The blaring Israeli music with the distinct “workout beat” piqued my curiosity. I peered inside the room off the lobby of the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Stamford, Connecticut, last month, and saw women of all ages doing something I had never seen before: “kangoo dancing.” Wearing elevated jump shoes on springs that allowed them to “pogo” to the wild beat, they seemed to be having the time of their life as they danced in pairs and solo. You would never guess that the circumstance that brought them together was the tragic loss of their husbands.

The Shabbaton was a joint project of Samchainu, a support organization for widows founded over 11 years ago by Breindy Halberstam and Shani Stefansky Waldman, and Nagilla, a Lakewood-based support group for widows. In Hebrew, samchainu means “our joy,” and while watching the women dance, smiling ear to ear, it struck me how apropos the name is.

Rebbetzin Fruma Rochel Altusky has several claims to fame. Among them are her maternal grandparents, American Torah pioneers Rabbi Yaakov Yosef and Aidel Herman (of All for the Boss fame) and her illustrious parents, Harav Chaim Pinchas and Rebbetzin Basha Scheinberg. But if you ask her what she feels her biggest yichus is, she will tell you it is being the first girl to attend the very first Bais Yaakov high school in America.

Rebbetzin Altusky’s life spans three continents. She was born and spent her earliest years in Mir, Poland, where her father was learning in the yeshiva. Her parents moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1935, when she was four years old. She grew up in New York and married Rav Chaim Dov Altusky. After teach for many years in New York, the Altuskys moved to the Mattersdorf section of Yerushalayim in 1965, joining her parents after the relocation of her father’s yeshiva, Yeshivas Torah Ore.

It is not unusual for pulpit rabbis to run from simcha to simcha – literally! Attending a bris, engagement party, and wedding in a single day is par for the course. But on March 9, two Baltimore rabbis rose to a different kind of rabbinical running challenge.

It all began when Rabbi Moshe Hauer, Rav of Bnai Jacob Shaarei Zion, and Rabbi Binyamin Marwick, Rav of Shomrei Emunah, answered the call for “a few good clergymen.” The call was issued by Rabbi Meir Kaniel. The running-enthusiast social worker is the program coordinator of the RabbisCanRun Challenge, which was held for the second consecutive year, this time within the annual 10K Jerusalem Marathon.

Zev Zalman (Z.Z.) Ludwick is the only Breslover chasidic luthier in the state of Maryland – if not on the entire East Coast. Most likely, he is the only one in the world. (In case you were wondering, a luthier is someone who makes stringed instruments.) Interestingly, it was a string of Divine Providence incidents that led this musician to discover his passion for building and repairing violins.

“I always wanted to make a living in music,” says Z.Z. I wanted to be a rock star from the time I was five, and I also wanted to be involved in building instruments from a young age. I really did not have the follow-through, though,” admits Z.Z., proprietor of Ludwick’s House of Violin, in Silver Spring. “After a few weeks of searching online for an apprenticeship, I was ready to give up this dream when the hand of Hashem touched the situation.”

Hindsight is 20/20, as the old saying goes, and this is certainly applicable when it comes to raising one’s children. Although caring for our children’s needs from infancy to adulthood is one of our most important purposes in life, the fact that the only training available is “on-the-job” may give us pause to look back on our child-rearing careers and ponder: What am I glad I did, and what do I regret having done?

After recently reading an article in Business Insider, “Six Ways Millennials Are Raising Kids Differently than any Generation before Them,” these questions come to mind: Do millennial parents have more guidance than their parents did in raising their children? And, are the babies born each year to millennial moms being raised better than the children of baby boomers”?

Have you ever wanted to perform a chesed but decided not to because you couldn’t accomplish the entire feat yourself? Perhaps you were able to cook dinner for someone who just gave birth but had no way to deliver it. Or you wanted to visit someone in the hospital but had no way to get there. Thanks to a relatively new organization in town, the impossible has become possible. Stretch acts as a shadchan, pairing over 120 volunteers with the requests of potential recipients, so such concerns no longer stand in the way of doing chesed.

Joining Forces

Ahuva, a special ed graduate student, moved to Baltimore from Georgia to attend Maalot three years ago. She has been involved with Stretch since its inception a year-and-a-half ago. Last winter, Ahuva was part of a group of four women who wanted to raise funds for a single mother of two young children who was in school and couldn’t support herself. “We got a psak to help her and wanted to send out a tzedaka mailing,” says Ahuva. “We needed help for the manual labor of stuffing the envelopes, typing, and sticking on the address labels. I had a brainstorm and called Stretch. They were amazing. A diverse group of volunteers of all ages and stages came out for a few winter evenings to help. Baruch Hashem, the job got done. The mailing raised between eight and nine thousand dollars, which supported this single mother for several months until she was able to finish school, get her degree, and find a full-time job.”