Thursday, July 16, 2015

Why Do Jews Put Pebbles on Gravestones? from Chabad Magazine Wednesday, Tammuz 28, 5775 · July 15, 2015

Why Do Jews Put Pebbles on Gravestones? from Chabad Magazine Wednesday, Tammuz 28, 5775 · July 15, 2015
Editor's Note:
I don’t like to live in the past. Why waste the precious now bemoaning what was when there’s so many opportunities for what could be?
Yet these three weeks are a period of mourning for the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, its destruction and the beginning of our exile.
So let’s get this straight: We’re not mourning the past. The past is happening right now, and we’re fixing it for the sake of the future.
Rabbi Chayim Yosef Dovid Azulai, a brilliant star of 18th century Jewry, wrote that every historical event of the Jewish People reoccurs each year at the same time—just not in a way that's within the range of our five senses. Which means that now we have the opportunity to correct the greatest calamities of Jewish history. And if we are given the opportunity, that means we are given the power as well.
Jerusalem was destroyed and our exile began due to senseless divisiveness. Let’s start by fixing that. Get together with other Jews. Where there’s been a falling-apart, fall back together. Where there’s been acrimony, make harmony.
And then, where there’s been destruction and exile, let there be rebuilding and regathering.
Tzvi Freeman
on behalf of the Chabad.org Editorial Team
PS: What are your thoughts? Are Jews preoccupied with the past? Or is that our way of dealing with the future? Let me know.

Stop Groping
Turn on the light.
Fine, blunder around in the dark, carefully avoiding every pit. Grope through the murky haze for the exit, stumbling and falling in the mud, then struggling back to your feet to try again.
But why not just turn on the light?
Lift yourself up, plug yourself in, immerse yourself in the wisdom of Torah and ignite the love within your heart.
Even if the light is ever so faint, that will be enough. For the smallest flame can push away the darkness of an enormous cavern.

This Week's Features:
Printable Magazine

These 14-Year-Olds Helped This 88-Year-Old Celebrate the Bar Mitzvah He Never Had by Dovid Margolin
Jewish News » North America
At Illinois Holocaust Museum, 14-Year-Olds Inspire a Survivor’s Bar Mitzvah
At Illinois Holocaust Museum, 14-Year-Olds Inspire a Survivor’s Bar Mitzvah
Students invite a guest speaker to wrap tefillin, and the memories start to flow … by Dovid Margolin | July 12, 2015 8:02 AM

Mitchell Winthrop, center, was speaking to a group of students from Chicago’s Seymour J. Abrams Cheder Lubavitch Hebrew Day School at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie when the boys suddenly took charge, offering him a lasting lesson.
The guest speaker at the Illinois Holocaust Museum posed an unanswerable question to the dozen Chabad eighth-grade boys sitting in front of him. Mitchell Winthrop, 88 years of age, a survivor of the Auschwitz and Mauthausen Nazi concentration camps, had been raised in a secular Jewish home in Lodz, Poland. Why had he, he asked the boys—someone who hadn’t even had a bar mitzvah—been chosen to survive the Holocaust and not his pious, white-bearded grandfather?
His question was meant to provoke thought, but it also spurred the graduating class of Chicago’s Seymour J. Abrams Cheder Lubavitch Hebrew Day School into action.
“It’s never too late to make a bar mitzvah!” called out 14-year-old Yankel Raices. The group was on a trip to the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, the highlight of which is to hear a first-person account from a survivor. “We can do it right now. We can put on tefillin.”
Winthrop’s family intended for him to have a bar mitzvah; as a boy, he had even chosen which bicycle he wanted from his uncle’s shop as a birthday present. Then came the Nazi invasion, and on Nov. 14, 1939, the imposing Great Synagogue of Lodz—where Winthrop’s bar mitzvah was to be held a few days later—was burned to the ground. The next few years were a living hell for young Mitchell (born Mietek Weintraub; his Hebrew name isMoshe), during which he lost his home, family and friends.
More than seven decades later in Skokie, it took Winthrop a moment to realize that the boys were not joking. If Winthrop was willing, they would celebrate with him, then and there.
“I forgot the prayers,” Winthrop objected.
“We’ll help you,” the boys replied, almost in unison.
A few moments later, with a yarmulke on his head and a pre-war photograph of his entire family on the screen behind him, Winthrop donned tefillin for the first time. As he finished saying the words of “Shema,” the boys began to dance, pulling the older man into the joyous circle.
“When we started doing the hora, I felt very emotional,” says Winthrop. “Here was my whole family looking and witnessing my bar mitzvah, if only in a picture. I’m emotional even now as I retell it.”
The Early Years

“It’s never too late to make a bar mitzvah!” called out 14-year-old Yankel Raices.
Winthrop’s story begins years earlier, in the bustling city of Lodz, where he was born to an upper-middle-class family. Lodz—then home to nearly 200,000 Jews who made up some 30 percent of the city’s population—was a textile hub, and Winthrop’s father,Shimon, was a traveling salesman for his family’s successful textile business. Winthrop’s grandparents were strictly religious Jews, and while his own parents were less so, they remained closely connected to Jewish life.
Winthrop attended the Katzenelson School, where he studied Hebrew, and he often attended synagogue with his father or grandfather. “I still remember some of the prayers I learned preparing for my bar mitzvah from back then,” he recalls. “I studied hard because I didn’t want to shame my parents and family.”
Yet the bar mitzvah was not to be. The Nazis entered Lodz in September of 1939, and by May of the next year, the city’s Jews were forced into a ghetto—the second biggest in Poland—the Weintraub family among them.
“My father died of hunger in the ghetto,” relates Winthrop. “We were a well-to-do family, but my father died of hunger. After that, there was nobody to attend to my religious upbringing.”
Because of its high level of productivity, the Lodz ghetto remained intact until 1944, when the remaining Jews were shipped to Auschwitz and the ghetto liquidized. At Auschwitz, Winthrop and his mother, Devorah, both made it past the selection, and Winthrop remembers his mother being happy they had both been given the chance to live. He never heard from her again.
“When the war ended, I looked for her, and I’ve kept looking until today,” he says. “I still don’t know what happened to her or her six sisters.”
The only valuables Winthrop had with him when he arrived in Auschwitz were photos of his family. Ordered to strip and hand over their clothing, the inmates were left with only their shoes and belts. Winthrop slipped the photographs into his shoe.
“I had no money, only photos, but it was a treasure for me. As soon as I hid them, I felt a sharp blow to my head; it was a Kapo [an inmate who served as a prison functionary] watching that people don’t slip any money or jewelry into their shoes,” he remembers. “I emptied my shoe and when he saw it was only pictures, he didn’t care, but I was afraid to pick them up again. I just left them there.”
Winthrop spent eight days in Auschwitz; he says he doubts he would have survived had he been there any longer. When inquiries were made for an experienced electrician, Winthrop volunteered himself despite a total lack of knowledge of the subject, and thus was sent to a nearby coal mine to work.
He worked there until Jan. 17, 1945, when, with Soviet Red Army troops approaching, he and his fellow inmates were forced on a death march. Auschwitz was liberated 10 days later.

Winthrop’s elementary-school graduation at Itzhak Katznelson Academy in Lodz, June 1939. The tallest, he is standing in the back row on the upper left. Winthrop said he recovered the photo from a boy standing second to his left, M. Syrkis, whose family managed to escape Hitler and travel to what was then British Mandate Palestine. Winthrop got the photo from his schoolmate while on a visit toIsrael in 1964, when he was working for Bank Leumi.
Escaped and Sent Back
Winthrop remembers people dying around him as they marched, coupled with the fatigue that enveloped him. “I was sleeping as I marched; I knew that after a few days of this, we’d all be dead.”
After three days of marching, Winthrop made a daring escape together with an older Jew from Luxembourg. They were caught just a few days later and sent to Vienna, where Winthrop attempted to pass himself off as a Pole.
“They saw I was circumcised and knew I was lying,” he adds. “The Aibershter[‘the One Above,’ in Yiddish] helped me survive.”
From Vienna, the now 18-year-old was transferred to the Mauthausen labor camp in Austria, where he remained for three months and five days until it was liberated by the American army in May of 1945.
“I was emaciated, sleeping on corpses when the Americans came in,” recalls Winthrop. “But the first thing I did was take a train back to Lodz, back to the Russian side, to see what happened to my family, my home. Nothing was left.”
In the ensuing months, Winthrop and a few fellow survivors his own age managed to smuggle themselves back into the American zone, bribing Soviet troops and walking all night to once again find freedom. After a few years in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany, Winthrop immigrated to the United States in 1948.

Winthrop’s extended family in a photo dated in the fall of 1926. His mother is at the far right, seated in the chair, pregnant with Winthrop. His father is standing behind her. The two boys in the center are brothers and his second cousins, and the only other survivors from the entire photograph; they escaped to the Soviet Union.
Safely in America, Winthrop went about rebuilding his life, earning a master’s from the University of Chicago, teaching at Purdue University and then working as a teacher in the Chicago Schools System. His Polish remains impeccable; after his retirement in 1989, he worked in the Cook County courts system as a Polish interpreter. All the while he never shared his harrowing life story.
“At first, no one here wanted to hear our stories,” says Winthrop of the atmosphere Holocaust survivors encountered in the early post-war years. “They dismissed it, so I learned to clam up.”
Not wishing to traumatize his three children, he didn’t share his story even with his own family, finding ways to evade explaining the numbers tattooed into his left arm. It was in an effort to discover his mother’s fate that pushed Winthrop to pen his memoirs, The Arrival: I Sought God in Hell, with the hope that someone with any knowledge of what occurred might contact him. When he was done, he approached the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie about adding it to their gift shop.
“They told me that the book would sell better if I would consider speaking to audiences, as part of their speakers’ bureau,” he says. “So I was sort of pushed into this.”
Today, Winthrop addresses school groups and other audiences at the museum around once a week. Warm and articulate, he has become a popular speaker, sharing his experiences with a generation that can hardly fathom the horrors he witnessed and endured.
“People are buying the book and listening to my story,” he says. “So it’s bearing fruit.”
The Bar Mitzvah

Rabbi Ilan Heifetz, the Chabad school’s secular-studies principal
Having studied about the Holocaust as part of their eighth-grade curriculum, the Cheder Lubavitch boys boosted their learning with a visit to the museum.
“The exhibit is very well-done. The tour takes you through the rise of Hitler to the Wannsee Conference [outside Berlin] to the war, and ultimately, to liberation,” explains Rabbi Ilan Heifetz, the school’s secular-studies principal. “It’s a very powerful experience.”
At the end of their tour, the group met Winthrop, who told them the story of his life and shared with the boys a poem he had written for the 70th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation.
“I asked the boys: How could G‑d save me? I wasn’t a full-fledged Jew; I was circumcised, but never had a bar mitzvah.
“Instead of answering the question, they made me a bar mitzvah!”
Winthrop asked that the one extant photo of his family—taken mere months before he was born and given to him years later by a great-uncle who survived the war—be beamed onto the screen as the boys began to help him put tefillinon.

The group celebrated with singing and dancing. Days later, Winthrop, 88, attended the boys’ school graduation ceremony, putting tefillin on again, this time with Raices’ father, Rabbi Sholom Ber Raices of Lubavitch Chabad of Skokie.
“When I began to repeat the prayers, I realized that I knew them,” says Winthrop. “Seventy-five years! Seventy-five years after I learned them, I remembered. I tried to go ahead because I knew the words.”
Unbeknownst to the group of boys at the time, one of Winthrop’s sons was in the room, capturing the moment on video and witnessing an event that Winthrop refers to as bashert—something that was meant to be. “It was my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, all of my relatives, and one of my sons there, too; I was in front of my whole family. It was very exciting and emotional for me.”
Days later, Winthrop attended the boys’ graduation ceremony, putting tefillin on again, this time with Raices’ father, Rabbi Sholom Ber Raices of Lubavitch Chabad of Skokie.
If there is one word that could sum up the experience, it might simply be this: “wow.”
“Wow,” replies Winthrop, “is right.”
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="http://embed.chabad.org/multimedia/mediaplayer/embedded/embed.js.asp?aid=3000216&width=auto&height=auto"></script><span style="clear:both;" class="lb" id="lbdiv">Visit <a href="http://www.chabad.org/multimedia/default_cdo/aid/591213/jewish/Video.htm">Jewish.TV</a> for more <a href="http://www.chabad.org/multimedia/default_cdo/aid/591213/jewish/Video.htm">Jewish videos</a>.</span>

     Judaism 101 
  Starting Friday: Laws and Customs of the Nine Days

    
The first nine days of the month of Av, and also the morning of the tenth,1 are days of acute mourning for the destruction of the first and second Holy Temples.
During this time, we don’t:
  • Eat meat (including poultry) or drink wine, for during this period the sacrifices and wine libations in the Holy Temple ceased.2 The exceptions to this rule are meat and wine consumed on Shabbat or as part of a meal that celebrates a mitzvah, such as a circumcision, bar mitzvah, or the completion of a tractate of the Talmud.
  • Launder clothing (except for a baby’s)—even if they will not be worn during the Nine Days—or wear freshly laundered outer clothing.3 Those who wish to change their clothing daily should prepare a number of garments and briefly don each of them before the onset of the Nine Days. Then it is permitted to wear these “non-freshly laundered” garments during the Nine Days.We don’t consume meat or wine, for during this period the sacrifices and wine libations ceased
  • Swim or bathe for pleasure.
  • Remodel or expand a home.
  • Plant trees to be used for shade or fragrance (as opposed to fruit trees).
  • Buy, sew, weave or knit new clothing—even if they will be worn only after the Nine Days.
    Exceptions to this rule: (a) If you will miss a major sale, or if the garment will be unavailable later. (b) For the purpose of a mitzvah, such as purchasing new clothing for a bride and groom.
  • Cut nails during the actual week of the fast of Tisha B’Av—i.e., starting from the Saturday night before the fast until the conclusion of the Nine Days.
The Sephardic custom is to observe the stringencies regarding meat, wine and bathing only in the week of Tisha B’Av.
Some more observances:
  • The Sanctification of the Moon is postponed until after Tisha B’Av.
  • There is no law forbidding traveling during the Nine Days; however, it is customary to refrain from traveling (or engaging in any potentially perilous activity) during these days, unless it is absolutely necessary.
  • One may become engaged to be married during this period, but no celebration should be held until after Tisha B’Av.
Note: All these restrictions are in addition to the restrictions that apply during all of the Three Weeks.

Shabbat Chazon

The Shabbat preceding the Ninth of Av is called Shabbat Chazon—“Shabbat of the Vision.” This Shabbat’s reading from the Prophets begins with the words Chazon Yeshayahu, the “vision of Isaiah” regarding the destruction of the Holy Temple. The legendary chassidic master Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev said that on this special Shabbat, every Jewish soul is shown a vision of the third Holy Temple. The purpose of this vision is to arouse within every Jew a yearning to actually see this edifice which will be built by G‑d, and to do as many mitzvot as possible in order to realize this dream. While this vision may not be sensed with the physical eyes, the soul certainly experiences this vision, and it affects the person on the subconscious level.
There is no mourning on Shabbat—click here for more on this topic.
If We try to moderate the sadness through participating in permissible celebrationspossible, this week’s havdalah wine or grape juice should be given to a child—younger than bar/bat mitzvah age—to drink.
Click here for the rules that apply if this Shabbat falls on the eighth or ninth of Av.

The Inner Dimension

“When the month of Av enters, we reduce our joy . . .”
—Talmud, Taanit 26b
The entire month of Av is considered to be an inopportune time for Jews. Our sages advised that a Jew who is scheduled to have a court hearing—or anything of a similar nature—against a gentile during this month should try to postpone it until after Av, or at least until after the Nine Days.
On the positive side, as we get closer and closer to the messianic era, when these days will be transformed from days of sadness to days of joy, we start to focus on the inner purpose of the destruction, which is to bring us to a higher level of sensitivity and spirituality, and ultimately to the rebuilding—with even greater grandeur and glory—of all that was destroyed.
We therefore try to moderate the sadness through participating in permissible celebrations. It is therefore the Chabad custom to have someone complete a tractate of the Talmud each day of the Nine Days, in order to infuse these days with permissible joy.
Click here for more on this topic.
FOOTNOTES
1.The Temple was set ablaze on the afternoon of the ninth of Av, and burned through the tenth.
2.Through custom, this prohibition has been expanded to include food cooked with meat. However, one may eat food that was prepared in a meat pot or utensil.
3.Shoes purchased specifically for the Ninth of Av—e.g., shoes made from canvas or rubber—may be worn even if they are new.
© Copyright 2015, all rights reserved.



     Judaism 101 
  What to Expect at a Conversion


Question:

I’m planning to convert to Judaism. This has been something I’ve been considering and mulling over for years, and I’ve made my decision. What I should expect? What will the process look like?

Answer:

The most important thing is that when you convert you will be Jewish. This is something that you will carry with you for the rest of your life. It is important to note that conversion to Judaism is a one-way street. Once you take the plunge (literally and figuratively), you’re a full-fledged member of the tribe forever.
Another important thing to take note of is that conversion is something that can be done only under the auspices of a bona fide beit din (Jewish court) made up of three G‑d-fearing, fully observant rabbis. When looking for a beit din to do your conversion, do your homework, and make sure the rabbis are indeed Torah-observant (Orthodox) and recognized as such by others.

The Actual Conversion:

Conversion to Judaism has a few components, which are undertaken under the supervision of an established beit din:
  1. Accepting the yoke of the commandments. When you convert, you must verbalize your commitment to live in accordance with all of the Torah’s commandments as they are explained in Torah law. It is not enough to commit to some or even most of the precepts; a convert must commit to every single one of them. Also, this needs to be done out of a sincere desire to serve G‑d as a Jew, not because of any other motive, such as the desire to marry a Jewish man or woman.
  2. Immersion in the mikvah. A mikvah is a pool of natural water, usually rainwater. At your conversion, you will dunk into this spiritually cleansing bath. It is at this moment that you will accept the Torah upon yourself.
  3. Circumcision. If you are a male, you will need to be circumcised. If you were circumcised as a baby, a symbolic drawing of blood is all that will be done at this point.
  4. When the Temple stood in Jerusalem, a convert would bring a special sacrifice to the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. When the Temple is rebuilt—may it be speedily in our days—converts will again bring sacrifices.1

Why Does It Take So Long?

Conversion is a lifetime commitment. This means that you really need to know what you’re getting into, and the Jewish community, as represented by the beit din, needs to know whom they are embracing as the newest member of the Jewish family. In order to make sure that everyone is on the same page, many beit dins have a regimen of study and observance they require potential converts to undertake before they will perform a conversion. You’ll often be required to live immersed within the Jewish community, observing all the mitzvahs, so that you get a firsthand feel of every aspect of a committed Jewish life.
In some cases this process might be overseen by a rabbi vouching for your sincerity, knowledge and commitment. Other beit dins may actually set a course of study and practice spread out over the several months or years, to make sure that you are really ready to convert. (See Why Is Conversion to Judaism So Hard?)

The Biblical Basis

The laws concerning conversion are derived from the instructions the children of Israel were given to prepare for receiving the Torah at Sinai. As the verse states, “One rule applies to the assembly, for yourselves and for the proselyte who resides [with you]; one rule applies throughout your generations—just as [it is] for you, so [it is] for the proselyte, before the L‑rd.”2
Take a careful look at our nation’s conversion process at Sinai, and you will see all the elements there:
Circumcision: The children of Israel had to circumcise themselves in Egypt before partaking of the paschal lamb, as is clear from the verse in Exodus, “All uncircumcised males may not eat from it [the paschal lamb].”3
Immersion: Later, at the foot of Mt. Sinai, we are told that Moses sprinkled the blood of the sacrifice upon the Jewish people as a preparation for receiving the Torah and becoming the Jewish nation.4 The rabbis received a tradition, “There is never a sprinkling without immersion.”5 Furthermore, we find that G‑d tells Moses that in preparation for receiving the Torah he should tell the Jewish people to “sanctify them today and tomorrow, and have them wash their garments.”6 According to tradition, “washing” is a reference to immersing in the mikvah.
Sacrifice: The third thing that the Jewish people did before fully converting was to offer a sacrifice at Mt. Sinai.7
Beit Din: Additionally, the children of Israel were overseen by a rabbinical court, as the verse states, “I charged your judges at that time, saying: ‘Hear the causes between your brethren, and judge righteously between a man and his brother, and the stranger [ger, “convert”] that is with him.’”8

On a Spiritual Note

Our sages say that a convert is someone who has always had a Jewish soul. That is why the Talmud refers to the convert as “a convert who comes to convert” rather than as “a gentile who comes to convert.” In other words, the convert was always a Jewish soul at his or her core.
Additionally, our sages compare a convert to a newborn child. The process of birth is the closest human beings can come to touching the divine. At the same time, it is a painful experience that sometimes seems like it is stretching on forever. Like a birthing mother, hang in there. The results are well worth it.
FOOTNOTES
1.For an overview of the fundamentals, see Talmud Bavli, Yevamot 46a–49b and Bechorot 30b; Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Issurei Biah, chapters 13–14; Tur, Shulchan Aruch and Aruch ha-Shulchan, Yoreh De’ah 268–269.
2.Leviticus 15:15; Talmud, Keritot 9a.
3.Exodus 12:48.
4.Exodus 24:8.
5.There are other circumstances in the Torah where there are sprinklings, such as in the purification process required after coming into contact with a corpse (Numbers 19:18), as well as in the purification of a leper (Leviticus 14:7). In these other cases, the sprinkling alone is not sufficient to achieve the purification, and the individual seeking purification would need to immerse in a mikvah as well (Numbers 19:19Leviticus 14:8). This supports the notion that immersion was needed for the sprinkling at Sinai as well.
6.Exodus 19:10.
7.Exodus 24:5.
8.Deuteronomy 1:16; Talmud, Yevamot 47a.
© Copyright 2015, all rights reserved.



     Editor's Picks 
  The World Is a Symphony

    

All that exists sings. Not that it exists and it sings. No. Its song is its being.
Why? Because each and every being emerged out of the infinite light. And to there it desires to return—not to be a thing, but to return to nothingness, reabsorbed within its source.
Yet, when it comes close to its source, it feels the desire of that source—that it must go back and exist.
And so it goes on, oscillating back and forth between being and not-being, each thing with its particular rhythm and pattern. According to that pattern, so are the properties of that thing. And that is its song.
Today, we call this string theory. The prophets and the ancient Book of Formation call it “running and returning.” It is the secret of all life and all being. There is not a thing that exists that does not throb, pulsate, and travel its journey undulating in a manifold pattern of waves. Every particle of life sings.
As a master composer is invested in every nuance of His composition, so too with our universe. It may be a nebula or an exploding supernova, it may be an ant or a microbe or even some subatomic particle that flits in and out of existence before any laboratory can detect it—in each one is invested all the infinite wisdom and beauty of an infinite Composer.
How much more so in the totality of all these trillions upon trillions of parts, all in perfect harmony and counterpoint, each playing its unique part in the counterpoint of a single symphony.
That is the way it is in all the higher, spiritual worlds. In our world, the parts are out of sync. In the higher worlds, the light of wisdom creates a harmony between all parts. Our world awaits us, the human being, to find harmony among ourselves.
Once we find that harmony, our world responds with a symphony to outshine all others. Because in the higher worlds, the Composer only dreams of His music. Our world is a world of action. In our world, it all becomes real.
Create harmony—at home, at work, in all the world around you. Create wonder.
Rabbi Tzvi Freeman, a senior editor at Chabad.org, also heads our Ask The Rabbi team. He is the author of Bringing Heaven Down to Earth. To subscribe to regular updates of Rabbi Freeman's writing, visit Freeman Files subscription.

© Copyright 2015, all rights reserved.



     Editor's Picks 
  The Temple Guards and Their Mystical Meaning


During the “Three Weeks,” when we remember the destruction of the Holy Temples in Jerusalem, it is customary to study the portions of the Talmud which detail the structure and function of these magnificent buildings where G‑d’s presence was manifest.
Two popular tractates are Middot, which discusses the layout of the Second Temple, and Tamid, which spells out the daily routine of the Levites and kohanim who served in the Temple.
Interestingly, both tractates begin with the same line—“In three places, the kohanim guard the Temple”—and then launch into a discussion of the stations of the honor guards who would remain awake all night to guard the Temple Mount.
The first point of departure between the two texts is that Tamid mentions only the three places where the kohanim would stand, while Middot goes on to list the 21 spots where Levite guards would stand as well. (The remainder of the tractates are quite different, although there is some overlap.)
Why the difference? Rabbi Levi Yitzchak devotes 25 pages of dense Kabbalistic text to explaining this discrepancy through the lens of Jewish mysticism.
The following is a mere sample skimmed from a rich and deeply nuanced analysis:

Chesed vs. Gevurah

Our first clue lies in the names of the two tractates.
Tamid, “Constant,” thus named because it enumerates that which took place on a constant basis, denotes the unbounded flow of divine energy that is characterized by the Kabbalistic modality of chesed—kindness.
Middot, “Measures,” thus named because it tells of the precise measurement of many of the Temple buildings, denotes the G‑dly attribute of gevurah—severity, strength and justice. With gevurah, G‑d curtails the effervescent flow of chesed.
This same distinction between chesed and gevurah also appears between the kohanim and the Levites.
The souls of the kohanim are derived from chesed, which is why they bless the nation of Israel after first saying, “Blessed are You . . . who has sanctified us with the holiness of Aaron and commanded us to bless His Nation of Israel with love.”
The souls of the Levites, on the other hand, come from gevurah.
Quite appropriately, Middot discusses the placement of the Levite guards, since both the tractate and the tribe are gevurah-oriented. It follows that Tamid tells only of the placement of the kohen guards, who share its chesedbent.

The Author Unmasked

Now let’s peel back another layer. The Talmud tells us that Middot came into being through the recollections of Rabbi Eliezer ben Yaakov, who lived through the harrowing years of the destruction of the Second Temple and the subsequent dispersion of our people.1
It is not known for certain if Rabbi Eliezer was a Levite, but we do know that he traced his maternal lineage to Levite stock.2 And the sages tell us that most boys resemble the brothers of their mother.3 Thus, if Rabbi Eliezer’s mother’s brothers were gevurah-inclined Levites, it stands to reason that he would have also had a healthy dose of the same attribute. Thus, it is most appropriate that he would have been the one to author a gevurah-themed tractate.

Significant Forgetfulness

Opening the book itself, we discover that there are two times where Rabbi Eliezer ben Yaakov stops the narrative, noting that he does not recall a specific detail: Concerning a specific chamber in the “women’s courtyard,” he says that he forgot its purpose. Abba Shaul then fills in, saying that it was used to store oil and wine, and that it was called the House of Oil in Aramaic.4
The second instance concerns a chamber called the “Wood Chamber.” Again, Rabbi Eliezer forgot its purpose, and Abba Shaul steps in, saying that it was for the high priest.5
Now, the very idea of forgetfulness, in which a certain piece of knowledge ends, is very much in line with gevurah, which curtails the unending flow of chesed.
But why did he forget the function of these two specific rooms?
Concerning the Wood Chamber, the answer is simple. Since the high priest epitomized the chesed of his fellow kohanim, it stood to reason that he would not find a permanent place in the gevurah-mind of Rabbi Eliezer ben Yaakov.
Parenthetically, this is also expressed in the Torah’s treatment of manslaughter, which we read about in the portion of Massei.6 If one kills by accident, he must flee to a city of refuge, where he lives among the Levites until the death of the high priest. What does a killer have to do with the high priest? Why does he return home only when the high priest dies? The Midrash explains, “The killer shortens the days of man, and the high priest lengthens the days of man. Is it not right that the shortener of days should be present with the lengthener of days.”7
And here we see the same division. The high priest, associated with unending kindness (lengthener of days) has no commonality with the accidental killer. On the other hand, the gevurah-oriented Levites can rehabilitate him, since they share a common trait—albeit expressed in a very different manner.
Indeed, the extending nature of the high priest is expressed in the very name of his office, the Wood Chamber, since trees often live for a very long time, much longer than humans.8
Now let us turn our attention to the other chamber that Rabbi Eliezer forgot about: the Oil Chamber. Oil is also very strongly associated with the high priest, who was traditionally elevated to his position in a ceremony that included special anointing oils.9
Since the ever-flowing oil was so closely linked to the high priest, the chamber named for it could not remain in Rabbi Eliezer’s gevurah-leaning consciousness.
Let us conclude with a prayer that we soon merit to once again see the Holy Temple in all its glory, with the high priest, anointed by oil, in his Wood Chamber and the Levites doing their guard duty, everyone involved in the constant, unending service of the Almighty.
Based on a lengthy discussion found in Torat Levi Yitzchak 270–294.
Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson (1878-1944) was a mystic and scholar who wrote commentaries on the most esoteric texts. As rabbi of a major Ukrainian city, he struggled valiantly to strengthen Judaism, in spite of Soviet persecution.

FOOTNOTES
1.Talmud, Yoma 16a.
2.In the beginning of the tractate he tells how his maternal uncle, a Levite charged with guarding the Temple, had fallen asleep at his post, and his garment was singed by the watchman.
3.Talmud, Bava Batra 110a.
4.Middot 2:5.
5.Middot 4:5.
6.Numbers 35.
7.Yalkut Shimoni ad loc.
8.This is also reflected in Isaiah’s prophecy of longevity in the future, where he says (Isaiah 65:22), “For as the days of a tree, so will be the days of My people.”
9.This is seen in the words of King David, who writes (Psalms 133:2), “As the good oil on the head which runs down upon the beard, the beard of Aaron, which runs down according to his attributes.”
© Copyright 2015, all rights reserved.



     Your Questions 
  Why Do Jews Put Pebbles on Tombstones?


Question:

I was visiting the gravesite of my mother, and I noticed that some tombstones had small rocks or pebbles on top of them. What is the reason for this?

Reply:

Some have made the claim that this is a relatively new custom,1 but while it is not necessarily a universal or even a Chabad custom,2 it is indeed an old Jewish practice that goes back at least to medieval times and possibly earlier.3

Why Is It Done?

There are a number of reasons given for this custom, on both a basic level as well as a more esoteric one:
  • By placing a rock or a pebble on top of the tombstone, we honor the deceased by letting people know that the gravesite has recently been visited.4 When others notice the rocks, they will see that this is a grave visitors frequent, and they too will take an interest in who is buried there, and perhaps will visit the gravesite themselves.5
  • On a more mystical level, the Talmud tells us that reading the inscription on a gravestone can adversely affect one’s Torah learning.6
    While the Kabbalists explain that in general this warning applies only to inscriptions that protrude from the tombstone and not words engraved into it,7 Rabbi Yosef Yuzpa Hahn (1570–1637) cites a tradition that placing a stone on the tombstone also helps to avoid any undesirable consequences that would result from reading a tombstone.8
  • The placement of the stone serves as an invitation of sorts for a spark of the departed to come down and rest upon the tombstone for the duration of the visit.9

Why Not Flowers?

While placing a rock on a tombstone is an old Jewish custom, placing flowers at a gravesite is not. In life, people may enjoy the beauty of their physical surroundings, but when they die, all of their material possessions and beauty are meaningless and left behind. It is only their accumulated spiritual wealth that remains immortal, just like a rock, which stays forever.
To learn more about why Jews don’t place flowers at a gravesite, see Flowers, Jews & Gravesites and Why No Flowers on Jewish Graves?
FOOTNOTES
1.Rabbi Yitzchak Borda, Responsa Yitzchak Yeranein, Yoreh De’ah 3:2, contends that this custom stems from the Mishnah (Eduyot 5:6), which says that the practice used to be that if one died, and he was guilty of a sin for which one would normally be stoned, the rabbis would place a very large rock on top of the funeral casket to attone for that sin. However, Responsa Rivevot Ephraim 8:51 vehemently refutes this claim. Others make a claim that this is a new custom, and is really an offshoot of a different ancient Jewish tradition of placing some grass on the tombstone. As we shall explain in subsequent footnotes, this custom goes back at least to the medieval ages, if not to Talmudic times.
2.It seems it is more prevalent within Ashkenazic Jewry. See, for example, Responsa Darkei David, Yoreh De’ah 15.
3.See Rabbi Reuven Margalios, Shaarei Zohar 161a, who points to the following episode in the Midrash as possible evidence of the very early practice of this custom: “Once, a student of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai forgot all of his learning. Not knowing what to do, he went to the cemetery, where he cried and prayed for mercy. There, he was told in a dream the following words: ‘When you will throw upon me three pebbles, I will come to you.’ Not knowing the meaning, he went to an interpreter of dreams, who replied that the word koli, which means ‘pebbles,’ can also mean ‘voice’; thus, the meaning is that if you review your learning three times, it will come back and stay with you. The student did so, and his previous scholarship was restored” (Kohelet Rabah 10:10). It should, however, be noted that Rabbi Margalios himself expresses a number of reservations at definitively pointing to this as proof that pebbles were commonly placed on graves.
4.Hilchot u-Minhagei Rabbi Shalom of Neustadt (Derashot Maharash) 490, cited in Ba’er Heitev on Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 224:8, and Eliyah Rabbah 224:7; Shaloh, Masechet Rosh Hashanah. See also Taamei ha-Minhagim 1069.
5.Based on this reason, one would place the stone onto the tombstone before leaving the cemetery.
6.Talmud, Horayot 13b.
7.Shaar ha-Mitzvot, Parshat Va’etchanan; Mishnat Chassidim, Yom Gimmel. See also Kitzur Shulchan Aruch 128:13.
8.Yosef Ometz, vol. 2, Seder ha-Limmud le-Atzmo. See Responsa Rivevot Ephraim 8:51, who postulates that the reason placing the stone helps may be based on the ancient custom of Ashkenazic Jews to have the tombstone lying flat. Thus, when one puts a stone or pebble onto the tombstone, one is in essence obscuring part of the text, which serves as a reminder about the consequences of reading an inscription and also prevents a visitor from fully reading the obscured inscription, pre-empting any effects that reading the text in its entirety may have.

Based on this, one would place the stone upon the gravestone when he arrives.
9.Preface to Siftei Tzaddikim by Rabbi Solomon Mutzafi. Based on this reason, one would place the stone upon the grave as soon as he arrives, and he would take it off right before he leaves.
© Copyright 2015, all rights reserved.



     Your Questions 
  Why Break a Glass at a Jewish Wedding?


Question:
I understand that the reason I will be breaking a glass with my foot at the end of the wedding ceremony is to commemorate the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem some 2,000 years ago. This was indeed a significant event in Jewish history, but it doesn’t seem to have any relevance to me. What does a destroyed building have to do with my wedding?
Answer:
The destruction of the Holy Temple has extreme personal relevance. It happened to you. It is true that shattering the glass primarily commemorates the fall of Jerusalem; however, it is also a reminder of another cataclysmic shattering—that of your very own temple, your soul.
Before you were born, you and your soulmate were one, a single soul.
Then, as your time to enter this world approached, G‑d shattered that single soul into two parts, one male and one female. These two half-souls were then born into the world with a mission to try to find each other and reunite.
At the time, the split seemed tragic and incomprehensible. Why create fragmentation where there was once completion? Why break something just so it could be fixed? And if you were meant to be together, why didn’t G‑d leave you together?
It is under the chupahthe wedding canopy, that these questions can be answered. With marriage, two halves are reuniting, never to part again. Not only that, but you can look back at the painful experience of being separated and actually celebrate it. For now it is clear that the separation brought you closer than you would otherwise have been.
Ironically, it was only by being torn apart and living lives away from each other that were you able to develop as individuals, to mature and grow. Your coming together is something you had to achieve and choose, and therefore it is appreciated deeply. With the joyous reunion at the wedding, it becomes clear that your soul was split only in order to reunite and become one on a higher and deeper level.
And so you break a glass under the chupah and immediately say the congratulatory wish of “Mazel Tov!” Because now, in retrospect, even the splitting of souls is reason to be joyous, for it gave your connection the possibility for real depth and meaning.
We see a parallel story in the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.
The Temple was not merely a building; it was the meeting place of heaven and earth, the ideal and the real, G‑d and creation. When the Temple was lost, so was the open relationship between G‑d and the world. Our souls were ripped away from our Soulmate.
The only antidote to fragmentation is unity. And the deepest unity is experienced at a wedding. Every wedding is a healing, a mending of one fragmented soul, a rebuilding of Jerusalem in miniature. Our sages teach us, “Whoever celebrates with a bride and groom, it is as if he rebuilt one of the ruins of Jerusalem.” When soulmates reunite in a holy marriage, an energy of love and oneness is generated, elevating the world and bringing it one step closer to mending its broken relationship with G‑d.
So you see, your personal story and the story of Jerusalem’s destruction are inextricably linked. The shattering that happened to Jerusalem happened to your soul, and the joy you are experiencing now will one day be experienced by Jerusalem, too.
One day soon, when the Temple is rebuilt, our souls will reunite with G‑d, our Soulmate, in a true relationship that we built together. We will no longer mourn the destruction, but looking back we will finally understand its purpose, and we will celebrate.
Then, even the shattering will deserve the blessing of “Mazel Tov.”
Please see our Jewish Wedding site for more insights into the wedding rituals.
Aron Moss is rabbi of the Nefesh Community in Sydney, Australia, and is a frequent contributor to Chabad.org.

© Copyright 2015, all rights reserved.



     Parshah 
  The Joy of Slow-Speed Travel


For the past century, we have been perfecting the art of high-speed travel. We can now get from any point on the globe to another in a matter of hours. But apparently that is not fast enough for some—they want to get there within minutes. And the sky is no longer the limit. Futuristic modes of travel include personal space flights, and high-speed tubes such as Elon Musk’s hyperloop.
But where are we headed at such breakneck speed?
We find a few instances in the Torah of preternaturally shortened travel. When Abraham’s servant Eliezer traveled from Canaan to Aram to seek a wife for Isaac, he covered the distance, a three-day journey by foot, in just one day.1 The sky is no longer the limitSimilarly, the road shortened for Jacob on his way from Beersheba to Charan to find a wife.2
During their initial journey in the desert, it seemed that the Jewish people were likewise on the express track. On the verse “It is an eleven-day journey from Chorev to Kadesh Barnea” (Deuteronomy 1:2), Rashi comments that the Jewish people traversed this distance in only three days.
But despite the early head start, matters played out quite differently. Instead of going supernaturally fast, we went supernaturally slow, and spent 40 years wandering in the desert.
It seems that the Torah leaves room here for only two extremes—either a dramatically shortened journey or a dramatically drawn-out one.
The Jewish people set out from Egypt destined for the Promised Land. And there were two possible ways of getting there. One way was high-speed travel. G‑d could have whisked them off, posthaste, and settled them in the Land of Israel without delay.
But something would have been missing. The Jews would have missed out on an important process of soul-searching and self-growth had they entered Israel immediately. They needed a transition period. They needed time to shed the habits and outlook that had grown on them during more than 200 years of slavery in Egypt. They needed to process and internalize all that they had been taught at Mount Sinai. And they needed to do it through their own efforts. From this perspective, an express trip to Israel would have done them no favors.
The Baal Shem Tov teaches that each of the 42 journeys that the Jews took in the desert represents a different stage of life,3 and we all pass through these stages on the way to our personal Promised Land. How we get through them is up to us.
Ultimately, the purpose of receiving the Torah and settling the Land of Israel was to accomplish a merger of the physical and spiritual—to transform the earth into a home for G‑d. When it is handed to us from above, it may be easier and faster, but unsatisfying in the long run.
There is a dual message for us, living as we do in the We may not be paying enough attention to the detailshigh-speed era. Our attention span measures in seconds, and we expect to have everything—from our video-on-demand to our food order—delivered immediately. But certain things in life cannot be rushed. In our haste to cover ground, we may not be paying enough attention to the details of the journey. We need time to savor the process and truly experience each stage as it comes.
On the other hand, perhaps we are mastering high-speed travel for a reason. During the course of our 2,000-year exile, we’ve taken a slow and tortuous route. We’ve done it the long way and the hard way, and now we’re through. In retrospect, we are grateful for the grueling journey that we completed through our own efforts. But we’re past the point where further wandering would be beneficial. It’s time to come home. We want Moshiach and we want him now.
(Based on an address of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Likkutei Sichot, vol. 19, pp. 1–8.)
Chaya Shuchat is the author of A Diamond a Day, an adaptation of the chassidic classic Hayom Yom for children, as well as many articles on the interface between Chassidism and contemporary life. She is a pediatric nurse practitioner with a master’s degree in nursing from Columbia University.

FOOTNOTES
1.Genesis 24:42 and Rashi there.
2.Talmud, Sanhedrin 95a.
3.See Likkutei Sichot, vol. 4, p. 1083.
© Copyright 2015, all rights reserved.



     Parshah 
  Twelve Sticks


Moses spoke to the heads of the matot (“tribes”) . . .
The stick, it can be said, is a piece of a tree that has paid the price of leaving home. Indeed, one would hardly recognize it as the tender green shoot who departed the mother tree: its supple spine has stiffened into a column of inflexibility, its porous skin has woodened into a core-deep hardness. The springy bough has become, well, a stick.
The stick, it can also be said, is one who has reaped the rewards of leaving home. The tender shoot has gained backbone and stature. It has learned to stand its ground—no longer is it swayed by every passing wind and breeze. Its spell out in the cold has toughened it, made it a force to be reckoned with. The malleable sprig has solidified into the formidable staff.

Exile

The Torah has two names for the tribes of Israel: shevatim and matot. A shevet is a “branch” or “switch”; mateh means “stick” and “staff.”
Both names express the idea that the tribes of Israel are limbs of the “tree of life,” offshoots of the supreme Source of all life and being. But each represents a different state in the Jew’s relationship to his or her roots. The shevet bespeaks a state of manifest connection to one’s source: the branch is still fastened to the tree, or at least still has its life-juices coursing through its veins. The shevet is the Jew in a state of visible connection to his G‑d, sustained by an open divine involvement in his or her life.
The mateh is a shevet who has been uprooted from its tree. The mateh is the Jew in galut, a “child banished from his father’s table”1 to wander the cold and alien roads of exile. Deprived of its supernal moorings, the mateh is compelled to develop its own resistance to the storms of life, to look to its own frail heart for the strength to hold its own, far from the ancestral home.

The Torah Reading of Matot

There is a section of the Torah (Numbers 30:2–32:42) that carries the name Matot, as its opening verse describes Moses’ instruction to the “heads of the tribes” (rashei ha-matot) of Israel.
It is significant that in the Tribes of Israel are referred to here as matot, and that the entire Torah portion is so named. This Torah section is always read during the “Three Weeks” from 17 Tammuz to 9 Av, during which we mourn and re-experience the destruction of the Holy Temple and the onset of our exile.
Every stick yearns to return to its tree, yearns for the day that it will once again be a fresh and vital branch, united with its siblings and nourished by its progenitor. When that day comes, it will bring with it its hard-earned solidity, the mateh-maturity it gained sticking it out in the lone and rootless environment of galut.2
From an address by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson; translation/adaptation by Yanki Tauber.
Originally published in Week in Review.
Republished with the permission of MeaningfulLife.com. If you wish to republish this article in a periodical, book, or website, please email permissions@meaningfullife.com.

FOOTNOTES
1.Talmud, Berachot 3a.
2.Based on Likkutei Sichot, vol. 18, pp. 382–384.
© Copyright 2015, all rights reserved.



     Women 
  The Three Most Common Misconceptions about Religious People


Most baalei teshuvah, returnees to Jewish observance, transform slowly and methodically, “trying on” each mitzvah to make sure it “fits” before adding another. My husband, Zev, and I decided to become completely observant after one (needless to say, very powerful) Shabbat experience. There was no changing our minds on this, although people certainly tried; they assured us we were making a huge mistake by “becoming Orthodox.” Surprisingly, however, once we “transitioned,” very few people wanted to hear anything about how we were adjusting to our new lifestyle. (The only exceptions were my mother’s friends, who apparently questioned her endlessly about our decision, so much so that I eventually hosted these women for a Q & A luncheon.)
Why was everyone else so quiet? Many of these people had been good friends, so I don’t think they feared offending us by asking if we missed cheeseburgers. I think they didn’t want to hear about our lives because they didn’t want to change their opinions about Jewish observance and observant Jews.
I know about these perceptions as well as anyone. I had plenty of issues with religion and religious people. In fact, it still surprises me that I was able to change my perceptions.
Here are three of my biggest misconceptions, and what I did to change them:

1. Religion Is a Crutch

I grew up with a prejudice against religious people. They were not too intelligent, and needed a spiritual crutch to get through life. Smart and strong and enlightened people didn’t need religion, so why would I want to “be religious”? It didn’t even sound like a Jewish concept, which may be why it was so off-putting. Still, I wanted to become observant; I just had to change my perception of religion.
Whenever I questioned if I had to be dumb to be religious, I would visualize the enormous books I saw on the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in the homes of every observant Jew I ever met. Many of those books were volumes of the Talmud, books I could barely lift, much less read. The giant pages looked like unintelligible mazes to me. But I loved the fact that these volumes were beyond me—it meant I couldn’t dismiss them either. There were too many commentators over too many years to be fooling all of the people all of the time. These scholars, with names like Rashi, Tosafot and Maharsha, were smart and strong and enlightened all right, but in a realm of life that had eluded me completely.

2. Jewish Women Are Second-Class

A Jewish and female administrator from my graduate program didn’t mince words when she saw me several years after I decided to become observant: “I’m surprised you would do this. You were so intelligent.”
The prevailing opinion among onlookers is that “Orthodox” women are considered less important, so why would a modern, educated woman choose such a status? Why would someone willingly subordinate her identity, aspirations, independence—the qualities that characterize an autonomous woman—in order to follow Torah Judaism?
Two factors helped me get past this misconception early on. The first was seeing observant women in action. I remember one woman in particular. She was disarmingly funny, alive and intelligent. When I heard how many children she had, every fiber of my being understood, This is a superwoman.
The second factor was understanding that the Jewish woman’s gifts are spiritual, and can’t be measured in physical terms. From this perspective, G‑d’s regard for every Jewish woman is undeniable: He entrusts only her with the potential to combine heaven and earth by creating a child with a Jewish soul. The physical circumstances of her life determine if and how she utilizes this potential, but the gift is within her no matter what.

3. Observant Jews Can’t Do What They Want

Well, this one is actually true, at least sometimes. But like in a marriage, I am committed to doing what G‑d wants even if I don’t want to do it. On our “wedding day,” at Mt. Sinai, G‑d told us what He wants—it’s all in those big books and in books about those big books. When I do a mitzvah, my connection to Him strengthens, making it easier to do the next mitzvah, and so on. Ideally, I can become someone who truly wants to do what G‑d wants. After 30 years of trying, I’m happy to report that this does happen fairly frequently.
The good news is that, please G‑d, very soon, everyone is going to want to do what G‑d wants—all the time—with the coming of Moshiach. The Torah assures us of this. And, according to all those big books, G‑d also wants us to demand that He send Moshiach now.
Lieba Rudolph lives in Pittsburgh, PA, and writes a weekly blog about Jewish spirituality.

© Copyright 2015, all rights reserved.

VIDEO

What's the Value of Just One Mitzvah?
The philosophy in Jewish outreach: Every mitzvah that a Jew does has infinite value to our Father in Heaven.
By Pinchas Taylor
Watch (6:37)
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Story 
  A Story About Stew


The story is told of a simple, unlettered Jew who kept a tavern on a distant crossroads many weeks’ journey from the nearest Jewish community, who one year decided to make the trip to the Jewish town for Rosh Hashanah.
When he entered the shul on Rosh Hashanah morning, it was already packed with worshippers and the service was well underway. Scarcely knowing which way to hold the prayerbook, he draped his tallit over his head and took an inconspicuous place against the back wall.
Hours passed. Hunger was beginning to gnaw at his insides, but the impassioned sounds of prayer around him showed no signs of abating. Visions of the sumptuous holiday meal awaiting him at his lodgings made his eyes water in pain. What was taking so long? Haven’t we prayed enough? Still the service stretched on.
Suddenly, as the cantor reached a particularly stirring passage, the entire congregation burst into tears. Why is everyone weeping? wondered the tavernkeeper. Then it dawned on him. Of course! They, too, are hungry. They, too, are thinking of the elusive meal and endless service. With a new surge of self-pity he gave vent to his anguish; a new wail joined the others as he, too, bawled his heart out.
But after a while the weeping let up, finally quieting to a sprinkling of exceptionally pious worshippers. Our hungry tavernkeeper’s hopes soared, but the prayers went on. And on. Why have they stopped crying? he wondered. Are they no longer hungry?
Then he remembered the cholent. What a cholent he had waiting for him! Everything else his wife had prepared for the holiday meal paled in comparison to that cholent. He distinctly remembered the juicy chunk of meat she had put into the cholent when she set it on the fire the previous afternoon. And our tavernkeeper knew one thing about cholent: the longer it cooks, the more sumptuous your cholent. He’d looked under the lid on his way to shul this morning, when the cholent had already been going for some eighteen hours; good, he’d sniffed approvingly, but give it another few hours, and ahhhh . . . A few hours of aching feet and a hollow stomach are a small price to pay considering what was developing under that lid with each passing minute.
Obviously, that’s what his fellow worshippers are thinking, as well. They, too, have a cholent simmering on their stovetop. No wonder they’ve stopped crying. Let the service go on, he consoled himself, the longer the better.
And on the service went. His stomach felt like raw leather, his knees grew weak with hunger, his head throbbed in pain, his throat burned with suppressed tears. But whenever he felt that he simply could not hold out a moment longer, he thought of his cholent, envisioning what was happening to that piece of meat at that very moment: the steady crisping on the outside, the softening on the inside, the blending of flavors with the potatoes, beans, kishke and spices in the pot. Every minute longer, he kept telling himself, is another minute on the fire for my cholent.
An hour later, the cantor launched into another exceptionally moving piece. As his tremulous voice painted the awesome scene of divine judgment unfolding in the heavens, the entire shul broke down weeping once again. At this point, the dam burst in this simple Jew’s heart, for he well understood what was on his fellow worshippers’ minds. “Enough is enough!” he sobbed. “Never mind the cholent! It’s been cooking long enough! I’m hungry! I want to go home . . . !”

Jewish history is a cholent.
The Talmud states that “the people of Israel were exiled amongst the nations only so that converts may be added to them.” On the most basic level, this is a reference to those non-Jews who, in the centuries of our dispersion, have come in contact with the Jewish people and decided to convert to Judaism. But chassidic teaching explains that the Talmud is also referring to the many other “souls” which we have transformed and elevated in the course of our exile—the “sparks of holiness” contained within the physical creation.
The great Kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria (the “Ari”) taught that every created entity has a spark of G‑dliness within it, a pinpoint of divinity that constitutes its soul—i.e., its spiritual function and design. And when we utilize something to serve the Creator, we penetrate its shell of mundanity, revealing and realizing its divine essence.
It is to this end that we have been scattered across the six continents—so that we may come in contact with the sparks of holiness which await redemption in every corner of the globe. So that a printing press in Boston should print a work of Torah learning on paper manufactured by a Pennsylvania mill from a tree which grew in Oregon. So that a forest clearing in Poland should serve as the site for a traveling Jew’s prayers, and that a scientific theory developed in a British university should aid a Jew in his appreciation of the divine wisdom inherent in the natural world.
And the holier the spark, the deeper it lies buried. The Kabbalistic masters employ the analogy of a collapsed wall—the highest stones are the ones which fall the farthest. By the same token, when G‑d invested His will in His creation, He caused its loftiest elements to descend to the most distant and spiritually desolate corners of the earth. Hence our galut—our exile from the Holy Land, our subjugation to alien governments and cultures, the cessation of G‑d’s open and direct involvement in our lives, and our seeming abandonment to chance and fate. All this is a “descent for the sake of ascent,” a mission to the most forsaken points of earth—spiritually as well as geographically—to extract the exceptionally lofty sparks they contain.
Thus, the more painful the galut, the more challenging its trials, the lowlier the elements it confronts us with—the greater its rewards. Every additional minute of galut represents more sparks of holiness redeemed, and its every further descent brings a deeper dimension of the divine purpose to fruition.
But there comes a point at which every Jew must cry out from the very depths of his being: “Enough already! The cholent has been cooking long enough! We want to come home!”
Yanki Tauber is content editor of Chabad.org.

© Copyright 2015, all rights reserved.



     Lifestyle 
  Bourekas Three Ways: Potato, Broccoli and Mushroom


Bourekas can be filled with just about anything, but I find broccoli, mushroom and potato to be particularly popular. These are not difficult to make, but they can be a bit fiddly, especially if you haven’t made them before.

From the beginning of the month of Av (this year, nightfall of Thursday, July 16) until the day after Tisha B’Av, we observe “The Nine Days”—a time of mourning for the destruction of our two holy Temples. During this time (aside from Shabbat) we abstain from eating meat or chicken, which are considered festive. So today I’m sharing this meat-free recipe.
Certainly, it’s not the healthiest (puff pastry!), but serve these with a big salad or some roasted veggies and fresh fruit, and you’ll have all you need.

Prepare the fillings.

Lay out the pieces of puff pastry and wait until they are pliable but not too soft and sticky.

Place a dollop of filling in the center of each square. Not too much, or they won’t close properly.

Fold over to make a triangle and press the edges together. Brush with egg (and seeds, optional).

Bake until golden brown. Enjoy!

Ingredients:

  • 36 frozen puff pastry squares
  • 1 large Spanish onion
  • 2–3 large Yukon Gold potatoes
  • 20 oz. mushrooms
  • 16 oz. frozen broccoli florets
  • 2–3 tbsp. olive oil
  • 3 eggs
  • Kosher salt
  • Optional: poppy and sesame seeds

Directions:

  1. Dice and sauté the onion in the olive oil and 1 tsp. salt. Divide the sautéed onion into three equal portions. Leave ⅓ in the pan and set the rest aside.
  2. Peel and dice the mushrooms and add to the pan with the onion. Sauté until soft and add salt to taste. Set aside.
  3. Peel and boil the potatoes. Drain and mash while still hot. Add in half of the sautéed onion (with the oil it was fried in) and salt to taste. Set aside.
  4. Boil the broccoli until tender. Puree until smooth. Salt to taste and mix in the remaining sautéed onion.
  5. Crack and gently beat the eggs. Pour a little into the potatoes and mix through. This will make the potato mixture smooth and creamy. Pour a small amount of egg mixture into the broccoli, and also into the mushrooms. (The broccoli and mushrooms will need much less than the potato—you don’t want them to be too liquidy.)
  6. Set the rest of the beaten egg aside for the egg wash later on.
  7. Lay out the puff pastry squares on a piece of parchment paper. Allow to defrost until pliable. Place a spoonful of mixture in the center of each square. Gently fold over in a triangle shape and press down to seal edges. If the dough feels dry, dip your fingertip in cold water, and that will help seal the edges.
  8. Transfer the bourekas to a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, and brush with egg.
  9. Optional: sprinkle seeds on top. I like to use sesame seeds for the potato and poppy seeds for the mushroom, and I leave the broccoli ones plain.
  10. Bake at 400° F for 30 minutes until tops are golden brown.
  11. Serve warm or at room temperature. For best results, reheat in the oven.
Miriam Szokovski is the author of the historical novel Exiled Down Under, and a member of the Chabad.org editorial team. She enjoys tinkering with recipes, and teaches cooking classes to young children. Miriam shares her love of cooking, baking and food photography on Chabad.org’s food blog, Cook It Kosher, and in the N’shei Chabad Newsletter.

© Copyright 2015, all rights reserved.



     Lifestyle 
  Crossing Over the Jordan River


The descendants of Reuben and Gad had an abundance of livestock, very numerous . . . and they spoke to Moses and to Eleazar the kohen and to the princes of the community, saying . . . “The land that the L‑rd struck down before the congregation of Israel is a land for livestock, and your servants have livestock.” They said, “If it pleases you, let this land be given to your servants as a heritage; do not take us across the Jordan.” (Numbers 32:1–5)
The tribes of Reuben and Gad asked Moses if they could remain and settle on the eastern side of the Jordan because it had abundant pasture for cattle. Moses response was fraught with anger, as he called upon them to cross over with the rest of the people to fight. They responded that they would leave their cattle and families behind, and proceed into Israel with the other tribes to conquer the land. The painting captures the royal colors of the tribes on the eastern side of the Jordan bracing themselves to go to war, vowing that only after all the land had been conquered would they cross back over to the other side of the Jordan. The Midrash reflects the negative side of their action, saying that they loved their wealth and money more than the Land of Israel.
In contrast to the lack of desire of these tribes to cross over the Jordan are the many pleas of Moses who prayed repeatedly to cross over to the other side—to the good Land of Israel, depicted here with a large glowing sun. Crossing over to the other side of the Jordan is mentioned hundreds of times in the Bible. Here in the painting, the other side of the Jordan is radiating with golden light reflecting the positive vision of the future.
Yoram Raanan takes inspiration from living in Israel, where he can fully explore and express his Jewish consciousness. The light, the air, the spirit of the people and the land energize and inspire him. His paintings include modern Jewish expressionism with a wide range of subjects ranging from abstract to landscape, biblical and Judaic.

© Copyright 2015, all rights reserved.



     Jewish News 
  Kosher Soup Kitchen in Milan Feeds Muslim Refugees Passing Through

    

Meals are being provided in Italy to Eritrian, Ethiopian, Sudanese and Syrian refugees—many of them Muslim—who temporarily stay in rooms below the Milan central train station, these days retrofitted as a Holocaust memorial and museum.
Meals are being provided in Italy to Eritrian, Ethiopian, Sudanese and Syrian refugees—many of them Muslim—who temporarily stay in rooms below the Milan central train station, these days retrofitted as a Holocaust memorial and museum.
A hazy summer darkness has descended upon Milan, Italy’s second-largest city. The last of the night’s trains are rumbling out of the central station, but in the cavernous expanse below, a completely different kind of activity has been set in motion.
The area—containing hidden rail loading stations designed for cargo and mail—was where thousands of Jews were deported to Auschwitz by German and Italian forces, most never to return.
Now, retrofitted as a Holocaust memorial and museum, the place has recently become the temporary home of Eritrian, Ethiopian, Sudanese and Syrian refugees—most of them Muslim—fleeing to the safety and prospects they hope to find in Northern Europe.
Many of the refugees will remain for just one night before boarding the trains above to where they hope to be greeted by family and friends who have already taken the trip. Others will remain a second night, though almost none will remain in Italy.
Upon arrival, the refugees are given towels and toiletries, and shown to a shower area that was built just for them. But first, they enjoy a nourishing hot meal, prepared and delivered by the volunteers of the Chabad-affiliated Beteavon (“Good Appetite”) soup kitchen.
A nourishing hot meal, prepared and delivered by the volunteers of the Chabad-affiliated Beteavon (“Good Appetite”) soup kitchen, is given at night to the refugees, who fast during the day in the month of Ramadan.
A nourishing hot meal, prepared and delivered by the volunteers of the Chabad-affiliated Beteavon (“Good Appetite”) soup kitchen, is given at night to the refugees, who fast during the day in the month of Ramadan.
Most have not eaten properly for days. Since it is currently Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting during daylight hours, the freshly prepared meal is the first food many of the refugees will have had since the night before. Many have expressed their appreciation for the kosher meals, knowing that it conforms to their religious standards as well.
Rabbi Yigal Hazan, who oversees the kitchen, says the Jewish community’s involvement with the refugees is based on the biblical commandment to “love the stranger, for you, too, were a stranger in the land of Egypt.”
“We ourselves were refugees running from people who wished to kill us,” states the rabbi. “In this very same spot, we are now helping others who find themselves strangers in a strange land.”

‘In the Very Best Way’

Similar sentiments were expressed by Roberto Jarach, vice president of the memorial and former president of the local Jewish community.
“As soon as we learned that there were refugees passing through Milan needing a place to stay, we began considering how we could house some of them,” says the 71-year-old, whose father was community president before him. “At that time, we had large school groups passing through the museum every day, and it was not feasible. Once school let out and attendance has gotten smaller for the summer, we immediately drew up plans to accommodate nearly 40 refugees every night.”
A woman in Milan packs fruit and other items for incoming refugees.
A woman in Milan packs fruit and other items for incoming refugees.
Jarach had an area partitioned off for the refugees, and outfitted it with beds and a shower (there were already ample toilets and sinks). He says that partnering with Beteavon—which already distributes meals to homebound and disadvantaged people, as well as on the streets at public places—was the logical next step. “I’ve observed the fine work of Chabad here in Milan since the 1960s, and I knew that they could be depended on to do everything in the very best way,” he says.
A significant part of the logistics and coordination is being done by Sant’Egidio—a Catholic group—and the person who spends the night with the refugees is a Moroccan Muslim, who reports that he normally finds a few members of every group with whom he can communicate in Arabic.
Jarach says that more than 1,000 refugees sleep all over Milan every night, mainly in public shelters. To his knowledge, the Holocaust memorial is the only privately operated site. “We’ve now gotten communication from Germany, from people who’ve stayed here, thanking us,” he says. “They appreciated the clean towels and fresh food, the things we do to make their stay as pleasant as possible.”
Local volunteer Riki Karmeli says she has been to the Holocaust memorial twice to deliver food she cooked together with other volunteers. “They come very late at night,” she says, “so I have not actually seen them either time, but perhaps it is best that way. Everyone deserves dignity and privacy.”
Some of the cooking staff and volunteers, shown with Rabbi Igal Hazan, who oversees the kitchen.
Some of the cooking staff and volunteers, shown with Rabbi Igal Hazan, who oversees the kitchen.
An aid worker and some of the younger refugees at the kosher soup kitchen.
An aid worker and some of the younger refugees at the kosher soup kitchen.
Women in their sleeping quarters; many will remain for just one night before boarding the trains above to where they hope to be greeted by family and friends in Northern Europe.
Women in their sleeping quarters; many will remain for just one night before boarding the trains above to where they hope to be greeted by family and friends in Northern Europe.
The rabbi in the men's area; upon arrival, the refugees are given towels and toiletries, and shown to a shower area that was built just for them.
The rabbi in the men's area; upon arrival, the refugees are given towels and toiletries, and shown to a shower area that was built just for them.
The recipients have expressed their appreciation for the kosher food, knowing that it conforms to their religious standards as well.
The recipients have expressed their appreciation for the kosher food, knowing that it conforms to their religious standards as well.
The rabbi explains that the Jewish community’s involvement with the refugees is based on the biblical commandment to “love the stranger, for you, too, were a stranger in the land of Egypt.”
The rabbi explains that the Jewish community’s involvement with the refugees is based on the biblical commandment to “love the stranger, for you, too, were a stranger in the land of Egypt.”
© Copyright 2015, all rights reserved.



     Jewish News 
  At Illinois Holocaust Museum, 14-Year-Olds Inspire a Survivor’s Bar Mitzvah

    

Mitchell Winthrop, center, was speaking to a group of students from Chicago’s Seymour J. Abrams Cheder Lubavitch Hebrew Day School at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie when the boys suddenly took charge, offering him a lasting lesson.
Mitchell Winthrop, center, was speaking to a group of students from Chicago’s Seymour J. Abrams Cheder Lubavitch Hebrew Day School at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie when the boys suddenly took charge, offering him a lasting lesson.
The guest speaker at the Illinois Holocaust Museum posed an unanswerable question to the dozen Chabad eighth-grade boys sitting in front of him. Mitchell Winthrop, 88 years of age, a survivor of the Auschwitz and Mauthausen Nazi concentration camps, had been raised in a secular Jewish home in Lodz, Poland. Why had he, he asked the boys—someone who hadn’t even had a bar mitzvah—been chosen to survive the Holocaust and not his pious, white-bearded grandfather?
His question was meant to provoke thought, but it also spurred the graduating class of Chicago’s Seymour J. Abrams Cheder Lubavitch Hebrew Day School into action.
“It’s never too late to make a bar mitzvah!” called out 14-year-old Yankel Raices. The group was on a trip to the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, the highlight of which is to hear a first-person account from a survivor. “We can do it right now. We can put on tefillin.”
Winthrop’s family intended for him to have a bar mitzvah; as a boy, he had even chosen which bicycle he wanted from his uncle’s shop as a birthday present. Then came the Nazi invasion, and on Nov. 14, 1939, the imposing Great Synagogue of Lodz—where Winthrop’s bar mitzvah was to be held a few days later—was burned to the ground. The next few years were a living hell for young Mitchell (born Mietek Weintraub; his Hebrew name is Moshe), during which he lost his home, family and friends.
More than seven decades later in Skokie, it took Winthrop a moment to realize that the boys were not joking. If Winthrop was willing, they would celebrate with him, then and there.
“I forgot the prayers,” Winthrop objected.
“We’ll help you,” the boys replied, almost in unison.
A few moments later, with a yarmulke on his head and a pre-war photograph of his entire family on the screen behind him, Winthrop donned tefillin for the first time. As he finished saying the words of “Shema,” the boys began to dance, pulling the older man into the joyous circle.
“When we started doing the hora, I felt very emotional,” says Winthrop. “Here was my whole family looking and witnessing my bar mitzvah, if only in a picture. I’m emotional even now as I retell it.”

The Early Years

“It’s never too late to make a bar mitzvah!” called out 14-year-old Yankel Raices.
“It’s never too late to make a bar mitzvah!” called out 14-year-old Yankel Raices.
Winthrop’s story begins years earlier, in the bustling city of Lodz, where he was born to an upper-middle-class family. Lodz—then home to nearly 200,000 Jews who made up some 30 percent of the city’s population—was a textile hub, and Winthrop’s father, Shimon, was a traveling salesman for his family’s successful textile business. Winthrop’s grandparents were strictly religious Jews, and while his own parents were less so, they remained closely connected to Jewish life.
Winthrop attended the Katzenelson School, where he studied Hebrew, and he often attended synagogue with his father or grandfather. “I still remember some of the prayers I learned preparing for my bar mitzvah from back then,” he recalls. “I studied hard because I didn’t want to shame my parents and family.”
Yet the bar mitzvah was not to be. The Nazis entered Lodz in September of 1939, and by May of the next year, the city’s Jews were forced into a ghetto—the second biggest in Poland—the Weintraub family among them.
“My father died of hunger in the ghetto,” relates Winthrop. “We were a well-to-do family, but my father died of hunger. After that, there was nobody to attend to my religious upbringing.”
Because of its high level of productivity, the Lodz ghetto remained intact until 1944, when the remaining Jews were shipped to Auschwitz and the ghetto liquidized. At Auschwitz, Winthrop and his mother, Devorah, both made it past the selection, and Winthrop remembers his mother being happy they had both been given the chance to live. He never heard from her again.
“When the war ended, I looked for her, and I’ve kept looking until today,” he says. “I still don’t know what happened to her or her six sisters.”
The only valuables Winthrop had with him when he arrived in Auschwitz were photos of his family. Ordered to strip and hand over their clothing, the inmates were left with only their shoes and belts. Winthrop slipped the photographs into his shoe.
“I had no money, only photos, but it was a treasure for me. As soon as I hid them, I felt a sharp blow to my head; it was a Kapo [an inmate who served as a prison functionary] watching that people don’t slip any money or jewelry into their shoes,” he remembers. “I emptied my shoe and when he saw it was only pictures, he didn’t care, but I was afraid to pick them up again. I just left them there.”
Winthrop spent eight days in Auschwitz; he says he doubts he would have survived had he been there any longer. When inquiries were made for an experienced electrician, Winthrop volunteered himself despite a total lack of knowledge of the subject, and thus was sent to a nearby coal mine to work.
He worked there until Jan. 17, 1945, when, with Soviet Red Army troops approaching, he and his fellow inmates were forced on a death march. Auschwitz was liberated 10 days later.
Winthrop’s elementary-school graduation at Itzhak Katznelson Academy in Lodz, June 1939. The tallest, he is standing in the back row on the upper left. Winthrop said he recovered the photo from a boy standing second to his left, M. Syrkis, whose family managed to escape Hitler and travel to what was then British Mandate Palestine. Winthrop got the photo from his schoolmate while on a visit to Israel in 1964, when he was working for Bank Leumi.
Winthrop’s elementary-school graduation at Itzhak Katznelson Academy in Lodz, June 1939. The tallest, he is standing in the back row on the upper left. Winthrop said he recovered the photo from a boy standing second to his left, M. Syrkis, whose family managed to escape Hitler and travel to what was then British Mandate Palestine. Winthrop got the photo from his schoolmate while on a visit to Israel in 1964, when he was working for Bank Leumi.

Escaped and Sent Back

Winthrop remembers people dying around him as they marched, coupled with the fatigue that enveloped him. “I was sleeping as I marched; I knew that after a few days of this, we’d all be dead.”
After three days of marching, Winthrop made a daring escape together with an older Jew from Luxembourg. They were caught just a few days later and sent to Vienna, where Winthrop attempted to pass himself off as a Pole.
“They saw I was circumcised and knew I was lying,” he adds. “The Aibershter [‘the One Above,’ in Yiddish] helped me survive.”
From Vienna, the now 18-year-old was transferred to the Mauthausen labor camp in Austria, where he remained for three months and five days until it was liberated by the American army in May of 1945.
“I was emaciated, sleeping on corpses when the Americans came in,” recalls Winthrop. “But the first thing I did was take a train back to Lodz, back to the Russian side, to see what happened to my family, my home. Nothing was left.”
In the ensuing months, Winthrop and a few fellow survivors his own age managed to smuggle themselves back into the American zone, bribing Soviet troops and walking all night to once again find freedom. After a few years in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany, Winthrop immigrated to the United States in 1948.
Winthrop’s extended family in a photo dated in the fall of 1926. His mother is at the far right, seated in the chair, pregnant with Winthrop. His father is standing behind her. The two boys in the center are brothers and his second cousins, and the only other survivors from the entire photograph; they escaped to the Soviet Union.
Winthrop’s extended family in a photo dated in the fall of 1926. His mother is at the far right, seated in the chair, pregnant with Winthrop. His father is standing behind her. The two boys in the center are brothers and his second cousins, and the only other survivors from the entire photograph; they escaped to the Soviet Union.
Safely in America, Winthrop went about rebuilding his life, earning a master’s from the University of Chicago, teaching at Purdue University and then working as a teacher in the Chicago Schools System. His Polish remains impeccable; after his retirement in 1989, he worked in the Cook County courts system as a Polish interpreter. All the while he never shared his harrowing life story.
“At first, no one here wanted to hear our stories,” says Winthrop of the atmosphere Holocaust survivors encountered in the early post-war years. “They dismissed it, so I learned to clam up.”
Not wishing to traumatize his three children, he didn’t share his story even with his own family, finding ways to evade explaining the numbers tattooed into his left arm. It was in an effort to discover his mother’s fate that pushed Winthrop to pen his memoirs, The Arrival: I Sought God in Hell, with the hope that someone with any knowledge of what occurred might contact him. When he was done, he approached the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie about adding it to their gift shop.
“They told me that the book would sell better if I would consider speaking to audiences, as part of their speakers’ bureau,” he says. “So I was sort of pushed into this.”
Today, Winthrop addresses school groups and other audiences at the museum around once a week. Warm and articulate, he has become a popular speaker, sharing his experiences with a generation that can hardly fathom the horrors he witnessed and endured.
“People are buying the book and listening to my story,” he says. “So it’s bearing fruit.”

The Bar Mitzvah

Rabbi Ilan Heifetz, the Chabad school’s secular-studies principal
Rabbi Ilan Heifetz, the Chabad school’s secular-studies principal
Having studied about the Holocaust as part of their eighth-grade curriculum, the Cheder Lubavitch boys boosted their learning with a visit to the museum.
“The exhibit is very well-done. The tour takes you through the rise of Hitler to the Wannsee Conference [outside Berlin] to the war, and ultimately, to liberation,” explains Rabbi Ilan Heifetz, the school’s secular-studies principal. “It’s a very powerful experience.”
At the end of their tour, the group met Winthrop, who told them the story of his life and shared with the boys a poem he had written for the 70th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation.
“I asked the boys: How could G‑d save me? I wasn’t a full-fledged Jew; I was circumcised, but never had a bar mitzvah.
“Instead of answering the question, they made me a bar mitzvah!”
Winthrop asked that the one extant photo of his family—taken mere months before he was born and given to him years later by a great-uncle who survived the war—be beamed onto the screen as the boys began to help him put tefillin on.
The group celebrated with singing and dancing. Days later, Winthrop, 88, attended the boys’ school graduation ceremony, putting tefillin on again, this time with Raices’ father, Rabbi Sholom Ber Raices of Lubavitch Chabad of Skokie.
The group celebrated with singing and dancing. Days later, Winthrop, 88, attended the boys’ school graduation ceremony, putting tefillin on again, this time with Raices’ father, Rabbi Sholom Ber Raices of Lubavitch Chabad of Skokie.
“When I began to repeat the prayers, I realized that I knew them,” says Winthrop. “Seventy-five years! Seventy-five years after I learned them, I remembered. I tried to go ahead because I knew the words.”
Unbeknownst to the group of boys at the time, one of Winthrop’s sons was in the room, capturing the moment on video and witnessing an event that Winthrop refers to as bashert—something that was meant to be. “It was my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, all of my relatives, and one of my sons there, too; I was in front of my whole family. It was very exciting and emotional for me.”
Days later, Winthrop attended the boys’ graduation ceremony, putting tefillin on again, this time with Raices’ father, Rabbi Sholom Ber Raices of Lubavitch Chabad of Skokie.
If there is one word that could sum up the experience, it might simply be this: “wow.”
“Wow,” replies Winthrop, “is right.”
© Copyright 2015, all rights reserved.



     Jewish News 
  Camp Gan Israel Russia: 25 Years of Historic Transformation

    

Despite wide language differences, the first batches of American yeshivah-students-turned-counselors at Camp Gan Israel managed to find a way to communicate with their young Russian-Jewish charges. Here, a counselor introduces his campers to the “alef-bet” in the summer of 1990.
Despite wide language differences, the first batches of American yeshivah-students-turned-counselors at Camp Gan Israel managed to find a way to communicate with their young Russian-Jewish charges. Here, a counselor introduces his campers to the “alef-bet” in the summer of 1990.
The third in a series of articles on Chabad-Lubavitch summer camps.
High on a flagpole some 70 kilometers west of Moscow, the green-and-white banner of Camp Gan Israel flutters in the breeze. Now in the midst of its 25th year, Gan Israel Moscow—a part of the Chabad-Lubavitch worldwide network of Jewish summer camps—draws more than 300 children for separate boys’ and girls’ sessions of overnight camp.
On the formerly well-ordered grounds of a Soviet Young Pioneer Organization’s camp—or pianerskee lager—kipah-clad boys and girls in skirts can now be seen playing sports, swimming or learning about their heritage throughout the sprawling campsite.
At the end of the week, as darkness settles in on Friday evening—and with it, the peace of Shabbat—the long tables in the dining room are set with challah and grape juice, gefilte fish and salads. After prayer and Kiddush, the singing begins, softly at first, but then louder, more spirited. Before long, the sound of hundreds of Jewish children singing Shabbat melodies emanates through the otherwise silent Russian night. By the end of the evening, campers and staff are dancing on the benches, chanting in Russian: “I’m so proud to be a Jew!”
It’s a sight replicated in dozens of Gan Israel camps throughout Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and in the Caucuses and Baltics—one that the erstwhile leaders of the Young Pioneer Organization could never have imagined. It’s also one that continues to build upon the legacy of the very first Gan Israels in the Communist bloc, when small groups of American yeshivah students arrived in the decaying Soviet Union to change the face of Russian Jewry.

Forging a Bond

In an unprecedented show of Jewish pride mere steps from the Kremlin, Camp Gan Israel held a traditional lineup on Red Square in 1991. Rabbi Dan Rodkin, center, a Moscow native who had recently become religious, explains what they're doing there to a once-feared Soviet officer.
In an unprecedented show of Jewish pride mere steps from the Kremlin, Camp Gan Israel held a traditional lineup on Red Square in 1991. Rabbi Dan Rodkin, center, a Moscow native who had recently become religious, explains what they're doing there to a once-feared Soviet officer.
For years, the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Lishkas Ezras Achim run by Chabad had arranged for Chassidic couples, yeshivah students and others to travel to the Soviet Union under the guise of tourism, laden with tefillin, mezuzahs and Jewish books to distribute to local Jews. Through the 1980s, their travel was closely monitored by authorities and limited to the cities they were given permission to visit, mainly Moscow.
“Everything Chabad was doing in Russia then was top-secret,” recalls Rabbi Levi Raices, today a Chabad emissary in Kharkov, Ukraine. “People who went in the early ’80s didn’t tell anyone about their trip until after they returned.”
With the expansion of rights created by Perestroika, the movement of Jews from abroad became freer as Jewish activities emerged from underground. Chabad yeshivah students began spending months-long shifts in the country, helping to reinforce the skeletal remnants of Jewish life that had survived the harshest years of oppression and operated out of the Moscow’s little wooden Lubavitch synagogue, Marina Roscha.
When summer of 1990 approached, the leadership of Ezras Achim began organizing what would be the Soviet Union’s first Jewish overnight camp for children, Camp Gan Israel. Rabbi Levi Heber, today a renowned mohel in the New York area, had been a camp counselor before, so when the opportunity to travel to the Soviet Union came—his father, Rabbi Shmuel Heber, was active in Ezras Achim—he jumped on it.
With the walls of the Kremlin and Lenin's tomb behind them, the campers at Gan Israel Moscow call out the 12 “pesukim” (Torah passages). The Soviet Union officially disintegrated days later.
With the walls of the Kremlin and Lenin's tomb behind them, the campers at Gan Israel Moscow call out the 12 “pesukim” (Torah passages). The Soviet Union officially disintegrated days later.
“I gathered a group of seven yeshivah students to serve as counselors,” says Heber. “Before camp, we all passed by the Rebbe [Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory] for dollars and a blessing for success.”
In August, the group disembarked in Moscow, just a few weeks prior to the arrival of Chabad’s first permanent emissaries to the Soviet Union—Rabbi Berel Lazar to Moscow; Rabbi Shmuel Kaminezki to Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine; and Rabbi Moshe Moskovitz to Kharkov, Ukraine. The circumstances that met themwere, to hear it from him, less than ideal.
“The first year was very primitive; there were no flush toilets, no showers. Camp was held in a school building on the outskirts of Moscow that was not designed for that,” he recalls.
Beyond the lack of adequate facilities, the American counselors had no common language with their 100 Russian-speaking campers.
“Here was a group of Americans without any language, in what was to us a Third World country with very limited resources, and our job was to give these kids a wonderful summer experience while instilling within them the values of Judaism they had never been exposed to before,” explains Heber, who was 19 at the time. “Yet by the end of the summer, we were all singing together, benching [Yiddish for grace after meals]together and forging an amazing bond with these boys. It was truly miraculous.”
Midway through camp, Raices joined the crew. With the Communist economy in shambles, he saw empty stores and long lines to procure basic goods like bread and milk. The American dollar was so prized that the yeshivahstudents found themselves wealthy relative to the poverty surrounding them, even though there was almost nothing to buy.
After a few years, the Gan Israel Camp network had expanded throughout countries that had comprised the Soviet Union. Here, Rabbi Levi Haskelevich, today campus rabbi at Lubavitch House at the University of Pennsylvania, poses with his bunk in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, in 1994.
After a few years, the Gan Israel Camp network had expanded throughout countries that had comprised the Soviet Union. Here, Rabbi Levi Haskelevich, today campus rabbi at Lubavitch House at the University of Pennsylvania, poses with his bunk in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, in 1994.
What truly stayed in his mind, however, was the burgeoning Jewish pride he saw—boys with little Jewish knowledge now happily enveloped in an authentic Jewish experience.
“One kid had a trumpet,” says Raices. “When we took camp on trips, he used to blast ‘Haveinu Shalom Aleichem’ out the bus window. For them, expressing their Jewishness was totally new, and many were afraid. He didn’t care.”
The rag-tag team of spirited American yeshivah students left an indelible mark on their young campers, creating the Russian Camp Gan Israel model in use today.

‘Covenant of Abraham’

If the Soviet Union’s economic model was a failure, their efforts to obliterate millennia-old practices of the Jewish faith certainly were not. Members of the older generation remembered bits and pieces of their heritage, but some cornerstones of Jewish practice—like brit milah, circumcision—had almost disappeared.
While not explicitly banned, Russian Jews were intimidated into not circumcising their children, with Communist Party members—required by party rules to be atheist—facing expulsion, which inevitably led to social consequences and job loss. Grown Jewish men seeking to be circumcised found themselves at an even greater risk; adult circumcisions remained dangerous until the mid-1980s. An adult brit could lead to prison time for the mohel on charges similar to “operating without a surgical license” and for the adult for “self-mutilation.” It meant that a vast majority of Soviet-born Jewish men had never entered into the covenant of Abraham.
The Bukharian Sephardic communities of Russia's eastern regions managed to hold on strongly to many of their traditions throughout communism. Shown here is Gan Israel Uzbekistan, 1994.
The Bukharian Sephardic communities of Russia's eastern regions managed to hold on strongly to many of their traditions throughout communism. Shown here is Gan Israel Uzbekistan, 1994.
Scattered around the Soviet Union, however, were a handful of older Jews who continued to perform circumcisions under the cover of secrecy. Two of them were Chabad Chassidim Reb Mottel Lifshitz (warmly known as Reb Mottel der Shoichet for his work as a ritual slaughterer) and Reb Avraham Genin, both stalwarts of Moscow’s underground Jewish community. Reb Mottel was the city’s primary mohel for newborn babies, while Reb Avraham gathered funds and made the arrangements needed for an adult brit to take place, performing them himself with assistance from a surgeon.
Heber, who heads the International Bris Association and has thousands of circumcisions to his credit, cites his first summer at camp as the inspiration for his career. Towards the end of the first session, a group of seven boys expressed their wish to be circumcised. Dealing directly with Genin, the American counselors arranged for the circumcisions to take place at the anonymous Moscow apartment from which he operated.
Although by 1988 circumcisions were taking place openly in the Soviet Union, the sudden internal collapse of Soviet power meant that many of the older Chassidim, such as Genin, often continued to operate as they always had—underground.
“We snuck into the two-room apartment one by one,” recalls Heber. “We were met by Reb Avraham and the doctor he worked with. The bris was performed on the dining-room table, while the rest of the boys waited in the next room.”
Camp Gan Israel Moscow in 1990 did not take place at a camp grounds, but at a school facility. Kipah-clad and tzitizit-wearing campers perform morning exercises at lineup.
Camp Gan Israel Moscow in 1990 did not take place at a camp grounds, but at a school facility. Kipah-clad and tzitizit-wearing campers perform morning exercises at lineup.
The equipment was old, the anesthetic weak and the stitches coarse. From the moment the procedure began until its end, the campers screamed in pain. “We thought we’d gone too far,” remembers Heber. “The other boys were in the next room, and there was no way they didn’t hear the first boy’s cries.”
The brit wasn’t exceptional. It was simply how circumcisionshad always been done in the Soviet Union: secretly and without proper medication.
To the staff’s surprise, when the first camper’s turn was over, the next boy opened the door and walked in.
“They were ready to endure it with true self-sacrifice because they knew how important it was,” says Heber. “Standing there, I felt there had to be a better way to do it, so the next year I came to camp prepared with more equipment. I became a mohel because of what I saw in that Moscow apartment.”
In the years since, thousands of Jewish boys have been circumcised at Gan Israel camps in the former Soviet Union, usually on a designated brit day when a mohel comes, and in a far safer and cleaner environment. (A new bris center opened just last month in Moscow in the Rambam Medical Center, part of the Shaare Zedek Jewish Center for Chesed, in the Marina Roscha neighborhood.) These days, Heber notes, he often circumcises the sons of his campers from Gan Israel Moscow, many of whom live in New York or elsewhere around the globe.
A camper wraps tefillin at Gan Israel Yekatrinoslav in Ukraine, commonly referred to as Camp Yeka.
A camper wraps tefillin at Gan Israel Yekatrinoslav in Ukraine, commonly referred to as Camp Yeka.

The War That Wasn’t

The next year, Gan Israel opened on proper camp grounds and was joined by sister camps in Kiev, Dnepropetrovsk and Kharkov. That summer, girls’ camps opened for the first time as well, staffed by young Chabad women flown in from the United States.
“In August of ’91, we took the whole camp to Red Square,” recalls Rabbi Dan Rodkin, a Moscow native who had recently become religious, and is now director of Shaloh House Jewish Day School in Boston. “We lined up right in front of the Kremlin, and said the 12 pesukim [Torah passages] proudly with everyone staring at us. A few days later, communism fell.”
On Aug. 19, hardline Communists made a last-ditch effort to save the dying Soviet empire by executing a coup. With tanks rolling through Red Square and memories of the Soviet Union’s past aggressive actions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, no one knew what to expect. Foreigners streamed out of the country, and many Jewish organizations closed their doors.
“We thought it was going to go back to the way it was before,” says Rodkin. “It was a very scary time.”
Raices was head counselor at Gan Israel Dnepropetrovsk at the time and was awoken by the camp director. “All of you Americans have to leave now. There’s going to be a war!”
Chess in Moscow, 1990: Communication of the soul meant that staff and campers could interact in plenty of ways without necessarily speaking the same language. As the years went by, dedicated American staff picked up more and more Russian, many retaining the language to this day.
Chess in Moscow, 1990: Communication of the soul meant that staff and campers could interact in plenty of ways without necessarily speaking the same language. As the years went by, dedicated American staff picked up more and more Russian, many retaining the language to this day.
Glued to their shortwave radio, the group listened as BBC reported breaking developments from Moscow. Barricades had been set up, civilians killed. They tried phoning through to Chabad in Moscow, and when they finally got through, they had their answer: The Rebbe had given a blessing that everyone would be safe, and they should stay and continue their work. So that’s what they did.
In fact, all of Chabad’s activities in the crumbling Soviet Union continued unabated, and in Moscow, where Heber remembers successfully convincing parents that their children were safer in camp than in the city itself, Gan Israel’s session came to a happy conclusion the day the coup ended.
“A bus full of children had to wait on the highway back into Moscow for 90 minutes extra, and parents started to get worried,” recalls Rodkin, who was one of only two native Russian speakers working as a counselor that summer. “Later, we found out the delay was caused by the tanks leaving Moscow. The putsch [attempted coup] was over, and the Soviet Union dead.”
Five boys point to their new Jewish names on a “Mazal Tov” sign celebrating circumcisions in Moscow in 1992. Altogether, there are 54 names on the list—boys who reclaimed the heritage denied to them for generations.
Five boys point to their new Jewish names on a “Mazal Tov” sign celebrating circumcisions in Moscow in 1992. Altogether, there are 54 names on the list—boys who reclaimed the heritage denied to them for generations.

‘The Greatest Effect on Me’

It was the lively, daring spirit the American counselors brought with them in those heady early days that lives on in Gan Israel. The Russian campers were used to rigid regulations that were part and parcel of the educational methods in that area of the world. Their conception of Judaism and learning was flipped upside down when they encountered the authentic and warm Jewish “brothers” from across the ocean.
“I was older already, and a staff member, but the American counselors made a huge impression. It was mind-blowing,” says Rodkin, who also directs Camp Gan Israel in Brighton, Mass.,, and where some of his former campers from Moscow who live in the Boston area send their own children today.
Rabbi Moshe Baruch Beynish is a prominent educator and Chabad emissary living in Moscow. His path began at Gan Israel Kharkov, where he was sent at age 15 by his father in 1994. It was there that he first began to delve into his heritage, and where he began to keep the laws of kashrut and Shabbat, and received his Jewish name.
“I wasn’t settled in camp until Shabbat came,” he says. “That changed me. The singing, dancing, the farbrengen until the early hours of the morning … it had the greatest effect on me. I’ve kept Shabbat since then.”
Beynish also spent every subsequent summer until 2014 at a Gan Israel, either as a camper, counselor or, after his marriage, camp director of Gan Israel Moscow. He remains very active in camp there, creating its educational curriculum and much of its programming.
Rabbi Levi Heber, right, then 19, at the Moscow apartment where Genin performed circumcisions. The apartment belonged to an elderly woman known as Bubbe Charne, who would prepare a celebratory “feast” following each brit performed at her apartment. Genin can be seen partially obscured by Heber, the surgeon who worked with him is on the left, as Bubbe Charne approaches the table.
Rabbi Levi Heber, right, then 19, at the Moscow apartment where Genin performed circumcisions. The apartment belonged to an elderly woman known as Bubbe Charne, who would prepare a celebratory “feast” following each brit performed at her apartment. Genin can be seen partially obscured by Heber, the surgeon who worked with him is on the left, as Bubbe Charne approaches the table.
“Russian-speaking yeshivah students are the staff at camp now,” says Beynish. “But we couldn’t have done that without the example set for many years by the Americans. The Americans all cared for camp; they thought about it the whole year. They raised money to bring candies and prizes to camp; they didn’t expect anything to be handed to them. They came to Russia to give over whatever they could to the campers. Our staff were campers back then, so they know what that looks like and can give it over to their campers.”
Not all camps in the former Soviet Union are staffed by locals. Gan Israel Yeka in Ukraine (short for Yekatrinoslav, former name of Dnepropetrovsk, the Rebbe’s home city) is organized and funded by a small group of dedicated American yeshivah students working hand in hand with Chabad emissaries on the ground. The fundraising is done mostly through social media, and the dedication of the staff directly correlates to the phenomenal growth the camp has seen in recent years. This summer, they opened a girls’ division in conjunction with Chabad of Odessa.
“Ultimately,” says Heber, reflecting on the five summers he spent in Moscow, “we thought we were going to Russia to inspire the children there. But in seeing and interacting and building relationships with them—many of which have lasted until today—it was we who were inspired. You can’t witness pure Jewish souls yearning for more and not be.”
To find a Jewish camp near you, visit the Camp Gan Israel directory here.
The first article in the summer-camp series, “Deaf Boys and Girls to Experience Summer Camp Steeped in Judaism,” can be viewed here.
The second article in the summer-camp series, “Bigger and Better Than Ever: California’s Camp Gan Yisroel West,” can be viewed here.
Camp Gan Israel Moscow at Red Square, with Chief Rabbi of Russia Berel Lazar standing on the far left as a policeman looks on.
Camp Gan Israel Moscow at Red Square, with Chief Rabbi of Russia Berel Lazar standing on the far left as a policeman looks on.
The first girls' summer camps opened in 1991. A recent picture from the girls' session at Gan Israel Moscow.
The first girls' summer camps opened in 1991. A recent picture from the girls' session at Gan Israel Moscow.
These days, many Gan Israels in the former Soviet Union are staffed by yeshivah students born and bred there … and who certainly know how to entertain campers.
These days, many Gan Israels in the former Soviet Union are staffed by yeshivah students born and bred there … and who certainly know how to entertain campers.
Gan Israel Yeka, Ukraine, is organized and funded by American yeshivah students. This year it is being held on campgrounds owned by Chabad-Lubavitch of Zhitomir. The crisis in Ukraine means that the yeshivah students who run Yeka must raise more funds than ever so they can accept those who apply, but might not have the resources to pay for it.
Gan Israel Yeka, Ukraine, is organized and funded by American yeshivah students. This year it is being held on campgrounds owned by Chabad-Lubavitch of Zhitomir. The crisis in Ukraine means that the yeshivah students who run Yeka must raise more funds than ever so they can accept those who apply, but might not have the resources to pay for it.
Activities at Camp Yeka include swimming, sports and Jewish classes—and making challah, too, even for the older boys.
Activities at Camp Yeka include swimming, sports and Jewish classes—and making challah, too, even for the older boys.
A bonfire at Yeka, one of the staples of summer camp everywhere.
A bonfire at Yeka, one of the staples of summer camp everywhere.
Gan Israel in Kharkov, Ukraine, is also staffed by Russian-speaking yeshivah students, many themselves from Kharkov who spend their summers at camp near home. Here, a group shot of some of the younger boys with their counselors.
Gan Israel in Kharkov, Ukraine, is also staffed by Russian-speaking yeshivah students, many themselves from Kharkov who spend their summers at camp near home. Here, a group shot of some of the younger boys with their counselors.
A group photo of the girls' division in Gan Israel Moscow. The campgrounds are those of a former Young Pioneer Organization camp, which among other things featured a monument to Grigol Ordzhonikidze, a Georgian Bolshevik leader who, together with Joseph Stalin and Armenian Anastas Mikoian, were known as the “Caucasian Trio.” The statue was removed after the campsite was purchased for Gan Israel.
A group photo of the girls' division in Gan Israel Moscow. The campgrounds are those of a former Young Pioneer Organization camp, which among other things featured a monument to Grigol Ordzhonikidze, a Georgian Bolshevik leader who, together with Joseph Stalin and Armenian Anastas Mikoian, were known as the “Caucasian Trio.” The statue was removed after the campsite was purchased for Gan Israel.
© Copyright 2015, all rights reserved.



     Jewish News 
  The Secret Under the Carpet: Spirit of Mikvah Flows Throughout the World

    

An astonishing discovery beneath the floor of a home in the Ein Karem section of Jerusalem. (Photo: Assaf Perez)
An astonishing discovery beneath the floor of a home in the Ein Karem section of Jerusalem. (Photo: Assaf Perez)
What was recently found hidden for centuries beneath the floor of a Jerusalem living room closed the circle for a child born decades earlier in a nearby hospital. This is the story of discovery, rebirth and an unbroken chain of tradition that reaches through Jewish generations and around the world.

The Ancient Ritual Bath

Walking into the stylish living room in Jerusalem’s Ein Karem neighborhood, the casual visitor could hardly imagine the ancient secret beneath the living-room rug. Even the archaeologists who were called in to investigate expressed their disbelief at first.
Yet when the residents removed their carpet and began to drill beneath the floor for renovations, they discovered an ancient staircase leading downward.
“Could it be an ancient mikvah?” they wondered. A Jewish ritual bath below?
At the bottom of the stone stairs, archaeologists found signs that a mikvah had indeed been dug around 2,000 years ago, during the Second Temple era. After months of careful study, the scholars from the Israel Antiquities Authority confirmed that the ritual pool conformed to all halachic requirements preserved in Jewish law for thousands of years and was consistent with other Temple-era mikvahs found elsewhere in Israel. It had remained hidden underground all these years.
For Rabbi Mendel Greisman, director of Chabad of Northwest Arkansas, reading about the find felt like the closing of a circle. He had been born in the same village as the ancient mikvah, in Jerusalem’s Hadassah Ein Karem Hospital. He grew up in Jerusalem; met his wife in Brooklyn, N.Y.; and found his place as an emissary in, of all places, the state of Arkansas.
Rabbi Mendel Greisman (Photo: NWA Media)
Rabbi Mendel Greisman (Photo: NWA Media)

From Ein Karem to Arkansas …

How did Rabbi Greisman wind up in the U.S. Deep South, all the way from Israel?
“By plane,” he responds with a laugh. “Seriously, after I got married, my wife, Dobi, and I were looking for a place that needed a Chabad-Lubavitch couple. We heard about this area. It has a small local Jewish community, and besides that, it’s near Walmart’s corporate headquarters, so many, many people stream through on business. Of course, we try to help them in any way we can.”
The rabbi and his wife arrived in Rogers, Ark., a decade ago. A short time later, they opened an active Chabad House, where Dobi Greisman is program director. They began to host prayer services, and to run special holiday events and children’s programs. Their efforts bore fruit. The Jewish community was flourishing, but one thing was missing: a ritual bath.
“The mikvah is the basis of every Jewish community. It symbolizes—more than anything else—regeneration and purity,” explains Dobi Greisman. “But building a mikvah is a complicated and expensive process, so much so that in spite of our desire to build one immediately when we settled in Rogers, it was stuck in the planning phase for longer than expected.”
After much effort they built the first halachically valid mikvah to be built in that area of Arkansas, and recently completed the final decorative touches on the building.
When the rabbi read about the unearthing of the ancient mikvah in Ein Karem, he says he felt like a circle had been closed.
“For me, the words ‘Ein Karem’ remind me of my birth. I was born there and so was half my family. Is it only symbolic that an ancient mikvah, the symbol of rebirth, was discovered in the neighborhood of Ein Karem exactly when we were celebrating the opening of our new mikvah, representing the rebirth and rejuvenation of Arkansas Jewry?
There’s more than symbolism here. There’s the closing of a circle, or, if you like, the continuation of the long, long golden chain of Jewish history.”
The archaeologists found scorch marks on the mikvah. According to the Archaeological Authority, it’s possible that these burns are a testimony to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple.
What the Romans didn’t know was that while they might have succeeded in burning the mikvah in Ein Karem, its spirit could not be destroyed; it rings out from thousands of mikvahs all over the world.
The preparation room at the Rogers, Ark., mikvah
The preparation room at the Rogers, Ark., mikvah

‘Influence Generations of Descendants’

For countless generations, going to the mikvah was part of every married Jewish woman’s life. In fact, the ritual is so fundamental to Jewish life that Jews are required to build a mikvah even before establishing a synagogue.
In recent decades, however, many women never had the chance to observe this vital mitzvah. Many mikvahs were neglected, and women didn’t feel comfortable using them; other women simply never knew they existed.
On 16 Tammuz 5735, the Lubavitcher Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory—announced that the mitzvah of family purity was to be given top priority. “Not only is this a basic mitzvah for any Jewish family, which influences the spiritual and physical health of the children,” the Rebbe said, “going to the mikvah will influence generations of descendants.”
As part of the Family Purity Campaign, the Rebbe also stated the need not only to make mikvahs kosher, but aesthetically pleasing. Since his announcement, hundreds of exquisite new mikvahs have been built all over the world. Awareness of the mitzvah has spread, and tens of thousands of women have embraced the laws of family purity.
“We are very particular about the cleanliness and the beauty of the mikvah,” says Dobi Greisman. “Our goal is that every woman who uses it will have a relaxed, personally fulfilling experience.”
Does she have a message to those who may have never experienced this profound and moving Jewish tradition?
“My message is basically aimed at women readers,” she replies. “Since we built the mikvah, a number of women have begun to keep the precious mitzvah of family purity, and they visit the mikvah every month. These women are a source of inspiration to us all, especially to those readers who don’t yet keep this mitzvah. We’re talking about women who had never heard of a mikvah until ours was opened, and in spite of that, they accepted this mitzvah.
“I’m certain that everyone can. Women who try it can testify that it improves their lives, personally and spiritually, in so many different ways.”
The immersion pool at the Rogers, Ark., mikvah
The immersion pool at the Rogers, Ark., mikvah
© Copyright 2015, all rights reserved.


Chabad.org Magazine   -   Editor: Yanki Tauber
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