What is the power of Chabad on Campus? One of the people who witnessed the joyous singing and dancing at the Havdalah gathering following the JewFest Shabbaton this past Motzei Shabbos describes the surreal and uplifting atmosphere in this open letter he submitted to CrownHeights.info.
While visiting my ailing mom in Brooklyn, just a few months before her untimely passing, I shared with her the exciting news that Chavie and I were going to adopt a second baby. She pondered the idea that we’d have adoptive Irish twins, thirteen months apart, and after a few moments, she gave me her loving motherly look and asked “Why so quick? What’s the rush”? I’m still uncertain where my answer came from, perhaps directly from my soul: “Mom”, I said, “I thought we don’t believe in family planning!”. She smiled, accepted it, and shared my witty comeback with whoever would listen.
Before enrolling at U.C. Santa Cruz, Amanda Botfeld, a Reform Jew from Santa Monica, had never heard of Chabad. “I avoided Jewish spaces in part because I never felt like my level of Jewishness was ‘enough.’ Jewish community events are often intended to reaffirm your standing as an insider; I usually left feeling more like an outsider,” she wrote in an op-ed published by JWeekly. “But Chabad was different.”
Donald Trump will win the election in a landslide, predicts Chaim Ross in this op-ed he submitted to CrownHeights.info. Read further in the extended article to see why.
Unlike our grandparents in Soviet Russia, we have the freedom to vote. Let’s vote to keep our freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom to pursue happiness, writes Aliza Bas Menachem in this pre-election day op-ed.
A young single on the ‘Shidduch Market’ bemoans the seeming difficulty of Shadchanim and parents to accept it when a young Bochur or girl rejects a suggestion, or take it seriously when they express their preferences.
A Crown Heights mother expresses concern that too often parents don’t concern themselves with the safety and well-being of teenage girls who babysit their children in this op-ed submitted to CrownHeights.info.
Her name was Faygee. She was 20 years old and she had a smile that could light up a room. Faygee was one of my wife Aviva’s students and she was full of life, full of love, and full of hope. She always knew what to say to make everyone around her feel good, how to give them chizuk so that they could carry on even when they faced trials and tribulations. But we lost her Monday night to an accidental heroin overdose.
A neighborhood resident wrote to CrownHeights.info about an incident he witnessed in the aftermath of yesterday’s Labor Day Parade in Crown Heights.
Aliza Bas Menachem bids farewell to Barry Chamish, OBM, an investigative journalist who wrote a book about the 2005 Disengagement from Gush Katif called ‘Bye Bye Gaza.’
Erev Shabbos is supposed to be a time of serene anticipation for the arrival of Shabbos. Instead, for many couples who work full time and have children, it can be a day of immense stress. One member of the Crown Heights community who struggled with this problem found a solution in Hayom Yom, and is eager to share his secret with the community.
“When Dr. Ben Carson spoke at the Republican National Convention, I thought he was about to call for a Moment of Silence in our schools,” writes Aliza Bas Menachem in this powerful op-ed reflecting on the current tensions and racial strife affecting the country. Unfortunately, he didn’t.
“The other day I heard someone say Chabad was ‘a humanitarian Jewish organization.’ I cringed” writes Baila Olidort, the Director of Communications at Chabad-Lubavitch Headquarters. “Today we speak of social good and humanitarian causes as if they are millennial values. We are uneasy talking about things that aren’t politically correct, like G-d, chosenness, intermarriage, or the rituals and practices that identify us as Jews.”
Rabbi Danny Yaffe, who serves as youth rabbi in the Great Synagogue of Sydney, shares his thoughts on the latest craze among smartphone-wielding youth – a game called Pokemon Go.
Rabbi Avraham Lapine, director of Chabad at the University of Missouri, who lost his mother at the age of five to a brutal murderer who broke into their home, wrote the following op-ed about healing the racial divide engulfing the United States, which was printed in The Columbia Daily Tribune.
Rabbi Noach Salovitz, a member of the Crown Heights community, authored the following op-ed on what he feels has been absent from the ongoing discussion regarding the Crown Heights Eruv, which he shared with CrownHeights.info.
In an opinion piece in The Forward, Loyola University Law Professor Yitzchok Adlerstein points to a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that affirms the right of parents to educate their children according to their religious beliefs, even if violating their state’s mandatory education standards.
2
