HANC Middle School’s Eighth Grade Graduation took place on Wednesday, June 19, in the gym of our illustrious yeshivah. The gym was adorned with balloons and a “2024” arch. The graduates looked extremely proud as they walked down the aisle, and their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were certainly shepping a lot of nachas.

The Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV), representing over 2,500 traditional, Orthodox rabbis in American public policy, Tuesday lamented the decision by Hebrew Union College (HUC), the flagship seminary of the Reform Judaism movement, to admit and ordain rabbinical candidates in interfaith relationships. This comes after the board of HUC dropped its ban prohibiting students from being in a relationship with a person of another faith.

For a decade and a half, Rav Wolfson made an annual visit to Kew Gardens Hills

The Torah world was thrown into mourning this past Motza’ei Shabbos shortly after midnight, with the p’tirah of Rav Moshe Wolfson ztk”l, 99. In the 1960s, Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky, Rosh HaYeshivah at Mesivta Torah Vodaath of Kensington, Brooklyn, appointed Rav Wolfson, a beloved magid shiur, to be Mashgiach Ruchani at the Torah citadel where he had been one of Rav Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz’s closest talmidim. Rav Wolfson was also the longtime mara d’asra at the Yeshiva’s summer getaway Camp Torah Vodaath, as well as at Beis Midrash Emunas Yisrael of Boro Park, which gained its namesake off the Rav’s everlasting principle of stressing the unique value of faith in our generation. Rav Wolfson, one of the most revered rabbinic figures of our time, delivered a down-to-earth experience to all he encountered.

My father, David Baron, whose Iraqi name was Jiji (changed later in Israel and then in America to Baron), was born in Basra, Iraq. In 1948, when war broke out in Israel, my father was one of those Jews who fled to Iran through the underground because the Shah was good to the Jews at that time.  After living in Iran for three years, he made Aliyah to Israel and joined his parents and the rest of his family. Life in Israel was hard for them because they lived in tents. They were accustomed to being non-observant, so they just settled with their way of life as it was.