Just over one year has passed since we pulled away from our house for the last time in a rented pickup truck packed with 11 suitcases, five carry-ons, five personal items, a stroller, car seats, toys, activities, and snacks. With our home and cars sold, we and our three children left our beloved Baltimore behind.

My husband and I are native Baltimoreans. My mother, Cindy Futeral, a”h, graduated from Bais Yaakov in 1980, and I followed her 26 years later. After high school, I attended Maalot, Towson, and University of Maryland at Baltimore. My husband had been a student at Talmudical Academy, Rambam, and Ner Yisrael, followed by University of Maryland at College Park. We loved Baltimore with its calm lifestyle, where keeping up with the proverbial Cohens was not central to our success.

I grew up in a different time. The lines between adults and children were drawn with precision. I called adults Mr. or Mrs., and it never occurred to me to answer back to my parents. When I ate with adults other than my parents, my siblings and I sat at the children’s table. We never felt left out; that’s just the way things were back then, and we accepted it without question.

Mostly everyone I knew learned proper manners. We said please and thank you, ate with our mouths closed, and were taught not to interrupt adults when they were speaking. My mother insisted we speak correctly, using correct diction. In my small town, my friends all said, “I’m going over my friend’s house” and “It was so fun.” I learned to say, “I’m going over to my friend’s house” and “It was so much fun.

Doni, a friend of mine since high school, sidled up to me in the supermarket one day and said he wanted to talk. He related that years ago he had been visiting Israel and saw a man outside Yericho who was giving camel rides. He approached the man and asked, “How much do you charge to go up on the camel?” The man replied good-naturedly, “It is free.” The price was right, so Doni took a deep breath and courageously proceeded to participate in local culture. He mounted the camel, and the camel rose. Led by its owner, the camel began to walk, as Doni held on tightly with a mixture of joy and trepidation. Eventually, he had enough and decided it was time to come down. He called to the owner that he wanted to stop. The owner called back, “To go up on the camel is free, but to come down is 20 shekel? Okay?” Doni didn’t find it funny, but he did agree.

Autism is a challenging – and more and more frequently diagnosed – condition. In fact, as of 2018, the CDC estimates its prevalence as 1 in 44 children. While we might think of a child with autism as being non-verbal and exhibiting hand flapping and other odd behaviors, he could also look like any other child yet be struggling with many life skills. Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, differ widely. What they have in common are deficits in communication and social interaction, and 2) restricted, repetitive behaviors, interests, or activities.

Mrs. Irma Pretsfelder, a resident of Ranchleigh and a member of Ner Tamid Greenspring Valley Synagogue, was born in Bürgeln, a small town in Western-Central Germany, in 1926. “I guess that makes me an old lady now,” she quipped when I had the pleasure of interviewing her this summer. Her family had lived in Bürgeln for generations. She was fortunate to be able to flee Germany for England just before World War II began, when she was almost 13 years old, and has lived in Baltimore for the past 76 years. Her gentle and warm demeanor belies the suffering and anguish she endured in her life. Her memory is excellent, and she kindly agreed to provide us with her fascinating account of pre-war life in Germany, as well as the War years in England and beyond.

We used to joke that my dad and my stepmom owed me shadchanus for their marriage of close to 25 years. After being introduced through a mutual friend in the 1990s, my dad and stepmom, Sara Leah, corresponded over the phone and via fax. (Remember those days?) After a few months, they met in a pizza shop in Boro Park. For some reason, he brought us children along with him. Perhaps it was because he didn’t know better, or maybe it was because he wanted her to view him as a package deal with the kids. 

At first she thought he was crazy for bringing his kids on a date intended for two, but then I – being a lactose-intolerant Jewish kid – got a stomachache, and we went to her home to use the restroom. Sara Leah was so impressed with how my father took care of me that she decided to give him another shot, and that’s when their life as a couple began. 

by Meira Levi and Aharon Levi

 You might say that teaching is our family business. My father has been teaching in yeshivos for over 20 years, and I began teaching in Bais Yaakov when I returned home from seminary. I must admit that it’s nice to come home at the end of the day and have someone to talk shop with, someone with whom I can compare notes. Sometimes I’m in class, and a student pulls a particular stunt or asks a particularly pointed question, and I have this sense of deja vu. Then it dawns on me that my father told me an almost identical story of that same thing happening to him a few years back. Just recently I shared with him a question I seem to get almost every other week: Why do we need to learn this?

Building a hospital is not a typical endeavor for a chaddishe rebbe. But the Klausenberger Rebbe, Rabbi Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam, zt”l, wasn’t a typical rebbe.

Born in 1905, in Rudnik, Poland, young Yekusiel Yehudah showed signs of greatness early on. As a child, his primary teacher was his father, Rav Tzvi Hirsch Halberstam, who was also the rav of the town. The Klausenberger Rebbe stated that the time he spent learning with father – formally and informally – made an everlasting impression on him even though his father passed away when he was only 13.

Dear Dr. Kidorf,

I have been reading your articles in the WWW with great interest. I am a bachur who is of legal drinking age. I went to a shul for Simchas Torah, where the rule was that everyone had to bring their own bottle of alcohol. Not only did people bring their own bottles, but they brought fancy stuff that cost, at a minimum, 50 dollars a bottle (and that’s the low end). In your previous articles, you mentioned the drop in IQ points for drinking under 25, and I don’t want to damage my brain. (I am rather proud of my IQ.) However, what am I supposed to do when I want to get together with my friends for all these occasions, such as weddings, and, actually, almost every Shabbos? I want to fit in and am not willing to be the odd guy out. I am having trouble bridging the points you have made in the past with “real life.” Any advice or insight would be appreciated.

?In 1977, in Long Beach, California, I met a saintly Lubavitcher chasid named Menachem Mendel Futerfas. Active at age 70, he was fundraising for Kfar Chabad in Israel. He was born in London in 1907, prior to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. For many years, he ran underground cheders in Russia during the darkest days of Soviet oppression. When the Soviets eventually learned of his efforts, they tortured and imprisoned him for 14 years. Reb Mendel, as he was known, was also responsible for repatriating thousands of Jewish Polish refugees after World War II.