Queens Jewish Link
Connecting the Queens Jewish Community These images coming out of France earlier this week should be seen by every single New Yorker, as...
Two recent stories highlight both the promise and the risks in expanding chareidi military service.
The sukkah is a temporary structure, but it is meant to become our home. The Mishnah tells us that for seven days, a person should make his sukkah his permanent dwelling and his house temporary. We leave behind the solid walls and protections with which we surround ourselves all year and move into a fragile dwelling beneath the s’chach.
We usually think of the Aseres Yemei Teshuvah as the days between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. But Chazal did not call them the “seven days of repentance.” They are the Ten Days of Repentance, which means that Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur themselves are not merely the bookends of the process. They are part of it.
In the new book After the Davening, which presents the teachings of my rebbi, Rabbi Michel Twerski shlita, he offers a searching way to measure whether we are living the Torah we profess.
When Yom Kippur was observed in the time of the Beis HaMikdash, the avodah of the day stood at the center of its observance. It was the one time during the year when the Kohen Gadol entered the Kodesh HaKodashim, lifnai v’lifnim, crossing a boundary that no other human being was permitted to cross.
It is an honor and a privilege to write about great individuals, especially those who’ve tremendously impacted my own life and politics. Joe Mermelstein was one such individual. It is not a coincidence that his third yahrtzeit takes place on the very same day that his friend, his colleague, and his prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is up for re-election on April 9. Joe, if he were still alive, would be the first to pay for 747s to fly Israeli citizens living in America to Israel to make sure to vote in the election (of course, he would not tell them who to vote for, but they would know). He was a man of action. He was not a talker. He was a doer. He made me president of American Friends of Ateret Cohanim, and for that I am forever grateful. His life spanned most of the 20th century and was devoted to the Jewish people, his family, and his business. His story is truly an impressive history lesson.
