Mount Kilimanjaro is the highest free-standing mountain in the world. So why would three Orthodox Jews leave the comfort of their homes in exchange for a week of arduous hiking?
In 2001, while driving home to Bat Yam, near Tel Aviv, twenty-six-year-old Alte Nechama Malka (“Malkie”) Wachsman was killed in an accident. In response to her daughter’s death, Rebbetzin Sara Meisels, the daughter of the late Bobover rebbe, Rabbi Shlomo Halberstam, decided to share the importance and power of the word Amen with others.
Thirty-five years ago, Avraham and his wife, Dina Bracha, drove to Maine (as Arnold and Bonnie) and bought a twenty-acre plot of land, which was covered in snow, for $800. Ten years ago, when Avraham was fifty, “all my illusions shattered,” he says. Avraham started driving to an Orthodox shul an hour and a half away in Bangor, Maine, looking for something to fill his void.
It was not only the contents of the more than forty magnificent essays that comprise the book on Judaism, Torah, the Land and State of Israel and the future of the Jewish people that inspired and impressed me. What most touched me, and brought me literally to tears, was the array of authors represented by the essays in the book.
There can be little doubt that the robust growth, baruch Hashem, of the Torah-observant community, both in Eretz Yisrael and in chutz la’Aretz, has brought challenges along with its blessings. But that different groups may have developed in somewhat different directions hardly makes for a tragedy.
It is the autumn of 1942. I, Lulek, am a boy of five years and four months, short in stature, terrified. I stretch my neck as far as it will go in order to catch a glimpse of my father. He is standing in the Umschlagplatz, the assembly point for deportation, which is next to the Great Synagogue of our town, Piotrkow, Poland. Father, with his impressive beard and black rabbi’s suit, stands in the center, surrounded by Jews.
PDF
