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As Rosh HaShanah approached, many of us were busy planning our davening, our meals, and getting our thoughts together.

Please recite Psalms 20, 30, 88, 121, and 130.

Yosef ben Esther Gittel

Chaim Avraham ben Shifrah Zisel

The Kew Gardens Hills Shofar Blowing Initiative was the brainchild of neighborhood resident Mark Mittel, who has long blown shofar at local senior centers and a local minyan. With many homebound due to COVID-19 restrictions, Mittel felt there was an obvious solution. “Many in our area can blow shofar; we just needed to arrange a system to alert the community and find members from the neighborhood to rise to the occasion,” explained Mittel, who also stepped in for Jack Meth to lead the 72^nd Avenue shofar blowing.

The mother of the Chofetz Chaim was once asked why she thought she had been zocheh to have a son such as the Chofetz Chaim. She could not think of anything she had done to warrant such a son. They pressed her and said you must have done something special. She said the only thing she could think of was before she married, her mother had told her that any free minute she had, e.g., while waiting for the soup to boil or some such opportunity, she should use to say a few p’rakim of T’hilim. This is what she did, and she felt that in the z’chus of the T’hilim she said, she was zocheh to have a son such as the Chofetz Chaim (www.aneinu.com).

What do Houston, Miami, Brooklyn, The Five Towns and Lakewood all have in common? All of them were cities that participated in Dirshu’s momentous Yom Limud U’Tefillah to commemorate the yartzeit of the Chofetz Chaim and all that he stood for. They joined hundreds of other communities in every continent aside from Antarctica, in a massive demonstration of Jewish unity.

 You can build it very small,

You can build it very tall,

You can build it very large,

You can build it on a barge.