder, we prefer to use the phrase “person with substance use disorder,” simply to acknowledge that he or she is still a person!

This article’s author thinks that all of this is nuts and perhaps wants to return to the good old days when we called a drunk a drunk and a junkie a junkie. While her argument is more than a little mean-spirited, it is not without some merit. The author cites, as one example, the trend to call men who hit their wives “intimate partner violence users” instead of “batterers” or “perpetrators.” (At least our field is consistent!) My worry is that modifying the language can unintentionally minimize the severity of the problem. We can’t lose sight of the fact that substance use disorder and domestic violence are extremely serious and often deadly problems.

When I moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, in the late 1960s, Rav Levi Yitzchok Horowitz, better known as the Bostoner Rebbe of Boston,* had a shtiebel-type shul on Beacon Street, right near the border of Brookline (which is a separate municipality) and the Brighton neighborhood of the city of Boston. At that time, the Rebbe himself no longer lived in the shul building but in an adjacent house, but the building still contained the room where the Rebbe held his seudos (today they would be called tishin), had his sukkah, baked matza (using a firewood oven in the basement), and had numerous hachnasas orchim rooms upstairs. The shul part of the building on the main floor still had all the appearances of a somewhat converted house.

The Rebbe himself was the attraction of the shul. There was no community to speak of at that stage. The shul had a few gabbayim to make sure that the daily minyan was somewhat organized. There wasn’t much of what we would call an organization. All of that would happen later.

September 6, 2024

A home invasion occurred on Winner Avenue behind Cross Country Elementary School. Three Hispanic men dressed as BGE employees knocked on the door of an elderly resident’s home, claiming to smell gas. They pushed their way inside and became violent towards the homeowner and ransacked the house.

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September 16, 2024

There was an armed robbery with multiple gunmen in front of Shomrei Emunah. A second carjacking attempt occurred on the 6500 block of Baythorne, near Rabbi Eichenstein's shul.

Remember when we talked about the so-called “singles crisis” in the last issue? Well, grab your favorite drink and a notepad because we’re diving deeper into solutions. As someone who’s been-there-done-that, and now coaches others through it, I’d like to share some insights that might just be a game changer for you or someone you love.

Family Stability: It Starts at Home

You know how they say charity begins at home? Well, so does a healthy view of marriage. The answer to family instability isn’t just about fixing broken homes – it’s about building inspiring ones. If you’re married, please realize: Your kids are watching. They’re not just passive observers; they’re future relationship architects, taking notes on your blueprint. If you don’t enjoy being married, why should they?

What can we do? Work on your marriage. Build the kind of home and relationship that your children will want to emulate. When they see that deep connection, that spark of joy between you and your spouse, the respectful way in which you speak to one another during disagreements, they’ll want to create it for themselves. You are planting seeds that will grow into their future (hopefully healthy) relationships.

It was May, 1967. The mood in Israel was tense. Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt was riling up the masses, talking about driving Israel into the sea. There was a fear that the surrounding Arab countries were about to attack Israel from all sides with the intent of destroying it, and there was a sense of imminent tragedy. High school students were put to work digging trenches around Israeli towns to impede foreign attack. City parks were consecrated as burial grounds. The common black humor of the time was, “Will the last person to leave Ben Gurion Airport please turn out the lights?”

One of the proudest, most memorable moments of my life occurred soon after I turned six years old, when my name appeared in our local paper, the New Haven Register. And, thanks to my mom, a”h, who was as sentimental as I am, I have it documented in the original yellowing clipping, headlined, “Register Fresh Air Fund Reaches Total of $18,637.”

The Register Fresh Air Fund was an initiative of our hometown paper to raise money to send local indigent children to camp. Together with my neighborhood friends, Beth, Lizzy, and Lynn, our Lemonade, Cookie, and Candy sale raised $21, a respectable donation, considering we charged a mere two cents per item!

 Efrat, Israel

It was truly a magical moment. On our first Shabbat after making aliyah last winter, we arrived at Shirat David, Rabbi Shlomo Katz’s shul in Efrat, and were showered with handshakes, hugs, and dancing around the bimah by the packed shul, as they sang in unison, V’shavu banim following an aliyah.

Then, on the last two Shabbatot in July, three different new olim had their own magical moments. So many olim in one shul, in one community in Israel, is quite rare. Yet such occasions are becoming more frequent. Nefesh B’Nefesh – the wonderful  handholding Israeli organization that helps new olim navigate the vast Israel systems and requirements, prior to and during their aliyah and for potentially years after – has remarkable statistics showing that over 4,000 new olim from the U.S. and Canada have moved to Israel since October 7^th. That includes 2,000 just this summer, on over 14 group flights. Additionally, there have been over 13,000 requests to opening aliyah files since October 7, 2023, an increase of 76% compared to the corresponding period last year. Our own aliyah in February was part of this record-setting trend and the very positive development that has no end in sight.