“O God! Nations have come into Your heritage; they have defiled Your Holy Temple; They have given the … the flesh of Your pious ones to the beasts of the earth. They have spilled their blood like water around Jerusalem…” (Tehillim 79) It was 5:30 AM and my bedroom was still pitch black. I gently picked up my phone to look at the time and I am
Quite often I am the ‘go to’ person with regard to whatever someone may need in Israel. As I have three married children living there and my father was a sixth generation Yerushalmi, I have hundreds if not thousands of relatives in almost every corner of the land. I was therefore not surprised when Dovid contacted me for my input. Dovid, who is just turning 20, is a good-natured
“In the Merit of the Righteous Women the Jewish People Were Redeemed”~Yalkut Shimoni Shir HaShirim:993. I met my good friend Hymie Gluck from the Bagel Store yesterday. Hymie is a warm and friendly person who I (and many others) like and admire very much. He always has a good Vort or story to relate to me any time he sees me.
Yesterday was no exception as he related to an incident which brought tears to my eyes.
We all make mistakes, I know I do. In fact, I probably make more mistakes in a day than correct decisions! However, too often, I expect others to be tolerant and forgiving and forgetting when it comes to my mistakes while I am too strict in not being as tolerant with regard to the mistakes of others.
On June 10th, 1977, an Israeli freighter ship, the ‘Yuvali’, en route to Taiwan, sighted 66 half-starved and sickened Vietnamese refugees who were part of the thousands of “Boat People” who were desperately trying to escape the tyrannical Communist regime of Viet Nam. Captain Meir Tadmor telegraphed Haifa for permission to take them aboard, even though his ship carried only enough life rafts and jackets for his 30-member crew.
I can recall the cab ride many years ago. As I entered the cab in Yerushalayim almost a score of years ago, I was more than a little nervous. With all of the rhetoric and rancor about rabbis and Chareidim being tossed around in the media at that point in time, I was concerned that with my obvious Chareidi-rabbinic appearance that perhaps my secular-looking cab-driver would be less than appreciative of me. Therefore, when I entered the cab I
Lawrence Bernstein (name changed) was born to Holocaust survivors in the East Tremont Section of the Bronx in 1951; the family davened by Rabbi Moshe Bick Zt”l on East 169th Street. Lawrence knocked on my door on Erev Pesach minutes before I was about to sell the Chometz. Larry was obviously a not-a-regular and I had no time on such a busy day to ‘chap a schmooze’. He said he was here to “sell me his hoometz."
