Rav Tzvi Pesach Frank, zt”l, the posek of his generation, lived almost his entire adult life in Yerushalayim, and passed away before I attended school and certainly before I had ever visited or moved to Israel. So how could I have a story about him?

Rav Moshe Feinstein, zt”l, was the gadol hador in America, and although I had the zechus to meet him on numerous occasions, I did not have any private conversations with him, nor did I observe any specific events that are not known to those who have read the biographies about him. So, how could I have a story about him?

I did have a close relationship with many of Rav Feinstein’s talmidim, however, and through them, I have a myriad of interesting stories and observations. One of these talmidim, Rav Efrayim Greenblatt, gave me the inside scoop on a fascinating piece of history of Jerusalem that includes these great figures.

It is well known that Rav Moshe Feinstein used to complain that the halachos of tzedakah were among those about which he was asked too infrequently. Yet some of the most common shailas I get have to do with tzedakah.  

The questions I will answer in this article are: 1) May a parent use maaser money to support married children in kollel? 2) May one can pay tuition out of maaser kesafim funds? and 3) May one ask Hashem to pay him back for the tzedakah money that he gave?

As a very American high school graduate, raised in a frum New York family, I arrived at Ner Yisrael planning to stay one year in full-time yeshiva. My life was all planned out. I already had a scholarship to a good college in New York City and was the winner of a New York State Regents Scholarship, which would provide me with extra money while attending college. I planned to combine my daily college attendance with some yeshiva education while I achieved my B.A. degree, probably with a major in psychology, and then I intended to pursue my professional career: either to attend graduate school and become a psychologist or, more likely, to attend a top law school and become an attorney.

“Ma Nishtana halaila hazeh….? On all other nights we eat chometz or matza, but on this night we eat only matza….”

Those of us who live in Israel but have children and grandchildren living in chutz la’aretz, or vice versa, will certainly identify with my predicament. My daughter, who lives in New Jersey, was expecting right before Pesach, with the probability of a bris on erev Yom Tov or on Yom Tov itself. With Pesach coming on Sunday night, it meant that, should she have a boy, it would be impossible or at least very difficult for me to attend the bris. I admit to a lot of disappointment; up to that time, I had not missed a single bris of any of my (at the time, nine) grandsons, two of which involved my spending Shabbos in Flatbush, where my son lives with his family. But the timing of this baby’s arrival, two weeks before Pesach, complicated matters, particularly since I was scheduled to give a Shabbos Hagadol drasha in our neighborhood in Yerushalayim.

In the nearly 20 years since our aliyah, I have traveled to the US many times – generally combining business and pleasure by attending family simchas and fundraising in the same week. Since I now have two married children in the States, these visits have become more frequent, but they are also for the most part uneventful.

That word cannot be used to describe my most recent trip to the East Coast, scheduled for two weeks after Sukkos. The “fun” began on erev Sukkos, when my son forwarded me a news item that, due to runway repair construction at Ben Gurion Airport, all flights for 16 days in November would be flying over the Holon cemetery and thereby pose a problem for kohanim.