Hidden behind the plain, functional facade of the Dushinsky yeshivah building on Rechov Shmuel Hanavi is its beis midrash—a beautiful edifice that is home to a warm and welcoming chasidus. In many ways, that is a reflection of the Dushinsky Rebbe himself. Known for his extreme simplicity and humility, Rav Yosef Tzvi Dushinsky’s modest exterior belies his remarkable spiritual depth.
I first encountered the Rebbe at the airport when I was flying to Eretz Yisrael. Traveling without a gabbai, the Rebbe sat near the gate of our flight, learning quietly and speaking graciously with whoever approached him. At the time, I was too shy to step forward, a missed opportunity I have regretted ever since.
Among the many stories attesting to the Rebbe’s unique pashtus is the following, representative of his essence:
A few years ago, a picture circulated of the Rebbe carrying a case of water to a stranger’s apartment. On his way to be menachem an avel in a certain building, the Rebbe saw a Yid struggling to carry cases of water up the stairs. The Rebbe immediately took one of the cases and carried it up to the man’s apartment on the second floor.

When I ask one of the Rebbe’s chasidim for the gabbai’s number so I can make an appointment with the Rebbe, he looks at me askance. “Call the gabbai? Why? Ask the Rebbe himself.”
As I stand in a short line in the Dushinsky beis midrash after Shacharis waiting to speak with the Rebbe, I’m rethinking my decision to listen to his advice.
Although the Rebbe does not appear to be rushing any of his visitors, the line moves quickly. Then the Rebbe spots me—the only one in the room not wearing traditional Yerushalmi chasidic garb.
“Shulem Aleichem,” the Rebbe greets me with a warm smile. After a minute of small talk, the Rebbe asks how he can help me, and I tell him why I came.
“Aren’t there others more important you can speak to?” he asks in his typical self-deprecating manner.
“I have spoken to some of them, but everybody wants to hear from the Rebbe,” I reply.
To my relief, the Rebbe smiles again. He asks how long I will be in town. “Until the end of the week,” I tell him. He contemplates for a moment.
“This is a very busy week,” he admits. “We experienced a tragedy in the chasidus, and I have to travel to raise money to support a new almanah and many children. On Thursday, we have a hachnasas sefer Torah. It will be difficult, but we can try either early afternoon before the hachnasas sefer Torah or immediately after.”
The Rebbe gives me a warm brachah and instructs me to reach out to a gabbai regarding his schedule on Thursday afternoon. If nothing opens up then, he says, I should come to the hachnasas sefer Torah on Thursday night. I am deeply moved by his kindness and warmth to a complete stranger.

* * *

Thursday morning, I call the gabbai, who informs me that the Rebbe is still busy fundraising for the newly bereaved family and will not be available this afternoon. “Maybe after the hachnasas sefer Torah,” the gabbai says.
My flight is scheduled for that night. Though the departure time is quite late, I have no idea when the hachnasas sefer Torah will conclude; it’s probable that I will not be able to wait long enough to speak with the Rebbe. But when I voice my concern to the gabbai, he laughs and tells me with certainty, “It’s going to end at eight o’clock.” I’m somewhat skeptical but decide to try.
One thing I’ve learned is the reason why the Rebbe is not available in the morning: it’s because of his intense learning schedule. He deviates from it only for especially important matters. During the hachnasas sefer Torah, I schmooze with one of the talmidim learning in the yeshivah. He tells me about the Rebbe’s seder hayom.
“Every morning before davening, he has a chavrusashaft with two older bachurim who have already left the yeshivah and entered the working world. They come at six to learn with him. After davening, he has another chavrusashaft with another few bachurim who can use chizzuk. The Rebbe is a mohel, and he performs brissim almost every day.
“Because he became so much in demand and didn’t want to disturb his sedarim, he only performs a bris if the people are willing to have it in his beis midrash.
“It’s not about kavod,” the talmid tells me. “He doesn’t accept kibbudim unless all the grandfathers have already served as sandak.”
After that, he learns with Rav Meir Eliyahu Goldstein, who comes every morning to learn with the Rebbe. According to those I spoke to, that chavrusashaft is chok v’lo yaavor; the Rebbe rarely if ever misses it.
“Rav Goldstein is a rosh kollel by us,” the talmid says, “and they lock themselves in their room to learn together.
“In the afternoon, the Rebbe gives two shiurim. An earlier one is for shiur daled, and one after Minchah, for shiur hei. Both shiurim are older bachurim.
“After that, he says an entire yom of Tehillim, which he started during COVID for cholei Yisrael. After that he learns with Rav Yosef Tzvi Klein for an hour, and then he has hours for kabbalas kahal.
“On Thursday, instead of kabbalas kahal he gives a shiur to shiur gimmel. On Friday, he gives a shiur to balebatim in the sefer Panim Yafos.
“He always reminds the hanhalas hayeshivah that the yeshivah runs from Sunday morning until Friday afternoon. The Rebbe instituted his own project on Friday afternoons. Every one of us bachurim writes on a paper what hours he learns on Fridays and Shabbosim, which we then hand in to the Rebbe.
“Before Kabbalas Shabbos, the Rebbe joins us at the learning seder and gives a shiur on Sidduro Shel Shabbos to all the bachurim. He started this when he first became rebbe.
“On Shabbos morning, the Rebbe once again joins us for a seder before Shacharis, and this repeats itself on Motzaei Shabbos and in the summer after Minchah. This is so important because the Rebbe always tells us that if you go for a day or two without learning, then it’s as if you’re starting the zman anew. There must be continuity.”

* * *

The hachnasas sefer Torah is a beautiful, simple and very not rebbishe affair. The Rebbe is standing near his seat watching the dancing. Suddenly the music stops, the chasidim dance the new sefer Torah to the aron kodesh, and the event concludes with Tehillim and Maariv. After Maariv, the Rebbe notices me standing in line. He nods his head, indicating that I should follow him, and leaves to his room adjacent to the beis midrash.
As soon as I reach the door, a gabbai —one I have not met before—informs me that the Rebbe has an appointment now. I inform him that I believe I have an appointment with the Rebbe now, as arranged by a different gabbai. He says he has to ask the Rebbe.
He returns with the message that the Rebbe will see me now—on the condition that I do not take any pictures while in his office. The Rebbe is aware that there are many pictures of him available to the public, but he doesn’t enjoy being photographed.
“You will have to wait, though, because the Rebbe has a chavrusa now, a Yid named Gross who sells pasta to grocery stores. He was recently one of the eidim at a chuppah, where he joked to the Rebbe that since he is an eid, he has to do teshuvah in order to be a kosher one. The Rebbe told him that the Be’er Mayim Chaim in the previous week’s parshah actually discusses this, and he instructed him to come learn it with him after the hachnasas sefer Torah.”
The gabbai remarks that it’s unusual for the Rebbe to say in which sefer he saw a particular shtikel Torah. “In order to avoid being seen as a talmid chacham, the Rebbe hesitates to answer when people ask in learning, aside from talmidim. And when he does answer, he phrases it, ‘I once saw somewhere; I’m not sure exactly where.’ Then he will complete the entire shtikel without missing a beat.”

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From 1995 to 2021, Rabbi Aaron Kotler served as the CEO of Lakewood’s Beis Medrash Govoha. Since his departure from that position, he has largely stayed out of the public eye. Yet he continues to follow in his father’s footsteps, teaching and spreading Torah to distant communities.

In this conversation, he reflects on his remarkable upbringing and the enduring legacy he continues to shape.

You grew up in a home of greatness, and for many years you were involved in your father’s work. Your father was the embodiment of Yissachar and Zevulun, serving as both the rosh yeshivah and the fundraiser. You assumed the role of fundraising, while your brother Rav Malkiel became the rosh yeshivah.
Yes. My father did both. And while he carried the yeshivah, he also carried klal Yisrael. They used to joke that Rav Aharon Kotler’s koach in psak was obscured by his lomdus, and Rav Moshe Feinstein’s lomdus was obscured by his psak. My father’s brilliance in learning was obscured by his askanus in taking care of the klal. But he was also a nonstop fountain of Torah and a unique gadol hador.
My mother also did many things. Her desk was the go-to address for Bikur Cholim, Tomchei Shabbos and shidduchim. Even bachurim would come to the house on a regular basis to say hello and get some ice cream. Her tiny desk had a massive Rolodex of doctors’ names, and she also kept a file of index cards with notations on things she was doing, such as finding jobs for people, helping those who needed extra money and solving problems.
Our house was always full of strangers. There were nine of us kids sharing four bedrooms, and our cousins, the Schwartzmans, lived with us as well, so altogether there were around 15 children in the house.

One of the sweetest interviews I ever did was with your mother, a”h. When I was a bachur, she redt a shidduch for me. When I interviewed her years later, I told her, “I don’t know if I ever thanked the Rebbetzin for redting that shidduch, but I just want the Rebbetzin to know that nothing came of it.” She replied with a chuckle, “Oib gornisht hot geshehn iz avada gut—If nothing happened, then it was surely for the best.” She had such a down-to-earth quality.
She did. I once came to her and saw that she was smiling, so I asked her why. She said, “I made three shidduchim this week, and one of them was very difficult.” The difficult shidduch had involved a divorced woman who got engaged to a divorced man. The woman had divorced her first husband because he didn’t have a job and didn’t feel responsible for taking care of the household. She said to my mother, “I’ll listen to any shidduchim the Rebbetzin suggests, but he has to have a job.”
My mother then told me who the man was. I said, “But he doesn’t have a job!” She said, “You’re right, so here’s what I did. I redt the shidduch and told him, ‘You’d better not tell her that you don’t have a job. We’ll take care of it when the time comes.’” They went out, and once my mother saw that things were serious, she called one of the yeshivah’s balebatim and said, “I made this amazing shidduch between two people who had been divorced, and I even got him a job!” The balebos said, “Really? Where?” “By you,” she told him. She was a real doer in that sense.

She was an amazing person. She was as sharp as a whip.
She was smart like anything and could see right through you. I once brought one of the most insightful, intuitive people I knew to her, and he told me afterward that he felt as if she had looked right through him. She saw his soul.

She said things exactly as she saw them, and her candor could sometimes catch you off guard.
She was also always happy, with a good laugh and a candy in her hand. What people don’t know about her is that she was also highly educated. She went to the Augusta Victoria Gymnasium in her hometown of Memel, which was a German school. She grew up speaking English and German. I have her grades from school.
In fact, min hashamayim, the reason why she was able to get her visa out of Russia and escape to Japan was that she went to the Japanese Embassy in Moscow. There were a lot of refugees trying to get in, but they weren’t admitting anyone. She didn’t know this at the time, but I have copies of the cables.
Japanese Foreign Minister Matsuoka had ordered Ambassador Tatekawa to stop giving visas to Jews. This was after Sugihara. If you wanted to get out after 1940, there were no more Sugihara visas. But the same kneitch that Sugihara and Jan Zwartendijk were mechadesh—that Curacao officially said “no visa required”—meant that you could still go to Japan and get a two-week transit visa saying that you were going to Curacao.
The way it originally worked was that Zwartendijk, the Dutch consul in Kovno, would stamp the passport “No Entry Visa Required for Curacao,” which was true, but Curacao wouldn’t take them in. Technically, there was no visa required, but if you showed up there, they weren’t going to let you in. Once the Dutch consul stamped your passport, you could then go to Sugihara, the Japanese consul, and he would give you a two-week transit visa as if you were heading to Japan on your way to Curacao. Of course, he knew that these people were going to stay in Japan.
After Sugihara had to stop giving out those visas, the refugees who still wanted to get out of the country, including my mother, decided to go to the Japanese Embassy in Moscow, and the ambassador there started giving out visas. In the meantime, he was getting cables ordering him to cease and desist: “We don’t want them. If any Jew needs to be helped, he can go to Vladivostok—on the other side of Russia—because the consul there has a limited number of visas available for refugees.” That was actually a joke, because you couldn’t get to Vladivostok without an entry visa for Japan. Stalin wasn’t going to let anyone cross Russia without that.
The embassy in Moscow was closed and wasn’t letting anyone in, but my mother was young and well-kempt, and speaking in English she said to the guards, “I have an appointment with the ambassador.” They saw a foreign woman speaking in English, so they let her in. She knocked on the door, and the ambassador’s aide opened it. She said again in English, “I have an appointment with the ambassador.” He saw a well-dressed woman speaking in English, so he called the ambassador. When the ambassador walked in, she said, “I need a visa.” He didn’t give her a visa, but he did give her a transit certificate that was valid for two weeks. The visas were also valid for two weeks, so he was pulling a diplomatic shtick on his bosses. He gave transit certificates to a number of people, but he was forced to stop a few days later.

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Lev Leviev is one of the most prominent yet most private figures in the Jewish world. Renowned as a diamond magnate and major philanthropist supporting a wide range of causes, his personal story and that of how he built his empire remained largely untold—until now.

I recently had the rare privilege of sitting with Mr. Leviev for nearly two hours for an interview. The conversation was easygoing and relaxed, not what I expected from the man who took on De Beers. While he clearly possesses a sharp and unconventional business mind, the phrase he returned to again and again was “Avinu Shebashamayim,” consistently attributing all his success to Hashem.
As a young boy growing up behind the Iron Curtain in Tashkent, Lev learned Gemara with Rashi and Tosafos, completing several masechtos. While he was still a teenager, Lev’s family settled in Bnei Brak, where he led a simple and grounded life, and yes, attended tishen.
A devoted chasid of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Leviev shared several career-defining moments with the Rebbe, including the one that set everything in motion.
He has no plans of slowing down. For Leviev, business today is a means to an end: funding the many mosdos he has built and continues to support. These include worldwide institutions for the Jewish community, kollelim for older men, yeshivos, girls’ schools and more.
We discussed the future of the diamond industry, his approach to supporting mosdos and the business lessons he has learned along the way.
Wishing you a chag kasher v’samei’ach. Enjoy!

—Nesanel

I was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in 1956, the fifth of eight children. I have four older sisters. We were always a strictly Orthodox family, not only going back to my great-grandparents’ generation, but a continuous lineage of Jews who always kept the faith. The major turning point was in 1906, exactly 120 years ago, when a Chabad shliach named Rav Eliezerov arrived in Samarkand, where my father and grandfather were born, and opened a cheder with 15 children. Among them was my grandfather. Rav Eliezerov strengthened Yiddishkeit in his students.
“My grandfather had been orphaned of his mother, and his father, my great-grandfather Yitzchok, had to support the family during those difficult times. As soon as the Communists came to power, they closed all the religious schools. They left one shul where only the elderly were allowed to daven. But the Yidden continued to keep Shabbos, as everyone was frum. The Jewish quarter became a kind of ghetto for the few thousand Yidden who lived there.
“Over the years, the children began to leave the ghetto, go to the city and study at universities, becoming doctors and scientists. They were afraid to do mitzvos in public, as it was forbidden. Everything was closed down, and in 1920, Rav Eliezerov had to flee Russia because the borders were going to close.
“He left his students, among them Rav Chizkiyahu Kaykov, who studied in Lubavitch. Rabbi Kaykov and my grandfather were chavrusos. They did all the activism together.
“The flame of Yiddishkeit went underground. The Yidden kept all the mitzvos in secret until they were informed upon and arrested. Many were sentenced to death for their religious activities; others were exiled to Siberia and sentenced to work in the uranium mines. In 1953, when Stalin died, these exiles, including my grandfather, were granted amnesty and released. Baruch Hashem, everyone returned healthy and safe from the frozen wasteland.
“Meanwhile, my father and his brothers had fled from Samarkand to Tashkent because the authorities wanted to arrest my grandfather’s children as well. They changed a letter in their last name so they wouldn’t be caught. We are Leviim; originally, my last name was Levi HaLevi. In the Soviet Union they always added an ‘ev’ at the end of the last name, turning Levi to Leviev.
“Our religious activities continued in Tashkent. From the age of five I had a rebbi, a Chabad chasid who operated in secret. He would come every day to teach me in hiding in the basement. Every day brought challenges; we always had to hide who we were—not only from the non-Jews but even from other Yidden who knew nothing about Yiddishkeit. For them, Lenin was god. Shabbos was especially challenging. We couldn’t be mechallel Shabbos, but missing school triggered inquiries, which would lead to a KGB investigation and prison time for my father. Most weeks, we simply took the risk and stayed home.
“When I was 12, I decided I would no longer attend school. Between the danger of missing classes on Shabbos and my refusal to remove my hat—a school requirement—the situation had become untenable. I went to study in an underground yeshivah in Samarkand.
“I lived in a house with ten other bachurim and our teacher. At the time, we thought that was the entire yeshivah. Only later did we discover that there was a network of many such houses, each with a teacher and each operating quietly.
“Back in Tashkent, though, they began to question my absence. When my father was threatened with arrest, I was smuggled back home in the middle of the night. Amazingly, while there were very few frum children in town, there were farbrengens all the time. We would be careful to come one by one and not to leave together as a group. We’d close the door, drink l’chaim, discuss words of Torah and dance. This was all under heavy prohibitions and a real threat of death. We’d get together on Yomim Tovim and special days. We lived in a kind of clique of our own: our family, my father’s brothers and a few Chabad chasidim. We had no beards or peyos because it was forbidden.
“My father was the manager of a department store. He also had a side business selling imported clothing. He made a good living.
“Finally, in 1971, we moved to Eretz Yisrael, baruch Hashem. For a long time, we were denied permission to emigrate, and my father had to pay a lot of money for our permits. When we finally made it out, we settled in Bnei Brak. Every Friday afternoon, everything shut down for Shabbos. It was beautiful. We used to go to the tishen of many rebbes, such as Lelov, Vizhnitz and others. There were a few rebbes, special tzaddikim, who came from Russia.
“I was 15 when we came to Eretz Yisrael, so I didn’t help my father with the business, but I had already received the best business lesson of my life when I was 12. I was always buying and selling on the market; we’d have to run when the police were spotted. I was making money, and my father received some sporty suits that were popular at the time. I told him I wanted a suit, which was worth 12 rubles. He asked me, ‘Do you have the money? These aren’t free. Pay and you’ll get it.’
“I was so offended that I cried. At the time, I thought my father was being stingy and didn’t love me. I’m ready to be moser nefesh for him, and he wants me to pay him for a suit? He’s not embarrassed to take money from his son? Baruch Hashem, that gave me the right perspective: to not rely on anyone except Avinu Shebashamayim. From that day on, I said, with Hashem’s help, I would not accept any more money from my father. Not that he ever gave me much before then.
“It was the most important lesson in life. Many parents spoil their children by giving them money and all the latest things. In our house, that concept didn’t exist. There was food at home? You got new clothes once a year before Pesach? Make do with what you have. That was the motto of our house. It was a strict and tough upbringing, but it was very loving.

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“First comes the hummus: studded with chickpeas, anointed with a little reservoir of olive oil, greedily smeared up with hunks of pitta [sic] bread and messy fingers. Then the tabbouleh, then some homemade falafels…”
Thus opened an article in The Guardian, the London daily that is considered Britain’s “paper of record,” like our country’s The New York Times. And, like The Times, it has a denied but evident bias against Israel and Jews.
The details of the sumptuous meal continued through several deliriously described courses and dessert (baklava and homemade chocolate, if you really must know). The writer, the paper’s sports writer and opinion columnist Jonathan Liew, was feasting at a successful North London Arab-run eatery called Cafe Metro.
He wasn’t writing a food column. It was, rather, a report on a controversy swirling around Cafe Metro and a new nearby branch of a popular upscale bakery called Gail’s.
The night before it was due to open, the bakery was vandalized with red paint. Less than a week later, all its windows were smashed in. Slogans reading “reject corporate Zionism” and various obscenities were scrawled on its walls.
Gail’s describes itself as “a British business with no specific connections to any country or government outside the UK,” but its parent company, Bain Capital, reportedly invests in military technology, including some Israeli security companies. Bad bakery!
Mr. Liew, after noting how Cafe Metro, “proudly blazons its Palestinian heritage” with a public display of flags, describes it lovingly as “a source of comfort and community in troubling times, resistance in its tastiest and most delicately spiced form.” And goes on to contend that “the very presence of [Gail’s] 20 metres away from a small independent cafe feels quietly symbolic, an act of heavy-handed high-street aggression.”
Gail’s, the writer seems to imply, has no business being a business.
Many people saw Mr. Liew’s description of the bakery’s opening, “an act of heavy-handed, high-street aggression” as, well, an act of heavy-handed Fleet Street aggression.
It was also an example of utterly corrupt journalism. Mr. Liew wasn’t quoting the Arab owners of Cafe Metro—who would be misguided enough to characterize Gail’s as an aggressor for simply existing. It was the columnist’s own ostensible statement of fact.
Making matters even more outrageous, the piece, which included no quotes from anyone connected to Gail’s, dismissed the window-smashing and paint smearing as “small acts of petty symbolism.”
A slew of complaints about the column was registered by, among many others, Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, who called the column “disgusting,” “appalling” and “ridiculous.”
With typical droll British humor, Senior Barrister Simon Myerson referenced the paper’s record of bias, writing: “I see The Guardian is having an anti-Semitic moment. Sorry, another anti-Semitic moment.”
The Guardian later edited the piece, “repositioning” the objectionable “aggression” wordage “to clarify it meant to refer to the described fears about the chain’s impact on small traders.”
Also, “to avoid misunderstanding,” the paper removed the “small acts of petty symbolism” phrase, which, it explained, “was not intended to minimize local vandalism but rather to suggest its misdirected futility.”
All of which really misses the point. It was the framing of the entire piece that was, and remains, journalistically objectionable.
After hundreds of words extolling the gustatory delights of Arab cuisine, Mr. Liew dwells for hundreds more on how the family of one of Cafe Metro’s operators “once lived in the city of Beit Hanoun in Gaza, and now lives out a precarious and hunted existence in one of Gaza’s many temporary refugee camps…”
And he contrasts that with how “Gail’s has long been feted as a purveyor of luxury baked goods and is an unmistakable barometer of local affluence.” Even though the chain is not currently owned by Jews or Israelis, the insinuation is as obvious as it is odious.
And Mr. Liew concludes with the observation that the two businesses “have found themselves on the frontline of a war. A deeply asymmetric war, defined by gross imbalances in power and resources and platforms.”
There is in fact a gross imbalance here. It lies in the shameless portrayal of a vandalized victim as an aggressor, opposite a reverent, adulatory portrayal of an imagined victim. ●

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People don’t fail because they’re not smart. People fail because they never stick with one thing long enough to succeed.”
It’s the kind of line you expect from a business podcast or self-help guru, not from a rebbishe-looking, chasidishe Yid speaking in thickly accented English. Yet that is precisely who delivers it in a clip that recently went viral.
The speaker is Rav Shulem Landau, rosh yeshivah and rosh kollel of Mosdos Rivnitz. He leads close to 100 bachurim in his yeshivah and more than 200 yungeleit learning across three kollelim in Williamsburg. A marbitz Torah for decades, Rav Shulem has shaped thousands of talmidim who have passed through his mosdos.

The clip, though, is far from a one-off. Lately, it’s nearly impossible to scroll through WhatsApp without encountering one of Rav Shulem’s status videos, each offering a tightly delivered piece of practical wisdom in plainspoken English. His videos routinely rack up millions of views, along with thousands of likes, shares and comments.
And therein lies the paradox: a chasidishe rebbe delivering mussar to the masses on social media.
I needed to find out who the rav behind the quotes really is and what exactly he’s doing there.
On this rainy evening, his beis midrash on Ellery Street is easy to miss, tucked discreetly into the middle of a row of identical townhouses. There is no sign, just a narrow doorway that gives little indication of the reach of the man inside.
When I step into the building, I’m immediately struck by an unexpected sight: a group of Sephardic balebatim filing out of Rav Shulem’s office. Some are dressed in tailored suits, others more casually; a few sport slicked-back hair. It’s not the crowd one expects to encounter in a Williamsburg shul, and certainly not in a chasidishe beis midrash.
“Please give the Rav a few minutes,” Rav Shulem’s gabbai, Shraga Moshe Kalmanowitz, tells me.
While waiting, I ask Kalmanowitz what he can tell me about the phenomenon that has drawn so much attention.
“It’s a lot more interesting than most people realize,” he says. “The Rav’s audience on these platforms is incredibly diverse—every kind of Jew you can imagine, and even non-Jews.”
He scrolls through his phone and shows me a sampling of comments beneath Rav Shulem’s videos. One stands out. “The rabbi is spitting fiery truths,” writes an African American pastor.
Kalmanowitz explains that the responses go far beyond public comments. “People message the Rav directly with real questions about life, faith, marriage and purpose. It’s impossible to keep up. We receive thousands of messages every single day.”
Rav Shulem Landau’s voice, it seems, is reaching far beyond Williamsburg.
A few minutes later, Kalmanowitz motions me forward and ushers me into Rav Shulem’s study.
Rav Shulem sits at the head of a long table, an old, well-worn Gemara open in front of him. He looks up, smiles warmly and gestures for me to take a seat directly beside him.
“So,” he asks in the same heavily accented English familiar from the viral clips, “what do you want to talk to me about?”
I assure him that Yiddish is my first language. He nods approvingly, and we switch immediately to mamme lushen, as he calls it.
“Growing up in Kiryas Yoel, I didn’t even know English,” he tells me. “I never attended English classes. I thought it was bittul Torah.” He pauses and then smiles at the memory. “My grandfather begged me to learn the language of the medinah. He said it was the only way a person could earn a parnasah, but I told him I was going to stay in learning my entire life. I was a foolish child.”
“Even though it came true?” I challenge him gently.
“Yes,” he replies without hesitation. “Even though it came true.” He taps the table lightly for emphasis. “Because knowing English is still useful. It would make it much easier for me to speak to people who don’t understand Yiddish.
“It was foolish for another reason as well,” he continues. “Staying in learning wasn’t the norm in my family. My father was a bus driver at the time, and money was very tight. Today, baruch Hashem, my father is a rav in Kiryas Yoel with his own shul. But for many years he worked to support himself. Still, he never stopped learning. He was never a rav by profession, but it was bashert for him to become one. My mother says that in the end she got a rav for a husband.”
Today, his father is known as the Zlotchover Rav. “He’s very matzliach,” Rav Shulem says. “He doesn’t seek kavod, so everyone loves him.”
Born in Eretz Yisrael, Rav Shulem’s father later came to Williamsburg, where he became a talmid of the Satmar Rebbe, Rav Yoel, zt”l. The family’s connection to Satmar ran even deeper: Rav Shulem’s grandfather had learned by the Rebbe in the original town of Satmar. After the war, the family lived for a time in Bnei Brak and then moved to Williamsburg in the 1970s, eventually settling in Kiryas Yoel.
“The reason my father chose the name Zlotchov,” Rav Shulem adds, “is that our family tradition is that we are einiklach of Rav Michel Zlotchover, ben achar ben.”
He smiles as he notes that the family has since become one of rabbanim. “I have a brother, Rav Moshe Landau, who is the Yampoler Rav. I have another brother, Rav Mordechai Leib, who has a shtiebel. And my children are already rabbanim as well. My brother Reb Yoeli is also b’etzem a rav, he just hasn’t gotten the job yet. But he’s getting there.”
“We’ll make him a rav in the article,” I joke. “He’ll discover it when he reads it.”
Despite serving as a rav and heading major mosdos, Rav Shulem’s parnasah does not come from his avodas hakodesh. “I have some partnerships, investments and other ventures,” he explains. “I was involved in business when I was younger.” Today, however, he is no longer involved in business day to day, leaving him the space to focus on what he sees as his real mission.
Beyond his shul, Rav Shulem also heads a yeshivah and kollel. “Our ultimate goal,” he says, “is to create something similar to what exists in the Litvishe world. There, bachurim and yungeleit often learn together in the same beis midrash, and the yungeleit create a powerful kol Torah. This has a real impact on the bachurim. Even if a bachur is going through a difficult period, he’s still immersed in a makom Torah and drawn into its atmosphere.”

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During the latest military operation against Iran, El Al has been operating under extreme constraints that have significantly disrupted normal air travel. As this interview goes to print, outbound flights from Israel have been sharply curtailed by government mandate, limiting the airline to just 15 flights per day, each carrying no more than 50 passengers.

Compounding these restrictions, ongoing missile threats and rapidly evolving security conditions have led to cancellations and frequent schedule changes, leaving thousands of passengers stranded and scrambling to find alternative routes. At the same time that flight capacity has been restricted, a significant increase in oil prices has further strained the airline’s operations and financial outlook. The financial toll on El Al has been severe, with losses estimated at approximately $4 million per day.

While struggling to maintain vital air links, the airline has come under public criticism for how it allocates the limited number of available seats. Many travelers have expressed frustration over what they perceive as unclear or inconsistent prioritization.

Shlomi Zafrany offers a rare inside perspective on the airline’s decision-making process. He addresses the criticism and explains the complex coordination between El Al and Israeli authorities, highlighting the difficult balance among operational limitations, security considerations and the urgent need to bring people home safely.

f it’s not a secret, can you tell me where you are right now?
It’s not a secret. We’re on our campus, which is within the airport complex. We have a bunker for these kinds of situations. We hope to never have to use it, but it’s intended for exactly these times.

Does the bunker belong to the airport or to El Al?
It’s El Al’s bunker. Inside the bunker we have our management team, the operational control center, and all of the major teams that need to continue working even when the sirens go off, which is what we’ve been doing for the last three weeks. Obviously, it’s important to us to keep our team safe.

So when people complain about canceled flights, they’re communicating with you in the bunker. Maybe they should know that you’re not operating normally.
It’s actually more challenging than that, because our customer care teams are either working remotely or from our call center, which isn’t underground. This means that every time the siren goes off, whether they’re at home or in the office, they need to stop what they’re doing and go to the safe room, which obviously creates another disruption. It’s a real challenge to try to provide decent service to customers. But that’s our goal.
Another challenge is that we’re dealing with the same frustration as our customers over the fact that we are forced to cancel flights or cap the number of people who can board an aircraft. All these limitations mean that 80% of our customers must be rejected as long as these restrictions are in place.

You’ve probably been operating from the bunker since October 7.
No. We did for the first few weeks, but then we moved back to the offices. We were there until last June, when we had to go back to the bunker during the 12-day war with Iran, and now we’re back here again. I believe that this is the third episode that has forced us into the bunker since the outbreak of the war in 2023. In addition to the other challenges the airline is facing, our working quarters aren’t all that great.

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“Joseph Kent, a top counterterrorism official under Trump, just resigned. Kent and I don’t agree on much, but he is right: ‘Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.’”
—Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), echoing Kent’s anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

The Jews are behind it all.

That’s the thinking behind an inordinate amount of conspiratorial thinking. The idea that Jews were responsible for everything from the Black Plague to 9/11 to last week’s weather (and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s infamous Jewish space lasers) is a kind of anti-Semitic thought that has been with us for a couple thousand years. (The Romans had their own versions of this way of thinking.)
It’s therefore no surprise that we have been hearing similar things about the Iran war, especially from the political extremes. But what is more worrying is that we’ve been hearing those sentiments from members of the Trump administration as well as elected officials.
Just this past week, the head counterterrorism official in the Trump administration, Joe Kent, resigned, and in his resignation letter, he blamed the Iran war on Israel and “its powerful American lobby,” blamed the Iraq war and apparently the rise of ISIS on Israel as well, and suggested that President Trump had been fooled into joining the war.
That idea didn’t just find resonance on the far-right, Kent’s natural allies. Leftists, including Senator Bernie Sanders, echoed the statement. The fact that Kent has had ties with neo-Nazis and showed himself to be a conspiracy theorist multiple times did not faze them.
That episode raises a larger question. When the dust settles, will Israel’s enemies use the Iran war to turn Americans even further away from Israel?

A troubling terror chief
In February of last year, President Trump nominated Joe Kent, a former Green Beret and CIA officer, to serve as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, the country’s central organization for guarding against terror attacks.
Kent had unsuccessfully run for Congress twice, and that left him with a record that made a number of left-leaning advocacy groups, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and Democratic Majority for Israel oppose his confirmation.
Kent also had some Republican opposition. Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), a Trump opponent who was no longer in Congress at the time, said of Kent, “This guy is, I’m not going to say neo-Nazi, but as close as you can get to that without being labeled that is about what he is. Every conspiracy theory he buys into.”
One Republican, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), eventually voted against his confirmation.

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The American Jewish community was shocked by the news that two Jewish customers speaking Hebrew outside a restaurant in northern California last week were attacked and beaten by three men who happened to be walking by.
Then came the second shocker: one of the attackers was not a teenage miscreant but a 32 year-old attorney, employed by a local law firm as a specialist in mergers and acquisitions.
Once again, the old stereotype about violent anti-Semites and other terrorists—that they are young, unemployed and turn to extremism because they have “nothing to lose”—is contradicted by what we actually discover about them.
Barack Obama was a prominent exponent of the notion that poverty is a prime cause of terrorism. As a state senator in Illinois in 2001, Obama wrote that the 9/11 terrorists’ “lack of empathy” for their victims came “out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.” As president, in 2015, Obama asserted that terrorism increases “when people are not able to make a living or take care of their families.”
Obama was not alone in making such assumptions. Just last week, a prominent Israeli journalist, Tzvi Gottlieb, claimed that Hezbollah is actually just “an employment problem,” and if Israel would pay the salaries of its 50,000 members—which he estimated at $420 million annually—they would gladly put down their guns.
Yet the details emerging about recent Islamist attacks in New York, Virginia and Michigan contradict the notion that terrorists are simply unemployed people looking for jobs who don’t actually believe in the cause they espouse.
Emir Balat, who hurled a bomb at protesters near Gracie Mansion, ran lucrative online businesses selling high-end footwear and construction supplies. Mohamed Jalloh, who murdered a professor in Virginia, was 36 and served in the state’s national guard. Ayman Ghazali, who rammed his car into a Michigan synagogue, was a 41 year-old father of two with a job and a house. All three of them had plenty to lose by becoming terrorists.
A series of studies in the 1990s and early 2000s pulled the rug out from under the theory that terrorists are uneducated and unemployed, starting with a demographic analysis of the 415 Hamas terrorists deported by Israel to Lebanon in 1992. Dozens of them were doctors or professors; three-fourths were married; many had five or more children.
A study of 250 Palestinian Arabs who trained for suicide bombings in the late 1990s found that “none of them were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded or depressed. Many were middle class and, unless they were fugitives, held paying jobs…Two were the sons of millionaires.” Similarly, two-thirds of the 9/11 hijackers had attended college, some had master’s degrees and most had professions.
Contrary to the recent claim by Tzvi Gottlieb about Hezbollah, a study of its members in 2002 concluded that “having a living standard above the poverty line or a secondary school or higher education is positively associated with participation in Hezbollah.”
Radical ideology, not poverty, is the main cause of terrorism. That was true during the Holocaust—a large majority of top SS officers were university-educated professionals, and many had doctorates—just as it is true of contemporary Islamist and Palestinian Arab terrorists. ●

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Mark Levin is not only a well-known media personality and political commentator, but he has recently become part of the news itself as well.
In recent weeks, Levin has taken on commentator Tucker Carlson, whose rhetoric has increasingly become openly anti-Semitic, including the use of long-standing anti-Jewish tropes in his commentary. Carlson’s attacks have expanded into criticism of President Trump’s war against Iran, which he blames entirely on Israel. This stance has placed Carlson at odds not only with Trump but also with several leading figures within the MAGA movement who strongly support Israel and the administration’s policy toward Iran’s terror regime. Carlson’s arguments not only undercut the administration’s foreign policy but cross a line, intertwining political critique with prejudiced attacks on the Jewish community.
The dispute, however, has not remained limited to Carlson. Megyn Kelly has echoed many of Carlson’s sentiments with regard to Israel and the Middle East, amplifying what now appears to be a widening divide among prominent conservative media figures. These debates have highlighted growing tensions within the movement over both the US-Israeli alliance and the proper strategy for confronting Iran’s threats.
This ongoing war of words reached new heights on Sunday when Levin, a long-time supporter of President Trump and a vocal defender of the State of Israel, pushed back strongly with a biting post on X, expressing sharp disapproval of Kelly’s statements opposing the operation.
But what began as a dispute among media figures quickly escalated further when President Trump himself entered the conversation. Trump waded into the controversy on his own platform, Truth Social, forcefully championing Levin and defending him against critics. In doing so, he unexpectedly weighed in on the broader argument, backing Levin while implicitly rebuking Carlson and Kelly.

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Mark Levin, a truly Great American Patriot, is somewhat under siege by other people with far less Intellect, Capability, and Love for our Country. Mark is Tough, Strong, and Brilliant, hence the nickname “THE GREAT ONE,” conceived by our MAGA friend, the wonderful Sean Hannity, after years of dealing with Mark in Legal, Media, and other capacities. Mark would often do Sean’s show, speaking as a lawyer, and Sean realized then, as did others, that he was special. Mark Levin was not looking to do Television, Radio, or anything else, but he was drafted by very smart people who understood that there are few like him. He is a true Conservative, an Intellect far smarter than those who criticize him but, above all, he is a man of Great Wisdom and Common Sense who truly loves our Country. When you hear others unfairly attack Mark, remember that they are jealous and angry Human Beings, whose “sway” is much less than the Public understands, and will, now that they know where I stand, rapidly diminish. Other than for his wonderful wife and family, Mark Levin only cares and wants one thing, GREATNESS AND SUCCESS FOR AMERICA! Those that speak ill of Mark will quickly fall by the wayside, as do the people whose ideas, policies, and footings are not sound. THEY ARE NOT MAGA, I AM, and MAGA includes not allowing Iran, a Sick, Demented, and Violent Terrorist Regime, to have a Nuclear Weapon to blow up the United States of America, the Middle East and, ultimately, the rest of the World. MAGA is about stopping them cold, and that is exactly what we are doing. G-D BLESS OUR GREAT MILITARY, WHICH I HAVE REBUILT SINCE THE BEGINNING OF MY FIRST TERM, TO ACHIEVE EVERLASTING PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD TRUMP.

Against the backdrop of this intensifying debate, I spoke with Levin to discuss it. He emphasized what is ultimately at stake for the United States, Israel and the broader strategic confrontation with Iran, and he explained why these right-wing commentators remain outside the mainstream of Republican thought, exerting little influence over President Trump’s decision making.

On Sunday, the president of the United States weighed in with a post on Truth Social on your give-and-take with Megyn Kelly. What did that feel like?
I was absolutely stunned and incredibly gratified. He’s a really wonderful man. What he’s doing with Iran and his efforts to fight anti-Semitism are unprecedented. I don’t think we’ve ever seen the likes of him before. My wife, Julie, and I were absolutely thrilled by what he had written. I hadn’t spoken to him in weeks.
Obviously, this was brought to his attention, although certainly not by me or anyone on my behalf. It’s an amazing thing to have the president of the United States step in the way he did.
I think the even bigger picture is that he’s had enough of the effort by this cabal to undermine MAGA, the conservative movement and the Republican Party, and now he’s publicly saying so. I think it’s pretty clear to any sober thinker that these individuals have their own agendas, and that their effort is to disunite us.

Did you have any warning that the president was going to mention you in such a laudatory fashion?
No. I had absolutely no knowledge or expectation. It was the furthest thing from my mind.

He said such wonderful things about you.
(Laughs.) I usually only get compliments from the family, and that’s about it.

What do you think the post accomplishes? Of course, it endorses you in a wonderful way, but do you think it tilts the argument in your or his favor?
I think it says what it says, and it clarifies that I’m an outspoken supporter of his as well as what he’s doing in Iran. So I think he’s saying, “These people are really attacking me as well as Mark, and they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Do you think there’s any possibility that the president will lose control over his own MAGA movement?
The facts are indisputable. Over 90% of MAGA supports the president and his handling of this war against Iran, and zero percent of these woke-right neofascists do. Yet they claim to represent MAGA. They don’t represent MAGA. The president made that very clear in his statement. “I’m MAGA, and this is what we stand for.” We know what he stands for: peace through strength. He’s never been an isolationist. He also said that Iran is not going to get a nuclear weapon. So he’s been very consistent on what he’s campaigned on and what he’s doing.

He mentioned Sean Hannity as well. Do you think he’s trying to give you and Sean stronger voices than you’ve had until now?
No. I don’t think that’s something he was thinking about, certainly not the way I read it.

Do you find yourself more empowered and more responsible for voicing that support than you have until now?
I don’t think about being empowered. I try to do what I think is right. My positions haven’t changed for decades, not a single iota. You either have a view of the world that’s based on a belief system, value system and principles, or you don’t. I’m very blessed to have my platforms, and I don’t pull any punches.

You’re very admirable in sticking to your values, and I think everyone should emulate you in that. After all, you’re fighting the good fight.
You’re very kind. I don’t really know any other way to do it. It’s the way we roll here.

You used to focus heavily on the left, but now it seems like you’re equally passionate about addressing those in your own camp, the right wing of the Republican Party.
I look at it a little differently. I don’t think these people are still part of the “right wing” or the “Republican Party.” I’m a constitutional conservative, and they have never been part of what I believe.
That being said, yes, these people were previously aligned with the Republican Party, and now they seek to destroy it. Some of them previously sought to be aligned with the conservative movement or constitutional conservatism, but now they seek to destroy that too. They’re off in their own orbit at this point.
They are similar in their hatred of Israel, its prime minister, Jews and, quite frankly, the United States.

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I remember it clearly. It was blow after blow, and klal Yisrael was reeling. Some 40 years later, the Torah world is still limping from the loss of two gedolei Yisrael—spiritual giants who complemented each other in their knowledge, wisdom, and the ability to bear the weight of powerful decisions on their shoulders, together.

Wednesday marks the 40th yahrtzeit of my zeide, Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky, zt”l, who was niftar on 29 Adar I 5746/1986. Two weeks later, on 13 Adar II, Taanis Esther, his dear friend and confidant, the posek hador who guided klal Yisrael for decades, Rav Moshe Feinstein, zt”l, was niftar. In a leap year, like the year they left this world, Rav Yaakov’s yahrtzeit comes first. In a regular year, like this year, Rav Moshe’s yahrtzeit precedes that of Rav Yaakov. Sometimes one is first, sometimes the other.
It is reminiscent of Rashi’s comment that in the Torah sometimes Moshe is mentioned before Aharon and sometimes Aharon before Moshe, to teach that they were equal in stature. While it is not for us to suggest comparisons between gedolei Yisrael (even if one is my own grandfather), this alternating order is striking. It reflects, in a small symbolic way, the shared leadership they provided.
Numerous biographical articles and books have been written about each of these gedolei hador individually. I would like, however, to reflect on a specific aspect of both their lives: the extraordinary relationship between Rav Yaakov and Rav Moshe.
To casual observers, they seemed cut from the same cloth: two Litvishe rabbanim who both became roshei yeshivah and stood together at the helm of American Torah life for decades, carrying the burden of klal Yisrael with mutual respect, deep affection and agreement on almost every critical matter. In reality, however, they came from different backgrounds and different schools of thought, and they often approached critical issues from completely different perspectives.
Rav Moshe was a talmid of Rav Pesach Pruskin, and his outlook was shaped by the Lithuanian rabbinic tradition. His clarity, precision and confidence in psak made him the address for halachic questions from across the United States and around the world. Rav Yaakov, a talmid of Slabodka, carried the imprint of the Mussar movement—measured, thoughtful and attuned not only to the letter of the law but to how that letter would live in the hands of people. He was known for guiding klal Yisrael in general matters with prescient vision that extended far beyond the moment. Yet those differences never became divisions.
I once read about a meeting at which Rav Moshe had rendered a decision on a matter of public concern, and that was how the matter was ultimately adjudicated. Rav Hutner, zt”l—who, like Reb Yaakov, had learned in Slabodka—disagreed with Rav Moshe’s decision, later commenting to Rav Yaakov that “had Rav Moshe learned by our rebbe, he might not have held that way.”
In a different instance, my zeide quietly noted to me that he might not have expressed a certain ruling in the same way Rav Moshe had—because while Rav Moshe was technically correct, my zeide was worried that his ruling in this case might later lead to manipulation in other circumstances—but such observations were never criticisms. (He may have wanted to teach me how he approached certain issues.)
Once, my zeide’s talmid came to him with a very complicated sh’eilah. He refused to rule on it. “This you must ask Rav Moshe. Only Rav Moshe has shoulders broad enough for this,” he said. Then he added, “If Rav Moshe tells you that you may be lenient, you should follow him one hundred percent. It is one hundred percent mutar, and I stand behind it equally.”
After the petirah of Rav Aharon Kotler, zt”l, in the early 1960s, the American Torah world entered a new phase. Rav Ahron’s fiery drive was almost impossible to replicate, but it had to be sustained with steadiness. For the next 20 years, Rav Moshe and Rav Yaakov did that together.
They addressed the concerns of Agudas Yisrael, Chinuch Atzmai, and countless other communal organizations and matters that shaped Torah life. Their affection and reverence for one another was transcendent. Rav Moshe once said, “I love Rav Yaakov, and I am certain he loves me as well,” quoting the pasuk in Mishlei, “Kamayim hapanim lapanim kein leiv haadam laadam—As a face sees its reflection in the water, so does one man’s heart reflect another’s feelings.” Rav Yaakov beamed when he heard this.
Rav Yaakov’s admiration for Rav Moshe was of public record. He once addressed a group who had just visited Rav Moshe, telling them a personal anecdote. “When I was a five-year-old boy,” my zeide said, “everyone in my town envied an old man of about 90 who had, at the age of five, shaken the hand of Rav Chaim Volozhiner. I assure you that in years to come your grandchildren will boast that their zeide had the privilege of meeting Rav Moshe Feinstein.”
My grandfather lived in Monsey. Rav Moshe would sometimes come to Monsey to stay at the home of his son-in-law, Rabbi Moshe Tendler. On those occasions, my grandfather would always go to visit him. I remember driving my zeide to the Tendlers’ home after Rav Moshe had taken ill. Rav Yaakov urged him to rest properly, even bringing proofs from Chazal about guarding one’s health that fit his particular situation. Rav Moshe smiled. One sentence, I can’t forget. With that trademark twinkle in his eye, my grandfather exhorted him gently in Yiddish, “Kenst mir folgen. Ich bin a bissel elter fun eich. You can listen to me. I’m a little older than you.”
Rav Moshe smiled and assured him that he would indeed get more rest.
After we left, Rav Moshe reportedly turned to one of his grandchildren and said, “Now it’s our turn for me to visit Rav Yaakov.”

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Two weeks ago I received a phone call from Chaim (Charlie) Lefkowitz, introducing himself as a mortgage broker who specializes in LifeCo commercial loans—funded not by traditional banks, but by life insurance companies.
Wanting to help educate investors and other mortgage brokers about the availability and benefits of using LifeCo loans, Chaim had arranged a panel at the then-upcoming ReFinance Real Estate Summit. Though extremely successful as a broker, he was experiencing some stage fright—a common affliction—and requested my help in preparing for actual event. I ended up moderating the panel together with Chaim and a LifeCo correspondent, underwriter and lawyer. Chaim did great.
Afterward, I observed many people at the summit approach Chaim for more information about this relatively unknown side of mortgage lending, and I realized he’d be a natural subject for this column.
After spending almost a decade in his family business, Chaim decided to branch out. He started to work on some minor development projects, which led him to the world of commercial mortgages. He got his start in the mortgage field while securing loans for some of his developments.
What almost nobody knows—and this includes, until recently, some of the most sophisticated commercial investors in our community—is that life insurance companies are one of the largest providers of commercial real estate loans in the entire United States, putting out somewhere between $30 and $40 billion a year, and that getting a loan through them is in many ways faster, cheaper and more reliable than going through a traditional bank.
Today, Chaim is one of the foremost experts in LifeCo lending in the frum world, closing between 70 and 80 deals a year with an execution certainty that no conventional bank can come close to matching.
We spoke about how commercial real estate lending works, why LifeCo has quietly become the superior product for the right deals, and what it takes to figure out something from scratch that nobody around you knew how to do. Enjoy!

—Nesanel

I was born in Brooklyn, New York, the fourth of eight children. I grew up in Williamsburg and went to Satmar until my bar mitzvah, then to a yeshivah in Borough Park called Kavonas Halev, which is associated with Krasna. For yeshivah gedolah, at around 15 or 16, I decided to explore a little, so I went to Rav Henoch Perl’s yeshivah, the first chasidishe yeshivah in Lakewood, which had just opened.
“The learning was completely different from what I was used to. Rather than try to get through a lot of masechtos, they learned two or three blatt Gemara over the entire year, which was very challenging for me. So I moved on to Nitra Yeshiva in Mount Kisco, and from there I got married at 20.
“My mother’s father was Reb Sender Deip, the Satmar rosh hakahal, and we are proud Satmar chasidim. I have a connection to the Rebbe, Rav Zalman Leib, and I go to him before every simchah with a kvittel.
“My father opened a hardware distribution company in the late 1990s. Later, my grandfather (his father) and my uncle joined him, and for close to 30 years, they ran a wholesale hardware and paint supply business together. They supplied hardware stores, plumbing companies and lumber yards throughout New York City with brushes, paint supplies and all related materials. My grandfather worked there until he passed away in 2015 at close to 90 years old.
“I was never really the entrepreneurial type in yeshivah; I was always the arranger. I wasn’t interested in making a few dollars by binding sefarim; I was always thinking about the big picture. I’m a very neat, very organized person, and I like to organize. Whenever something was going on in yeshivah, whether it was Purim, a sheva brachos or an event, I arranged every detail.
“A few months after I got married, I joined my father’s business as a salesman. That’s when I found out that I am not a salesman. I had to do it to make a parnasah, but after a few years I moved inside the company and started growing things. I tried to take the business online to Amazon and Walmart and expand outside of New York City and New York State, but that turned out to be a challenge on both the logistics side and the family side.
“Working with family runs on two separate tracks simultaneously. One track is the family relationships, and the other track is the needs of the business. If a company doesn’t adapt to keep up with new developments, the younger generation eventually hits a ceiling. I hit that ceiling. I also realized that although we’d worked well together for ten years, staying in the business would hurt my relationship with my father.
“I stayed in the company a little while after my grandfather passed away and then I left. I was 32 years old, I had a family, and I wanted to find something that no one in my family had ever done and had significant potential. Real estate was the obvious choice.
“I joined a company that did both property development and management in New York City, and the owner of that company became a genuine mentor. He didn’t just hand me one piece of the business; he brought me in and promised that he was going to show me everything I needed to know to be successful, and that I would get to decide down the road which part of the industry I wanted to pursue. He taught me development, management, lending, fundraising—everything. He took me to the banks and showed me how to represent his deals, how to get them through to closing, and also how to evaluate a property, what to look for, and how to develop from the ground up.
“He also turned me into a numbers person, which I wasn’t yet at the time. Numbers never lie, and you can read them up and down, but you have to actually understand them first. I had to push myself hard to learn how to evaluate a deal, underwrite it, and make it work. It wasn’t easy, but once I got there, it clicked.
“After about two and a half years he told me that I could stay if I wanted, but he’d shown me everything he had and now it was my time. So I left and started doing my own small ground-up constructions in the Bronx. I bought some finished properties in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. During Covid, when you could get loans cheaply, we bought a number of lots and built on them.
“I found my real footing once the construction was done. I went back to the lenders I had already built relationships with and started doing the mortgages myself. The opportunities kept growing. I started helping people in the community find funding for their commercial properties. At a certain point I wanted to do something unique, something that would put me in a completely different category.

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Meet two brave souls, a Muslim lady in London and a Jewish man in Tehran.

First, some background:

A British group, the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), holds an annual Al-Quds Day march in the UK capital. Al-Quds is the Arabic name for Yerushalayim and, as decreed in 1979 by Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, the first Iranian supreme leader [read: “ruthless dictator”], the last Friday of the month of Ramadan is occasion to host marches and demonstrations to express opposition to Israeli control over the Holy City.

Following the vaporization of Iran’s more recent and newly late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ordered the murders of some 30,000 Iranian protesters earlier this year, the IHRC lamented him as “a rare role model” who would be “mourned by freedom-loving people all over the world.”

Now the group is upset. Its planned march through London this year was nixed by British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, the Muslim daughter of Pakistani immigrants. She unapologetically approved a request from the Metropolitan Police to ban the march in order “to prevent serious public disorder.” Both Labor and Conservative members of Parliament backed the banning of the march.

A spokesman for the IHRC, Faisal Bodi, told the BBC’s The World Tonight that it was “a sad day for freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and the right of people to legitimately protest about issues they feel strongly about.” Not to mention to incite hatred of Israel and Jews.

Kudos to Home Secretary Mahmood, brave soul #1.

A couple thousand miles away, in Tehran, lives a second intrepid, a Jewish Iranian restaurant owner by the name of Arash.

Middle East Eye is a news medium whose focus lies in its name. It is owned by a company with a single director, Jamal Bessasso, a Kuwait-born resident of the UK. MEE is rumored to be funded by the government of Qatar and is a go-to site for anti-Israel “reportage.”

But it also carries some worthy stuff. Like a recent lengthy piece titled “Iran’s Jews feeling fear and heartbreak as US-Israeli strikes rain down.” It featured quotes from interviews with members of Iran’s small Jewish community—some 9,000 people in a country of 90 million.

One interviewee, Yosef (last names are omitted in the article), “trying to stay safe from air and missile strikes that often originate in Israel, a country he is supposed to feel some affinity with,” according to the interviewer, is critical of Israel, which he says “has damaged [its] reputation around the world.’

“Yes, I’m Jewish,” he explains. “But I cannot see the country where I was born and raised as my enemy.”

Then there’s “Daniel,” a 52-year-old Jewish worker in a jewelry shop in the capital city.

“I don’t remember the time before the revolution,” he says. “But my parents and older relatives always told us that Iran and Israel once had close relations. They never imagined that one day the two countries would be in a situation like this.” (They never imagined Islamist terrorists becoming their country’s government.)

And then there is the aforementioned Arash, 71, who owns a small restaurant in Tehran.

Asked about his own feelings regarding the conflict, he says, “It’s not easy to talk about these things, especially during wartime. This is a war between two countries that you feel connected to.”

He then dares to claim that many of his fellow citizens who are Muslim are resentful of the Islamist regime.

“The level of anger toward the Islamic Republic is so high,” he says, “that many Iranians today see Jews as friends.”

And then he waxes more daring still, and asserts a truth that justifies the omission of his surname, “The real question,” he states, “is: who first promised to destroy the other?” And, in case the interviewer somehow missed the point, Arash makes it explicit: “The policies of the Islamic Republic,” he explains, “helped bring the situation to this point.”

Although he sees himself as an Iranian, he says, “It makes me sad that the policies of this government have brought the country to this situation.”

At some times and in some places, stating an obvious truth, like addressing an obvious danger, is an act of courage.

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The US Takes Up the fight Against Belgium’s Bigotry

Belgian police raided the homes of three respected mohalim in Antwerp. Their alleged crime: performing bris milah without a medical license.
Under current Belgian law—as interpreted by authorities—only licensed medical professionals may perform circumcisions. Unlike neighboring countries such as the Netherlands and Germany, Belgium hasn’t created a clear exemption or certification pathway for religious circumcision performed by trained mohalim. During the raids, the police confiscated their equipment and demanded the names of the Jewish infants they circumcised in the past, raising the possibility of retroactive prosecution.
At present, there is only one Jewish doctor in Belgium who is also a mohel. Strict enforcement of the law would therefore render most bris milahs in the country impossible. Families would be forced to either travel abroad or conduct the bris discreetly, which some observers have likened to the underground religious practices that were caused by Soviet-era repression.
The court case against the mohalim remains ongoing. Belgium’s Jewish community has argued that the prosecutions violate the country’s constitutional protections for freedom of religion. At the same time, communal leaders have sought a practical solution: a certification framework that would allow qualified mohalim to perform bris milah legally.
To that end, representatives of the Jewish community approached Belgium’s minister of health, Frank Vandenbroucke, requesting the creation of a regulatory pathway. Thus far, however, Vandenbroucke has declined to propose legislative adjustments or administrative accommodations.
That refusal drew a sharp response from the United States ambassador to Belgium, Bill White. A businessman and philanthropist appointed in 2025, White has made religious liberty and the fight against anti-Semitism central themes of his diplomatic tenure. On Monday, February 16, 2026, he publicly demanded that Belgium drop the “ridiculous” and “anti-Semitic” investigation into the three men.
In a social media post, White called on Belgium’s “very rude” socialist health minister to stop the “unacceptable harassment” and “disgusting” treatment of the mohalim, and he urged the country to do “a much better job” on anti-Semitism. White insisted that Belgium either change its law that circumcision must be carried out under strict conditions by a medical professional or recognize that the investigation into the “three beautiful religiously qualified and wonderful men” was anti-Semitic. He dismissed accusations that he was interfering in Belgium’s judicial affairs as a “political distraction.”
White’s posts were explicit. He wrote:
“TO BELGIUM, SPECIFICALLY YOU MUST DROP THE RIDICULOUS AND ANTI SEMITIC ‘PROSECUTION’ NOW OF THE 3 JEWISH RELIGIOUS FIGURES (MOHELS) IN ANTWERP!”
He then criticized Vandenbroucke personally:
“You must make a legal provision to allow Jewish religious MOHELS to perform their duties here in Belgium. Take action NOW! The world is watching. America is counting on you to do the right thing. Frank, you should do it NOW so this case ends!”
White also claimed that at their first meeting, Vandenbroucke had refused to shake his hand or pose for a photograph together, adding, “He was very rude and was quite obnoxious. I was told he does not like my great President.”
After Belgium’s Foreign Minister Maxime Prévot publicly condemned White’s comments, White posted again:
“In NO way, shape or form have we ever suggested that a political person in the Gov’t should interfere in a judicial case. That said, the case should be immediately dropped. It is ABSOLUTELY an issue of anti-Semitism. You either have to make a change to the procedural accreditation or you have to call prosecution of these three beautiful religiously qualified and wonderful men anti-semeitc [sic].”
Belgian officials responded forcefully. Prévot called White’s accusations “false, offensive and unacceptable,” accusing him of violating “fundamental diplomatic norms.” Authorities reminded the ambassador of the Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations, stating that personal attacks on a member of the government and interference in Belgium’s internal affairs are contrary to basic diplomatic rules. The ministry emphasized that while Belgium values its relationship with the US, dialogue “must be based on respect for our institutions and our sovereignty,” and reaffirmed its condemnation of anti-Semitism and racism.
The diplomatic row escalated further when White reportedly threatened Conner Rousseau, leader of the Flemish socialist Vooruit Party, with a travel ban to the US. Rousseau had posted on social media comparing the actions of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to historical atrocities, drawing parallels with the Holocaust. Rousseau said that he was unrepentant:
“I posted that on social media five weeks ago, and yesterday it suddenly turns out to be a problem. I suspect [White’s] intervention regarding the circumcision did not go as he would have liked. I can only say that we in Belgium have the right, and I also believe a political duty, to express our concerns about what’s happening in the US. I respect the ambassador’s opinion, but I also ask for respect for ours.”
The controversy also involved Belgium’s lone Jewish member of parliament, Michael Freilich, who had discussed the circumcision controversy publicly, including conversations with American lawmakers. Critics accused him of inviting foreign interference in domestic judicial matters. Among them was Sammy Mahdi, head of the Christian Democratic and Flemish Party, who compared Freilich’s actions to “a member of parliament with a Muslim background lobbying in Morocco or Qatar to influence a court case in Belgium.” Freilich denied attempting to orchestrate US pressure. The European Jewish Association condemned the public questioning of Freilich’s loyalty as a “public lynching,” warning that it echoed one of Europe’s oldest anti-Semitic tropes.
White’s intervention has made it clear that Washington sees this case as part of a broader transatlantic concern over rising anti-Semitism and the protection of minority religious practices. It is worth noting that some 60 Jewish leaders wrote to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last May, urging the EU to condemn Belgium after the police raid the homes of the three mohalim in Antwerp, but no condemnation was forthcoming.
The attitude of the Belgian authorities is a concern. And while there is no direct link between the Belgian government’s controversial policies and random anti-Semitic acts in the country, such incidents are certainly concerning. A shul in the Belgian city of Liège was damaged in an explosion during the early hours of Monday, according to police.
The blast occurred around 4:00 a.m. local time in front of the shul, shattering windows across the street but causing no injuries, officers said.
Willy Demeyer, the city’s mayor, described the incident as “an anti-Semitic act,” while Prime Minister Bart De Wever expressed solidarity with the Jewish community on social media.
The Belgian federal prosecutor’s office, responsible for terrorism and organized crime, is leading the investigation, an official confirmed.
To better understand the American position and the evolving diplomatic tensions, we spoke with Mark Walker, principal adviser for global religious freedom at the United States Department of State. Walker outlined the US government’s perspective on Belgium’s actions and discussed the measures the administration may take to press Belgium to safeguard the religious liberties of its Jewish community.

Mark Walker is a former US representative from North Carolina, serving from 2015 to 2021. In April 2025, he was nominated to serve as ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, but after delays in his Senate confirmation he withdrew on January 8, 2026, and was appointed as State Department adviser on global religious freedom, where he focuses on advancing religious freedom initiatives around the world.

During his time in Congress, Walker was active on issues connected with US-Israel relations. He cosponsored bipartisan legislation to strengthen cooperation between the two countries, and he supported efforts opposing the delegitimization of Israel and the global BDS movement. He also advocated for policies addressing security concerns for Jewish institutions and took positions critical of the Iran nuclear deal, reflecting a pro-Israel stance.
As the Trump administration’s nominee for the global religious freedom post, Walker visited Israel in 2025, including Jerusalem and the Kosel, where he pledged to combat anti-Semitism, promote interfaith cooperation and reaffirm the ties between the United States and Israel. He met with religious leaders and families of hostages taken during the 2023 Hamas attacks, emphasizing the shared commitment to defending religious liberty and promoting coexistence.
Walker ran for the US Senate in North Carolina in 2022, seeking the Republican nomination, and later pursued the Republican nomination for governor of North Carolina in 2024. He has also been involved in national politics, including serving on former President Donald Trump’s campaign staff. Throughout his career, Walker has focused on legislative efforts and advocacy related to both conservative policy initiatives and religious liberty.

Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. You’re doing incredible work. Please describe your role at the State Department.
I serve as Secretary Rubio’s principal adviser on religious freedom issues, whether that involves the Druze in Syria, anti-Semitic incidents, or Christians in Africa.
We currently designate 13 countries as Countries of Particular Concern. There are actually two tiers to the CPC list. The first is a lower-level designation known as the Special Watch List. The second is the more serious list. If a government isn’t taking steps to prevent attacks on Christians or address anti-Semitic behavior, it can trigger economic sanctions and other measures.
I oversee a team of about three dozen people who focus on different regions. We monitor these governments closely to assess whether there are intentional violations of religious freedom.

If a government is engaging in acts of religious discrimination, to whom do you report it?
I report to Marco Rubio, and on occasion to President Trump. But my direct supervisor is Secretary of State Rubio.

Every administration has its priorities. How important is religious freedom to the Trump administration?
It’s huge. I think he set a real precedent during his first administration when he became the first president to address religious liberty and host a conference on it at the United Nations. No American president had ever done that before.
We know that President Trump has placed a lot of strong voices in key positions when it comes to calling out anti-Semitic behavior. Even in this day and age—when over the past few years it has become more common for entertainers and leaders to be weaker on these issues—he continues to be a strong voice, and he is well aware of the role I serve.
I served in Congress for six years, and my dear friend Mike Huckabee is someone with whom we have worked with closely over the years. We are both grateful for the opportunity to work for both President Trump and Secretary Rubio.

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John W. Spencer is a retired United States Army officer, urban warfare researcher and author. He currently serves as chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute, codirector of the Urban Warfare Project, Chair of War Studies at the Madison Policy Forum, and host of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast at West Point. He is also a founding member of the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare.

Spencer has provided expert commentary on contemporary conflicts, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine. His analyses of Israel’s campaign in Gaza following October 7 have been widely cited, including by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

You may be the most quoted military expert in history.
I’m honored.

Over the past week, we have witnessed one of the most amazing bombing campaigns of all time. Would you agree?
Absolutely. The synchronization and lethality are unparalleled. There has never been a military operation in history where the entire political and military leadership of the opposing force was eliminated in the first four hours, if not the first four minutes.

How significant is that when there are clearly others who can step into their roles?
I get that the bench is deep, but this is what I call the first neurological strike. War is always a contest of will. There have usually been other ways to attack the will of the political leadership, the military and even the population, but this is a change in the character of warfare, severing the brain before the other strikes begin. Those directing the enemy’s strategy—the commanders of their military forces, the defense minister, the chief of staff, the head of the missile command, etc.—were basically eliminated. I understand that they’ll just be replaced, but you can’t say that Israel and America haven’t made it clear, in both the 12-day war and this one, that whoever wants to be next in command will also be next on the target list.
I use the analogy—and of course all analogies have their limitations—that if before the boots hit the ground on D-Day they had eliminated Hitler, along with his successor and all of his field marshals, it might not have necessarily won the war, but it would have definitely changed the paradigm of what the enemy thought he was going to do. That’s the Sun Tzu aspect of The Art of War: you win by attacking the enemy’s strategy.

Sometimes it’s good to keep the enemy’s leadership intact so you know with whom to negotiate as the war progresses. In the current situation, who would that be?
They will appoint someone, and you also have to look at the goals for this war as stated by the political leadership. This is about changing behavior, and one of the strategies for that is this decapitation, but you also want to eliminate their capability. I believe that they realized in past negotiations that the differences were irreconcilable, so now they want to see if…well, not the next ones in line, but the third or fourth ones in line will be different.
They also want to see if the weakening of their power, which is also one of the outcomes of their elimination, leads to a popular uprising or whatever comes after that, and then those people will change the behavior of the regime. That’s why I believe this isn’t necessarily a regime-change war but a behavior-change war aimed at the leadership of Iran. If the outcome is regime change, as most people believe it will be, then you get that net result.
That’s why the other line of operation is to eliminate Iran’s capability. In some aspects, you hope for a change of behavior in the long run, but in the short run you eliminate anyone’s capability, regardless of their behavior. That means destroying their nuclear program, their missile program and their navy, which are definitely measurable, whereas when you get into the cognitive aspect it’s a lot harder.

There are experts such as Robert Pape and others saying that what America is trying to do flies against historical evidence showing that these types of wars cannot be won from the air. Does what America and Israel are trying to do contradict what we already know?
Not necessarily. I know Pape well, but if you want to look at bombing campaigns that changed regimes, there are two recent ones: Libya and Serbia. And if you want to look at campaigns that changed behavior, you can also look at the Persian Gulf War, which changed Saddam’s behavior not just in Kuwait but also with regard to his nuclear program.
When you start comparing what’s going on to past campaigns, you also have to look at whether bombing is really the only strategy here. That is why I don’t like it when analysts only judge what they can see versus what they know. You can’t make comparative analyses to similar situations and say that you won’t have success without boots on the ground, which gets you to the question of whether there will be boots on the ground.
Then there are nuances about whose boots on the ground you’re talking about, because right now there’s the threat of Kurdish boots and you also have the Azeris, the Baluchis and the possibility of a popular revolt. The administration has said that they aren’t done weakening the power of the regime. So I would challenge Pape and ask him, “Are you saying that no bombing campaign has ever weakened the power of the enemy?” That would clearly not hold up to historical comparison.
And after weakening that power, a popular revolt is absolutely in the cards, although America has told them not to come out yet. So is the goal to weaken the regime, remove its capabilities and then have the not-our-boots-on-the-ground part of the plan as phase two? We’ll see. But this is why you can’t create analysis based on what you infer the plan to be.

Do you think that the United States, Israel and the rest of the world have overestimated the potential for a popular revolt? Meaning that there may be millions of Iranians who would want to see that, but in a country that large they may still be the minority.
I don’t think so. You can’t overestimate what a popular revolt can do; that’s historical. In fact, I think people may have underestimated how much Iranians want a change in policy. But there are limitations to what a popular revolt without arms can do, which also comes with the assumption that there aren’t any plans to use arms.
This brings us back to the question of whose boots we’re talking about. During the 1979 Iranian Revolution, hundreds of thousands of soldiers refused to follow orders to put it down, and many even went over to the revolution. Is that a possibility? That has certainly been a very large part of the current plan with the psychological operations—the text messages and TV, and they even got hold of the prayer app—as well as public statements to the regime, the military and even the IRGC offering immunity, asking them to lay down their arms and for soldiers to defect. It isn’t a black-and-white question of whether the people will come out. I think that’s a given, because they’ve already shown that they would.
Again, this is why the plan isn’t only to attack the political leadership or the IRGC. You can see that they’re also attacking the Basij headquarters, the police headquarters and other important locations so that if there were a popular revolt, it would have a better chance of success. Hopefully we’ll see defections from people who recognize that the regime doesn’t have a future, which is also a goal in war. You want to convince the enemy that he has no hope of survival.

You are a man of science who understands military strategy. When you calculate, you make rational calculations. But do those calculations take into account the response of an irrational enemy?
They do. War is an act of force to compel your enemy to your will. You want the threat of force to compel him to do what you want, but there is also irrationality and uncertainty, so you have to account for both.
That is also why I say that the continued, unprecedented eliminations of political leadership and military command are part of getting rid of the irrational until you get to a rational actor. That is clearly all part of the plan.

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Moshe (Morris) Oiring runs a network of healthcare companies that serve thousands of people every day. In recent years, he has also begun expanding into kosher hospitality, opening the first glatt kosher hotel in Albany and now working on a new one in Manhattan.
In our conversation, we discussed the broader scope of his work—how his healthcare enterprises serve communities daily, how his newer hospitality projects reflect the same philosophy, and why he believes affordability and access should matter more than simple profit maximization.
He also shared ideas about community building and entrepreneurship that I found both new and inspiring. I hope you do too.

—Dovid

My father was born in Russia and grew up on Webster Avenue in the South Bronx,. My grandmother liked the Bronx, until two bullets flew in through my father’s bedroom window. Then she conceded, ‘Maybe it’s time to leave.’
“The family moved to Eretz Yisrael, settling in Meah Shearim. My first cousin, Bentzi Oiring, is the head of ZAKA there. My parents met and married in Israel, but my mother suggested they go to America for parnasah. They settled in Boro Park, and my father taught in Dyker Heights.
“My mother told me that her father had played a role in bringing Rav Yisrael Meir Lau to a position of leadership. I didn’t really believe her, but years later, I met Rav Lau at an event and mentioned that I was Penina Slavaticki’s son. At first he didn’t react, but his rebbetzin immediately turned and said, ‘What did you just say?’ She pulled me aside and told her husband, ‘This is Penina’s son.’ Rav Lau then asked, ‘Why did she leave Israel?’ He said that without her help, he would not have been able to accomplish what he did. Later, when I dedicated a volume of Encyclopedia Talmudit in memory of my mother’s father, Rabbi Lau wrote to me reiterating how my grandfather had helped him and encouraging me to continue helping others in the same way.
“We lived on 48th Street and 12th Avenue. I started in Bobov for Pre-1A, then went to Kamenitz, and then to the Yeshiva of Brooklyn. My father’s brother was chasidish, and my father wanted to bring us up that way too. My mother, having grown up in Tel Aviv, had a somewhat different outlook. She said, ‘Morris can learn Yiddish from your brother, but he will go to a more modern school.’
“After college, I went straight into politics. My first job was working on Hillary Clinton’s first campaign for the US Senate. After that, I served as Jewish liaison on campaigns for the New York City mayor and the New York State governor. Following a long tenure as an aide and Jewish affairs adviser to Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, I joined Mayor Bloomberg’s campaign staff during his second mayoral run, and I later worked on the reelection campaigns of Governors Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson.
“During Paterson’s campaign, I visited Touro College to help mobilize voters. When the founder, Dr. Bernard Lander, asked if I was an alumnus, I admitted I had dropped out years earlier for financial reasons. ‘Every Jewish boy needs a degree,’ he insisted. He arranged a scholarship on the spot, allowing me to finally graduate. Twenty years later, I returned the favor by establishing a scholarship in honor of both Dr. Lander and Governor Paterson. In 2024, Touro College honored me in recognition of that effort.
“At one point I considered running for office myself. I was a leading contender to succeed Simcha Felder, alongside David Greenfield and Joe Lazar. Before committing, I asked Governor Paterson for his endorsement. He was willing to give it, but he also gave me some surprising advice: ‘Don’t run.’
“‘You like helping people,’ he said. ‘You’ve spent 14 years giving your life to others. It’s time to start thinking about yourself.’
“He suggested I go into healthcare instead. I took his advice and transitioned into adult day care.
“Although David Greenfield is a personal friend, I did not endorse him during that campaign. He won, and Joe Lazar lost. Later, Joe helped me get started in the healthcare business. He taught me the value of dealing with people with honesty, loyalty and transparency.
“Our company, the Oiring Group, is based in Queens. We’re focused on providing assisted living and home healthcare services that prioritize dignity and quality of life. Unlike traditional nursing homes, our assisted living facilities are site-specific communities designed for independence. Our residential division includes a 172-bed assisted living facility in Queens and a 120-bed site in Buffalo, and we are expanding with a projected 165-bed private-pay site in Albany and another 200-bed facility in Rochester.
“True Blue Care at Home, our home healthcare division, currently provides nurses, aides and therapists in 51 counties across New York State.
“About five years ago, my father and I traveled to Albany for Governor Andrew Cuomo’s State of the State address. My father, who was then 85 years old, wanted a tuna sandwich, but we couldn’t find a kosher one anywhere in that neighborhood.
“My father turned to me and said, ‘Moshe, enough with the home care and assisted living. It’s time to make a kosher hotel in the state capital. Our people deserve it.’
“‘Tatty,’ I protested, ‘I don’t know anything about hotels.’
“‘But you know how to help people,’ he countered, ‘and you know how to bring people together.’
“I found a hotel in downtown Albany that was in bankruptcy. We purchased it and invested about $3.4 million in renovations, transforming it into a beautiful glatt kosher hotel. It has 134 rooms, each equipped with Shabbos keys, and two kitchens—one kosher and one not. A camp rents the entire hotel for about six weeks every summer.
“It’s a resource in other ways, too. Albany is close to Jewish communities in Canada as well as New York. Wedding costs can be prohibitive whether you’re in Monsey or Montreal. We wanted to provide these communities with a beautiful yet affordable venue for simchos. Today we partner with different groups, including Satmar families, enabling almanos and yesomim throughout the region to celebrate their milestones with dignity.
“Building on that success, with Hashem’s help, we’ll soon be closing on a property on 42nd Street in Manhattan with the goal of turning it into a glatt kosher hotel. Right now, Midtown Manhattan doesn’t offer a proper kosher option.
“In earlier generations, there were always people who would pause in the middle of their day and ask, ‘How can we help the community?’ That’s the model I try to follow: building spaces that make life easier for the community.”

You mentioned three business fields: assisted living sites, home healthcare and hotels. Which do you consider your primary business?
My core business is assisted living and home care. Both fulfill my personal mission: helping people. I had many opportunities to sell the business in the past few years, but when you build something from the heart, you don’t sell it. I truly love what I do.
The healthcare industry generally has a large turnover rate. Our company has an 87.6% retention rate, which says a lot about the culture we’ve built.

You seem to gravitate toward upstate.
All our business are based in New York, but yes, we do like upstate.

Is the healthcare business dependent on programs or support from the state?
Some funding comes from state programs and some from private pay. The individual situations differ. The bottom line is that we try not to turn people away.
Many of our residents receive SSI, SSD or Social Security benefits. If someone qualifies for SSI or SSD, we can often bring them into the facility without it costing the family anything out of pocket.
The residences are government-connected, but the hotel is purely private sector.

Do you personally manage all three businesses, or do you have other managers running them?
I oversee them, but each company also has its own CEO. We have well over 600 employees, combined.

Are they all equally profitable?
No. Some are more profitable than others.

Which one takes up most of your time?
The healthcare side almost runs itself by now. The hotel requires a lot more creativity and hands-on involvement. For example, the hotel has its own spokesperson. To create more of a community atmosphere, I hired someone to oversee public events and community engagement opportunities.

Each business requires different expertise. Are you basically a jack of all trades?
In the Hamptons, I daven with Adam Neumann, the former CEO of WeWork. One Shabbos I asked him what he thought was the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire. He answered, “A billionaire never stops learning.”
That stuck with me. I’m not an expert in every field, but I surround myself with the best people in those fields, and I try to keep learning.

You’ve called your work a “labor of love.” Do you mean mainly the kosher hotels?
No. I mean the home care and assisted living as well. My goal is to make sure we have the best people representing us and caring for families.

Business is usually about self-interest. Ideally, my self-interest and yours don’t collide so we can both succeed. But the point of business is to gain something, usually money.
I think you’re looking at it a little differently than I do.
As an entrepreneur, you lead by example. I’m a CEO. As such, I’m responsible for an army of people whose work touches about 3,000 lives every day. When I entered healthcare, the industry was very dysfunctional. My approach was simple: treat people well and pay them well. When employees feel respected and valued, they stay. When they stay, clients are happy. And when clients are happy, the business grows.
When organizations are purely self-serving, they rarely succeed in the long run. Leadership keeps leaving for the next opportunity. But if people feel that you genuinely care about them, they care about you too.

That’s an interesting perspective.
Mike Bloomberg once told me,“Fifty percent of life is just showing up. Go places, meet people and build relationships.”
I tried to adapt that philosophy as a frum Jew. In a sense, every entrepreneur represents their community. When I go to events and meet people, I try to represent our community with dignity.
The question isn’t, “How much did you accumulate?” It’s, “What impact did you have while you were here?” Eventually, when a person leaves this world, the government takes most of his wealth. Positive actions reverberate. If you give even a quarter to someone who needs help, that small act creates a ripple effect.

It sounds like you’re describing a higher calling for a businessman.
It’s a universal lesson. When I was in ninth grade at Chofetz Chaim, my rebbi told me I wouldn’t amount to anything. I came home very upset. My father told me a pretty strong message for a 14-year-old to hear, “If you want to show him he was wrong, then be successful.”
Years later, I was at an Agudah dinner with Mayor Bloomberg, and the rabbis were lined up to greet him, and my ninth-grade rebbi was among them. As each rabbi came up, I would quietly whisper their names in Bloomberg’s ear so he could greet them personally. When that rabbi reached us, he shook my hand and said, “I always knew Moshe Oiring would amount to something.”
Perseverance has an impact. So does paying it forward. Don’t get so busy with your life that you forget to give back.

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You may not have heard of “Captain Ella,” but Israeli Lieutenant Colonel Ella Waweya is pretty well-known in the Arab world—in Israel and beyond.

That’s because Ms. Waweya, an Israeli Muslim, recently became the Israel Defense Forces’ Arabic-language spokesperson, succeeding Colonel Avichay Adraee. In that role, and in uniform, Captain Ella has appeared in many social media videos, presenting an image that has stunned some, infuriated some and elated others.

One such video shows her walking down a street in Tulkarm, in Shomron, “Area B,” greeting viewers in Arabic with a smile and a friendly “Ya ahali, Tulkarm!”—“Hi, Tulkarm folks!”—as young Arabs look on in some puzzlement.

Another armed soldier accompanied her as she held a microphone.

Her message there was economic. She explained how she hears from many fellow Arabs in Yehudah and Shomron how they want only to be able to feed their families and make ends meet.

“But,” she says softly but firmly, “there are people who would steal those dreams from you, pull your young people and children to the way of arms and turn these alleys into battle sites.”

“In the end,” she continues, “you and your children are paying the price. Don’t let terrorism steal your lives away, and don’t let anybody hide among you.”

That video garnered more than 800,000 views on one social medium. Her combined videos, across several media, have been seen by millions. And she has half a million social media followers.

Needless to say, there have been negative reactions to Captain Ella. It is criticism, though, born of hatred: the same Arab currency that necessitated the accompanying soldier in Tulkarm—and fear, that she might actually be convincing Arab Muslims about reality.
In fact, it’s undeniable that she made a positive impression on some, perhaps many. She has received private messages from Arabs frustrated by the terrorists who act in their name. But few would dare express the fact publicly.

Captain Ella hails from the Arab Israeli town of Kalansuwa, where all the citizens are Muslim Arabs. She originally kept her enlistment in the IDF secret from her family, but her mother came to feel pride in her daughter’s accomplishments.

“Ten years later,” Ms. Waweya said in 2024, “there are now ten soldiers from Kalansuwa [in the IDF], and I believe I’m allowed to take credit for that. I come home in my uniform, and people ask questions about the army. Those who want to join, I accompany from A to Z.”
The new Arabic spokesperson has served in the IDF for more than a decade. Before her recent promotion, she was a deputy spokesperson.

In 2004, a presenter for a Russian Arabic-language outlet quoted a survey to her about how Gazans think that Hamas won.

She answered: “Of course they have won—in destroying the future of Gazans, the schools, the mosques, the hospitals. If this is victory, then ahlan wa sahlan (“kol hakavod”—very loosely translated). So you want to tell me that they have won? It will take them years to rebuild the infrastructure in Gaza. Here [in Israel], things are reblooming. Yes, [Hamas] murdered and destroyed, but we can look back, learn our lessons, embrace each other, and move forward.”

At the onset of the current conflict, Ms. Waweya used social media to post a caricature of Iran’s blessedly late leader Ali Khamenei, depicted as a bloodied octopus, with an Arabic caption reading “The arms that extended to sabotage capitals and countries and threaten the proud people of Israel were cut off one by one, until the head of the octopus of terrorism paid the price for its evil and criminality in its own backyard.”

It’s easy—and, unfortunately, justifiable—to be pessimistic about the likelihood that Arab and Muslim antipathy toward Israel will change anytime soon. Hatred is still being relentlessly inculcated in too many young Arab minds.

But incurable optimists can point to the increased number of Arabs working at Israeli government agencies and in law enforcement. And can hope that Captain Ella, as a Muslim woman speaking in Arabic, her first language, to millions of fellow Arabs and Muslims, might open a crack in the wall of anti-Israel hostility, and that the crack will, as time progresses, widen further.

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Zachor

That on Shabbos Zachor, when Jewish communities around the globe gathered in their shuls to read the parshah of mechiyas Amalek, the evil enemy of the Jewish people, Khamenei, together with a group of his henchmen, was obliterated as they plotted to annihilate us, is among the open miracles our generation has merited to witness.
With deep emotion, and with prayers to Hashem for what may yet unfold, I would like to quote some of the holy words of the Rambam in his Iggeres Teiman and allow them to speak for themselves:
“The Sages of blessed memory frequently allude to persecutions and have said that subsequently G-d would make the decree null and void by destroying the power that issued it. It was this observation that led the Sages of blessed memory to affirm that persecutions are of short duration (Kesubos 3b).
“The Divine assurance was given to Yaakov Avinu that his descendants would survive the peoples who degraded and discomfited them, as it is written: ‘And your descendants will be like the dust of the earth’ (Bereishis 28:14). That is to say, although his offspring will be abased like dust trodden underfoot, they will ultimately emerge triumphant and victorious. As the simile implies, just as dust finally settles upon the one who tramples it and remains after him, so shall the Jewish nation outlive its persecutors.
“The prophet Yeshayahu long ago predicted that various peoples would succeed in vanquishing Israel and lording over them for a time, but that ultimately G-d would come to Israel’s assistance and put a stop to their woes and afflictions.
“We are in possession of the Divine assurance that the Jewish nation is indestructible and imperishable and will always continue to be a preeminent community. As it is impossible for G-d to cease to exist, so the Jewish nation’s destruction and disappearance from the world are unthinkable, as we read: ‘For I, Hashem, do not change; and you, sons of Yaakov, will not be consumed’ (Malachi 3:6).
“Similarly, He has vowed and assured us that it is unimaginable that He will reject us entirely, even if we disobey Him. This very promise was already given through Moshe Rabbeinu, who says: ‘And yet for all that, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them, neither will I abhor them to destroy them utterly and to break My covenant with them; for I am Hashem their G-d’ (Vayikra 26:44).
“Put your trust in the true promises of Scripture, brethren, and do not be dismayed by the succession of persecutions, the enemy’s ascendancy over us or the weakness of our people. These trials are designed to test and purify us so that only the saints and pious ones of the pure and undefiled lineage of Yaakov will adhere to our faith and remain within the fold, as it is written: ‘And among the remnant are those whom Hashem shall call’ (Yoel 3:5). This verse makes clear that they are not numerous but are the descendants of those who stood at Har Sinai, witnessed the Divine revelation, entered into the covenant of G-d and undertook to do and obey, as expressed in their declaration, ‘naaseh v’nishma—we will do and we will obey’ (Shemos 24:7).”
May we merit to internalize and live by these words and thereby hasten the coming of Moshiach, speedily in our days.

Reassessing America’s Role in the World – A Conversation with Joel Rubin

Joel Rubin is a former deputy assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs in the Obama administration, where he directed the State Department’s engagement with the US House of Representatives. Over nearly two decades in Washington, he has held senior foreign policy positions in the executive branch and on Capitol Hill.
A nationally recognized expert on national security, foreign policy and Congress, Rubin has extensive experience navigating the intersection of policy and politics. He has also run for Congress, giving him firsthand insight into the political dynamics that shape US foreign policy decision making.
A frequent commentator in national media, Rubin brings deep expertise in legislative strategy, diplomacy and the political dimensions of US national security.These are historical times we’re living through. I just interviewed Michael Oren, who is the former Israeli ambassador to the United States. He quoted his cab driver, who said, “We are not living in historic times; we are living in biblical times.”
(Laughs.) It’ll be Erev Purim pretty soon, so something is going on, which is kind of surreal, to be honest. I think these are extraordinary times; I’ll put it that way.

In what way is it surreal?
Because we just crossed over many lines that have been discussed over the decades in Washington diplomatic circles in terms of how to deal with Iran, and we stepped into a whole other universe and dimension. I know I’ve gone biblical on you. I didn’t mean to, but why not? I mean that sincerely, because we just witnessed the Americans and Israelis jointly conduct a massive aerial assault on Iran. Think about what that means.
For decades, the concept of the US and Israel overtly coordinating and collaborating on a joint strike against Iran, a major Muslim power in the Middle East, was unthinkable. There were a variety of political risks associated with it. Of course, there were also a variety of operational risks, but the ultimate concern theoretically was that it would harm the standing of Israel and more so of the United States in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Now that may come to pass; I don’t know. But no one in the Arab world condemned it. There are no massive street protests in the Arab world condemning the Zionist aggressor or the Americans. That’s one of those great scenarios that never came to pass. It just went poof.

Although there is no great pushback from the Muslim world, ironically there’s a lot of pushback from the Christian world.
Well, there are a lot of Christians out there, right?

Nothing is ever 100%, but there are voices out there like Tucker Carlson, who is an anti-Semite, speaking out in the name of “Christian values.” What concerns people is not necessarily Tucker Carlson but that the president will be getting pushback from his own movement.
Yes. It’s driving people like Tucker crazy. The depth of their hatred toward Jews and Israel knows no bounds, and they’re extremely shocked and dismayed that this American president thinks differently. Frankly, I’m not a Trump activist; I’m a Democrat. But I’m an honest American, and I look at this and think that the way Trump is managing this is ultimately about American interests. Israel served a vital strategic role in executing the strikes, but they weren’t carried out on behalf of Israel. This was on behalf of the United States. As Trump said very clearly, it was out of concern for Iran’s nuclear program, and of course its other programs, such as ballistic missiles and other activities, and its unwillingness to come to an agreement.
To these hate mongers, the anti-Semites you’re describing, everything is about the Jews pulling the strings. They can’t see an action by anyone around the world without a Jew hidden behind it for nefarious purposes. So to them, what’s stunning, shocking and dismaying is that they can’t put these two ideas I described together in their heads, and they just think that Donald Trump has been duped by the Jews.
But ask American military service members who were wounded in the Marine barracks in Beirut or by roadside bombs in Iraq about how they view Iranian military activities in the region. They would say that Iran is a threat to America’s military security; they aren’t going to say, “Let’s do it for the Jews and Israel.” As someone who engages in the spaces of foreign policy professional as a Democrat and as a Jewish person, I always try to maintain the American perspective on this. I think it’s in our interests to not let Iran get nuclear weapons.

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Honestly, even I was surprised when I saw the masses coming out to protest against the brutal regime of the Ayatollahs in Iran. For 40 years I have been following what happens in Iran, and I never expected such a massive, overwhelming response to the calls of the shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi, to demonstrate.

“Millions of protesters took to the streets, despite the enormous danger. For every one person who demonstrated, there were another ten who wanted to but were afraid. I have no doubt that today the people of Iran are thrilled about the killing of Khamenei and the American and Israeli strikes. The new generation hears of how good economic conditions were before the Iranian revolution under the shah and compares that to the economic depths in which they find themselves today. They say, ‘We want to fix the mistake of our parents and return to the Pahlavis, who will bring back the days when Iran was part of the Western world.’ They are sick of the cruel and extreme rule of the ayatollahs. For the first time in history, people in the streets of Iran were shouting ‘Javid shah—Long live the shah!’ When Israel struck the regime most of the people danced for joy and called out, ‘Bravo, Netanyahu.’”
So says Ardashir Leviyan, a Tehran native who served in the Royal Guard of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Some years after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, he was forced to flee Iran and eventually made his way to Israel. Today he is active in the media world, hosting Persian-language radio programs for the Iranian opposition community. He broadcasts twice a week on Radio Ran, a station aimed at Iranians in Israel, in the United States, and in Iran itself. Leviyan maintains ties with the shah’s son and his people in exile in Los Angeles, and with civilian members of the opposition inside Iran.

No Organized Opposition Inside Iran
“There is no organized, structured opposition inside Iran today,” Leviyan says. “The Iranian regime executed anyone connected to the opposition. The active opposition is the one outside Iran’s borders. Among the various groups there is one prominent one—the Mojahedin-e Khalq, whose base is in Europe. But they’re communists who lean toward Marxism, and the Iranian people are repelled by them. They also collaborated with Saddam Hussein during his war against Iran. There is no chance they will ever assume a leadership position in Iran.
“The second significant group,” he continues, “is that of the shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi, who lives in Los Angeles. In recent years he has united almost wall-to-wall support from the opposition outside Iran. And we have seen how, during the recent protests, he has also accumulated enormous popularity inside Iran itself. Every call he made to go out and protest was answered with the support of millions of Iranians.”
Leviyan has ties with Pahlavi and is aware of his vision for Iran’s future. “The shah’s son has no plans to come and restore an autocratic monarchical guard as it was in the past. He does not intend to replace one dictatorship with another. He wants to install a democratic regime in Iran, chosen by the people, and he wants to be the man who leads the Iranian state toward such a regime. Iran is a large country with a glorious cultural past and enormous natural resources, with the capacity to be an advanced and wealthy nation, yet today, because of its leadership, its people live in tremendous poverty. There is nothing for people to eat in Iran. People are angry.”

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Bankruptcy is one of those words people misunderstand. Most assume it means you simply get to wipe the slate clean and don’t owe anyone any money forever, but it’s not that simple. In fact, when a company declares bankruptcy while owing money to many of their vendors, those claims still have value, and even significant value, as they are often later paid either partially or in.
This is where Joseph Sarachek comes in. Joseph is a lawyer who has traded over a billion dollars in bankruptcy claims. He represents creditors, investors, vendors and funds that are trying to recover money from bankrupt companies when others assume it’s gone. He has built a practice focused on enforcing judgments and extracting value from complicated situations.
People who have access to and trade bankruptcy claims are rare, and Joseph is one of the foremost experts in the field.
We discussed several concepts of bankruptcy, how it isn’t the end of the road for many, and he also introduced concepts that most readers will find new and interesting.
Enjoy!
—Nesanel

I was born in New York City, the oldest of three children, with a younger brother and a younger sister.
My grandfather, Rabbi Joseph Sarachek, was president of the Board of Jewish Rabbis during World War II and a scholar of medieval Jewish literature. I never knew him. I was extremely close to my grandmother, though. She was a lawyer and always impressed upon me how noble a profession it was; she told me that as a lawyer you could help people and make a good living. She was also heavily involved with Hadassah and played an active role in the development of Hadassah Hospital, which existed before the State of Israel and became much more significant after its founding.
“My maternal grandparents came from Europe. My grandfather served in World War I, came to the United States and worked as a house painter in Brooklyn.
“My father was a commercial banker who worked at Bank Leumi. He was from Long Beach, Long Island. I grew up in Great Neck, New York, in a Reconstructionist household. I did not attend religious schools. A chance meeting with Rabbi Leibel Baumgarten, the Chabad rabbi in East Hampton, changed the direction of my observance.
“I later moved to Scarsdale, where I still live. I am a member of Young Israel, and most of my kids went to Ramaz. I put on tefillin every day, and I am very involved with Colel Chabad, the charity run by Rabbi Sholom Duchman.
“I was entrepreneurial as a teenager, but I wasn’t a success right away. One of my first ventures was selling bagels on the street outside Penn Station, and it failed. I mainly worked in restaurants and food service, and I was quite good at it. My first job was busing tables at a temple in Great Neck. After that, I worked at the most popular restaurant in Great Neck, doing busing and some light waitering. At the time, my high school ran a service through which people could hire students to work at their party. I got many jobs through them and made good money bartending and cleaning up at parties. That’s what enabled me to buy a car at 17.
“I always wanted to go to Cornell, but I didn’t get in at first. I started at Binghamton and later transferred to Cornell. My grades were very good, and I was also very active in extracurricular activities there: I was on the rowing team and the student newspaper, treasurer of my fraternity, and I ran a campaign for an independent candidate for president.
“I wanted to go to law school, but money was tight. I received a scholarship from New York Law School, so I went there. I excelled in corporate bankruptcy law and soon joined a bankruptcy law firm.
“Bankruptcy law is very entrepreneurial. It’s part business analysis, part legal application. The legal aspect is much more than simply filing a bankruptcy claim. It’s figuring out how to maximize assets for all stakeholders—the shareholders, investors, employees, debt holders and banks. The entrepreneurial part is recognizing patterns. Like everything else, bankruptcies follow a cycle, which ultimately comes down to cash flow. If a company lacks liquidity but carries heavy debt, they often can’t survive.
“I’m a bankruptcy geek. In my spare time, in addition to learning Gemara, I read bankruptcy articles and journals, and post a lot on LinkedIn about things I find interesting, to educate others.
“My first job was at a bankruptcy firm, Kreindler and Relkin (K&R), in the Empire State Building. They focused largely on creditor-side work. We didn’t represent the people filing for bankruptcy; we represented the people who were unhappy they were filing. Creditor-side work involves representing the banks, vendors or investors who are owed money and are trying to recover as much as possible. Debtor-side work, by contrast, means representing the company that has filed for bankruptcy, helping it restructure its debts, negotiate with lenders and attempt to reorganize or sell the business.
“The firm primarily represented lenders to the apparel industry—banks and factors (agents that buy a company’s accounts receivables, less a discount for commission and fees). It was a unique niche; the apparel industry was heavily Jewish, and these businesses often relied on these specialized lenders to survive, despite the high interest they often charged.
“After a year and a half at K&R, I was hired by a major commercial bankruptcy firm, Kelley Drye & Warren, where I handled both debtor and creditor cases. We handled many high-profile cases. We worked on Revco and on Interco, the company that owned Converse sneakers. I enjoyed the debtor-side work, but it requires large teams and significant resources to execute properly. While at Kelley Drye, my boss, Sandy Mayerson, came into my office one day and said we were going to write an article for a premier bankruptcy publication about trading claims. I was 27 years old and had no idea what that meant. I researched it and discovered an entire field of investors who buy bankruptcy claims.

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Christian attitudes in the US have improved considerably toward Jews over recent decades.

In the Catholic world, good will followed 1965’s Vatican II, which condemned anti-Semitism and called Jews their “elder brothers.” And the good will has been not only on display but actively demonstrated on issues of common interest, from raising alarm about Islamist terrorism to promoting school choice. The Catholic Church has maintained diplomatic relations with Israel since 1993.

American evangelicals are particularly strong supporters of Israel; a majority believe the Holy Land belongs to the Jewish people. Other Protestant denominations have formally renounced anti-Semitism and affirmed Hashem’s covenant with the Jewish people.

But that good will is not shared by two self-promoting Christians who have been prominent in the public eye.

Back on February 9, a meeting of the White House’s Religious Liberty Commission focused on combating anti-Semitism and upholding religious freedom went fine, well, until it ran off the rails.

One member of the commission, conservative activist Carrie Prejean Boller, used the meeting to attack “Zionism”—i.e., Israel and its supporters—and defend commentators Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. (The former promoted Nazi apologists and Holocaust deniers; the latter encouraged her followers to read a text claiming that Jews ritually murdered Christians and drank their blood. As Mr. Carlson might drolly comment, Just saying.)

Ms. Prejean Boller proclaimed that her Catholic faith—to which she converted last spring—informs her anti-“Zionism” convictions.

“I’m a Catholic,” she declared, with zeal not uncommon to neophytes, “and Catholics do not embrace Zionism, just so you know.

“So,” she sneered at several victims of anti-Semitism who had testified at the meeting, “are all Catholics anti-Semites?”

Two days later, the commission chairman booted her for trying to “hijack” the hearing for her “own personal and political agenda.” She then accused the commission of having “a Zionist agenda,” and, in intrepid martyr mode, posted on social media that “I would rather die than bend the knee to Israel.”

Mr. Carlson, for his part, in his recent interview of US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, repeatedly took pains to stress his own Christian bona fides.

Much of the reaction to that nearly three-hour exchange between a snide, cantankerous (often misinformed and misinforming) Carlson and an impressively polite, knowledgeable and well-spoken Huckabee was about the ambassador’s honest admission that he believed that Hashem’s promise of Eretz Yisrael to Avraham Avinu included a much larger swath of land than present-day Israel.

Challenged by Mr. Carlson about whether that entire land belongs to the Jews today, Ambassador Huckabee responded, “It would be fine if they took it all…” sending media muckrakers running to their keyboards and Arab countries to their ready-to-rattle sabers. But they all seem to have not listened much further to when Mr. Huckabee made clear that Israel has no designs on Jordan, Syria or Iraq. The rest of his sentence was “but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here today.

“They don’t want to take it over,” he continued. “They’re not asking to take it over.”

But the more noteworthy parts of the interview were those in which Carlson touted his own Christian identity. He even questioned the Christian credentials of his interviewee. At one point, after lamenting the fact that the IDF had bombed churches and a Christian hospital in Gaza (places that held caches of Hamas’ weapons, as Mr. Huckabee patiently explained), Mr. Carlson said: “I would expect you to side with the Christians over the secular government of Israel.”

Mr. Carlson also claimed that the Christian population in Israel is dwindling and pales by comparison with the population in Qatar. He was informed by Mr. Huckabee that the first contention was false: the Christian population of Israel has grown to approximately 184,000, and the country hosts hundreds of churches. And, regarding the second claim, that Christians in Qatar are overwhelmingly migrant workers confined to a restricted church compound.

We must hope that “influencers” like Carlson and Prejean Boller fail to influence. But it’s sobering and concerning that the former averages a million viewers per podcast and that the latter, in the wake of her commission conniption, gained 30,000 followers on social media.

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You flew in today from London to be the badchan at the Rachmastrivka chasunah in Boro Park, and you came to visit me between the kabbalas panim and mitzvah tantz. You’re very busy, to put it mildly.
Baruch Hashem. Yesterday I was in Manchester because Satmar made a big chanukas habayis for their Heichal HaTorah. The Rebbe, Rav Aharon, was there. It was a major event.

You performed as a badchan?
No. I gave a drashah. I can’t do everything, but bisyata dishmaya I wear many hats. One of them is badchanus, but there are also chairmanships [serving as an emcee], maggidus and drashos. They’re all almost the same thing, but each one requires a different mehalech. I also have a weekly column in Moment magazine. Additionally, I’m the yosheiv rosh of Belz in London and a gabbai in one of the shtieblach. So as you said, I’m busy.

I know there are a number of Sterns in Vizhnitz, but I understand that you have no connection to them.
Correct. I was once at a large dinner for Vizhnitz in Ramat Gan. The Vizhnitzer Rebbe, Rav Yisrael, may he have a refuah shleimah, had recently become rebbe. I said, “I’m not a Vizhnitzer chasid, but I’m a chasid of the Vizhnitzer Rebbe, and I don’t think there’s anyone in klal Yisrael who isn’t.” I was very close with his father the Yeshuos Moshe, zt”l. He once said to me, “You’re a true Belzer chasid, but you’re also a true good friend of Vizhnitz.”

I assume that other rebbes would be able to say the same thing.
Yes, but Vizhnitz possibly more than most, and especially Vizhnitz London, with whom I’ve been very close for many years.

You don’t discriminate, and you badchan everywhere. And you don’t only do it for rebbes; you also do it for balebatim.
Yes. From the very rich to the poor. But as they say in English, it’s a completely different kettle of fish.

Explain the difference.
Doing this for balebatim is much easier because I’m in control. I can say whatever I want and make a joke whenever I want. By rebbes, I have to be far more cautious. Although the Vizhnitzer Rebbe of Monsey, Rav Mottele, once told me before a dinner, “I know Vizhnitzer Torahs better than you do, and I don’t need to hear Vizhnitzer things from you. On the contrary, I want you to talk about what comes naturally to you. You don’t have to force anything.” There are rebbishe chasunahs where I do have to put things in from their chasidus, but there are also others who say they want to hear something different.

On the other hand, when you go to a balebatishe chasunah, the mechutan has to tell you all of his maalos. But when you go to a rebbishe chasunah, the gabba’im take care of that.
By a rebbe there are no praises; there’s nothing personal about the rebbe himself. I’ll talk about his ancestors and his father, but not about the rebbe.
I’ll give you an example from what I just said tonight before the chuppah. The chasan is a Belzer einikel and so is the kallah. They descend from Belz in various ways. So this was an opportunity to incorporate a few things about their ancestors.
I told a story that Rav Shmuel Engel writes in his sefer Shu”t Maharash, volume 7. He was at Rav Shayale Tchechoiver’s chasunah in Belz—Rav Shayale became the son-in-law of one of the Mitteler Belzer Rav’s sons-in-law. Rav Shayale was a yasom by then—his father, the Divrei Chaim, had already passed away—and the Mitteler Rav told him, “Your father promised me that he would come for the chasunah, but the Eibershter had other plans. Do your utmost with all of your kochos so you can have a connection with your father.” And the sefer says that everyone started to cry. That was a good story to tell because it was about an ancestor of both sides.

Belz is your home, but how did you become a Belzer chasid? I understand that your family weren’t chasidim.
Not at all. We were always Ashkeneizim. My father didn’t wear a gartel, and he wore a short jacket. My mother’s father was Rav Shloma Baumgarten, son of Rav Yosef Baumgarten, who was the rav of the Schiffschul in Vienna. My father’s father was the rosh hakahal of the Schiffschul and an askan for Agudas Yisrael. He spoke at every Knessiah Gedolah, from the first to the last.

What did he do for a living?
He had a butcher shop in London. He passed away at an old age. His father was also an askan. They were all Oberlandishe Ashkeneizishe Yidden. So how did I get to Belz? It’s a very good question, and there are two parts to the answer.
My zeide, Rav Shloma Baumgarten, had a sister who got married after the war to a Belzer chasid named Reb Nachman Dachs, who was the rosh hashochtim in London. He had been a shochet in Germany before the war. He was a very passionate chasid and had even merited to see the Mitteler Belzer Rav. He paid my expenses to join him on a trip to Switzerland for a Shabbos when the Belzer Rav was there. It really pulled me very strongly. But my father wasn’t so excited, so he decided to ask Rav Yankele (of Pshevorsk), with whom he was very close. This was obviously many years ago. Rav Yankele told my father, “He’s a young rebbe and he brings out the talents of the bachurim. It’s very good. Let your son go to him.”
I went to Eretz Yisrael to learn in Tchebin, but I would also go to the Rav. The first time I went for a tish was on 21 Av, the yahrtzeit of the frierdiker Belzer Rebbe, which was right before the new zman began. After the tish, all of the out-of-town guests would pass by the Rav to take their leave, and I also went. He asked me who I was, and I told him. “Did you enjoy it?” he wanted to know. I answered that I did. “Come again on Shabbos,” he said. When I went back on Shabbos, a bachur came over to me and said, “The Rav said that we should be mekarev you.” I was all of 17 years old at the time. The rest, as they say, is history. “Heviani hamelech chadarav—the king brought me into his chamber.” Then I was invited for private Shabbosim in Givat Hamivtar almost every other week.

Were you wearing chasidishe levush?
No. I was wearing a short jacket and a shtafene hat. I have no explanation for the way he was mekarev me.

It was v’nafsho keshurah b’nafsho.
Precisely. Totally a connection with my nefesh. Although I stayed in Tchebin, I was going to Belz every week, and then I started going there every night for Maariv. On Friday and Motzaei Shabbos, I would learn with a Lelover yungerman in the Lelover beis midrash. The Lelover Rebbe, Rav Moshe Mordechai, saw me a few times and nodded to me. Then one day he asked me who I was. When I told him, he wanted to know where I spent my time. “In Belz,” I replied. “Belz!” he said. “Do you know what Belz is? Belz is a pipeline for kedushah and ahavah for klal Yisrael. The world doesn’t know who the Belzer Rav is!” That was really mechazek me.

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If you could know the future before it happened, you’d never lose. But what if you could get the next best thing: the single most accurate, real-time prediction of what’s about to happen? That turns out to be worth quite a lot, and it already exists.
In 2024, regular political polling showed that Kamala Harris had a strong chance of winning the presidential election. But those who were watching the prediction market Polymarket were seeing something very different: overwhelming odds that Donald Trump would be the winner. The actual numbers on the night of the election indicated that while the pollsters didn’t know what they were doing, the prediction markets did.
That phenomenon has led to a number of controversies, including political ones. How freely should these markets be allowed to operate? Do they have any use beyond gambling? Do they hurt more than they help?

What They Are
Prediction markets are essentially online places where people can bet on an array of future events. These range from the outcomes of elections or sporting events to the direction of military actions by various countries or even the specific words a politician will use in a speech.
The major idea behind prediction markets is “the wisdom of the crowds”: the theory that an aggregation of individuals can predict an outcome more accurately than any single expert. In other words, the impressions and knowledge of one person aren’t enough to reveal any real truth, but when you gather a multitude of those perspectives, you may gain insight into what will actually happen. As this would apply to an election, individuals tend to have an idea of how the people around them plan to vote. By pooling these localized insights, the market transforms thousands of personal anecdotes into powerful, focused data points.
In practical terms, people place bets, each one totaling about a dollar between the two sides. For example, over the weekend, Polymarket had a market on whether Ayatollah Khamenei would be ousted as Supreme Leader by March 31 of this year. Buying a “yes” contract cost 21 cents, while buying a “no” contract cost 80 cents. You can also sell both contracts. The price for the contracts changes based on how much people are willing to pay for them.
If it turns out to be true (according to the specific rules as explained on the page), then the people with “yes” contracts will get the underlying dollar for every bet they made; if it turns out to be false, the “no” people will get the dollar. The fact that the price was much lower for a “yes” contract than a “no” contract suggested that people were more confident that Khamenei would not be ousted by March 31, essentially believing (as a group) that there is only a 21% chance of that happening.
Meanwhile, there was also a market for whether he would be out by December 31, and the “yes” contracts were selling for 51 cents.

What Are They Good For?

Does betting on events have any larger positive effect on society? Polymarket likes to claim that it does. For instance, on the ayatollah wager, the website made an apparent reference to the US attacks on Iran, trying to dispel criticism about betting on bombings:
“Note on Middle East Markets: The promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events to society. That ability is particularly invaluable in gut-wrenching times like today. After discussing with those directly affected by the attacks, who had dozens of questions, we realized that prediction markets could give them the answers they needed in ways TV news and X could not.”

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After speaking with Moshe Grunfeld for over three hours, it was abundantly clear that his parnasah—simchah photography—suits him perfectly.
Moshe possesses a calm and happy nature, which is invaluable when it comes to dealing with the pressures of a tight, often frenetic wedding schedule. Unfazed in almost any situation, he projects a tranquil energy that his clients instinctively mirror.
Moshe’s professional reach also extends into the thriving field of frum feature films and live theatrical productions. What began as a chance experience with makeup during a camp play developed into a remarkable expertise. Founder of the theatrical makeup company Punim Chadushes (New Faces), Moshe has mastered the art of transforming actors into characters, using cosmetics, hair, prosthetics and various tools of the trade to render cast members unrecognizable even to their closest family and friends.
Whether he is capturing a face from behind the lens or creating one behind the scenes, Moshe is a master of the visual frame. Before Purim, when we all adopt costumes of some kind, how appropriate to speak to the king of disguises himself.
L’chaim! Enjoy!

—Nesanel

I was a preemie, so I like to say I got a head start on life and just kept moving forward. The youngest of eight, I was born in Albany but grew up in Boro Park. My father, who grew up in Williamsburg, was in the catering business. He initially operated Cotillion Terrace but eventually opened his own kitchen and built the business from the ground up. My mother passed away on March 21, 2020, right before her 70th birthday. I was very close with her, and her absence still weighs heavily on my heart.
“I attended a local cheder and then went on to learn in Munkatch, and I developed a close relationship with the Munkatcher Rav.
“In the Munkatcher yeshivah there was an emphasis on harnessing one’s strengths, which had a profound impact on me. I approached the hanhalah with a request to learn how to bind sefarim. They not only approved but even gave me an office and the necessary tools to pursue my interest. It was a serious learning environment but not a pressured one, which suited me well.
“As a kid, I always loved building things and creating fun activities. I ran carnivals on our block, and the whole neighborhood looked forward to them. For a few years, the money we raised went to Hatzalah, and I even received plaques for my work. I also helped other kids organize their own carnivals, recommending things that had worked well and working to improve things that hadn’t.
“After my bar mitzvah, I got involved in a struggling Chevras Tehillim near my house. It was a great learning experience, and I was able to help a number of branches of the organization. Even then, I didn’t just participate, I improved.
“I studied what kids actually wanted. I brought in famous storytellers, I bought nosh wholesale instead of retail, I ordered ice cream by the truck from Klein’s, and I tracked which prizes were taken first and which sat untouched. Within a few months, attendance grew from about 30 boys to over 500.
“I’ve always tried to give more value for the money. I focused on branding before I knew what that was. My signs had curtains, and every Chevras Tehillim I helped used the same imagery, so people knew it was under one management.
“Chevras Tehillim took up a lot of my time, but I also volunteered for Chai Lifeline. As a bachur, I went to hospitals very often. I thank Hashem that my parnasah today is earned by being mesamei’ach Yidden in other ways.
“When I was 18, the Munkatcher yeshivah closed down. With the brachah of the Munkatcher Rav, I started looking for a job. I had some very good offers, but since I was so young, the Munkatcher Rav recommended that I stay in a Torah environment. Because he was like a father to me and always supportive, I wanted to follow his advice.
“Soon afterward, I bumped into my seventh-grade teacher, Reb Leibish Hammer, who was teaching in Yeshiva Darchei Torah of Far Rockaway. He mentioned that Siach Yitzchok, also in Far Rockaway, was looking for someone to oversee the preschool’s arts and crafts department. They had two kindergartens and the rebbeim needed another hand to prepare these creative projects.
“It was essentially arts and crafts therapy. My job was to keep track of the children’s progress by monitoring their ability to follow instructions, replicate patterns, including lines, colors and sequence, as well as other key skills. While these tasks may seem simple, they were important for the children’s development. If a child couldn’t keep up or follow directions properly, it was a possible indicator of delay.
“I felt suited to that job right away because I always liked drawing. I have an older brother, Hershy, who is very artistic and taught me how to draw and how to use colors. It’s good to be the youngest. You benefit from all your older siblings’ talents; everybody teaches you. Many volunteers are the youngest in the family. Rebbe Nachman of Breslov says that everybody has a desire to be mashpia, to influence others. So older siblings are mashpia on the younger ones, and then the youngest ones seek out places where they can give and be of service.
“It was a part-time job, only a few hours a day, but it paid well. I was at Siach Yitzchok for over three years until I decided to return to learning full time. I joined a kollel in Williamsburg, where I merited a wonderful chavrusa from a rebbishe family. My time in kollel was gevaldig. I got married in 2011.
“Wherever I was, whatever the situation, I always tried to make it better. If I felt something wasn’t going well, I would try to think how I might improve it.
“I first started doing makeup when I was a counselor in Munkatcher camp. They were having a play and the makeup artist they had booked couldn’t make it at the last minute. There was makeup in the costume room, and I started experimenting, even though I knew nothing. I saw makeup, I saw faces, and I saw a need, so I stepped in.
“It wasn’t such a big deal for me to figure out: it’s art, just instead of coloring on paper, you’re coloring in 3D. I did a good enough job that Shloime Steinmetz at the Klausenberger camp asked me to do the makeup for their performance. Then Spinka camp called me.
“In 2009 or 2010, I worked for Hershy Rosner, a makeup artist and photographer, helping him with the makeup for a play called ‘Interen Kenigreich.’ That was the first time I was exposed to a real backstage environment. Later, after I got engaged, he hired me as a production assistant. I helped with editing, video work, script writing and things like that. I have tremendous hakaras hatov to him, because he guided me and taught me so much.
“After working for Hershy Rosner, I joined On Time Studios for a few months, where I was surrounded by talented creative people like Mendy Leonorowitz, a gifted filmmaker and director, and Ari Abramowitz, a strong writer. They relied on me to set up the scenes so they looked realistic and professional. I still do this today as the art director for Boruch Perlowitz productions.
“I have four brothers in construction and many friends who are contractors, so when the opportunity came up to take over a flooring company, I felt I could do it. With their backing and guidance, I stepped in. Baruch Hashem, it took off quickly. Within weeks, I was signing proposals for major buildings, six and ten floors of hardwood flooring, large-scale projects. But I was newly married, had just had a baby and everything in my life was shifting. I felt overwhelmed and disconnected. I needed to figure out who I was beyond the environment I was in.
“We moved to Airmont, New York, for a year, but that wasn’t enough. I wanted a full reset. So I unplugged completely and moved to Scranton, Pennsylvania, where we lived for four years. It was far removed from the noise. I didn’t know many people there, but it is a very strong, established community with genuinely warm people, where I was truly able to grow.

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I had to do a double take after reading that a group of 151 former ministers, ambassadors and diplomats accused the French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, of spreading disinformation about United Nations Special Rapporteur for Palestine Francesca Albanese.

Monsieur Barrot’s alleged misstep was his reaction to Signora Albanese’s comments on February 7, 2026, at an Al Jazeera forum in Doha, Qatar, on a panel devoted to “the Palestinian cause.”

True to loathsome form and to the great pleasure of her audience, the signora, like others on the panel, including a Hamas leader and an Iranian minister, railed against Israel.

Ho hum.

She accused the Western world of amplifying a “pro-apartheid genocidal narrative” and bemoaned the challenges that the “global community” faces today.

And she concluded that “We who do not control large amounts of financial capitals, algorithms and weapons, we now see that we as a humanity have a common enemy [italics mine].”

Monsieur Barrot called Signora Albanese’s remarks “outrageous and reprehensible.” Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said her “behavior, statements and initiatives aren’t appropriate for the position she holds,” and Germany’s foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, said Albanese’s position is “no longer tenable.” France, Austria, the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom have also called for the special rapporteur’s dismissal.

Even UN Secretary-General António Guterres, not known for empathy for Israel, said (through a spokesperson; he may have feared choking on the words) that “We don’t agree with much of what [Albanese] says and wouldn’t have used the language that she’s using in describing the situation.”

Thus my need to reread, with incredulity, the 151 former ministers’, ambassadors’, and diplomats’ and entertainers’ (always experts on foreign affairs) rush to the defense of the special rapporteur, claiming that the media had truncated and distorted her comments.
In an open letter, the group accused Monsieur Barrot of spreading inaccurate and manipulated information, and condemned its use to discredit the UN official.

“The dissemination of disinformation by senior officials,” they wrote, “undermines international law, weakens human rights protections, and threatens the credibility of the multilateral system itself.”

Signora Albanese herself fumed that “European governments accuse me—based on statements I never made—with a virulence and conviction that they have NEVER used against those who have slaughtered 20,000+ children in 858 days”—tellingly citing the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll claim.

So how did the signora defend her words? She contended that what she had meant by humanity’s “common enemy” was not—G‑d forbid!—Israel (the topic of her rant), but “THE SYSTEM [caps hers] that has enabled the genocide in Palestine.”

Oh.

Even in her attempt to “explain” her words, the signora felt it important to use the disgustingly deceitful word “genocide” for Israel’s war against Hamas. Hardly surprising, considering that, during the October 7 pogrom, she urged that the murdering of innocents be placed in its “context.” And that she dismissed reported acts of the invaders’ viciousness documented by UN Watch and the ADL as “fabrications.”

With that background, and in a speech that was devoted entirely to besmirching Israel, the special rapporteur’s claim that it was only a “SYSTEM” she was identifying as humanity’s enemy and not the usual object of her animus (and the subject of her speech) is ludicrous.

Three cheers for Monsieur Barrot, who stuck to his guns, posting on his social media, in response to the risible “contextualizing” of the special rapporteur’s Hitlerian comment: “Stop fake news. I did not truncate or distort Ms. Albanese’s comments. I simply condemned them because they are reprehensible.”

In an even semi-sane world, Signora Albanese would be reassigned to flipping pizza dough.

Back in 2024, former special envoy for combating anti-Semitism Deborah Lipstadt described remarks the signora made as “openly anti-Semitic.” And last year, she was placed under US sanctions, with the State Department condemning her “unabashed anti-Semitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West.”

In some places, it’s customary to stage Purim shpiels where contemporary figures take the place of Megillas Esther’s protagonists. With Monsieur Barrot and Signora Albanese occupying space in my head, were I in charge of central casting for such a play, I have a good idea about whom I’d choose for Charvonah. And Vashti.

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In a Jerusalem shul during Shacharis, a young boy sleeps on a narrow wooden bench under a window. All morning long he had tried to stay still, but his body refused to obey, his legs jiggling and his fingers drumming on the table. His thoughts raced faster than the words in the siddur, more quickly than a child his age could keep up with.

As the congregation rises for Shemoneh Esrei, his body finally gives in. Slumped forward with one of his shoes dangling from his foot, he puts his head down and falls asleep. A man leans over him and nudges him gently, whispering his name. There’s a flicker of movement—almost a response—but then the boy goes still again. Tefillos rise up around him. Children answer, “Amein yehei shmei rabbah.” The boy doesn’t move.
People begin to notice. They glance at him, look away and then look back. Something feels off, but no one knows what it is.
The sleeping boy was Dovid Weitman, today the founder of an organization that helps special-needs children and their families.
When Dovid tells me this story, his mind still moves the same way it did back then. Our first interview takes place on Zoom, with Dovid calling from a car in between back-to-back meetings for his organization. In one moment he is eight years old on a bench in a shul in Jerusalem. In the next, he is in a forest in Ukraine with his grandmother, a young girl learning how to survive at her uncle’s side.
He is not telling me these stories in a linear sequence. He is showing me a landscape that only he can see, a place where past, present and future converge. Dovid takes in the whole picture at once; the rest of us catch up in pieces. The same mind that can’t track a single line of text holds entire worlds in parallel.
People try to give it a name: ADHD, perhaps. The labels might be accurate but they don’t truly explain him. If Dovid has a diagnosis, it is simply this: he is a person who lives fully in the present, and in doing so draws other people into their own strength.
Dovid relates how his father would come to the cheder with cookies from Machaneh Yehudah. “Let’s sit down and learn a little bit,” he would cajole him. Ten minutes. Fifteen. But even that was too much. Nonetheless, his father kept coming to whichever cheder or yeshivah Dovid ended up in. “My father took buses and hailed taxis just to sit with me. It was never really about learning. It was love,” he says.
At home, his mother tried a different approach. “My mother brought me to private teachers and sat with me for hours drawing pictures, following the advice of an expert who said that some children absorb images better than words.” A baalas chesed by nature who was practical and generous, she poured that same determination into the search for the key that would unlock her son’s learning disability.
“As a child,” Dovid says, “wherever I went I kept hearing the same message: you are a gornisht, a nothing.”
Maybe that was why he began searching for other ways to matter. When he was around eight years old, he came up with an idea: If he couldn’t learn, he could at least help others. His plan? Any boy who could say Mishnayos by heart would get a prize. He would raise the money to pay for them.
For all that, his learning difficulties still left him on the outside. The other children didn’t play with him. They laughed, left him out of their games, blamed him for things he hadn’t done. They snickered when he tried to read. When he fumbled through davening or stumbled over spelling they mocked him, and he learned what it meant to be present in a room but treated as if he wasn’t there.
With nowhere to belong, either in the classroom or the schoolyard, he found one place where he could shape a world that made sense: Under his bed, eight-year-old Dovid Weitman kept his own secret universe.
Tiny plastic people no bigger than his thumb. A miniature empire of his own making, where no one failed tests and no one was told he didn’t matter. While other boys bent over their Gemaras, memorizing lines their fathers and grandfathers had learned before them, Dovid built chesed organizations, ambulances and shuls. While they davened, he dreamed.
He couldn’t keep his place on the page. The letters slipped away from him like mercury. But in the worlds he created, he never lost his place. There, he knew exactly where everything belonged. But the home in which he was growing up was built around a very different kind of knowledge.
“My mother came from a background where Torah was hu chayeinu,” he says. The granddaughter of the Manchester rosh yeshivah, Rav Yehuda Zev Segal, zt”l, she was raising 13 children, all nurtured with the hope that they would grow up to be bnei Torah and talmidei chachamim. “This is what she davened for, inspiring us through the deep reverence in which she held Torah study. Unfortunately, watching my siblings succeed while I failed one test after another, it felt as if the world had already decided that I was a lost cause. But beneath that verdict was a hunger I couldn’t yet name, something no mark on a test could satisfy.
“My father’s father was chasidish, but my father had learned in Litvish yeshivos so I hadn’t grown up in that world,” he continues. “My only taste of it was when my grandfather, Reb Avraham Weitman, took me as a little boy to a rebbe’s tish. The warmth and the singing stayed with me, even if I couldn’t have said why.
“One Shabbos night when I was 14 I wandered into a tish by myself. The room was packed: the chasidim singing, the rebbe at the head of the table. I stood in the back, just watching. I didn’t expect to be noticed. I was a nobody, a boy who couldn’t read, couldn’t learn and couldn’t sit still.”
Then Dovid did something uncharacteristic: He made his way through the crowd and introduced himself to the rebbe. “My name is Dovid Weitman,” he said. The rebbe nodded, his eyes resting on him for a moment longer than Dovid was used to. “Zei gebentsht, Dovid,” the rebbe replied.
A few weeks later, he saw the rebbe again on the street. Expecting to be forgotten, he repeated, “My name is Dovid Weitman.” The rebbe looked at him. “I know. I remember,” he said. For a boy who never seemed to fit in anywhere, who felt hurt and misunderstood, the warmth in that gaze was like a hand on his shoulder. For the first time he felt embraced rather than pushed away.
“At that moment, I knew that I wanted to be a chasid,” Dovid says. “It didn’t solve my learning struggles overnight, but it gave me a sense of belonging. In yeshivah, I approached the mashgiach and asked him, ‘Can I seal envelopes in the office?’ The mashgiach hesitated, unsure what to make of such an unusual request, but he said yes. And suddenly I had a purpose. I could do something and be useful. I no longer felt like I was wasting time and I was happy.”

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Meir Dagan, who led the Mossad from 2002 to 2011, remains one of Israel’s most influential and often controversial intelligence chiefs. Known for his audacious operations, incisive strategic thinking and unwavering commitment to Israel’s security, he shaped some of the country’s most consequential covert campaigns, from countering Hezbollah to slowing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. His tenure was marked not only by bold successes but also high-stakes gambles and occasional miscalculations.

Born in 1945 in Kherson, then part of the Soviet Union (now Ukraine), Dagan spent his early childhood in Romania before immigrating to Israel as a teenager. His family history was indelibly marked by the Holocaust; many of his relatives were murdered, including his maternal grandfather, Ber Erlich Sloshny, who was publicly executed by the Nazis in the town of Łuków. A photograph capturing his final moments hung on the wall of Dagan’s office throughout his career, serving as both a personal moral compass and a stark reminder of the dangers of anti-Semitism, a symbol of his lifelong vow that “there will be no second Holocaust.”
After surviving the war, Dagan and his parents arrived in Israel in 1950, first settling in a transit camp near Lod and later in Bat Yam, where his parents operated a small laundry. These formative experiences fostered the resilience and fearlessness that would later define his leadership.
Following his retirement—some have said dismissal—from the agency, Dagan broke with the Mossad’s tradition of silence by publicly opposing a preemptive Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. He cautioned that such an operation could spark a disastrous regional war and strain Israel’s vital alliance with the United States. His outspoken stance drew criticism from those who accused him of breaching norms of secrecy. But Dagan consistently argued for patience and measured decision making over impulsive military action.
In 2012, at the age of 67, Dagan was diagnosed with a life-threatening liver disease requiring a transplant. Because of age restrictions, the procedure could not be performed in Israel, prompting him to undergo surgery in Minsk, Belarus. During this difficult period he formed a close relationship with Rabbi Meilech Firer, whose guidance and support proved invaluable. After his recovery, Dagan expressed deep gratitude to Rabbi Firer and later assisted him in fundraising for a new rehabilitation center.
Despite his health challenges, Dagan remained an active and influential voice in public debates on Israel’s national security. In the following interview, Samuel Katz—author of The Architect of Espionage: The Man Who Built Israel’s Mossad into the World’s Boldest Intelligence Force—discusses Dagan’s worldview, his operational record and how history may judge him, especially in light of the October 7 massacre and Israel’s subsequent operations against Iran’s nuclear program.

I find it interesting that anyone can still regard Meir Dagan as an important intelligence figure after Israel’s attack on Iran. He was so adamant in his opposition to such action, predicting all kinds of terrible outcomes that didn’t come to pass. In that sense, history has proven him wrong. Has your understanding of Dagan changed in light of that?
No, not at all. I think it’s impossible to compare Meir Dagan’s warning about attacking Iran in 2009 to the facts on the ground in 2025. For Israel, it was a completely different universe not only with regard to capabilities but in terms of having a friend in the White House. President Obama was not a friend of Israel or Netanyahu, and Israel didn’t possess the necessary military might or intelligence—both in the view of the IDF assessment and in the eyes of Meir Dagan—to ensure that the attack would be successful. Back in 2009, Israel didn’t possess the F-35 fighter bomber, the air refueling capabilities or the remote tactics, and it had yet to build a vast network of intelligence assets to bring it the level that existed in 2025.

If my recollection is correct, most of his caution wasn’t based on doubts about Israel’s capabilities but on concerns about the potential repercussions of a counterattack from Iran. He was predicting worst-case scenarios. Fortunately, doomsday didn’t occur.
I don’t think he was worried about doomsday; I think he was worried about entering a war in which Israel wouldn’t have the strategic backing of the United States. One of the things Meir Dagan understood better than most was that Israel’s greatest strategic asset is its military and technological alliance with America. In 2009 and 2010, that was being severely tested.

We must also give credit where credit is due, namely his devotion to combating the Iranian threat.
Undoubtedly. When he was in command of the South Lebanon area, he led the first skirmishes of what would become the much wider war with Iran via Hezbollah. Later, as head of the Mossad, he was pitted against them and greatly enhanced Israel’s covert efforts. Intelligence gathering, the establishment of networks and assets in a country with allies from various ethnic groups isn’t something you can do overnight. In many cases it takes a long time. But I also think that the efforts of both Israel’s Military Intelligence and the Mossad that were invested in Iran and Hezbollah were so profound that in some cases the concern over threats nearer to home weren’t given the attention they warranted.

It’s interesting that he viewed Iran as a rational enemy. Do you think he truly understood the Iranian regime?
I think you’re focusing on words rather than actions, which is a mistake. The leadership in Iran may preach the end of the world, but the people in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the elements that keep the powers that be in power don’t want to relinquish their hold, nor do they want to give up the wealth they have amassed. In that sense they are rational, but they haven’t been successful in the way they exercise the power of their proxies.

Why do you consider Dagan such an important figure? Is it for his ability to gather intelligence or for the way he executed operations based on it?
I’ll tell you why. He was born from the ashes of the Holocaust; his parents had survived the Nazi invasion of Poland and most of his family was murdered. One of the things that drew me to him was the fact that they built an adopted family of other people who had also been subjected to the horrors of Europe. He was shaped by these things as a child.
He had also seen the victory of the Six-Day War and experienced the shock and surprise of the Yom Kippur War. As he once said in an interview, his entire generation of soldiers was betrayed by the decision makers. In that latter war, some 2,500 Israeli soldiers were killed over the course of 18 days. It’s also important to mention that when he was an armored brigade commander moving on Beirut in 1982, the horror of losing so many of his junior officers had a profound impact on him. He developed a unique talent for using capable individuals with very specific skillsets that could save lives in selective operations and prevent massive casualties. That’s why his approach was to avoid being foolhardy. If something was going to be done, there had to be a guarantee of success.

We need to assess Dagan in light of the October 7 massacre, as it changed Israel’s perspective on how to engage its enemies.
October 7 wasn’t a “massacre.” It has been incorrectly described on social media and in political discourse as an attack. But it wasn’t an attack; it was a full-fledged conventional invasion in which 22 communities and locations were captured. It was meant to hold territory, it was meant to start a larger Middle East war, and it was meant to redefine the Middle East with Israel desperate at the beginning of the American presidential cycle.
One of Meir Dagan’s special projects was the financial warfare intelligence unit that in Hebrew was known as Tziltzal and in English as Harpoon. He understood all along that money is the oxygen that drives terror. When the Israelis made the decision to allow Qatari and other money to go into Gaza so Hamas would want a better future for its people instead of warfare, it was a very Western approach. Only Westerners think that the most important driving force is to live the American dream. But Dagan understood that for all its Western European lifestyle, Israel is located in the Middle East, and you can’t apply Western standards to people who have made it very clear that they want to eliminate you. The Tziltzal unit was disbanded in 2017, after Dagan passed away. I think that many of the things that happened between his death and October 7 would have horrified him.

Please define those things that would have been reprehensible to him.
One of his most important contributions was that the Israelis traditionally firewalled all their information and handed it out very carefully. The intelligence world is a partnership of allies and sometimes adversaries. The Israeli intelligence services talk to nations and services with whom they don’t maintain diplomatic relations. Intelligence chiefs and officers are emissaries. One of the things Dagan believed was that intelligence that wasn’t being used was a waste of resources and of the effort to obtain it. It was wasted if it was sitting somewhere in a computer or file cabinet. He shared intelligence that could be actionable with his partners in the friendly world—the US and the West—and he also shared information with other partners who could help bring about greater security for Israel.

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At last year’s Orthodox Jewish Builders Association Expo, run by Meilech Webber, I conducted mini Lunchbreak interviews with several of the entrepreneurs who exhibited at the show. Those short chats were fun but left me wanting to hear more. One exhibitor I was happy to reconnect with was Isac (Beri) Wollner, founder of Bold Disposal and Demolition.
What impressed me most in our first quick talk was Beri’s happy demeanor and stress-free attitude, even in difficult situations. Beri had grown a company from scratch and was doing very well, until the market changed drastically. Forced to let all his employees go, Beri was left with just a single dump truck and a mountain of debt. Yet, with determination and creativity, not only was Beri able to recover but he established something even more successful.
Today, Bold Disposal and Demolition services the entire tristate area, focused on the real estate, warehousing and manufacturing market for cleanouts, gut jobs, demolitions, dumpster rentals and innovative construction or renovation solutions.
Beri talked about getting through tough times, developing his current business and what he learned along the way.
Enjoy!

—Nesanel

I grew up in Williamsburg, the second of eight children. We were comfortable but not wealthy. My father started out working for S&W, the clothing store in Manhattan. Then, with a few partners, he bought out a chain of gas stations and ran that for a few years. After that, he bought Sharmash Bus Company—with routes between Brooklyn, Kiryas Yoel and the Catskills—from his uncle. Ten years later he sold it to the Monroe Bus Company, which also doesn’t exist anymore, and started a new company called Vamoose, whose buses run from Manhattan to the Washington, DC, area. It’s still going, after 20 years.
“Vamoose started out as a cheap service, with its customers mostly from New York City. But after five years, my father realized that the cheap model wasn’t sustainable long term, so he redesigned it as a high-end service. In addition to regular coach buses, he also offers premium, business class coaches that seat only 34 passengers in a space built for 56. It has its own bus stop on Seventh Avenue and 31st Street in Manhattan. He has contracts with the Pentagon and the White House for their employees to travel back and forth to New York. During Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, her team contracted with Vamoose.
“I went to Satmar throughout my entire childhood. As a bachur, I was often involved in organizing and overseeing different initiatives. When the yeshivah had an event, I was the one coordinating it. I headed fundraisers for friends who didn’t have the means. I learned that from my parents, who are natural askanim. When a cousin from Eretz Yisrael reached out because his wife was sick, our family became very involved in helping them.
“After yeshivah, I joined my father at Vamoose and became his partner in growing the company. They were only running between New York and the DC area, and I wanted to expand to Boston as well. We applied for the operating licenses and thought that everything had been processed and approved. Evidently, there was some misunderstanding. On the first day of the new route, we got a call from the Boston Globe saying, ‘We hear you’re running a company in Boston without a license.’ That was a surprise, because I had the license in my hand! I have no idea how the paper found out about it or why they felt it was of interest to readers, but there was a large writeup about it the next day.
“Whatever their intention was, the article was tremendously beneficial to us—it was essentially very effective free advertising! We received hundreds of reservations. No one cared whether we had a license; they just cared that there was a bus going where they needed to go. Vamoose nearly doubled in size the week the article came out. But the venture didn’t have a happy ending. We had received permission from the local municipality and the city, but we hadn’t realized a state-level license was also required. They agreed to let us continue operating for a few weeks on the condition that we stop taking new reservations during that time and reapply for the remaining license.”
“The yad Hashem in the process was evident, though. In order to get a state license, you had to own a bus, but my father leased all his buses. We signed a contract with the owner of the leasing company, a Russian Jew who spoke a good Yiddish, stating that he would be our sole provider for the buses and the license would be granted under his name.
“It took us over a year to finally get the license. At our first meeting with our new partner, he said, ‘The license is in my name. I’ll give you 10% of the profits.’ The contract clearly stated that we would share the income, but he stood by his paltry offer.
“My father decided to just walk away from the whole thing. On our way out, my father said, ‘Hatzlachah rabbah.’ Our now ex-partner replied, ‘You don’t really wish me luck, you wish that my bus would overturn on the highway.’
“Sadly, two weeks later, on a Motzaei Shabbos, that’s exactly what happened. One of our ex-partner’s buses had taken a different route on I-95 and overturned. Fifteen people were killed. If the company had been in our name, we would have been blamed for the accident. The whole business was shut down by the federal Department of Transportation.
“Eventually I went out on my own. From 2009 until 2015, I managed a school in Boro Park. The foreclosure industry was becoming very popular at that time. The banks were getting a lot of houses that had gone into foreclosure, and they needed people to maintain them until they were sold. They would often want some small renovations to be done as well. I started a company to do these maintenance and repair jobs—things like changing the locks, cleaning the properties and fixing the plumbing.

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For better or worse (worse, I’d say, but the US Constitution begs to differ), anyone in our country can approach you on the street, in a park or in any other public place and call you the vilest names he can muster. He or she can sing praises of mass murderers and express the wish that the members of an ethnic or religious group he doesn’t like die horrible deaths.

Say hi to the First Amendment.

Americans’ right to speak freely is, in most cases, something worth appreciating. Countries whose governments criminalize citizens’ ability to express opinions are generally not places where any of us would want to live. But, once speech is unlimited, anything goes.

Well not anything; there are exceptions. The Supreme Court has held that speech “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and “likely to incite or produce such action” is unprotected by the Constitution. Likewise, libel or slander, or—did you know?—threatening the life of the president or anyone in the order of succession to the presidency.

But Nazi marches, KKK rallies and angry mobs chanting “Globalize the Intifada” are all tolerated by US law (if they don’t impede traffic). While that latter chant is in fact a threat—the intifadas were famously murderous affairs—the “imminent lawless action” isn’t present.

There are, however, cases where a “buffer zone” can legally be established, a police-enforced area off-limits to protesters. Where such zones can be created isn’t entirely clear. The Supreme Court has alternately upheld, struck down, or limited various buffer zones at places like medical clinics and residential neighborhoods or at funerals.

What about at a shul? Good question. And a pertinent one.

New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin has introduced legislation to create a 100-foot buffer zone to prevent “harassment” and “intimidation” around sensitive sites such as shuls, mosques, churches, and schools.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has proposed a statewide measure mandating a 25-foot protective zone around houses of worship. A coalition of New York lawmakers has introduced legislation to that effect.

Interestingly, when Ms. Hochul announced her plan last month, during her “State of the State” address in Albany, the audience applauded loudly, save one attendee, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who kept his hands in his lap.

“Progressive” groups like Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow oppose the proposed buffer zones. They want to preserve the right to, as has happened, shout slogans like “Globalize the Intifada,” “Say it loud, say it clear, we support Hamas here” and “Death to the IDF” in the faces of Jews attending shul events that encourage the purchase of homes in Israel.

Those groups see such events as aiding “the dispossession of Palestinians,” and buffer zones as “unconstitutionally suppress[ing] political dissent.”

The fact that, according to the New York City Police Department, anti-Semitic incidents made up 57% of all hate crimes reported in 2025 (and that the trend has continued, with more than half of all hate crimes reported in January targeting Jews or Jewish institutions) would make buffer zones around shuls (and other houses of worship; the law cannot make distinctions based on religion) a reasonable thing. Jews these days feel (and often are) threatened with violence. Whether that reasonability can pass legal muster will have to be seen.

If not, though, and hateful protesters are allowed to get in the faces of Jews interested in moving to Israel (something the protesters inadvertently bolster), perhaps a tactic successfully used in other contexts might prove useful.

Let the mob members shout and spit and threaten as they wish. Let the shul-goers ignore them (which will incense them even more) and just stoically walk into the building. And let a cadre of others photograph and video them as they are confronted by angry faces and endure verbal assaults.

There are archival photographs and film from 1930s Germany that show German citizens harassing Jews. Pairing those visuals with new ones showing contemporary haters similarly berating Jews in 2026 would make for a powerful set of images, easily shared widely with media and the public.

Maybe powerful images, of the sort that in other contexts have greatly affected public perception, can do the same thing here.

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Under the direction of its outstanding chief medical officer Dr. Howard (Chona Chaim) Lebowitz, Specialty Hospital of Central Jersey in Lakewood, New Jersey, stands out as one of the region’s premier medical facilities. A small, integrated “hospital-within-a-hospital” located at Monmouth Medical Center (formerly Kimball Medical Center), its sole focus is caring for chronically ill patients whom most facilities consider incurable.

As an independent entity, it offers the benefits of a more individualized hospital setting, combined with life-support services such as ventilator weaning, complex wound care, parenteral nutrition, respiratory and cardiac monitoring and dialysis.

Dr. Lebowitz received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School, graduating cum laude from the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. He was also awarded the DuPont Young Investigator of the Year Award by the American College of Chest Physicians. After completing his internship and residency in internal medicine at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dr. Lebowitz served as an attending physician there for five years, earning board certification in internal medicine before joining the medical staff at Monmouth Medical Center in 2001.

In addition to his medical expertise, Dr. Lebowitz is a talmid chacham in the truest sense of the term. A graduate of the Mir and BMG, he continues to spend half of each day in kollel immersed in Torah study. His unique combination of medical knowledge and remarkable fluency in Torah informs both his approach to patient care and the philosophy of his facility.

I’ve heard that you do amazing things, and speaking to the best people in the world is always a big honor.
Thank you.

Can you explain what your facility is like? I understand that you occupy two floors of an existing hospital building.
That’s correct. By way of background, we run what’s called an LTAC (long-term acute care) hospital. That sounds a bit like an oxymoron, but these types of hospitals were established to take care of chronically critically ill patients. A few decades ago, Medicare started reimbursing hospitals based on the admission diagnosis, and it didn’t matter how many days the patient stayed, so the motivation was to get them out as quickly as possible: “treat ’em and street ’em.” Patients were getting out quicker and sicker, but that model worked for the majority of people.
However, there are some patients who don’t get better in days but over the course of weeks or months, and sometimes they might not get better but still need higher-level care. That’s why these types of hospitals were constituted, which are essentially a Medicare designation.

Where do your patients come from?
They typically come from hospitals all over the Eastern seaboard after having a stay in an ICU at a transferring hospital. Maimonides is one of my biggest feeders. At this point most of our patients are frum, and we can talk about why that is. The vast majority are on life support and ventilators due to respiratory failure and other major medical complications. We typically try to tailor a course of about a month of treatment, and if they’re well enough after a month they’ll go home. If they’re well enough to go to a skilled nursing facility, they’ll do that.

You must have a high mortality rate.
Depending on the quarter, our mortality rate is approximately 25%. Everyone thinks it’s much higher because we take care of very sick and very elderly patients whom no one else wants to accept. These are patients who have had neurological catastrophes and would have been declared brain dead if that kind of testing were allowed in New York. But for the frum community, these are people whose families want proactive care no matter how sick their loved one is so they can have the best and longest life possible.

I was under the impression that yours is a sort of chayei shaah type of facility, but it’s not.
That’s a big misnomer. This hospital is for patients who are very ill. But I’ve had people who came to us on a ventilator and we weaned them off and treated all their complications, and now they send me videos from Florida. I’ve even danced with them at their kids’ chasunahs.

What’s the tzad hashaveh of the patients at your facility?
The common denominator is that they are critically ill and require an extended period of care to determine whether they will recover or not.

Why can’t they receive the same care at a regular facility? You mentioned that many of your patients come from Maimonides. Is it a matter of insurance reimbursement, meaning that other facilities wouldn’t be able to receive the same payment?
There are several factors. Number one, the typical Medicare patient in an acute-care hospital like Maimonides or Columbia has an average stay of four days. These places aren’t designed to take care of patients for weeks. For example, if you go into Maimonides, you’ll never get directed treatment for recreational and occupational therapy. You may get an evaluation, but you won’t get treatments that are directed at rehabilitation.
There are also things like nursing care to try to improve wounds. Wounds can get really bad over the course of days, but they get better over the course of weeks and months. Aggressive wound care isn’t attended to if you’re going to be in and out of a place in less than a week. I get a lot of patients who haven’t been fed elsewhere during their whole hospitalization, because those places aren’t used to addressing nutritional needs. It’s like if you go to an Airbnb for a few days, you expect one level of amenities, but if you go somewhere for the summer, it’s a different kind of setting.

Are there many facilities like yours?
It depends which part of the country you’re talking about. It essentially doesn’t exist in New York. One of the reasons is that years ago New York felt that their hospitals had too many beds, so they went through a bunch of commissions to cut the number of beds rather than introducing new ones. In order to have a state recognize the need for LTACs, there has to be a sense of central and communal planning, with stakeholders willing to look at the bigger picture. New York just couldn’t get that done politically.
That being said, people ask me all the time, “Why don’t we have something like this in New York?” There is a place in New York called Calvary Hospital that was grandfathered in as an LTAC, but it doesn’t really operate like one. It’s more like a hospice. That’s why the New York patients all come to New Jersey.

Were you asked by the people in New Jersey to do this?
We were asked by Robert Wood Johnson Barnabas, the health system that houses us, to help unload their ICUs and serve this patient population and address the problem of people not getting optimal care. There are other LTACs in New Jersey that were created by rehab companies, but they’re kind of souped-up nursing homes, meaning that they’re really subacute.
Our facility has a high level of acuity, and my nurse-to-patient ratios are unbelievable. I think I’m the only LTAC that has three full-time doctors and a physician assistant. If you come for a visit, you’ll see heilige, frum Yidden who are very well attended. Regardless of whether they do well or not, their families all appreciate that they are getting incredible medical attention and kind nursing care. Another tremendous relief is the fact that halachah isn’t something we just give lip service to or try to accommodate; it’s what we’re all about.
For example, we just took in a patient from Maimonides because they were reluctant to give him dialysis due to his poor prognosis. The patient’s family reached out to Rabbi Zischa Ausch from Chayim Aruchim, who said that providing dialysis is the right thing to do. I’m the one who asked them to reach out to him, and when Rabbi Ausch says to do something, our staff of nephrologists and dialysis nurses don’t roll their eyes as others might do elsewhere. We are all of the same mind.

In a case like that, does it create insurance coverage issues?
Most of my patients have Medicare, which reimburses us based on the admission diagnosis of a 28-day stay. But I don’t balance my books patient to patient. I’ve had elderly patients here for several months and much of that time was uncompensated. I tell the patients and their families, “If you’re well enough to leave after your month, you leave. If you’re too sick to leave, you stay. You don’t have to worry about the financial ramifications.” Thank G-d, everything has been working out for us in the aggregate. That’s the way we do things.

In other words, you’re basically able to balance the books across all your patients combined.
Correct. There are patients I lose a lot of money on, and others where I come out ahead. At the end of the year, we hope to make more than we lose.

I’d like to understand your relationship with Monmouth Medical Center.
We’re an independent entity that leases space and purchases things like dietary services, security services and radiology services if a patient needs an exam, but we’re completely separate.

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It was a freezing day in November when I entered the local imaging center.
A welcome blast of heat greeted me as the automatic door whooshed open. After a mild fall, winter had barged in, chilling all of us thoroughly.

I checked in for my abdominal ultrasound, already restless. Bariatric surgery was finally scheduled, after years of hesitation and delay. Weight had never been simple for me, but once I said yes to the surgery, I was ready to sign up and move on. The ultrasound was just another box to check.
“Are you sure I need this?” I asked the doctor dubiously. It seemed a bit much. At the age of 35, I was young and healthy. I’d never experienced any associated issues with my weight, though I was worried that if I didn’t address my obesity, problems would eventually develop.
The doctor shrugged. “It’s part of the pre-op testing,” he replied. That left me with no choice but to schedule that nuisance into my calendar.
At the center, I hopped off the exam table and bundled up again. My little ones would be home in 20 minutes, and I dashed for the door. If I’d had some more time, perhaps I would’ve noticed the tech’s wide-eyed concern while staring at the black and white screen.
It was a Friday when a secretary called from the center with a rather unusual question.
“Are you married?” she inquired.
Since when was that a requirement for weight-loss surgery?
I responded in the affirmative. Without furnishing any further details, she requested that both my husband and I come in for a follow-up meeting on Sunday. I thought perhaps they’d discovered a cyst or something like that. I figured that it was just another thing I’d have to resolve before proceeding with the surgery.
Now, there was no way I was going to wait until Sunday, the day my husband was due to travel out of the country for a planned business trip. As soon as my dishes were loaded into the dishwasher on Motzaei Shabbos, we drove over to the center, which was open, serving as an urgent care. It was frigid, and the temperatures had dropped into the teens. The car drove smoothly, the crunch of the ice and salt beneath the wheels an audible soundtrack.
The doctor on call pulled up my ultrasound results. I watched him go still, the computer mouse hovering over the grainy images. The room was silent. Faintly, I heard a young child crying, and the murmured hush of a man’s voice—the father’s?—attempting to calm him.
“There’s a mass on your pancreas,” the doctor broke the quiet. His eyes were still glued to the screen. “Whatever this is, it seems to have spread into your liver.”
He scribbled a number on a Post-It note. “If this is what it is, then you should call them.”
The doctor, a frum Yid, finally swiveled around. His eyes held something I couldn’t decipher, and his voice wobbled a bit.
“Hatzlachah,” he said as we rose. “May Hashem send you a refuah shleimah.”
I stared at the little yellow note nestled in my palm. RCCS. Rofeh Cholim Cancer Society. Cancer? I had cancer? That was for other people, people I’d vaguely read about in books, or whose names I’d overheard in hushed conversations at the bus stop. My family had never been touched by cancer before. Was I the first?
It was only once we were halfway home that I realized that I’d left my coat in the office on the coldest night of the year.
My husband canceled his trip, and the next few days were a blur. While I didn’t know much about cancer, or anything remotely medically related for that matter, I knew that pancreatic cancer was bad. So terrible, in fact, that my head kept playing images of my girls at my own levayah. Pancreatic cancer, I remembered, was particularly vicious, especially in the young.
I didn’t call RCCS. Calling them would be confirming this “thing” was cancer, and the doctor had qualified that ultrasounds weren’t definitive. So long as I didn’t reach out to RCCS, then I could convince myself that this whole episode was a bunch of nothing. Deep down, I doubted my own conclusions.
A CT scan was inconclusive. When I went to hear the results of the MRI, I anticipated good news. Unfortunately, that was not to be. We dialed RCCS.
For the first time since the whole saga began, I felt less alone. My caseworker told me that, yes, pancreatic cancer was survivable, and she’d put me in touch with pancreatic cancer survivors who’d also had metastases. She also reassured me that my weight would not impede treatment, a worry I’d been silently carrying with me, wondering if I’d squandered my only chance at life.
It was over, I thought Monday morning after the kids had all gone off to school. I stared into our backyard, now a winter wonderland with the snow frozen crystal on the branches of our oak tree. O-ver.
I had a biopsy done, and then we settled in for the week-long wait. The only way I survived the week was by remembering that Hashem is good and His judgment is just. We informed our parents, who davened along with us.
In the face of serious illness, my world shrank. I withdrew into myself, attempting to make sense of the incomprehensible. I let the phone ring, the laundry wait and the mail pile up. I have a small home-based business, and I’d always loved working from home at my desk in our sun-lit sefarim room. But the quiet became oppressive, fueling my dark musings. I was never an exercise fan, but I took up running in our quiet suburban neighborhood. With my sneakers pounding the pavement and my breath forming small puffs in the icy, still air, I forced my brain to be absolutely blank. It became my lifeline to sanity.
My diagnosis was stage four pancreatic cancer with metastasis to the liver. Pancreatic cancer is very often discovered when it’s far too late for meaningful treatment. By the time the cancer is symptomatic with liver dysfunction and abdominal pain, it has spread. Additionally, pancreatic cancer can be impervious to chemotherapy.
My caseworker warned me not to check the five-year survival rates. Curiosity got the better of me, and after a quick look, I understood why she’d insisted. I sat in my chair and stared into space. Hashem is good, I told myself fiercely. He has a plan.
It turned out that the path in His plan was a long and protracted battle. And I received the starring role in a drama I’d never asked for.
At the RCCS offices, the team was stumped. Doctors disagreed whether my tumor was of neuroendocrine composition or the far more typical carcinoma. The tissue biopsy revealed both were present, though doctors could not conclude which one was predominant. As my caseworker explained it to me, one was vanilla ice cream and one was chocolate: While they were both frozen treats, they had different characteristics. Chemotherapy treatment was individual for each of them.
Neuroendocrine tumors are rare. RCCS sent me to a doctor specializing in those tumors, and we set up a rough treatment plan. It would involve chemo and surgery, a protocol unchanged for the last three decades.
I arrived for the appointment to find a representative from RCCS already there. From that point onward, whenever there was an appointment of significance, someone was there. My condition overwhelmed me completely, and there was no way I could understand all the jargon doctors were so fond of tossing about. Formulating appropriate questions was likewise beyond me.
The doctor we met that day was nice, but nothing could varnish the bitter reality. When the cancer made its way into the bloodstream, its characteristics changed. She gently told me that there was no way for this cancer to be cured.
“We can try to make the fire smaller,” she offered up an analogy. “Chemo will put up a good fight. But in the end, fire always wins.”
Three months. That’s how long she gave me. It was the week of Chanukah. I thought of the menorah in our window, polished to a high sheen. Would I be gone before Pesach?
My world silently caved in around me, a quiet collapse that nobody but the few souls near me knew of. Without any sons, I wondered who would say Kaddish for me in a decade or two. I imagined my motherless daughters in their white dresses, walking down to the chuppah without me.
The RCCS rep refused to let us give in to despair.
“We are Yidden, and for us there’s always hope,” he insisted. We sat on the hard green waiting room chairs, trying to regain our composure. “Hashem is the Borei Refuos, and I see that every day. No is never our final answer.”
I won’t lie. It was a dark, dark time.
While we were all devastated, my father couldn’t bear it. I found myself comforting him, telling him that some people get into a car and don’t make it home, whereas I had the time and luxury to prepare myself to die. I don’t think it helped him very much, to be honest.
We were almost ready to proceed with treatment when it was determined that the carcinoma cells overwhelmed the neuroendocrine cells, which meant the protocol needed to be revised completely. The new hospital I’d be using wanted to test my tissue again. I always smile when I think of a pathology slide, containing a tiny slice of my pancreas, making its way over from one hospital to another, weaving its way through city traffic.
Meanwhile, my caseworker felt something was missing from the clinical picture. While I felt I’d aged at least three decades in the last two weeks, I was still young. So young, in fact, that the nearest age match in the RCCS pancreatic cancer database was more than 20 years older than me. Additionally, my biopsy findings were unusual: Two protein markers were equivocal, indicating the tumor was being driven by immune system malfunction. In nearly all pancreatic cancer patients, they were not intact. Doctors were not sure if this was good news or not. At this point, it was just another clinical finding.
RCCS got us an NGS, or Next Generation Sequencing blood test. This specialized test would shed more light regarding what was driving the DNA in my cells to divide and multiply out of control. But that test would take at least two weeks to run, and it was time that we likely couldn’t afford. In the interim, we settled on a treatment protocol. The plan was to extend my life for as long as possible.

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The business side of medicine may seem pedestrian from the outside, but it is often as complex and significant as the therapeutic side. While medical professionals and products save lives, they need a commercially successful firm behind them to get things done on a large scale. Amir London is the CEO of the publicly traded biopharmaceutical company Kamada (NASDAQ: KMDA), which has a portfolio of six FDA-approved specialty plasma-derived products indicated for rare and serious conditions. Founded in Israel, the company has since expanded internationally, with significant business and operations in
the US.
Although Amir partnered in a startup at one point in his career, he has always had an atypical view of entrepreneurship: he sees it through the lens of organizational impact, believing that individual excellence is a catalyst for broader success for the corporate entity.
Before becoming CEO of Kamada, Amir spent ten years at an international consulting firm, served six years as CEO of the Israeli-based pharmaceutical distributor Promedico, and later joined a US-based medical diagnostics startup. Amir has guided Kamada through a decade of continuous growth since assuming the helm of the company.
We discussed his career path, the long-term viability of pharmaceuticals as a career choice, and his unique habits that keep him focused.
Enjoy!
—Nesanel

I was born and raised in Haifa, Israel, but moved back and forth between the US and Israel over the years. My father was born in Israel in 1936. His father came from Ukraine, and my paternal grandmother is from the old city of Tzfat. My mother came to Israel with her parents from Romania in 1950, when she was 14. My parents will both soon be turning 90. I am married to Nurit and have three children: Afik (28), Saar (24) and Gur (20).
“I grew up in a home with two mathematician parents. My father was a professor of mathematics at the Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology, and my mother, who is a Technion graduate, headed the Math Department at Israel’s leading high school, the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa, which is known for its strong focus on science. That was the high school I attended. I followed in my parents’ footsteps and also graduated from the Technion.
“My wife is an architect. She too is an alumna of the Technion, as is our daughter. When she was accepted, she joked that she had no choice but to go there.
“I have two siblings, a sister and a brother. Growing up, our home was kosher. My father came from a religious background, as did my grandparents. We respect and follow many Jewish traditions, celebrate all the chagim and fast on Yom Kippur.
“The atmosphere I grew up in, both in my home and our community, was very education-oriented and I was surrounded by intelligent people. I wasn’t entrepreneurial at all as a teenager. In middle school and high school, I played basketball all day, every day. I am fairly tall, about 6’3”, and at an early age I played on the Israeli youth team. When I was 16, we won the Israeli National Cup.
“After I finished my military service I spent six months backpacking through the Far East, mainly in India. Upon my return, I studied management and industrial engineering at the Technion. I knew that I wanted to become a senior executive in a mid-size to large organization where I could apply both my analytical and people skills. While I didn’t know which industry I would end up, I figured that if I worked hard and demonstrated my value, I could work my way up to head a company.
“The first company I worked for, Tefen Consulting, developed unique software and methodology to help large semiconductor manufacturing facilities including Intel’s improve their efficiency. Each machine cost over a million dollars, and the production process itself was extremely complex and expensive. Every minute a machine sat idle translated into significant revenue loss.
“Our goal was to pinpoint bottlenecks in the production flow. We developed software and systems to identify those stoppages and devise strategies to eliminate or mitigate them. We built a very methodical approach to help companies resolve their issues, which helped me understand things relatively quickly. We ran these projects repeatedly across dozens of semiconductor facilities in the US and around the world. Over time, we became leaders in the industry.
“A few years later, we decided to take both the software and the business model and apply them to the biopharmaceutical industry. We had noticed many similarities between the two. Both are science and technology driven, yet manufacturing was not their core expertise at the time. Both utilized clean rooms for production, required extremely expensive capital equipment and had a significant need for efficiency improvements.
“The discipline is generally referred to as operational, or business, excellence. Basically, you analyze existing processes and systems with the goal of maximizing their impact on the overall operation. In complex production and supply chain systems, pinpointing the true bottleneck is surprisingly difficult. It’s very easy to become misaligned if you don’t break an operation down into its specific components and analyze them in detail.
“For example, a company might invest heavily in optimizing a specific department, only to realize that the upgrade adds zero value to the overall system. If your product-filling line is the primary tripping point preventing you from meeting market demand, optimizing an earlier step in the process won’t help you ship a single extra vial.
“This is a challenge in almost every industry, even those that are service based. If you go to a major airport, for example, and ask what it is specifically that prevents them from adding 5% more flights, you’ll rarely get a clear answer. Whether it’s a manufacturing plant, a laboratory or a financial institution, without a methodical approach, you risk wasting resources on ‘improvements’ that don’t actually move the needle.
“Our approach was unique and innovative at the time, and it created a domino effect that allowed us to scale rapidly from one major player to the next: Genentech, Amgen, Bayer, Roche, Eli Lilly, Abbott, Pfizer, Sanofi and many other biopharma giants. Within three years, we built a formidable franchise in the US.
“As the firm grew to over 200 employees, with projects all over the world, I was promoted to partner. I was responsible for the global biopharma business, overseeing operations first on the West Coast, then the East Coast, and eventually throughout Europe as well.
“During this period, I led a strategic initiative to establish a consortium of biopharma companies—a forum where industry leaders could exchange key success stories, best practices and benchmarking data. That consortium eventually became the gold standard for operational excellence within the biopharmaceutical industry.
“I first moved to the United States with Tefen when I was 25; I lived in Portland, Oregon, for two years. I then returned to Israel, married Nurit, and moved with her back to the US, spending the next six years in the Bay Area, where our first two children were born. My wife completed her master’s in architecture at UC Berkeley and worked for an architecture firm in San Francisco. After about ten years at Tefen, we returned to Israel, where our third child was born.
“While I was at Tefen, we managed a project for Israel’s Neopharm Group, during which I developed a close working relationship with the owner. Soon after the project ended, the owner acquired a competitor in Israel and needed to expand the management team. He tapped me to lead Promedico, one of the primary subsidiaries within the newly merged company.
“I stayed at Promedico-Neopharm for six years. We were the second-largest pharmaceutical importer and distributor in the Israeli market, serving as a local base for international biopharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, Wyeth, Abbott, Novartis Vaccines, Gilead and others. We imported the products, worked with Israeli HMOs and health funds on reimbursement, and handled distribution across the local markets.
“Then we returned to the US, where I joined an Israeli-American entrepreneurial team at a startup called Fidelis Diagnostics. We put in place a very interesting business model: while family practices in the US typically refer patients to external labs or specialists for diagnostics, we developed a concierge-style package of specific diagnostic services that could be performed directly in-office, allowing family doctors to offer a broader and more accessible range of services to their patients.
“One example was our approach to home sleep studies. Instead of referring patients to a dedicated sleep lab, we used a technology known as a ‘sleep watch.’ Patients slept in their own beds while the device recorded sleep apnea data. They then returned the device to their physician, who uploaded the data to the cloud, where a remote sleep specialist reviewed the results and provided feedback.
“We didn’t own any of the technologies ourselves; we identified, licensed and consolidated them into a single platform. In addition to sleep studies, we also offered NCV nerve testing and a breath-based technology used to identify H. pylori bacteria in the stomach. In total, we bundled five different technologies and brought them to physicians.
“The company was initially successful, but after two years, reimbursement rates for in-office diagnostics declined significantly and the model was no longer financially viable. We ceased operating in 2014, and I returned to Israel.

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It’s oh-so-chic these days to argue, in learned journals, late-night dorm room sessions and over tea and crumpets, about whether anti-Zionism is equivalent to anti-Semitism. Whether hatred of Israel and attempts to delegitimize her is effectively the same thing as hating Jews.

But, leaving that question aside for the moment, aren’t the vehemence, vilification and violence regularly exhibited at protests against Israel sufficiently ugly on their own to merit a sane society’s contempt?

If there are any protests over Myanmar’s genocide of Rohingya Muslims or over Communist China’s gross mistreatment of Uighurs—or over Turkey’s ethnic cleansing of Kurds, Christians and Yazidis, or over Sudan’s persecution of an assortment of non-Arab groups—they seem to have flown under the radar. If they exist at all.

When it comes to Israel, though, for her attempt to defang a movement pledged to her destruction, a movement that has maimed and murdered thousands of Israeli civilians, Jews and Arabs alike, she has become the villain of the nonce. And no one even tries to claim that Myanmar or China or Turkey or Sudan are “illegitimate” countries like, say, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani contends about Israel.

But, as odious and unreasonable as anti-Zionism is, the question remains: Is it an expression of anti-Semitism—that is to say, hatred of Jews, or an entirely different animal?

Well, the very fact that, as above, the only universal villain just happens to be a state that claims a Jewish identity would seem to point in the direction of the first contention. But it could be a mere coincidence. Could be.

Adding weight to the same pan of the scales, though, is the fact that haters of Israel seem to enjoy venting their spleen against not only Israelis but at Jews anywhere.

What, after all, does opposition to Israel have to do with the yarmulke-wearing citizen walking down a New York street, that merits him a beating? Or with a French shul, to justify setting it aflame? Or with Chanukah celebrants, to be mowed down with gunfire on an Australian beach? (No room here for the abundance of other examples.)

Nothing, of course—if, that is, the anti-Israel animus is what it claims to be: opposition only to a political entity, not bigoted hatred of an ethnic or religious group.

So all the scholars, dorm residents and tea-sippers can savor their theoretical discussions. But by considering their topic to have two arguable sides, they reveal themselves oblivious to reality.

Yes, yes, of course, there may well be some true anti-Zionist outliers who have nothing against Jews and only, for whatever reason, hate Israel. But outliers they remain.

Is Mayor Mamdani among them? I can’t claim to know what is in his heart. But what I can claim to know is that he has refused to condemn the “Globalize the Intifada” slogan, which unarguably translates as “attack Jews everywhere”; and, as I detailed in this space last November, that he regularly and wrongly claims that international law prohibits the purchase of a home in Yehudah or Shomron. Maybe it’s simple ignorance? Maybe.

One thing, though, seems certain: A Venn diagram with circles representing people voicing anti-Israel sentiment and people harboring anti-Jewish hostility, respectively, would yield a bloated overlap of the two, with only the slimmest arcs outside the intersection.

Rabbi Hertz Frankel, who shared a close relationship with the Satmar Rebbe, quoted him as stating: “Any non-Jew who opposes Israel is an anti-Semite, for it is not the shalosh shevuos [the Talmud’s ‘three oaths,’ one of which prohibits Jews from returning to their ancestral land en masse by force] that motivate his opposition.”

Rabbi Moshe Sherer, the president of Agudas Yisrael of America, shortly after the UN’s infamous 1975 “Zionism is Racism” declaration, had a similar take.

“Though the resolution was supposedly aimed only at secular ‘Zionism,’ a movement with which the traditionally Orthodox world has little connection,” he wrote, “we are not fooled; the slander is an attack on the entire Jewish people.”

In 2023, New York City authorities investigating a series of attacks on Jews reported that, while plotting the assaults, one of the perpetrators advised the others in a group chat, “Remember, don’t chant out Jews, it’s the Zionists.”

Sly, and revealing, advice.

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A conversation with Rabbi Yehuda Harel, who reflects on his daughter’s recent return to Beer Sheva after deserting her family and Yiddishkeit to live with a Muslim for nearly 20 years in a Bedouin village.

“When Ibrahim found out, he called the police to say that she had kidnapped their son and ran away. They blocked her from leaving the country and called her in for an emergency hearing.”

At long last, we are finally meeting in my home. The last time I saw you was in Yerushalayim, when we discussed your daughter’s situation and what we could do to help bring her home.
I must tell you that I truly appreciate your efforts. You became involved in this story many years ago all the way from chutz laaretz.

It really began for me when I saw a video of you standing outside the Bedouin village, holding your guitar and calling out to your daughter.
Yes. I would call out, “Chein (her nickname), come home! Come back to Abba!” The village where she was living is about ten kilometers from my home in Beer Sheva. I would go there with a Tehillim and my guitar, and I’m not ashamed to say that I cried a lot. And not just there, but whenever I picked up my guitar I would weep, knowing that there’s a shaar in shamayim through which niggunim enter.

It says that “shaarei dema’ot lo ninalu—the gates of tears are never closed.”
Exactly. But I believe that this entire episode had to take exactly as long as it did. My daughter had to be there for 20 years just as bnei Yisrael had to be in Mitzrayim for 210 years. Nothing anyone did would have helped.

You never gave up hope.
Never. “Ein yei’ush ba’olam.”

Did you go to the village every day?
Not every single day because there were days when I couldn’t, but I’d say I went every day that I could.

That really touched me, which is why I phoned you and wanted to interview you about your story. We’ve met two or three times since then, and I also visited you in your home, where I met your wife and some of your children and even davened Minchah in your shul. I was very surprised when you told me a few days ago that your daughter had come home. How old was she when she left?
She was 17 and attending a local Chabad school.

Are you connected with Chabad?
No. We’re very close with Breslov. That’s the nusach we daven in the shul where I’m the rav. This is a video of our “Hallel” on Chanukah. (He shows the clip.) You’ll notice the singing and dancing. All of the tefillot are like this every day.
There weren’t any Bais Yaakov high schools near us. She went to Bais Yaakov for elementary school, but for high school we wanted her to stay nearby so we sent her to Chabad.

And she was a regular girl.
Yes, but she was also very special and very friendly. All of the girls gravitated toward her.

Then she suddenly left when she was 17.
It wasn’t sudden; it was a process. It started when she was 16, in the middle of tenth grade. People told me that she was seeing a Bedouin boy, but I didn’t want to believe it.

Do you blame yourself for that?
No. It just didn’t make any sense.

You didn’t notice anything?
Not at all, and I don’t blame myself because this is clearly what Hashem wanted. Hakadosh Baruch Hu wanted her to bring these neshamot from that place. If I felt responsible I don’t know if I could live with myself, but I know that this was Hashem’s will.

How did it begin?
It started out as visits, but when we finally learned what was going on, we sent her to live with a Jewish family in Zhitomir, Ukraine, to get her away from him. Around four months later, the mother called me and said, “I think your daughter might be expecting.” I asked her to put my daughter on the phone, and I asked her point blank if she was. “Yes, Abba,” she replied.
Her first child, Yehuda Yisrael, was born in Zhitomir. That was very painful for me. But as the song goes, “L’Abba lo sho’alim she’eilot—We don’t ask questions of our Father.” I just said to Hashem, “I don’t know if I am great enough to be able to handle this nisayon. Please help me with withstand it.”
My wife flew to Zhitomir for the brit. When the mohel said, “V’yikarei shmo b’Yisrael…” my daughter asked me what name to give him. “I don’t know,” I replied. “My head isn’t clear. Whatever name you choose, I will bless you and I will bless him.” “Then I’m going to name him after you and add the name ‘Yisrael’ because he belongs to am Yisrael,” she said.
A short time later there was some sort of problem in Ukraine between the locals and the Jews, and my daughter called to say that she was coming home for two months. I figured it would be okay, and I sent her to Kibbutz Cholit, which is located near the border with Gaza. Years later, on October 7, 2023, the residents of that kibbutz suffered a lot.
During one of Chein’s visits home, we stopped to fill up on gas. Who was the attendant at the gas station? Ibrahim’s [the Bedouin man] nephew. You can see how Hakadosh Baruch Hu orchestrated all of this. He saw my daughter and didn’t say anything, but after we left he called Ibrahim to tell him that he had seen Chein in the car with a baby in her arms.

He didn’t know that she had a baby?
No. When Ibrahim found out, he called the police to say that she had kidnapped their son and ran away. They blocked her from leaving the country and called her in for an emergency hearing at the Welfare Ministry. In the interim, they gave her three choices: she could place her son in foster care, she could live with Ibrahim in a neutral location, or she could live with him in his village, Tel Sheva. She chose the second option.
They rented an apartment in Beer Sheva and lived there for a few months, but when the neighbors found out that she was a Jewish girl living with an Arab, they ripped off her mezuzah, wrote nasty things on their walls and cursed at them on the street. When Ibrahim saw this happening, he took her back to his village. “Look,” he said. “In the village, you’ll have an entire house to yourself. No one will know who you are, and you’ll have a yard and a garden and a couple of horses. You’ll be able to live in peace.”

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We were promised peace, weren’t we?
President Trump’s 20-point plan for peace in Gaza is still moving forward, but many questions about whether it will be successful and who will be involved in the process remain.
On the ground, it appears that there is a level of stasis; the situation is similar to the way things were when the open warfare ended with the ceasefire. The body of one hostage, Ran Gvili, is still in Gaza, but all of the rest have been returned. There were numerous ceasefire violations by Hamas and strikes in return by Israel, but there is no ongoing sustained fighting.
Still, for any real movement, things need to change. The question is whether they will.

Is Hamas disarming?
One of the main sticking points is whether Hamas will do as President Trump has said they must and disarm. So far, there is no sign that this will happen.
Instead, there are signs that it is trying its best to reconstitute itself. With many of its other financial lifelines gone, the terrorist group has been levying taxes on the food and supplies that aid groups have been sending into the area of Gaza where Hamas is in control. Israeli and Arab officials told The Wall Street Journal that Hamas has been able to start paying its employees again because of the taxes, as well as with money from Iran that can enter Gaza in various ways.
So far, there is no one who seems capable or willing to pressure Hamas into giving up its weapons aside from Israel. Egypt, Qatar and Turkey have told the US that Hamas would be willing to do so in a cash-for-guns scheme, but there has yet to be any movement on that front.

The Board of Peace
According to media reports, President Trump is planning to unveil the new Board of Peace this week in advance of the second phase of his peace plan. Its mission will be to oversee a new technocratic Palestinian government that would administer the part of Gaza not controlled by Hamas (and eventually all of Gaza), as well as to coordinate the rebuilding of the Strip.
Trump said that he himself would be the head of the board. Nickolay Mladenov has been announced as director-general of the Board of Peace. A former Bulgarian defense and foreign minister, he served as the UN’s Mideast peace envoy from 2015 through 2020. He has generally been viewed with respect by both Israelis and Palestinians.
The big question is which governments will have representatives on this body. Israel has been excluded. But it appears that Turkey has been excluded as well, which is a good sign for Israel.
Still, one of the latest lists to be publicized had Qatar on it, along with Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, Italy and Germany. We will find out this week who actually makes the cut, which may give us an idea of the direction things will take.
Hamas said this week that it will dissolve its own government in Gaza once the Palestinian technocratic government the Trump plan calls for is in place. As usual, they left any timing and details entirely unexplained.

The International Stabilization Force and the CMCC
Meanwhile, there has been no progress with regard to coming up with soldiers for the International Stabilization Force (ISF) that the Trump plan requires to keep the peace in Gaza. The only country that has said it is willing to contribute troops right now is Turkey, a suggestion that Israel has categorically rejected.
Others, like Spain, have said vaguely that they might contribute in the future. But so far it seems as if these countries aren’t actually willing to do so.
Meanwhile, a different kind of military coordination has been taking place at the Civil-Military Coordination Center, headed by the US, which has been making plans for the rebuilding of Gaza and the deployment of the International Stabilization Force—if it ever materializes. According to a report in The Jerusalem Post, the CMCC has been fast-tracking the clearing of Hamas tunnels in Rafah by the IDF so that buildings can be constructed. Estimates are that they could start going up within six months with the help of the UAE.
Allowing Palestinian civilians to move from the Hamas-controlled areas of Gaza into the Israeli-controlled areas could isolate Hamas further and keep them from using civilians as human shields. That would be one way of dealing with them even if the grander ideas of the Trump plan don’t pan out as hoped.

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Recently, I had the zechus of hosting a unique panel with three prominent askanim: Shloime (Sol) Werdiger, Ralph Zucker and Nechemiah Hoch. I was invited by Rabbi Naftali M. Miller, Agudah’s national director of development to speak with them during Agudath Israel of America’s live fundraising broadcast, and we discussed a wide range of issues.
While the three serve together on the Agudah board, with Shloime as its chairman, each is an accomplished and well-respected businessman in his own right, bringing a wealth of experience to the table.
Our conversation was extensive and engaging, touching on topics including their backgrounds, the pleasures and pressures of working with family, choosing a career, cell phone addiction, and, of course, what it really means to be an askan.

Enjoy!
—Nesanel

Nesanel Gantz: Welcome to our panel. Our distinguished guests are three giants who do so much for Agudah and klal Yisrael as a whole; I’m humbled to be a part of this.
I’d like to begin by hearing your background stories.

Shloime Werdiger: I was born in Borough Park. My father was a Holocaust survivor and the youngest talmid in Yeshivas Chachmei Lublin. We are Gerer chasidim, but at the time, there was no Gerer shtiebel yet, so we often davened in the Agudah and in Bluzhev. Agudah is in the Gerer blood.
I went to Torah Vodaas for high school. In Eretz Yisrael, I learned in Tchebin, because the Beis Yisrael suggested I go there. Rav Boruch Shimon Schneerson was my rosh yeshivah, and I learned by Rav Avraham Genechovsky.
When I was a child, Rabbi Moshe Sherer took a liking to me, and I spent a lot of time with him. I received a strong indoctrination because he recruited me at a young age. When I was learning in Eretz Yisrael, we would walk together from Malon Hamerkaz to Gur. On the Yomim Tovim he would daven in Gur. The she’eiris hapleitah Yidden [Holocaust survivors] like my father always felt a responsibility to the klal, to help them rebuild. With the encouragement of the Gerer rebbes, he pushed me to get involved in the Agudah.
When I got married, my wife made parnasah working in the diamond industry on 47th Street, but I was struggling. I started as a schlepper in the shmatte business. I worked very hard, but it took a long time to climb up the ladder until, with the Ribbono Shel Olam’s help, I was able to start my own business, focused on sports apparel and clothing.

Nesanel Gantz: It’s difficult for someone who has never experienced that struggle to imagine what other people have to go through.

Shloime Werdiger: I think it’s a little easier to get ahead in business today than it used to be, but it’s still difficult. There is a tremendous shefa in klal Yisrael today, which is wonderful and is being used for good things, but there is still an imbalance with many who are struggling.
In those days, when we first got married, we were all struggling with parnasah. Nobody grew up with a silver spoon in their mouth, especially not the children of Holocaust survivors. Our parents didn’t have businesses for us to go into. They didn’t have real estate or nursing home empires. We had a drive to be successful on our own; we had no fallback.
My kids are active in my business. I’m still active in the sports apparel business, but baruch Hashem, I’m able to devote much of my time to askanus. Agudah is my main “parnasah.”

Nesanel Gantz: Ralph, this panel is taking place in Bell Works, your property. What led you to develop Bell Works? When you first saw it, it was just a huge empty shell.

Ralph Zucker: I was born in Baltimore, Maryland. My father, z”l, was a talmid of Rav Aharon Kotler in Lakewood. He was niftar when I was young. My mother remarried to Rabbi Meir Wunder from Eretz Yisrael, and we moved between Bnei Brak and Yerushalayim.
I went to Beis Hatalmud and then to Telz-Stone, where I was zocheh to learn first seder by Rav Gifter. We learned Chezkas Habatim; it was a good way to start a real estate career…
After that, I came back to America and learned in Long Beach by Rav Yitzchok Feigelstock before going to Lakewood.
My first real paying job was as a busboy in my grandfather’s hotel, Zucker’s, at Glen Wild Country Club. Then I needed a place to live, so I built my house. I started doing a little development, and over time it grew. At this point, it’s been about 35 years of real estate development.
As for Bell Works, it was yad Hashem. A real estate broker showed me the property. It was the largest vacant office building in the United States at the time, and I thought I could redevelop it. I didn’t have a clear idea of the challenges it posed. If I had, I probably never would have done it.
By the time I recognized the risks, baruch Hashem, we had already done a lot of development and I felt we could be successful with this as well. It took a long time, with a lot of siyata dishmaya. We started in 2008, and it took us about six years to open the doors.
Since then, we’ve opened two other Bell Works, bli ayin hara: Bell Works Chicagoland, outside of Chicago, and another one here in New Jersey, in Fort Monmouth.

Nesanel Gantz: Nechemiah, tell us about yourself.

Nechemiah Hoch: Let me start by saying that I must have been standing in the right place when they realized they needed to fill the third chair. In the company of Shloime and Ralph, I feel like a “player of the week” sitting next to two major league MVPs.
I was born and raised in Queens, and I’ve basically lived within the same few blocks my entire life, not counting my years in yeshivah. I learned in Toras Moshe in Yerushalayim and Ohr Hachaim in Queens. My first job after kollel was in the construction industry, selling insulation. If you work in sales for even a short amount of time, the first thing you learn is humility. You get a lot of doors slammed in your face.
After a while, I joined my family’s real estate business. We mostly do multifamily and apartment buildings throughout the United States; recently, we’ve expanded to offices as well. We buy and sell, depending on market conditions.

Nesanel Gantz: Each of you took some time to find your career path. Today many young men spend a few years in kollel or finishing yeshivah, and only after that do they address the question of how to make a parnasah. How would you advise someone who comes to you for help? Do you recommend going back to school? What fields do you see as viable options, other than nursing homes
and real estate?

Shloime Werdiger: As far as a career path, that’s the yad Hashem.
I would not encourage anybody to go into the shmatta business. Plenty of young guys come over to me, and I’m always happy to advise and encourage them.
First of all, you can’t just sit at home waiting for someone to call and offer you a job. No one is going to tap you on the shoulder while you’re sitting in shul and say, “Hey, are you looking for a job? I’m interested in hiring you.” You have to do hishtadlus.

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Talk about a long fall.

A mere year ago, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was within spitting distance—well, maybe llama-spitting distance—of the vice presidency. Today he is a political has-been, having now announced that he won’t be running for a third term in office.

Making that announcement, he attributed his decision to the need to focus on “defending the people of Minnesota against the criminals who prey on our generosity,” which focus, he explained, would prevent him from giving “a political campaign my all.”

“So I’ve decided,” he continued, “to step out of the race and let others worry about the election while I focus on the work.”

He was right that the predatory criminals to whom he referred were instrumental to his surprising decision. But it was less his need to focus on their crimes—something that the Department of Justice and the FBI are fully capable of doing on their own—than it was Mr. Walz’s having missed the massive fraud that has lately put Minnesota in the national limelight.

That fraud dates back to the coronavirus pandemic, when a Minnesota-based nonprofit called Feeding Our Future was created to provide school lunches for thousands of students.
Widespread fraud was later uncovered in the organization, with 78 defendants—72 of Somali descent—associated with Feeding the Future found guilty of stealing public funds.

Over the course of several years, those who ran what might better have been called Frauding the Future amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in program funds, an operation the Justice Department has called the “largest COVID-19 fraud scheme in the United States.”

There are assertions, too, of other illegal schemes heavily involving the Minnesota Somali community, in areas like housing and day care facilities, which federal prosecutors said could ultimately amount to $9 billion or more—nearly half the federal funding provided the state for the programs at issue.

And Mr. Walz, along with others in the state’s Democratic leadership, have faced criticism for their lax oversight of the allocation of the welfare payments. A House committee is probing his possible role in what it called a “massive fraud.”

Might a message about progressive politics lie in the Walz washout?

When the current outgoing Minnesota governor first ran for Congress in 2006, he was regarded as a moderate “Blue Dog” Democrat. (The Blue Dog Coalition is the most conservative grouping of Democrats in the House.) He generally voted with his party’s moderates.

He broke with liberals on gun rights—at one point receiving an “A rating” from the National Rifle Association—and on energy policy, and he maintained strong support for Israel.
But as governor, he began to pander to his party’s progressive wing, embracing criminal justice reform and gun control (and was downgraded by the NRA to an “F”).

Mr. Walz also has been disturbingly supportive of his fellow Minnesotan Representative Ilhan Omar, she of anti-Semitic tropes and ugly anti-Israel views. And, responding to Republican criticism over the thievery that took place under his nose, Mr. Walz resorted to accusing his critics of racism.

It was speculated, too, that Kamala Harris chose Mr. Walz as her running mate in the 2024 presidential election, over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, to please the anti-Israel wing of the party.

Minnesota Republican Congressman Brad Finstad, who represents the congressional district Mr. Walz once held, stated the obvious, that the governor has “definitely changed.”

“I would say,” Mr. Finstad offered, “the only thing that’s conservative left about Tim Walz is his haircut.”

While the decline of Mr. Walz’s political career is due to the pilfered funds, it can’t be overlooked that his evolution from Blue Dog to bleeding heart—which, in fact, played a part in his deficient oversight of how federal funds were used by some Minnesotans—may say something about the progress of progressivism.

Much attention has been given to the ascension of Zohran Mamdani to the mayoralty of New York City. And troubling it is.

But whether the future of the left wing of the Democratic Party is more accurately presaged by the election of a radical as mayor than by the downfall of a progressive governor is far from clear.

Let us hope that as has gone Minnesota will go the nation.

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This past weekend, the Trump administration finally took a step it had been threatening for a couple of months: a massive military action in the heart of Venezuela.
After a series of bombardments of several Venezuelan military locations, American troops left Venezuela with a stunning prize: the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.
While Venezuelan officials claimed that 80 people were killed in the attack (which apparently included 32 Cuban operatives), no American personnel were killed, despite penetrating deep into a hostile country.
On Monday, Maduro was brought to federal court in New York City to face four criminal counts: narco-terrorism, cocaine importation conspiracy and possession of machine guns and destructive devices. Maduro, quieted by the judge when he tried to make a statement, pleaded not guilty.
What does Maduro’s capture mean for the future of Venezuela and the region? That remained murky on Monday because of conflicting statements by President Trump and members of his cabinet.

Running Venezuela
In the immediate aftermath of the capture of Maduro, speaking from his Mar-a-Lago resort, Trump made a very stark statement, that the US would be running Venezuela from now on.
“We’re going to be running it with a group,” Trump said, “and we’re going to make sure it’s run properly.” When asked who would be running it, he indicated “the people that are standing right behind me,” which included Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
That statement seemed puzzling, at least at first, because the US hadn’t left any troops in the country, nor had it dismantled the Venezuelan regime. All it had apparently done was remove Maduro.
Clarifications came in subsequent interviews with Secretary of State Rubio, in which he explained that the US was expecting that the current regime would do what the US wants. President Trump himself clarified that the then-vice president of Maduro’s government, Delcy Rodríguez (who was sworn in as president on Monday), would have to do what the US tells her to do, and that if she “doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”
Rodríguez has made some statements that were defiant and some that were conciliatory. On Sunday night, she said that her government would seek a collaboration with the US. “Our people and our region deserve peace and dialogue, not war,” she said.
Trump also dismissed the idea that María Corina Machado, the Nobel-Prize-winning Venezuelan opposition leader, could run the country. Maduro openly stole the 2024 presidential election from Edmundo González, the presidential candidate of the party that Machado represents. But Trump said about Machado, who has praised him, “I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country.”
One clear demand that President Trump has made is for US oil companies to be allowed back into the country and to administer the country’s massive oil reserves. At the moment, the only US oil company working in Venezuela is Chevron, which has a waiver from the US government to do so.
Trump has pointed to past nationalization actions by the Venezuelan government as theft of what he said should rightfully be American oil. Several American oil companies have billions of dollars of claims against the government of Venezuela for appropriation of their property.
Trump’s strong words about Venezuelan oil have boosted the stocks of oil companies, but they haven’t made a strong impact on the oil markets yet. That’s in part because currently most Venezuelan oil has been sold not on the open market but to Russia and China, so stoppages to the Venezuelan oil supply won’t immediately affect the general world’s supply, and whether it will begin to accrue to the US is not clear yet either.
And while many Venezuelans both inside and outside the country celebrated Maduro’s arrest, it is not clear whether the eight million Venezuelans who have fled the country or those who are suffering inside it will get any respite from these events.

The legal arguments
Was the Maduro operation legal? That question has two components: US law and international law.
In regard to US law, there is clearly precedent for a US president to take this kind of limited action without notifying Congress, even though that itself is a matter of dispute among legal scholars. The 1989 invasion of Panama under the George H.W. Bush administration was very similar to this action in Venezuela, and the legal arguments made by the government at the time about the president’s ability to take limited military action would likely be presented here, as well.
The Trump administration, specifically Secretary of State Rubio, has advanced a separate argument that this mission into Venezuela was merely a law enforcement action, with the military there simply to assist in law enforcement, and that, they say, would not require congressional notification.
In regard to international law, numerous experts have expressed consistent opinions that the action would not be permissible under the UN Charter, which outlaws military action between countries except for self-defense. The administration has claimed that the drug-trafficking that the Venezuelan government has been engaged in warrants a self-defense response, but drug-trafficking has never been viewed that way under international law before.
As legal expert Jack Goldsmith noted, however, previous presidents have taken similar actions—like in Panama, though there were a few more arguments about legality then—and have gotten away with it. It is unlikely that this will be different.
One other question that will come up in court is whether the US has the right to try Maduro. Generally, foreign leaders have legal immunity. But because the US and many other countries have viewed Maduro’s government as illegitimate, it is very likely that US courts will say he is fair game to prosecute.

The Donroe Doctrine?
One final question, beyond the fate of Venezuela, is whether the administration is planning military action in other countries in the Americas or even farther abroad.
While explaining his actions, President Trump made reference to the Monroe Doctrine, the 19th-century idea that the US must maintain supremacy in the Western Hemisphere, including by dominating Latin American countries. Trump joked that it should now be called the “Donroe Doctrine.”
In subsequent statements, Trump and Rubio have suggested that other countries may also see American action. Those include Cuba (a long-time concern of Rubio, a son of Cuban immigrants), Colombia and Mexico.
(President Claudia Scheinbaum of Mexico said that there was nothing to worry about and that this was just President Trump’s “way of talking.”)
Trump even made reference to his long-standing desire to control Greenland. And while he didn’t openly threaten military action to take it from Denmark, he did say that the US needed to dominate it in order to maintain security, leading the Danish prime minister to warn that a US attack on Greenland would end NATO.
To better understand the administration’s actions, we spoke with former US National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien.

________________________________________________________________________

Robert C. O’Brien served as the 28th National Security Adviser under President Donald J. Trump from 2019 to 2021. He is a seasoned lawyer and foreign policy expert with extensive experience in international negotiations, counterterrorism and national security strategy. Before serving as National Security Adviser, O’Brien was the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs from 2018 to 2019, playing a key role in securing the release of American hostages. He has also shaped US policy on critical global issues, including in Latin America and the Middle East.

The capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro is nothing short of stunning. What’s your reaction to this extraordinary development?
I had a couple of reactions. The first is that it was an exquisitely executed operation by our special forces. I am very proud of our airmen, Marines and soldiers, especially the Delta guys who went in and did the actual capture. There were also the airmen who were providing cover, as well as all the sailors involved. It was a well-done and well-planned mission.
The folks who haven’t gotten the recognition they should have are the CIA operatives who have been on the ground for months preparing the situation for the others to come in. It was the intelligence they provided that allowed the door kickers and special ops to come in to a heavily fortified military installation. This wasn’t a compound in the desert; it was a heavily fortified compound with serious anti-aircraft capability and a lot of men on the ground. Nonetheless, they had the intel to get in and out of an urban environment, which is very difficult to do. All around, it showed the capability of the United States to do something when we put our minds to it. It was a very difficult mission that succeeded with no loss of life or equipment. It was a great operation on the technical front.
The political issue of what happened is that President Trump has shown himself to a be a peacemaker, and he is actually sort of a pacifist. He doesn’t like war, and he doesn’t like undertaking these kinds of operations, because they put the members of our military at risk. He will if he has to, but he always gives the bad actors the opportunity to take an off-ramp. He gave Maduro numerous opportunities to leave Venezuela to avoid this, but he didn’t do it. Maduro called his bluff, and President Trump showed that he doesn’t bluff in such instances.
His strong preference is for peace, and he did this with the Iranians and their nuclear program as well, as we saw with Operation Midnight Hammer. He told them, “You’re not getting a nuclear weapon. You have to let the inspectors in. There have to be full inspections, and you have to dismantle your nuclear program.” They tap-tap-tapped him along. He tried to give them a fair deal. In fact, the deal he offered them, like the deal he offered Maduro, would have been criticized as too lenient. But they didn’t take it because they thought they were still dealing with Joe Biden. They thought they were dealing with the sort of American president they could leverage and push around. They found out that President Trump will put a fair deal on the table, but if you don’t take it you’ll suffer the consequences. That is exactly what happened with Maduro. The president gave him a chance to go to Tehran, Beijing or Moscow, but he turned that down. That’s why he is now in jail in Brooklyn.

He’s in my hometown, where we have a socialist mayor, so he’s in a socialist place.
A socialist Islamist mayor.

It’s ironic that he ended up in Brooklyn.
What happened with Maduro is that he crossed a number of red lines. There are plenty of bad actors in the world. We can’t right every wrong, and we can’t put every bad dictator in jail. But Maduro did a couple of things that violated American interests. First and foremost, he sent cocaine and fentanyl into our country. People are saying that most of it was cocaine and that it’s not as bad, but we’re losing a lot of young people to overdoses of that as well. It’s a scourge on our cities. Maduro was heavily involved in the drug trade. This wasn’t just a guy who turned his eyes away from the cartels because he couldn’t control them. He was heavily involved so he could make more money for his regime.
The second thing he did was send massive numbers of illegal immigrants to America, and he sent the worst of the worst like the Tren de Aragua gang members, who took over those apartment buildings in Colorado. Then he suspended the flights that were meant to repatriate them. He thought he was playing an asymmetrical game against the US, and that he had leverage over President Trump.
The third thing he did was take an American who was surfing across the border hostage. Those were three big strikes that go to the heart of the America First foreign policy—drugs, illegal immigration and hostage taking—and they infuriated the president. Maduro thought he could push us around, but he found out that it wasn’t going to happen.
On top of that, he invited Hezbollah, Iran, China and Russia into Venezuela and provided support for their activities in the Western Hemisphere. He brought America’s biggest adversaries into our hemisphere and provided a base for them. One of the things that has been reported is that they were teaching Hezbollah operatives Spanish so jihadis could pose as Latin Americans and infiltrate America.

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It was 2:00 a.m. on Friday night when Rabbi Yitzchak Garzon and his family were suddenly awakened by the sound of explosions that shook their home. “It’s probably started,” Rabbi Garzon said, trying to calm everyone down. But it wasn’t until Shabbos morning that some neighbors informed him of what had actually happened: Nicolás Maduro, the longstanding dictator of Venezuela, had been captured and taken away. An eerie silence hung over the streets.
Rabbi Garzon is the rosh yeshivah of Yeshiva Bene Azar (Bnei Ezer) in Caracas, which is affiliated with the Beit Shmuel community. He is also the son of the community’s long-time rav, Rabbi Avraham Garzon. Both father and son live in the Este district, the eastern part of Caracas. They shared their feelings and hopes following Maduro’s capture.
“The explosions themselves happened in a different part of the city,” Rabbi Garzon recalled. “They were downtown, near the presidential palace and military bases to the west of the area that has the largest Jewish population. But the sounds were heard everywhere. There were widespread power outages across Caracas, so everyone could tell that something big was happening. But it wasn’t until Shabbos morning that we learned what happened.”

How did the community react to the news?

“Everyone reacted differently. Some people felt relief and joy while others were filled with worry. There was also a concern that violence might erupt, so nearly all the shuls were closed. Almost everyone stayed home out of caution. Only today have people started to leave their homes again. The shul has reopened and the yeshivah will resume classes tomorrow. Since Chanukah, the educational institutions have been on an extended break and are returning to regular studies now anyway. We are very hopeful that these developments won’t lead to street fighting or harm to civilians, G-d forbid.”
The operation itself, however, didn’t come as a surprise to anyone. For several months the United States had positioned a military armada off the Venezuelan coast, and President Donald Trump had been issuing warnings to the regime, condemning Maduro’s dictatorial and terror-backed rule, and demanding that he step down either peacefully or by force. There had even been threats of military action against him and his allies, although they were primarily directed at regime-controlled naval operations.
“There was an expectation that some kind of action would take place,” Rabbi Garzon said. “But most people assumed it would be an invasion or something on a much larger scale, not just a targeted operation to capture Maduro. That was the speculation and concern. In the end it turned out to be very focused, and as far as we know civilians weren’t involved. But it was still very frightening. We heard all the explosions throughout the night.
“It’s a historic moment, but it’s not over yet. Maduro may have been arrested, but his regime remains intact, and we are entering a dangerous phase. People are stocking up on food and water in anticipation of whatever comes next, afraid that we may be forced to remain indoors. There are lines outside the stores, but aside from that not much else has changed.”

Have the authorities shown any signs of change? Does it feel like the leadership is acting differently?

“No. Everything is as it was. The government is functioning just as it did before. So far, we haven’t felt that Maduro’s capture has led to any meaningful shift. The regime is still being run by Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, and her public statements give no indication of change.”
In fact, Rodríguez announced that she wouldn’t cooperate with Trump. She also made an anti-Semitic remark, claiming the operation bore “Zionist fingerprints.” Her comments were broadcast on Venezuela’s state-run channel, where she further asserted that “the true objective of the American operation was to dismantle Venezuela’s political independence.”
Nonetheless, according to President Trump she is cooperating with the United States, and for now the White House team is essentially managing the country. This conflicting narrative has only deepened the confusion among residents of the country.
“We don’t fully understand what any of this really means,” Rabbi Garzon said. “You could say that it’s an unprecedented situation. It’s unclear who is actually in charge. If it’s the Americans who are effectively in control, what does that mean for us? Right now there’s a great deal of uncertainty. We just hope that the situation ultimately leads to something positive.”

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Many of the most successful businesses begin with a problem. An entrepreneur encounters an issue, finds a solution and builds a product or service around it. That’s exactly what Barry Cik did, at the age of 50.
After a successful career as an environmental consultant, helping real estate owners comply with environmental regulations, a simple errand led Barry down a related but uncharted path.
While shopping for a crib mattress for his newborn grandchild, Barry was shocked to discover that there were no truly natural, organic options available. So he decided to create one himself. He figured out how to manufacture it, and from that effort, a company was born. Today, his company is a recognized leader in natural organic mattresses and bedding. Over time, the company has expanded into a full line of sleep products for babies, children and adults, becoming a major force in the industry.
We spoke about the importance of organic living, what it’s like to working with your children and more.
Enjoy!  -Nesanel

I’m 74 years old. I was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. My parents came here after the Holocaust, and I was one of the few chasidishe-type kids in the city. We had a cheder, the Kaliver Yeshiva, where all the classes were in Yiddish.
“My father was a shoemaker, specializing in orthopedic shoes. He was a pashute Yid. When I was a child, I used to ask him halachic shailos, and he always gave the same response: ‘Azoi shteit in Shulchan Aruch.’
“Cleveland’s chasidishe community wasn’t exactly like the one in New York. After high school, I attended Yeshiva University for a couple of years.
“I wanted to pursue engineering, specifically, environmental engineering, so I transferred to Cleveland State University and then Ohio State University. I was led into engineering partly by aptitude and partly by passion: I had a knack for math and science, but I also was very concerned about the environment. At that time, Lake Erie was dying. The fish were gone; you couldn’t fish there anymore. The Cuyahoga River even caught fire, in 1969. You probably don’t remember that story. It seemed to me that we were actively destroying our environment. It wasn’t a theoretical issue; our use of toxic chemicals was causing lasting damage. I enrolled in the environmental engineering program, and that’s where I earned my degrees.
“I truly believed we were harming the environment. I wanted to reverse that trend, or at least reduce the harm, which is why my first career was in the environmental standards industry. My first business, if you want to call it that, was this:
“When you purchase a piece of property—this rule is the same today as it was back then—if it’s just a regular residential home, there’s no issue. But if you’re buying an industrial or commercial property, the bank will not give you a loan unless the property meets specific environmental standards. That’s where I came in: I became a baki in environmental compliance.
“My first job out of college was with an environmental consulting firm. I had to test the soil and groundwater beneath the property to determine if it was contaminated, and to what degree. We would present the bank with a report based on our findings, and then the bank would decide whether to approve the loan, and if so, the amount they were willing to risk.
“Essentially, I was working for the banks. I consulted for most of the major banks in Northeast Ohio as their main investigator for environmental issues. When someone applied for a loan, the bank would give them my card and say, “You have to hire this guy.” I would examine the property, review its history, conduct any necessary testing and then submit a report with my findings to the bank. This kind of due diligence is standard practice for every bank in the country.
“My company was called GEM Testing & Engineering Labs. I had several employees, and I was making a decent parnasah. Then, about 23 years ago, something happened that changed my whole career.
“We had our first grandchild, and my wife sent me out to buy a crib mattress. So I go to the store, I’m looking at the crib mattresses, I’m asking questions, and I realize that the mattresses are all loaded with toxic chemicals—there’s vinyl with phthalates, there’s polyurethane foam, there’s formaldehyde, there’s pesticides. It was crazy.
“I asked the salesperson, ‘What else do you have?’ And she said, ‘Nothing. This is what we sell.’ I said, ‘That’s nuts.’
“I went home and started joking with my wife. I said, ‘You know, my zeide slept on straw. Let’s go to our Amish friends and buy straw and make a mattress. I’m not putting a baby on this stuff.’ There’s a big Amish community in our area, and we were friendly with them and used to buy things from them.
“I didn’t mean it literally, and in the end we didn’t need straw. But we did create something. Then one of my sons put it on the internet, and people started sending us money for that product.
“My message was to the point: Do you want your baby sleeping on a mattress made with toxic chemicals? We offered a simple, healthy, organic option. Organic cotton fill, organic cotton fabric.
“I still get pushback on this. People say, ‘What do you mean, “toxic chemicals”? Even if the mattress is as bad as you say, who cares? It’s a solid piece of material. The baby is sleeping on a sheet. Everything’s fine. There’s no science behind your claims.’
“I know that many people think this way, and it really hurts me, because it’s not true. People are just not aware of it. I’ve read studies that tested the air around the mattress, within 12 inches, even with a sheet on top, and found toxic chemicals. How many babies today are sick? A lot more than anybody wants to admit, and toxic chemicals are a major factor in many of these illnesses. A baby is on a mattress for up to 15 hours a day. Those chemicals leach out of the mattress into the air around the baby, and the baby inhales that garbage.
“It’s not only the mattress, either. It’s the food too. There’s so much junk in the food, it’s frightening. This issue affects all kinds of consumer products.
“Baruch Hashem, we have become the leading brand in natural organic mattress manufacturing. I feel fortunate that not only do we produce a quality product but we’re also helping people live healthier lives.”

Did you have any competitors when you started?
Back then, there were no major players in the industry. There were a couple of small guys trying to get started too, but no one significant. For the most part, we’re the ones who drove the industry forward, and even though new, small competitors come up out there, baruch Hashem, we are still the standard bearers.

Why do you think that is? Why do you think no one thought of natural materials?
I can’t give you a perfect answer, but I can give you an example that might explain it.
When I first started, we didn’t make adult mattresses. We only made baby mattresses. I went to several pediatricians and asked, “Do you know what’s in a baby mattress? Do you have any idea what materials are used in it?” They didn’t know. They never thought about it. Nobody had.
I would explain to them that those mattresses were made with toxic chemicals, and I’d list this chemical and that one and all the others. I can’t forget this one pediatrician who said, “Barry, bistu meshuga? I thought you were a normal guy. This is crazy. How did you come up with this nonsense?”
Interpret it however you want, but the fact is that back then, nobody was paying this issue any attention. They didn’t care, not about baby mattresses and not about adult mattresses.

You said you’ve seen studies about chemicals leaking into the air?
Yes, I’ve seen many studies. The data is out there.

So you started this business and put it online. Were you a one-man show?
No. My two sons, Yehuda and Peretz, have been my partners since the very beginning.

You had the idea and decided to involve your kids right away?
Yes. At the time, both of them had graduated college and had very nice job offers lined up, but they both turned down those offers and said, “We’re going to support Tatty; we’re going to go into business with Tatty.”

How many children do you have? What are their positions in the business?
We have four children, two boys and two girls. My son Yehuda took control of certain areas, like the website, which was never my area of expertise. He has a degree in finance, so he also manages the financial side of the business. My son Peretz has a degree in mechanical engineering, so he’s responsible for the factory and the equipment we buy, as well as all the technical operations. Each of us has our own responsibilities, but we work together as a team.

Why did you decide to bring your kids into the business? A lot of people are scared to work with family.
That’s a fair question, but I don’t have a dramatic answer. I love my kids. We’ve always worked together, and we’ve always cooperated. I was Yehuda’s manager when he was a singer, so we already had experience working together.
I helped turn him into a world-famous singer. I started when he was around ten, maybe even younger. I was a violinist and played at Jewish weddings all over Cleveland. I had my own band, the Barry Cik Orchestra.

Since you brought it up, I must tell you that your son Yehuda is one of my favorite singers of all time. His album “Yehuda! & Friends” is particularly incredible. Simply stunning music with real Yiddishe hartz.
Thank you; that’s very nice to hear.

Talk to me about the progression of the company.
I always joke, “Would you like to see my business plan? Well, sorry, I never made one.” I never had the chance. From the minute we launched the business, people started ordering our products. They understood what we were doing. They were saying, “If you’re offering a mattress made from certified organic cotton, organic wool and organic latex without all these toxic chemicals, of course we’ll take it.”
The concept was very simple, and people didn’t require much convincing. Even without advertising, the value was obvious and people wanted it. Basically, we sold a mattress, people sent us money, we took that money, bought more material and made more mattresses. We’ve had consistent demand ever since. That’s how we built the company.

Where do you sell?
All across the country. And here’s a little joke. Some people think we’re based in California because we’re environmentally aware. But of course we’re not. We’re in Amish country, Ohio. So we don’t quite fit the stereotype people imagine.

How did you grow the business?
Largely through the internet; we have a constant stream of online orders. But we also went to retail stores and told them, “You have customers who care about health and the environment, and when they walk into your store you need to have an option for them.” They agreed to carry our products, and they did well.
Today we sell through many of the big retailers, and we also have our own stores. I believe we have about 18 stores across the country now.

Brick and mortar stores?
Yes, baruch Hashem. Although we sell a lot online, a mattress is one of those things that you really should try out in person before buying. When the internet started, mattresses were one of the last products people were willing to buy online, because people could not imagine choosing a mattress without lying down on it first.
We built the business online, but we also recognized that many people still want to test out a mattress before buying it.

I imagine that many young people have never tried out a mattress in a store.
Exactly. In fact, we’ve had many younger people walk past one of our stores, step in out of curiosity, try out a mattress and buy it, almost on impulse. Many consumers, especially younger ones, have a real craving to see and feel products before making a decision to purchase.

It’s not easy to grow a business to the size yours has reached today. You say you had a good product and customers came to you, but were there challenges along the way? Did competitors start showing up?
Of course there were challenges. But you have to ask a basic question: “Why does the consumer buy our product, and why do they choose it over others?” There’s a very simple answer. Go to our website and you’ll see that we have hashgachos. We have certifications from respected environmental organizations that verify our claims. We have over ten certifications, each focused on a specific area of health or sustainability.
Two of them are in regard to non-toxic standards; three certify that our materials are truly organic; others confirm ethical production, sustainable sourcing and so on. We can back up our claims. Our products are regularly inspected, verified and certified, and we’re transparent about that with the public.
Now some of our competitors are doing that too, and that’s fine. But we were ahead of the curve. From the beginning I insisted on getting certification. If I’m going to claim that a mattress meets a high standard of natural, organic or non-toxic, I can’t just say that, I have to prove it.

You were the first to do that. Do you think that it made a real difference?
Yes, very much so. Understanding that we needed hashgachah helped us as much as anything else, if not more.

I’m sure there’s serious competition today.
The market is growing like crazy, but that’s to our benefit.

How so?
We were one of the first companies in this space, so as the industry expands, so do we.
Increased awareness of the issues that drove me to start this business—chemical exposure, organic living, environmental health—drive customers to us. Consumers look for solutions, and they find us.

Today there are a lot of products online that claim to be natural or green, like bamboo mattresses, for example, that sell for a few hundred dollars. Your mattresses start at $1,000 to $1,500. How do you compete with that?
Why are you willing to spend more money on kosher food? Because you believe in it. We’re not selling to people who are looking for the cheapest option. We’re selling to people who believe in what we stand for. Our job is to show them we’re not lying and that we’re giving them a genuinely superior product.
Someone who shops online for the cheapest mattress isn’t looking for a natural product. They may happen to find something that claims to be “natural” or “eco-friendly,” and that’s a plus, so they buy it. Our customers are specifically searching for a top-quality, natural, organic mattress.

People actually seek you out?
That’s right. The downside is that some of our customers are such strong advocates of natural living that they even drive us a little crazy. But those are our people, and we’re the company they come to.

What do you think is different about the way people do business today versus the way they used to?
People today don’t trust anything. Thirty or 40 years ago, people were more trusting. Today, you make a claim and nobody believes you, especially when it comes to green products. People are less trusting, and for good reason. It’s because many companies just make things up. They spit out all the catchphrases, “This is green. This is non-toxic. This is natural.” Too often, it’s just marketing. There’s nothing real behind their claims.
Take bamboo, for example. It has become a very popular alternative to polyester in clothing, and people assume it’s as natural as cotton. Bamboo clothing is not natural at all. In its raw state, bamboo is the roughest, most uncomfortable material in the entire world. There’s no such thing as comfortable natural bamboo. They have to use tons of chemicals to soften it.

How do you build up trust in your product?
Two ways. First, by being legit. If you say your product is made a certain way, make sure it’s actually made that way. People can spot fluff. Second, and this is advice that I believe many businesses can learn from: Get haskamos and hashgachos for your business. No matter what industry you’re in, there are certification organizations that will verify and vouch for your product. Use them; that credibility is essential.

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Many of the most successful businesses begin with a problem. An entrepreneur encounters an issue, finds a solution and builds a product or service around it. That’s exactly what Barry Cik did, at the age of 50.
After a successful career as an environmental consultant, helping real estate owners comply with environmental regulations, a simple errand led Barry down a related but uncharted path.
While shopping for a crib mattress for his newborn grandchild, Barry was shocked to discover that there were no truly natural, organic options available. So he decided to create one himself. He figured out how to manufacture it, and from that effort, Naturepedic was born. Today, his company is a recognized leader in natural organic mattresses and bedding. Over time, Naturepedic has expanded into a full line of sleep products for babies, children and adults, becoming a major force in the industry.
We spoke about the importance of organic living, what it’s like to working with your children and more.
Enjoy!  -Nesanel

I’m 74 years old. I was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. My parents came here after the Holocaust, and I was one of the few chasidishe-type kids in the city. We had a cheder, the Kaliver Yeshiva, where all the classes were in Yiddish.
“My father was a shoemaker, specializing in orthopedic shoes. He was a pashute Yid. When I was a child, I used to ask him halachic shailos, and he always gave the same response: ‘Azoi shteit in Shulchan Aruch.’
“Cleveland’s chasidishe community wasn’t exactly like the one in New York. After high school, I attended Yeshiva University for a couple of years.
“I wanted to pursue engineering, specifically, environmental engineering, so I transferred to Cleveland State University and then Ohio State University. I was led into engineering partly by aptitude and partly by passion: I had a knack for math and science, but I also was very concerned about the environment. At that time, Lake Erie was dying. The fish were gone; you couldn’t fish there anymore. The Cuyahoga River even caught fire, in 1969. You probably don’t remember that story. It seemed to me that we were actively destroying our environment. It wasn’t a theoretical issue; our use of toxic chemicals was causing lasting damage. I enrolled in the environmental engineering program, and that’s where I earned my degrees.
“I truly believed we were harming the environment. I wanted to reverse that trend, or at least reduce the harm, which is why my first career was in the environmental standards industry. My first business, if you want to call it that, was this:
“When you purchase a piece of property—this rule is the same today as it was back then—if it’s just a regular residential home, there’s no issue. But if you’re buying an industrial or commercial property, the bank will not give you a loan unless the property meets specific environmental standards. That’s where I came in: I became a baki in environmental compliance.
“My first job out of college was with an environmental consulting firm. I had to test the soil and groundwater beneath the property to determine if it was contaminated, and to what degree. We would present the bank with a report based on our findings, and then the bank would decide whether to approve the loan, and if so, the amount they were willing to risk.
“Essentially, I was working for the banks. I consulted for most of the major banks in Northeast Ohio as their main investigator for environmental issues. When someone applied for a loan, the bank would give them my card and say, “You have to hire this guy.” I would examine the property, review its history, conduct any necessary testing and then submit a report with my findings to the bank. This kind of due diligence is standard practice for every bank in the country.
“My company was called GEM Testing & Engineering Labs. I had several employees, and I was making a decent parnasah. Then, about 23 years ago, something happened that changed my whole career.
“We had our first grandchild, and my wife sent me out to buy a crib mattress. So I go to the store, I’m looking at the crib mattresses, I’m asking questions, and I realize that the mattresses are all loaded with toxic chemicals—there’s vinyl with phthalates, there’s polyurethane foam, there’s formaldehyde, there’s pesticides. It was crazy.
“I asked the salesperson, ‘What else do you have?’ And she said, ‘Nothing. This is what we sell.’ I said, ‘That’s nuts.’
“I went home and started joking with my wife. I said, ‘You know, my zeide slept on straw. Let’s go to our Amish friends and buy straw and make a mattress. I’m not putting a baby on this stuff.’ There’s a big Amish community in our area, and we were friendly with them and used to buy things from them.
“I didn’t mean it literally, and in the end we didn’t need straw. But we did create something. Then one of my sons put it on the internet, and people started sending us money for that product.
“My message was to the point: Do you want your baby sleeping on a mattress made with toxic chemicals? We offered a simple, healthy, organic option. Organic cotton fill, organic cotton fabric.
“I still get pushback on this. People say, ‘What do you mean, “toxic chemicals”? Even if the mattress is as bad as you say, who cares? It’s a solid piece of material. The baby is sleeping on a sheet. Everything’s fine. There’s no science behind your claims.’
“I know that many people think this way, and it really hurts me, because it’s not true. People are just not aware of it. I’ve read studies that tested the air around the mattress, within 12 inches, even with a sheet on top, and found toxic chemicals. How many babies today are sick? A lot more than anybody wants to admit, and toxic chemicals are a major factor in many of these illnesses. A baby is on a mattress for up to 15 hours a day. Those chemicals leach out of the mattress into the air around the baby, and the baby inhales that garbage.
“It’s not only the mattress, either. It’s the food too. There’s so much junk in the food, it’s frightening. This issue affects all kinds of consumer products.
“Baruch Hashem, we have become the leading brand in natural organic mattress manufacturing. I feel fortunate that not only do we produce a quality product but we’re also helping people live healthier lives.”

To read more, subscribe to Ami

Displeasure over Kevin Roberts’ refusal to distance the Heritage Foundation from Tucker Carlson for offering neo-Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes a platform has yielded something good: a boost to Mike Pence.

Mr. Roberts is the president of the half-century-old organization whose mission is to promote conservative public policies like free enterprise, limited government and a strong national defense.

And after Mr. Carlson invited the Holocaust-denying, misogynist anti-Semite Mr. Fuentes on his popular program and treated the bratty man-child with kid gloves, many conservatives reacted with understandable outrage. Mr. Roberts, though, chose to support Mr. Carlson, who, as it happens, seems to have himself fallen down a conspiracy-theory, Israel-slandering rabbit hole.

(In false modesty, I will refrain from dwelling on how my long-ago warnings about growing ugliness lurking on the American right, an assertion that disturbed some people, have proven accurate.)

In a healthy reaction, though, to the radicalism that has infected part of the conservative world, a number of Heritage Foundation personnel have chosen to bolt from the group and affiliate themselves instead with Advancing American Freedom (AAF), a group founded by former Vice President Pence in 2021 to advocate for classical conservative principles—in contradistinction, that is, to a good chunk of President Trump’s MAGA movement.

Mr. Pence famously, and laudably, refused to participate in Mr. Trump’s and his supporters’ attempt to subvert the democratic electoral process on January 6, 2021.

According to three people testifying before a Congressional committee under oath, Mr. Trump expressed support for hanging Mr. Pence for disobeying his demand to refuse to certify the election results. Although he escaped the gallows, Mr. Pence was effectively sidelined in the conservative movement and gained little traction in an attempt to run for president himself in 2024.

It will be a steep uphill trudge for the former vice president to shift American conservatism away from the current affection so many harbor for characters like Mr. Carlson. But it’s heartening all the same, and cause for relief, to note the defections from Heritage to AAF.
So far, 15 Heritage staffers, including three senior officials from the think tank’s legal, economic and data teams, are moving to the Pence group.

AAF began a $15 million fundraising campaign last month to cover the expenses of hiring the outgoing Heritage personnel and raised $13 million within two weeks.

One of the erstwhile Heritage senior officials, John Malcolm, announced that he is becoming the vice president of the Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law, a legal advocacy think tank that has been part of the Heritage Foundation but will now affiliate with the AAF.

The man for whom the institute was named, Ronald Reagan’s former attorney general Ed Meese, gave the institute’s move his blessing.

The president of AAF, Tim Chapman, served as chief of staff to the late Heritage cofounder Edwin J. Feulner and helped found its advocacy arm, Heritage Action. So his and Mr. Malcolm’s move from Heritage to Mr. Pence’s group is significant. And Mr. Chapman said that he expects AAF to be welcoming more staffers from the Heritage Foundation soon.

Mr. Pence, about as far from a rabble-rouser as can be imagined, has nevertheless not held back from criticizing the wild-eyed part of the MAGA crowd—or the Heritage Foundation, which he accused of “abandoning its principles.” He expressed chagrin over how the foundation had embraced isolationism and how “Heritage and some other voices and commentators have embraced big-government populism and have been willing to tolerate anti-Semitism.”

“AAF is honored to welcome these principled conservative scholars to the team,” Mr. Pence said said about the defectors. “They bring a wealth of experience, a love of country, and a deep commitment to the Constitution and Conservative Movement that will further the cause of liberty.”

Whether Mr. Pence and his group can become the dominant force within the conservative world isn’t predictable. Nor can we know whether the former vice president, who was mocked for his traditional family values will set his sights on a return to the White House in 2028.

But the country, to greatly understate things, could do worse.

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Born and raised in Monsey, New York, Rabbi Shmuel Luger’s trajectory to becoming a rosh yeshivah is nothing short of extraordinary. From a very young age he wrestled with profound questions of emunah and struggled with alcoholism, teetering on the brink of losing connection to a life of purpose and meaning. Yet against all odds, he found the inner strength to reclaim his life. Through recovery, relentless dedication to Torah and a deep immersion in Yiddishkeit, he transformed his challenges into a source of wisdom and inspiration for others. Today, Rabbi Luger guides his talmidim through the lessons that he learned.

As a respected rosh yeshivah, I think it’s very courageous of you to share the story of your early struggles.
I spoke to my rebbe, Rav Zishe Solomon, the rosh yeshivah of Toras Simcha in Yerushalayim, about my reluctance to discuss that part of my life. He agreed that it’s hard to do. But he added that if sharing it will help others and be mechazek them, then I have to do it. That’s why I don’t want to glamorize my past or have anyone be misled by it.
On the one hand, people may say, “If he could overcome such challenges, I can overcome anything,” and I agree 100%. Aderaba, someone else could do a far better job. At the same time, I don’t want anyone to see a person go off the derech and say, “Echta v’ashuv—I will sin and then I will return.” That would go against everything I’m trying to accomplish.

Is your primary message about staying away from alcohol consumption?
Not at all. Because I’m in recovery, people often assume I’m simply anti-alcohol. I’m not. Being an alcoholic is a symptom of an inability to deal with life. While there is such a thing as chemical addiction, the deeper issue is that even if someone goes to rehab and becomes sober, he still hasn’t necessarily fixed his inability to cope. People aren’t comfortable with who they are, so they turn to things that allow them to escape.
When it comes to consuming alcohol and similar behaviors, the root problem is that we are so uncomfortable with ourselves that we can’t stand being alone. Rabbi Dr. Avraham Twerski, z”l, spoke about this often. Despite being extraordinarily successful, brilliant and arguably the most well-known psychiatrist in America, he spoke openly about how he struggled with low self-esteem. He once described being alone at a resort in Switzerland and finding that after just 20 minutes by himself, he couldn’t take it.
In my view, the struggle with self-esteem is the greatest challenge of our generation. I’ve discussed this with Rabbi Eytan Feiner—I’m a talmid of Sh’or Yoshuv and lived in Far Rockaway—as well as with other rabbanim, and they agree.

So in your estimate, the root cause of addiction is low self-esteem?
There’s an even deeper issue, which is identity. If a person doesn’t know who he is, anything you say to him can feel like an attack. That’s because he doesn’t have a foundation to deal with life. He lacks the atzmiyus of having a solid identity.
I once attended an asifas harabbanim in America with Rav Aharon Leib Shteinman. Afterward, there was a protest outside over his stance on an issue in Eretz Yisrael. At first, I thought it was a chillul Hashem, but then I asked myself: Does this bother Rav Shteinman? No. He’s one of the gedolei hador. You simply can’t offend someone like that because his sense of self is intact. When a person lacks that, external expectations can create a gap between who he truly is and who he feels he’s supposed to be.

Are you saying that the higher the level the person is on, the stronger his self-identity?
Yes. On occasion, I like to leave my phone at home and go learn in different places around Bnei Brak. One of my favorite spots is Ponovezh. When I sit down, I usually wait a few minutes to make sure I’m not in someone else’s seat, and then I look around and take it all in. Almost every bachur in the main beis midrash is dressed exactly the same: white button-down shirts with unbuttoned collars, sleeves rolled down; no one rolls them up. Their tzitzis are out but at a standard length; none are hanging down past their knees. Maybe someone is wearing glasses or a watch, but otherwise it’s very uniform. I once noticed someone wearing a rekel, and it really stood out.
There are only two or three rebbeim in the beis midrash, yet over 1,000 bachurim are sitting and learning. At one point, I found myself wondering: Do these bachurim see themselves as exactly the same or as distinct individuals?
I developed a bit of a kesher with one bachur, and I asked him that question one day. He looked at me with incomprehension. “Of course I’m me,” he said. “I have my own name. It’s not just the chitzoniyus that makes someone different. I’m myself, with my own maalos and chesronos.”
I didn’t go any deeper than that, because I didn’t want to push him or make him start questioning things, so I changed the subject. My point is that they all have strong identities that aren’t dependent on external factors.
The self-esteem problems we see stem from a Western culture that teaches us to believe that we must be different from others in external ways. The real issue begins when a person doesn’t know who he is on the inside. So he looks outward—to others and to society—and says, “This is what people value. This is what matters.” And he begins to act accordingly.
My grandmother is a Twersky, so I read all the articles in Ami about the family very carefully. In the article you ran about the late Rachmastrivka Rebbe of New York, Rav Chai Yitzchak Twersky, zt”l, it mentioned that Rav Yochanan of Rachmastrivka wanted to inherit the middah of “gornisht” from his father, Rav Mottel of Chernobyl, but one of his brothers had already gotten it first, so he took the “gor gornisht.” So yes, a person can break himself and channel these things in the right away.

That’s a high madreigah. But the average person needs to feel a sense of self-worth in a very real way.
Nowadays, there are conversations in the frum velt—more common in America than in Eretz Yisrael—about what we can call “Kiddush Club culture.” People talk about exciting things there; we might call it “Make Yiddishkeit Geshmak Again.” The world was like that when I was growing up. I believe it stems from a lack of being comfortable with oneself, creating a need for a constant matzav to keep the geshmak going.
People travel to other countries for Sukkos or rent apartments for exorbitant amounts of money and then complain that there’s too much alcohol at Simchas Beis Hasho’eivah. But the alcohol isn’t the problem.

In your opinion, the need to keep the geshmak going is the problem.
Indeed. Years ago, I was in a place where recovery meetings are held when I saw a notice about Shoplifters Anonymous. At first, I couldn’t process it, but apparently there are enough people addicted to shoplifting that they hold meetings. It’s a wild idea, but the way that alcohol, drugs, gambling and similar behaviors work is partly chemical, as they’re all the same chase for dopamine. When dopamine is released, a person feels good. And the more a person engages in dopamine-inducing activities the more the body adapts, and the less effective the same activity becomes. That’s why everything has to be bigger, more intense or more frequent.
Yiddishkeit is structured in a way that regulates dopamine in a healthy way. We have Shabbos every seven days. Special occasions—like a bris, a bar mitzvah of a chasunah—naturally give us an extra rush of dopamine. Constantly chasing highs, however, is dangerous. A person tries to recreate the initial thrill of drinking or using drugs, but it can’t be duplicated. The Kiddush might have been geshmak, but now he seeks an even better one. The more we give in to our taavos, the more the body expects and craves it.
This is how opiates and similar drugs work. A small dose never feels the same again, so people chase stronger doses, and when the body constantly pursues more dopamine, it can never be satisfied.

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“Claims against Israel seem to be raced to air or online without adequate checks, evidencing either carelessness or a desire always to believe the worst about Israel.”
—Michael Prescott, former political editor of the Sunday Times who served as an independent adviser to the BBC’s Internal Standards Committee, in a leaked memo that claimed that the BBC repeatedly published misinformation about Israel.

“I want to ask you a difficult question. There’ll be some people looking in, and they’ll go, look at what happened in Gaza and of course something was coming, what would you say to them?”
—BBC journalist Nick Robinson, interviewing a Jewish family in north London after the Bondi Beach terrorist attack and suggesting that attacks on Jews around the world were to be expected because of Gaza.

If anti-Jewish reports in mainstream media were a toxic flood before October 7, afterward they became a virulent tsunami. Much of that was anti-Israel lies that teetered well over the boundary between inaccurate reporting and into anti-Jewish propaganda. But there were also plenty of articles putting Jews around the world in a harsh light, blaming them for attacks carried out against them or using token “as a Jews” to cast the rest of the Jewish community as evil.
Is there any end in sight?

Buying the media and changing it
One major change that happened this past year was the acquisition of the media company Paramount Global by David Ellison, backed by his father, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. The Ellisons, a pro-Israel Jewish family, immediately made changes at CBS, a Paramount subsidiary. Most importantly, they put Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief of the centrist and pro-Israel Free Press, in charge of the news division at CBS, one of the three major non-cable TV news channels in the US.
That has already led to controversy. Weiss delayed the airing of a 60 Minutes investigative report about the Trump administration’s use of the CECOT prison in El Salvador to hold deportees. The 60 Minutes show is the flagship news program at CBS, and insiders accused Weiss of both being a shill for the Trump administration (the Ellisons have a close relationship with Trump) and being incompetent in the field of journalism.
The outcome of that kerfuffle may show whether Weiss will be able to permanently change the tenor and focus of a major news channel in the US.
(One concerning issue that has come up, however, is the suggestion that the Ellisons might bring Saudi and Qatari government investment funds into their proposed acquisition of Warner Discovery, which might give the Saudis and Qataris sway over CNN.)
Another major change may have been the way that light has been shed on nasty practices at the BBC. As Ami has previously reported, a leaked memorandum from Michael Prescott, who had been serving as part of an internal standards review at the BBC, showed that there were numerous failures of reporting—seemingly to the point of clear bias—on a number of issues. One of those focused on by Prescott was Israel, with him pointing out that the BBC had slanted its coverage against Israel in many ways, especially in its Arab-language service.
While the usual suspects complained about the memo, British members of Parliament called for changes. If anything comes of that, it may change the way one of the most prominent and widespread news outlets does its reporting.

Social media, in any case
One question about the few possible changes to media outlets is whether it matters anymore. Young people aren’t getting their news directly from these outlets one way or the other. Instead, they’re turning to the even worse world of social media.
According to a poll by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab taken at the end of 2024, three out of four US college students at 181 institutions said that social media is their main source of news. About half of the students said that their second-most used source of news was word of mouth. Only one out of five students said that they regularly turned to newspapers, whether digital or print, for news.
And this wasn’t because students thought that newspapers were less reliable. In fact, they mostly believed that they were more reliable than what they were seeing on social media or from influencers. That didn’t matter.
And even when they want to check up more about a story, they are more likely to end up reading about it in an AI-generated response from Google than in a primary news source.

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Among the pages of the Republican tax bill passed into law in July is something called a Trump Account, a way to invest for children. The IRS has issued its guidance about Trump Accounts, and we now know the details of these accounts and how they will be taxed.

One exciting aspect of the Trump Accounts is that they will consist of free money (with some caveats) for many American families. The government will put $1,000 into an account for each child born between January 1, 2025, and December 31, 2028, who is an American citizen with a Social Security number.
In addition, a number of billionaires have pledged to put varying amounts of money into these accounts for specific groups of children. This means some children will have more money in their investment accounts than the base $1,000.
Free money is definitely good, and experts have uniformly said that signing up newborns (and perhaps older children) for a Trump Account is a good idea. But when it comes to making investment portfolios for your children and putting in more money for them, there are some disadvantages to Trump Accounts, and it is worthwhile to know what they are.
This article is for informational purposes; a tax expert should be consulted before deciding on investments.

Investment in what?
The money in Trump Accounts must be invested in index funds in American equities and not in sector-specific indexes. In other words, the money will go into either mutual funds or exchange-traded funds that track something like the S&P 500 or a similarly broad stock index.
The money cannot be invested in index funds of foreign stocks or in bonds.

How to sign up
The $1,000 and any other money won’t automatically be put into accounts for children. Instead, you need to sign up for an account for your child by filing an IRS Form 4547. The forms aren’t ready yet, but the government says they should be available in 2026, and at that time, it should be possible to enroll online.

Free money?
One of the biggest draws of these accounts is that the government and some billionaires will be putting money into them.
First is the government, which will be putting in $1,000 for children born between January 1, 2025, and at least the end of 2028. (It would require further legislation to extend the opportunity to children born afterward.)
Even children who were born before January 1, 2025, and are no older than ten will have $250 deposited in their Trump Accounts through a donation from tech billionaire Michael Dell.
Furthermore, kids in Connecticut who are less than ten years old and live in the poorest ZIP codes will get an additional $250 in their accounts through a donation from mega-investor Ray Dalio.
The Trump administration has thrown down a challenge for other billionaires to make similar donations.
(Those who are on a government assistance plan that has an asset limit do not need to worry, according to the latest guidance. The free money placed in the accounts by the government and others does not count toward those assets. However, when the money is withdrawn, it will count as income for the owner of the account—the child, who by then will be an adult.)
Beyond the money given by the government and billionaires, parents and others can put up to $5,000 in an account each year before the child turns 18.

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Much attention was paid, for good reason, to the recent sold-out convention of Turning Point USA, the group The New York Times describes as the nation’s “preeminent conservative youth organization.”

The attention-paying was due to more than the fact that TPUSA, which was founded by the late Charlie Kirk, has become a major player on the American political field. The main attraction was the deep fissure that emerged at the MAGA-minded gathering. Some called it a “civil war,” one whose victors will determine the future orientation of the growing conservative movement in American politics.

On one side of the divide was commentator Ben Shapiro, who, in his speech, minced no words condemning the grand poobah of the other side, popular podcaster Tucker Carlson, for having hosted and coddled the repulsive misogynist and anti-Semite Nick Fuentes on his program.

Mr. Shapiro said that hosts are “responsible for the guests they choose.” He characterized Mr. Fuentes as “an evil troll,” and Mr. Carlson’s friendly interview of him “an act of moral imbecility.”

“If you host a Hitler apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes,” he said, “you ought to own it.”

Mr. Shapiro also denounced rabid anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Candace Owens, media personality Megyn Kelly and pundit Steve Bannon, whom he called “frauds and grifters.”

“The conservative movement is in serious danger,” he asserted, “from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.”

Mr. Carlson, in his speech, dismissed Mr. Shapiro’s attempt to “deplatform and denounce” people, and called him “pompous.”

The following day, Ms. Kelly, noting the internecine feud, declared the end of her friendship with Ben Shapiro and criticized another traditional conservative, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss. And went on to play the Israel card.

“It’s about Israel,” she said. “Those two are very…ardent Israel activists, which is fine, but they don’t get to dictate how the rest of us feel about Israel or what we do with respect to our friends and our friends’ opinions on Israel.”

She called Mr. Shapiro’s insistence that the conservative movement sever ties with people like Carlson and Owens “a betrayal.”

Particularly disturbing to me, though, was the closing convention speech delivered by Vice President JD Vance, who, in a thinly-veiled swipe at Mr. Shapiro, condemned what he called conservative “purity tests.”

“I didn’t bring a list of conservatives,” he said, “to denounce or to deplatform.”

In addition to his subtle defense of Mr. Carlson and, by association, Mr. Fuentes, the vice president also declared that “Christianity is America’s creed.”

He stressed that he was “not saying you have to be a Christian to be an American,” but was just noting how, “If you go to almost any food pantry in this country, you will find Christians feeding the poor…you’ll find Christians sitting patiently beside hospice beds and in recovery rooms and in all the places of the world where people have given up on other people.”

He seemed oddly oblivious to non-Christians dedicated to chesed.

Israel was on the vice president’s mind as well. In a subsequent interview in the British medium UnHerd, Mr. Vance said that the fear of Fuentes and his ilk are “overstated by people who want to avoid having a foreign-policy conversation about America’s relationship with Israel.” He further claimed that concerns about anti-Semitic voices are raised as a way to avoid discussing “a real backlash to a consensus view in American foreign policy” regarding Israel.

Mr. Vance has called Israel an “important ally.” But his words, to my ears, reflect a purely transactional embrace of the country. Israel provides intelligence and promotes regional security, and, in exchange, earns American aid and cooperation.

The opposite of a transactional relationship is a “relational” one, where the parties value each other for reasons beyond mutual benefits.

Joe Biden, whatever one may think of his presidency or policies, and despite his disagreements with Israel’s current government, had a relational connection to Israel. He regularly called himself a Zionist.

“Biden’s connection to Israel,” former Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller once said, “is deeply ingrained in his political DNA.”

I don’t quite get that feeling from Mr. Vance.

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Dear Ima,

I don’t know how to do this. I sit here beside you, watching you struggle for breath, fighting for life, and I am filled with so many regrets. The ICU is loud and quiet at the same time. I hear machines hum, alarms beep, the hiss of the ventilator pushing air into your lungs, and the nurses at their station chatting. But you are quiet. Too quiet.
Are you in pain? Oh, how I wish you could let me know what hurts.
So many numbers on the screens. The ones that should be high are low. The ones that should be low are high. They give medication to bring up your blood pressure, and it shoots too high. They lower the dose, and it drops again. Back and forth, up and down.
The doctors gently tell me, “Your mother is very sick. We are doing everything we can for her.” I nod, fighting back tears. What else is there to do?
As I sit here watching you, Ima, I keep drifting back to better times, before dementia changed everything. Before the silence. Before I lost the version of you who could ask me how I was doing, how the kinderlach were. You always knew when I was struggling, even when I tried to hide it. Your love didn’t need words. I felt it.
Things were not always easy for you, but you didn’t let that stop you. I remember you sitting in your chair near the front window and saying Tehillim. That worn Tehillim, the pages soaked with your tears, soft from years of holding. I know you had so much to daven for. Abba. Each of your children. Our struggles, our shidduchim, our health, our parnasah.
Now it’s my Tehillim that is getting soaked. Now I’m the one turning those pages, finding comfort in the same words that comforted you. There’s something about saying Tehillim; the words carry you when you don’t have words of your own. They hold your pain and give it somewhere to go. I understand now, Ima. I understand so many things now that I wish I had understood then.
When I got engaged, you took me from store to store, preparing me for my new life. You didn’t sit me down and give long speeches about marriage. That wasn’t your way. But you showed me by example how to be a devoted wife and caring mother.
Coming home to you after the birth of my first baby, you taught me how to care for him, how to swaddle him, bathe him and soothe him when he wouldn’t stop crying. When I had my first postpartum meltdown, you took the baby from my hands and told me to take a nap.
Now I’m the one tending to you. Now I’m the one sitting by your bedside. The roles have reversed, but they can never truly be equal. You spent years taking care of me. Feeding me, clothing me, worrying about me, davening for me. You gave me everything I needed without ever asking for anything in return. Now it’s my turn to take care of you, but I can never repay what you gave me. Not even close.
I feel so helpless sitting here watching you suffer. All I want is to take away your pain. To make you comfortable. To fix this. And I can’t. I can’t do anything except hold your hand and daven, and wonder if I’m doing enough. If I’ve ever done enough.
This is the part that breaks me, Ima. The regret.
I should have visited more, called more, asked more questions while you could still answer. I should have sat with you longer and held your hand while you could still squeeze back.
I know all the things I should have done. I knew them then, too.
I knew. And still, I said, “Tomorrow.”
Tomorrow I’ll visit. Tomorrow I’ll call. Tomorrow I’ll sit with you and really be present, not rushing, not distracted, not already thinking about what I have to do next.
But tomorrow became next week, next week became next month, the months became years. And here I am, sitting in the ICU, regretting all the tomorrows.
Thinking about everything I should have done differently, I know that I was doing the best I could. I was raising children, working and managing a life with a thousand demands pulling at me from every direction. I was tired. I was overwhelmed. I was human.
And yet, the excuses feel hollow now. Because the truth is that we make time for what we prioritize. And I should have prioritized you more. I should have put you higher on the list. I should have known that the list itself would one day feel meaningless, but you never would.
Now I am crying for all the precious time I wasted.
I cry for the conversations we’ll never have, the questions you’ll never answer, the things I will never know about you. What did you daven for all those years, sitting with your Tehillim? What would you tell me now if you could speak?
I cry for all the times I was impatient with you. The times I rushed our phone calls. The times I visited but wasn’t really there, physically present but mentally already out the door.
I cry because I understand you so much better now that I’m a mother myself. Now I’ve lived enough to know how hard you worked and how much you sacrificed, but by the time I understood this, you couldn’t hear me say it.
That is my pain, Ima.
A daughter’s pain.
A daughter’s guilt.
A daughter’s regret.
* * *
I know I’m not alone in this. I know that right now, in hospitals and nursing homes and living rooms around the world, other daughters and sons are sitting with this same weight. The weight of “I should have.” The weight of “why didn’t I?” The weight of realizing that time is not a renewable resource, and we spent it on things that don’t matter.
We think we have forever, but we don’t. We think there will always be another chance, but there won’t. We think that love is enough, that they know how much we care, even if we don’t show it as often as we should.
Maybe she knew, but that doesn’t ease the unbearable weight of not showing it more.
Regret is the price we pay for being human.
It teaches us to stop saying “tomorrow.” That the people we love won’t always be here, and neither will we. It teaches us that the dishes can wait, the emails can wait, the to-do list can wait, but the people we love can’t.
It teaches us to forgive ourselves. Beating ourselves up for not doing more doesn’t honor anyone. It just adds more pain to a world that already has enough.
* * *
I hope that you can forgive me, Ima. Forgive me for not visiting more. Forgive me for not giving you the kavod you deserve. Forgive me for all the tomorrows I wasted.
I can’t go back, but I can go forward differently.
Maybe the message I’m supposed to learn, listening to the machines breathe for you, is that it’s never too late. Until it is.
Al kol neshimah u’neshimah tehallel Kah. For every breath, we praise Hashem.
Sitting here beside you, I thank Hashem for every breath. Yours and mine.
I can’t undo all the wasted moments, Ima, but I can be here for this moment.
I’m here now, Ima. I’m here.

Miriam

Please daven for a refuah shleimah for Toba bas Sara Rivka

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Born in Kfar Chabad, Israel, into a Lubavitcher family, Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun was raised with deep roots in Jewish communal life. His parents served as shluchim of the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
The family later moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where his father worked as a rabbi and educator. Kaploun’s heritage reflects a long history of Jewish leadership; his father’s maternal grandfather, Rabbi Moshe Zalman Feiglin, helped establish Yiddishkeit in Australia and was referred by the Lubavitcher Rebbe as the Avraham Avinu of Australia. His maternal grandfather, Rav Moshe Yitzchak Hecht was one of the first shluchim in America and served as a rav and mechanech in the New Haven area for decades.
Rabbi Kaploun has pursued a career spanning business, philanthropy and community service. He is the cofounder and president of RussKap Water, a company focused on atmospheric water generation technology, and he previously served as a senior partner at a consulting firm advising on government relations and publicprivate partnerships. He has also been active in disaster relief and charitable efforts, including volunteer work after 9/11 and during major hurricanes, and he cofounded the Moses and Aaron Foundation with the late Elie Wiesel to support children with special needs and their families.
Kaploun also has a longstanding relationship with President Donald Trump, dating back to their time in New York, and he played a prominent role in Jewish outreach during the 2024 campaign. In 2025, President Trump nominated him to serve as the Special Envoy and Ambassador at Large to Combat Global Antisemitism. He received his Senate confirmation on December 18, 2025, by a 53–43 vote.
I spoke with Rabbi Kaploun this past Sunday.

Congratulations on your confirmation. It should be with a lot of hatzlachah.
Amein.

What do you see as your primary mission in this role? How do you plan to combat anti-Semitism?
In practical terms, there are three or four ways to do it. One is through education. Unfortunately, the educational system in this country and around the world lends itself to promoting hatred of Jews, with a lot of inaccuracies and things that are untrue. Therefore, we have to confront the untruths. That’s a very important part of confronting anti-Semitism. When The New York Times writes an article and has a misleading picture about a famine in Gaza, and 50 million people see it but their apology is seen by only 100,000 people, it means that 49.9 million people are getting the wrong information. There has to be a more concerted effort in confronting the inaccuracies that help spread the hatred.
Number two, some governments have policies that definitely lend themselves to not protecting their Jewish communities. The protection of American Jews and the Jewish community around the globe is my priority. That is what the job entails, and it includes dealing with governments, such as how to get Australia to ratchet up what they’re doing, which is something the American government had been requesting for a long time; they were ignoring the rising anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, we are seeing the results now. So I would say that protecting, educating and confronting are probably our three top goals.

Many people assume that this is mainly a domestic position, but your remarks highlight its international nature.
The position is formally titled Special Envoy and Ambassador-at-Large to Combat Global Antisemitism, and my intent is to honor that responsibility.

I know that you have roots in Australia.
Correct. My great-grandfather founded the Jewish community in a place called Shepparton, and he was considered to be the Avraham Avinu of Australia. My father was born in the Australian outback, and he went to school in Melbourne as a young child.

So you also have a personal connection to what happened in Australia.
Yes, but that doesn’t change the goals. It does, however, add an impetus and allows me to explain to the officials that I have a personal involvement. But of course, every Jew is someone I have to protect, regardless of affiliation. Kol Yisrael areivim zeh lazeh.

Do you believe that the problems faced by the Australian Jewish community are the result of governmental decisions, or from the downstream effects of immigration policies from the Middle East?
The American president and secretary of state have made it very clear that countries that tolerate terroristic behavior and call for things that are not in accordance with US policy are not helping to decrease hate. In fact, they embolden terrorists. Part of the problem was that the Australian government didn’t listen to the US when they asked them not to recognize a Palestinian state and to condemn Hamas in the strongest terms. They also ignored the recommendations of their own special envoy to combat anti-Semitism up until last week.
I’m receiving more and more information every day, but there’s no question that an unwillingness to confront the anti-Semitic rhetoric or the people who were on Australia’s own watchlist and ended up having guns anyway played a role. How does that happen? The question is how much responsibility the government bears for its inaction. There is obviously some culpability there.

You noted that the president and secretary of state have spoken out on these matters. Could you clarify your role in this initiative?
My function is to represent the administration in areas that involve anti-Semitism and expanding the IHRA definition of it, which lays out very specific roles for governments. It’s a non-binding agreement, but we would still like to see more countries join. I report directly to the secretary of state and will work with ambassadors and governments all over the world.

During your nomination, some people, including Jerry Nadler, expressed concern that the role is meant to be apolitical and you might be too partisan. How would you respond?
Allow me to address two things. During the process, I invited every member of Congress to meet with me to voice any concerns they had. I said during my Senate hearing that anti-Semitism is a bipartisan problem. For people who have an agenda against the president, it wouldn’t make a difference who was nominated. This is the same individual who commended the work I did with Elie Wiesel for children with special needs; in fact, I believe he authored eight or ten proclamations in Congress saluting it. So this is a purely political agenda, and when you have staffers who work for J Street and other anti-Orthodox groups and anti-Israel Jewish groups, you’re going to have that kind of person coming out against you.
The interesting thing is that many Democrats, including Josh Gottheimer and Dan Goldman, met with me and were thrilled by my nomination.

As a member of the chareidi community, in what ways do you anticipate that your Yiddishkeit will inform your approach?
Having grown up and experienced walking in the street and being called dirty Jew, having witnessed the Crown Heights riots, having a sister who passed away from cancers that were caused by 9/11, and having a cousin who was killed on October 7, I bring a different sense of purpose to what the role is all about.
My grandfather, Rav Moshe Yitzchak Hecht, was one of the Rebbe’s first shluchim, and my other grandfather, Reb Aharon Kaploun, was an ish chesed in Yerushalayim and Australia who did acts of kindness that are legendary. I learned from both of them that there are different ways to serve the community. There are times when things are better done quietly, and there are times when things must be done very publicly.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe explained to me and my parents when I had the experience of a yechidus for my bar mitzvah that we have the responsibility to light up the homes of other families. These are things that you take with you every day.
The responsibility of combating global anti-Semitism is a very awesome and daunting one. It’s not something I take lightly. But I take courage in the fact that because of how I was educated and my association with present-day gedolim, I have the ability to lean on giants to assist me in finding the right way to deal with each case. What works in one case doesn’t necessarily work in the other.
Baruch Hashem, many ambassadors have reached out to me over the last four or five months to work with me from their countries. They were all waiting for my confirmation to start the process. I believe that we are in a very strong position to hit the ground running and have an immediate impact. I would also like to thank US ambassadors like Mike Huckabee and Bill White, as well as the staff at the State Department and the assistant secretary for religious liberty.
You asked earlier about my responsibilities. Well, one of the points in the Gaza agreement is to engage in dialogue about how to reduce hatred. That’s something that’s extremely important. So is working with the UN so the Arab textbooks will stop praising martyrdom and children will no longer be taught to hate. As the president just reiterated the other day, American aid must be used to promote American interests around the world rather than hatred.

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The words “Free Palestine” were followed by fire—an attack with three Molotov cocktails.
The attack in June on a group of Jews marching in Boulder, Colorado, for the Israeli hostages left one older Jewish woman dead and several other marchers injured. When the police investigated Mohamed Sabry Soliman, who carried out the attack, they found that he had been influenced online by the teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood.
That determination spurred Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) to reintroduce legislation to brand the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization, legislation that had been in the works on and off since 2014. That legislation is still making its way through Congress.
But in late November, President Trump also took action. He issued an executive order setting in motion a process by which the executive branch would make a determination about branches of the Muslim Brotherhood and decide whether they were terrorist organizations.
The executive order specifically mentions the Brotherhood chapters in Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan as ones that have called for violence, though it does not immediately designate them terrorist groups.
Trump’s order left some of his supporters unhappy, because it fails to simply say that the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization.
In contrast, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida went ahead and issued rules designating the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)—an American organization that has been tied to the Brotherhood—as foreign terrorist organizations. CAIR is suing both states in court.
Around the world, only one Western country, Austria, has designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. The other countries that have done so are all Arab or Muslim countries, which generally have lower thresholds and standards of evidence to make such declarations.
What the divide between the White House and Texas and Florida hints at is that dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood is a bit more complicated than dealing with other international Islamist organizations. The groups affiliated with the Brotherhood extend to clearly recognized terrorist groups like Hamas, but they also include a political party that was a coalition partner in Israel’s government. That leaves the US government with a dilemma.

A Brotherhood Around the World
The Muslim Brotherhood dates back to 1928, when it was founded by a schoolteacher and imam named Hassan al-Banna. In the aftermath of Ottoman rule, Egypt was under the influence of the British, though there was an independent Egyptian government, which demanded that the country be secularized.
Al-Banna was of the opinion that Islam should be the bedrock and basis of all of society’s institutions, not merely a religion in a secularized country, and he created the Muslim Brotherhood to promote that “from below,” meaning as a grassroots organization that would overwhelm society. The organization established hundreds of social institutions, like schools, mosques and health clinics, throughout Egypt.
But Al-Banna also espoused violence as a proper way of spreading Muslim doctrine, and a military wing of the organization began carrying out attacks, including political assassinations, in Egypt during the 1940s. The organization also sent volunteers to attack Israel in 1948.
The Muslim Brotherhood was outlawed in Egypt in 1948 because the government felt that it was a threat, possibly a violent one, to its rule. Al-Banna was killed on the street in 1949, and his followers claimed that it was an assassination by the government.
The Brotherhood would continue to be oppressed in Egypt after the 1952 revolution that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power. Nasser was nearly assassinated in 1954 by what was suspected to be a Brotherhood plot, and that led to many of the Brotherhood leaders being imprisoned or executed.
One who would go on to have outsized influence was Sayyid Qutb, whose writings in prison would influence Sunni radicals and terrorist groups, such as Al Qaeda and ISIS. Qutb was eventually executed in 1966, but his writings lived on.
While that kind of extreme radicalism was an offshoot of the Brotherhood, the general mass of the Brotherhood took a different route during the 1980s, founding political opposition groups in many countries that often ran in elections, including in Syria and Jordan.
There were still openly violent groups that were part of the Muslim Brotherhood, such as Hamas, which was officially recognized as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. But in many places, the Brotherhood took on an air of respectability. Most notably, Mohamed Morsi, whose party was affiliated with the Brotherhood, became the president of Egypt from 2012 through 2013. The “growth from the bottom” idea of Al-Banna had achieved success—at least for a little time.
Morsi was quickly ousted by the current regime, and the Brotherhood was oppressed once more. But they had shown that the strategy worked.

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In all likelihood, you either own a Tesla or your kids have asked you to get one. Around 10% of people in the US own an electric car, with that number expected to grow every year. And electric cars need charging. Enter Munish Klein, co-founder of KWEV, a company that installs charging stations for electric cars in multi-family and commercial properties across the US.
Electric cars are a fun topic, and Munish is a fun person to talk to. An entrepreneur who had his own company until his partners wanted to sell, he has many years of experience in the energy-saving industry. After COVID, he pivoted his current company to focus on the ever-expanding industry of charging electric cars, with KWEV being his latest venture.
We spoke about energy, infrastructure and EV charging, how to build partnerships that last, and why emunah and patience matter as much as execution.
Enjoy!
—Nesanel

I was born in Montreal, Canada. I am 42 years old and the youngest of five children. My father was born right after the war in Kerestir, or, as his passport calls it, Bodrogkeresztúr. My father’s parents were both from Kerestir as well. One of his grandfathers was the rosh hakahal, and the other was the town’s shochet and dayan. In 1956, his family immigrated to Canada.
“My mother was born in Czechoslovakia. Both of her parents were survivors. My grandmother, whose maiden name was Mendelowitz, was a teenager during the war and her brother was a baby, not even a year old. Her father was very wealthy. One Friday, Nazis ransacked the house, and for some reason, they threw a big blanket over the baby’s crib. My grandmother stayed away all of Shabbos, and when she came back later, she found her baby brother still in the crib. She kept him with her throughout the war. Their father hid all his children with non-Jews, and they all survived. After the war, they all reunited.
“I went to the Skvere cheder. For high school, I went to the Mesivta of Lakewood. My cousin had gone there two years earlier and had a good experience, so my parents felt it would be a good fit for me as well. After Mesivta of Lakewood, I went to Vyelipol (Frankel’s Yeshiva) in Flatbush for about two years. That was 12th grade and my first year of beis midrash. After that I learned in Darchei Torah in Far Rockaway. The current rosh yeshivah of Darchei Torah, Rav Shlomo Avigdor Altusky, had been our next-door neighbor in Montreal.
“My grandfather started a shul called Bais Moshe in his basement. He also ran a kind of soup kitchen there, and every Erev Shabbos he would distribute free food to Holocaust survivors. Huge lines of people would form there every week. My grandmother once asked him, ‘You’re giving out all this food. Where’s the money? Where do you write it down?’ He answered, ‘It’s being written down up above.’
“My father was a caterer, primarily for weddings. He was a pioneer of off-premise catering. His food was so good that other caterers, like Michael Schick, used to call him for his recipes. But he was very modest; he never attributed his success to his own talents. He always said, ‘M’leigt es arein in oiven, in m’nemt es fun oiven, s’iz allehs fun oiven—you put it in the oven, you take it out of the oven, but it all comes from above.’
“My mother ran the bakery side of the catering. She baked fresh, heimishe cakes for every wedding, and people really liked them.
“I was always entrepreneurial. Growing up, I helped my father in his business during the summers, when there wasn’t much going on. When I was 12 years old, I was already selling cell phones. I had a family friend who was a dealer for AT&T, and they were giving out licenses, so I latched onto him. It’s not like I opened a storefront on 13th Avenue; eBay was still in its infancy, so I made myself an eBay account. This was about 30 years ago, and cell phones were a different world. I had a StarTAC. The next model, the Vader, was half the size of the StarTAC, but it never really took off. I still have both the StarTAC and the Vader stored away in a special box in my house.
“I also pioneered schnitzel sandwiches at Mesivta of Lakewood and started doing cholent on Thursday nights. It was more for fun and the challenge than for money; my parents always gave us whatever we needed. I don’t think I even tracked how much money I made; it was more for the thrill.
“I got married while still in Darchei, before I turned 20. I think I broke the record there as the youngest to get engaged. I may still hold it; I should call Guinness World Records to see if it counts.
“I learned in Darchei’s kollel for about a year after getting married. I was living in Borough Park and commuting. After we had a baby, the commute became harder, so I moved to the Mir in Flatbush. Rabbi Binyamin Eisenberger used to sit in the back row and handle shidduchim. After about two years in kollel, I went to work.
“My first real job was with a mobile billboard company. We were innovators in the truck-side advertising industry. We turned standard white box trucks into moving assets, selling the ad space and wrapping them with brand advertising. We built a national network, signing contracts with trucking companies across all 50 states. We would ask companies, ‘Why pay $10,000 for one stationary billboard on the BQE when for the same price you can have 100 trucks all over the city?’ It worked. We had defined routes, and with the tracking system we installed, we could show our clients exactly where the trucks were traveling on a daily and weekly basis.
“I did that for about two years, until 2005. The owners decided to stay in marketing but pivot into what was then the emerging digital marketing. Not digital ad space like on the Internet but installing plasma screens in entertainment spaces, like restaurants. You still see versions of them today. We contracted with these spaces in New York City, placed private-network screens in their locations, and ran ads for well-known companies like Bacardi and Coors. We were targeting major brands.
“It was a phenomenal experience—until 2008, when the market crashed and all the big companies pulled back on their marketing. For example, at their peak, General Motors was spending about $650 million a year on advertising, but that was cut down to roughly $100 million. As a result, all the newer players, including us, were basically pushed out of the business.
“After that venture folded, I moved into the solar and energy space. I had a brother-in-law in the solar business, so I started brokering for him. I was also brokering electric contracts. Large energy users go out annually and buy blocks of electricity rather than relying on fluctuating utility prices, and I was involved in that process. One thing led to another, and I became more involved in energy efficiency overall, analyzing buildings to see where consumption could be reduced.
“Around 2012–2013, lighting became a major focus in the energy industry, specifically, economical lighting. Buildings were transitioning from magnetic fluorescent fixtures, the T8 bulbs, the four- and eight-foot lamps, to more efficient lighting. There was a tremendous amount of activity in the business at that point, and that’s when I got heavily involved.
“I started my own venture, Advanced Energy Resources, which was primarily a consulting shop. We partnered with utility companies to process incentives and rebates for end users, meaning their clients. I later spun off a separate division called AER Lighting, which focused solely on installations. At our peak, around 2016, we had 20–30 technicians retrofitting lighting systems in well over a 1,000 buildings across the five boroughs, including multifamily and commercial properties. We were running a large operation with a monthly payroll of about $100,000.
“Then, when I was 32, I hit a crossroad. I had two partners in that business, and they wanted an exit. They had lost patience and believed this was a big opportunity, so we sold the entire company in exchange for shares in a public entity, ‘The Power Company.’ They completed a reverse merger into a shell and then spent several years restructuring many of the companies they had acquired. That process is still ongoing. They’ve continued to develop, but the shares haven’t appreciated in a meaningful way yet. Today, my shares are probably worth only a few thousand dollars.
“Siyata dishmaya always comes around; you simply have to keep your eyes open to see it. Since I hadn’t signed a non-compete, I was back in the office the next day, managing transactions on my own but taking it slowly. About a year later, two former employees of mine, David Lax and Charles (Luzee) Stengel, reached out and invited me to join them in their new lighting business, Solo Electric. It’s been ten years and we’re still operating.
“Unlike my previous massive, high-payroll operation, Solo Electric is more of a boutique firm. We’re licensed electrical contractors in both New York and New Jersey, employing technicians and project managers in the field and office. We handle everything from complex service upgrades to the installation of high-end lighting controls, incorporating occupancy and motion sensors and daylight harvesting, primarily for commercial properties throughout the tri-state area.
“We also oversee comprehensive energy compliance. As the city kept introducing increased energy regulations, companies needed a lot of auditing. For example, the city passed Local Law 84, requiring annual benchmarking for every building. Property owners have to collect all their energy usage, electric, gas and oil, document it, and submit it to the city. Then New York City introduced Local Law 88, which requires property owners to benchmark and complete lighting assessments through a very specific portal. Shortly after that they enacted Local Law 87, affecting retro-commissioning, which includes boiler tune-ups, boiler upgrades, insulation, piping insulation and related work.
“We essentially became partners with property owners, bringing in engineers and site surveyors to assess buildings and prepare these reports every year. Once we completed the full assessment, we would handle certain components ourselves and subcontract the rest.

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In 2003, during the Second Intifada, Shalom Har-Melech and his wife Limor, expecting their second child, were attacked by Palestinian gunmen while in their car. Shalom was killed and his wife injured.

Today, Mrs. Har-Melech is remarried (her current surname is Son Har-Melech) and a member of the Knesset. She testified before the body about the fact that one of her first husband’s killers went on to be released in a prisoner exchange deal. And went on to command a deadly attack on another Israeli and to take part in the October 7 massacre before finally being killed during the Gaza war.

Her testimony was in regard to a bill before the Knesset that she is sponsoring, with the enthusiastic support of Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir.

The bill, which passed its first reading (of the required three readings) by a vote of 39 to 16 on November 10, would mandate a death sentence for anyone convicted of “intentionally or out of indifference causing the death of an Israeli citizen, when the act is carried out from a racist motive or hate to a certain public…and with the purpose of harming the State of Israel and the rebirth of the Jewish people in its homeland.”

Needless to say, the proposal has outraged a bevy of human rights groups (who tend to downplay the human right to be safe from crazed killers), occupants of the political left and the Palestinian Authority.

Not to mention the Knesset National Security Committee, whose legal advisers determined that there are fundamental problems with the bill.

They object to the removal of judges’ sentencing discretion, since a murderer found guilty of the described crime would automatically be sentenced to death; and to the bill’s seeming de facto applicability only to Palestinian perpetrators and Israeli victims (although its wording makes no ethnicity-based distinctions).

The committee also insists that proof must be proffered for the contention that implementing the death penalty would deter terrorism.

What’s more, as currently written, the bill requires executions by lethal injection, involving doctors in the process. And the Israel Medical Association objected to medical personnel being involved in any execution.

Israel abolished the death penalty for murder in 1954 (when the UK and France were still carrying out executions, as do some 27 US states and the federal government today). But capital punishment remains on the Israeli books for certain offenses, including crimes related to the Holocaust and to genocide or treason. Famously, Israel convicted and hanged Adolf Eichmann in 1962.

In 1967, military courts established in the captured territories were authorized to impose the death penalty on murderous residents. But every Israeli government since has maintained a policy of abstaining from its use, instructing military prosecutors not to seek death sentences.

And so, the elephant cowering in the corner here is already existent Israeli law. The creature needs to be coaxed forward, watered and fed.
While the Son Har-Melech proposal may have its heart in the right place, a new law, especially one that raises questions, legitimate or not, that will be used to prevent its implementation, isn’t what’s needed.

Especially since passage of the bill will only add to the hatred for Israel that has spread like some poisonous kudzu around the world. That is why Degel HaTorah’s rabbanim instructed the party’s MKs to vote against the proposal. Rav Dov Landau called the bill “provocation for its own sake” and asserted that it could “cause bloodshed.”

Instead of a new law, what is needed is governmental direction to judges to no longer refrain from prosecuting terrorists under existent law, and to start sentencing the murderous among them appropriately. Doctors needn’t be involved in carrying out those sentences. Gallows work fine.

Terrorists with blood (Jewish or otherwise) on their hands deserve execution. Not because of some lust for revenge or hatred. But because of the simple fact that removing such people from the world concurrently removes the incentive that terror groups have to kidnap Israelis, namely, to effect the release of imprisoned murderers.

As MK Son Har-Melech succinctly put it: “A dead terrorist does not get released alive.” He can no longer serve as a living bargaining chip.

Nor does he have opportunities to pick up where he left off.

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Rav Yitzchok Kolodetsky, a son-in-law of Rav Chaim Kanievsky, zt”l, is a distinguished gaon and tzaddik in his own right. Known for his asceticism and fasting daily, his brachos and counsel, particularly in matters of chinuch and shidduchim, are highly sought after. His presence leaves a lasting impression on all who encounter him.

Together with his wife, Rebbetzin Leah Kolodetsky, he provides encouragement and guidance to countless individuals. Their home is a haven for those seeking wisdom and solace.

After the October 7 tragedy, Rav Kolodetsky demonstrated extraordinary empathy for the hostages. For months he slept directly on the floor in order to share in their suffering. When winter brought illness from the cold, he continued sleeping on a thin wooden board, maintaining his austerity while safeguarding his health.

This devotion moved many families of hostages to tears. During a visit to their home, Rebbetzin Leah showed them the wooden board, underscoring her husband’s profound identification with their pain.

I recently had the merit to meet with Rav Kolodetsky. In the course of our conversation, he reflected upon—among other things—his wife’s illustrious ancestry and their enduring spiritual legacy.

Why is the Rav currently in America?
There was a shvache neighborhood that my shver, Rav Chaim, wanted to strengthen, so he decided to open a kollel there that would be l’eila u’l’eila. Baruch Hashem, it has been very successful.
Today, we have two branches, one in Pardes Katz and the other on Rechov Sokolov, with a total of 1,000 yungeleit throughout the day. This means that I am responsible for supporting approximately 6,000 children. To sustain them, we need half a million dollars every month. I have shutfim who contribute and it adds up. Once a week, I daven by the kevarim of Rav Chaim and the Chazon Ish for my shutfim to have siyata dishmaya.

That’s not a kollel, that’s a full yeshivah.
Absolutely. But I don’t give shiurim, I give shmuessen. There are many kevutzos there, and each kevutzah has a rosh chaburah.

Perhaps the Rav can share a shmuess with our readers as well.
In the beginning of Parshas Vayeishev, Rashi quotes the pasuk (Ovadiah 1:18), “V’hayah veis Yaakov eish uveis Yosef lehavah uveis Eisav l’kash—And the house of Yaakov will be a fire, and the house of Yosef a flame, and the house of Eisav straw.” Eisav has bombs. Iran has huge bombs with which they could have wiped out everyone in a single day like Haman; it could have been l’hashmid, laharog ul’abeid. But there were great nissim well above derech hateva. America, which is a non-Jewish country—there are Yidden there, but the president isn’t Jewish—threw itself into the parshah in order to help. People don’t appreciate what happened.
For 30 years Iran had been amassing terribly destructive weapons that no one could reach because they were buried so deeply, and the Israelis, with all their capabilities, couldn’t do anything about it. Why should a non-Jewish president care about that? It was derech neis, and there were several nissim involved. The commander of the Israeli Air Force, who isn’t frum, told me, “I saw Hashem in front of my own eyes. Something like this doesn’t just happen.” In the end there were no casualties even though they had to fly over a number of Arab countries to get there. After that, the Americans were able to reach those bombs and destroy them; it was mamash neis Chanukah. People don’t recognize this because they’re used to things happening, but we have to thank Hashem for the nissim. And we also have to know Who it was Who saved us.
When Yosef was born, Yaakov said that the time had come to leave Lavan and face the satan of Eisav (Rashi, Bereishis 30:25). What is the koach of Yosef that is different from his brothers? Beis Yaakov is a fire, but a fire can be extinguished. However, beis Yosef is a flame. It’s the gasoline that makes the fire too powerful to be put out. Without that power, the fire cannot destroy Eisav.
What does this mean? There are two parts: sur meira and asei tov. The sur meira of Yosef was a big chiddush. He ran away from eishes Potifar and left his cloak behind even though he knew it would be used as evidence against him. But as the lehavah, the flame, he doesn’t remain for even one extra second when there’s a possibility of an aveirah; he immediately runs away. She had been bothering him for a long time and he kept rejecting her, but now he had no other option but to flee. He was a gibbor, so he could have spent the extra second it would have taken to get his cloak away from her, but his richuk mei’aveirah was very great.
On the pasuk (Tehillim 114:3), “Hayam raah vayanos—The sea saw and fled,” the Midrash says, “What did it see that caused it to flee? It saw Yosef, about whom it says, ‘Vayanas vayeitzei hachutzah—He fled and went outside.’”
Rav Aryeh Levin, zt”l [who was Rav Elyashiv’s shver], said that when he was ten years old, the Chofetz Chaim came to their village to sell his sefarim. In those days, there were many shuls that had a sign with the words “Shivisi Hashem L’negdi Samid” hanging over the amud, and they would cover it with glass so that the smoke from the candles wouldn’t erase Hashem’s name. When the Chofetz Chaim walked into the shul and noticed that there wasn’t any glass, he asked what happened to it. The people he was talking to made gestures with their hands as if to mock the gabbai. The Chofetz Chaim realized that they might be about to say lashon hara, so he grabbed his sefarim and ran out of the shul before he could hear it, even though you’re not allowed to run in a shul.
Rav Aryeh said, “This story happened over 70 years ago, but I still remember the fear on the Chofetz Chaim’s face as he ran out. Since then, if I ever hear something that seems as if it might have even the slightest hint of lashon hara, I say, ‘Stop! Enough!’ I see the Chofetz Chaim in front of my eyes.” That’s a lehavah. It’s not enough to not do an aveirah, there has to be a flame as well. “L’olam yargiz adam yetzer tov al yetzer hara.”
In the Lederman Shul in Bnei Brak we don’t use electricity on Shabbos because it’s chillul Shabbos, so we use gas instead. As soon as the baal tefillah says Barchu on Motzaei Shabbos, all of the kids are already waiting at the electrical panel to turn it on. One time, one of the boys mistakenly turned it on right before Barchu, and the Steipler Gaon yelled out, “Mechallelei Shabbos! Mechallelei Shabbos!” We saw the lehavah of Yosef. That’s the sur meira.
What’s the asei tov? Chazal say that Yosef was an eved who obviously had to work, but he would learn Torah by heart as he was working. That’s the meaning of lehavah. He didn’t just learn when he had time; he was burning with it all day. And that’s what saved him from doing an aveirah.
The Chofetz Chaim wrote a sefer for Jewish soldiers who were serving in the various European armies and had to go through terrible nisyonos. He said that they should learn whenever they could, and just as Yosef was saved from giluy arayos in the zechus of Torah, so too would they be saved from their nisyonos.

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