My first professional position in Jewish communal work was as the Youth and Education director in an “out-of-town” community, Wilmington Delaware. My wife Arleeta and I arrived with our one-year-old son Doniel in July of 1969. We were excited to take up a new and exciting challenge. Wilmington had a very small Jewish community, and we barely had a minyan of shomer Shabbos Jews.

A few days after we moved into our lovely apartment, the elderly chazan of the one and only OINO (Orthodox-in-name-only) shul asked if I’d join him in the shul’s kitchen for tea. The chazan was an ehrliche Yid from “de heim.” He had made it to the U.S. before the war and found work in Wilmington as a shochet and cantor. He was an old-school Jew who preferred Yiddish to English.

Kiryat Sefer, Modi’in Illit

I entirely identify myself as part of the Israeli chareidi community. I am also an immigrant from the U.S. and am identified as such as well. I first came here to learn in yeshiva only after getting a college degree.

My rebbe told me in the name of Rav Hutner, zt”l, that all immigrants to Eretz Yisrael are a “transition generation.” We decided to go through a transition from the way we grew up into a different kind of life that we now wish to lead. This is not to say that we grew up with anything inherently “bad”; we just want something else for our children. We want them to be sheltered from what we were exposed to in the “old country.” We want to give them the opportunity to grow to greater spiritual heights than we were able to obtain.

Many of you reading this article know me. After all, I grew up in Baltimore and spent my whole life here. Some of you know me as a businessman, with a 40-year career in specialty foods. Others know me from my articles in the Where What When or as a trustee of Baltimore’s wonderful Ahavas Yisrael Charity Fund. What many of you may not know is my profound attachment to music and especially to my guitar. Let me tell you the story.

Tzivia stepped back and examined her work. Perfect. A big picture of the Chazon Ish was now hanging in her living room – her living room! Wouldn’t Moishy Herman be impressed. She picked up Mom’s abstract painting, “Desert Winds,” now sitting forlornly on the side and gently placed it behind the couch.

Pesach is passed, and we are left with more than beautiful memories. For many of us, thoughts turn to losing the pounds we gained over the holiday, and even the pounds we started it with. The answer for many is to go on a “diet.” Dieting is a near-obsession in our culture even though we know it does not work very well for most people. When their motivation to continue on the path of deprivation flags, people tend to gain back the weight they lost. Often, they gain even more. Here, two experts in our community express their thoughts on dieting.

For some women, the most painful aspect of motherhood is not becoming a mother. When personal, familial, and social expectations of maternity are unfulfilled, the psychological fallout is often immense. Infertility and pregnancy loss are at odds with the biological, emotional, and spiritual drives that motivate a Jewish woman to birth and nurture her children. Those painful experiences are seldom discussed openly, but they are an aspect of maternity nonetheless.

The last 13 months, encompassing Corona and a third and fourth Israeli election, have been just plain creepy. Even the weather has been weird, with the coldest post-Pesach week I can remember in 35 years.

Well, thanks to the efforts of our excellent prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, we seem to have tackled Corona. Through his efforts at badgering the CEO of Pfizer, who received phone calls from Netanyahu 30 times, most Israelis have been vaccinated already, and our numbers have fallen from 70,000 actively sick Corona patients on February 10, to 3,300 as of yesterday (April 12). Most of the actively ill are people who refused the vaccination.

My husband and I recently visited the village of Peki’in, 40 minutes from our home in the Galil. It was incredibly moving to meet Margalit Zinati, the 86-year-old lone surviving Jew of Peki’in, and to visit the cave where some speculate Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai hid from his Roman oppressors. I love that every single corner of Israel not only has such a wealth of geopolitical and religious history but that we feel a genuine spiritual connection and link to the Land we now call home.

We usually do a lot of hiking on Chol Hamoed. My darling wife Chana is an avid fitness enthusiast, while I try to play the good husband and tag along and try to enjoy myself (or at least pretend to enjoy myself) as much as possible. Well, I guess my acting isn’t as good as I thought, and after several years of this itinerary, she told me that I needn’t shlep along anymore, and we could find other activities to enjoy together.

Have you ever blushed? Have you ever experienced “butterflies” in your stomach? Have you ever felt your heart racing out of excitement or fear?

These common occurrences are undeniably physical phenomena. Yet their underlying causes are not physical but emotional. Might there be other physical phenomena, even illnesses, whose true, underlying causes also reside in the world of our emotions?

Many of us would, understandably, reject such a possibility. Our mindset is a Western one. What is observable by the senses and empirically verifiable is legitimate. What isn’t isn’t. Moreover, the mind and the body are two separate entities. Emotions may be responsible for emotional illnesses. My back pain, however, is caused by a structural abnormality, my irritable bowel by inflammation, my chronic fatigue by….well, nobody really knows but certainly not by my inner world of feelings.