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Rabbi Aharon Kahn, a rov whose shul I am close to in Brooklyn, and a Rosh Yeshiva in RIETS, tells the story about his rebbe, Rav Joshe Ber Soleveitchik, one of the greatest Torah scholars of his generation and a chochom in many disciplines. Rav Yoshe Ber, while studying in Berlin, davened Yom Kippur at […]

Among the people you find in a German Jewish community are some who are blessed with an appreciation for the Jewish calendar and its science. You will also encounter some who are “calendar savants”. These are the handful of people who remember when it is your bar mitzvah Shabbos many years into your adulthood, and […]

In the much celebrated painting of Moritz Oppenheim of the Jewish wedding a jester appears on the steps of the synagogue. The chuppah is performed in the courtyard of the synagogue. Affixed to a wall of that courtyard is a tablet with a Magen David (six-cornered star) and some Hebrew writing. I was once told […]

When I was a teenager, Mr. Joseph Katzenstien z’l gave my father a recording of the Shul choir, which was recorded in a concert in 1955. Today, via Googling, I discovered that this was released as a record at the time. Recently, his daughter gave me the original magnetic reel from which this record was pressed.I […]

Transcribed from a lecture by Rabbi Benyamin S. Hamburger Shlita on Chol Hamoed 5778. Video here. Please excuse that this is written in the flow of a spoken lecture and not as an essay or even a blog post.   In the study of minhag we need to be discerning. For example, the minhag of […]