Although we are now far into sefer Bereishis, I am writing this in the week of parshas Noach, which brings back a memory that I want to share.

We are living in interesting times. As I walked to shul over Yom Tov, I rejoiced seeing so many observant young families passing by. The sight of a mother and father pushing a baby carriage, accompanied by a number of small children was the norm. Recently, I have been davening at Shomrei Mishmeres Hakodesh, whose Rav and Rebbetzin, Chaim and Devorah Schwartz, are welcoming and where the davening is inspiring and the weekly kiddush cholent delicious. The new shul is almost complete and the mikvah for Shabbos and Yom Tov use in the Cheswolde neighborhood is soon to open. Although I belong to three other shuls, Rabbi Schwartz is only a block-and-a-half from my home. It is not as easy for me to walk to Shomrei, although not so many years ago, I could walk six miles to Randallstown every Shabbos.

As the years pass, I am thrilled to see the fantastic growth of the Baltimore community. We see a plethora of new shuls opening and existing shuls building enlarged edifices. We see new schools opening to accommodate the exponential growth of our school-age population and the proliferation of new restaurants. I remember when going out to eat meant going to Liebes Delicatessen.

My six-hour guarding shift at our base near the gates of Gaza was almost over, following a four-hour emergency standby. Just then, shortly before sundown on Friday afternoon, I got the call from my company commander. “They need someone to help tonight in Gaza. The convoy leaves in 10 minutes. Can you go?”

I had already showered and put on my clean uniform in honor of Shabbos. I was thinking through the Torah idea I planned to share in the base shul that night. But the army was sending crews every evening to install sophisticated security systems on the guard towers of forward outposts inside Gaza. These outposts, which can accommodate up to 100 soldiers, include tents, fortified positions, and mobile command centers. Because the roofs of the outposts are exposed to Hamas sniper fire from less than half a mile away, they only work under cover of darkness. Every night’s delay in getting the security sensors up there means another day our soldiers’ lives are endangered. So, I grabbed my helmet, borrowed a bulletproof vest, and ran to the mission commander’s warehouse to help load the truck. The commander, a weathered lieutenant colonel who’d been doing this since before I was born, looked me over, pointed to a large box, and barked: “Are you strong enough to lift this?”

This past weekend, we celebrated a very exciting Shabbat Chevron with many thousands of visitors, reading parashat Chayei Sarah with its story of Avraham Avinu’s purchasing burial graves and fields from Ephron the Hittite. This constituted Avraham’s first recorded real estate purchase in the Land of Israel; hence, it merited 22 verses, very rare in the Torah for a land purchase.

We had six guests, all of them yeshiva students. Four of the six were from the baal teshuva yeshiva Machon Meir, which has been sending us Chayei Sarah guests for many years, since the days when I was translating the parashat hashavua sheet of Machon Meir. Every guest is a treasure and a world unto himself, but this year the award for most interesting guest might go to Yisrael, age 61, a successful Hong Kong businessman who decided in midlife to convert to Judaism and study Torah.

With Corona and the war, it has been five years since we residents of Kiryat Arba-Chevron enjoyed a full Shabbat Chevron such as we enjoyed during all the years since 1994. This year, we felt magic and electricity for weeks before the actual Shabbat. Visitors from the outside started to arrive on Wednesday. We had arranged to have our six guests weeks in advance. We then spent two weeks having to say no to people calling and asking for a place to stay.

Question:

I got a call from my sister-in-law, who had a wonderful idea for my son. She works with the girl at Bais Yaakov and has gotten to know her well. I did some research on the girl and am very impressed by what I hear. I called our shadchan to ask her opinion about the girl’s qualities and whether she thinks the shidduch is appropriate. The shadchan enthusiastically replied that she thinks it is a fantastic idea and she'd be happy to redt it!

Now I am in a pickle. On one hand, my sister-in-law knows both the girl and my son very well, so it may be more beneficial for her to handle the shidduch. The girl will trust her, and so we will get more honest feedback after dates. My son will also feel comfortable talking openly to his aunt.

On the other hand, we have been dealing with this shadchan for a long time. She made the shidduch for one of our children and has helped us with our other children. I value my relationship with her. She also has years of experience while my sister-in-law has never redt a shidduch. Of course, my relationship with my sister-in-law is very important as well. Do I owe it to her to let her handle the shidduch because it was originally her idea? How do I handle this delicate situation?

“Yes, she’s a wonderful, tznius girl with good middos who loves to do chesed.” This is your standard response when anyone asks about a potential shidduch.

“Does she have a good relationship with her parents?” the questioner continues. “Let me think…. Yes,” you respond. “Any emotional issues?” the woman probes further. “Hmm…. Not that I know of.” Now the questioning is finally coming to an end, “Is there anything I should be concerned about?” “Um, I don’t think so. She’s the perfect girl for your son.”

You feel relieved you were able to answer all the questions to the boy’s mother’s satisfaction and will hopefully have a part in the success of this shidduch and building a Jewish family. Was this the proper way to respond to these questions? Well, if the answers were honest and gave an accurate description of the girl, then they were okay – although it would have been better if they came across with more confidence and contained examples that illustrated the good qualities you mentioned.

But what if the girl’s strength and passion isn’t really chesed? What if you had to think about how to respond regarding the relationship with her parents since her father is verbally abusive? And the “Hmm…” before the answer about the emotional issues is because she takes anxiety medication, although you are not quite sure why she takes it. What if the hesitation before confirming there are no other concerns is that she has been hospitalized from time to time, but you don’t know the details?

On November 4, 2025, New York City voted overwhelmingly for its first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Little was known about this Ugandan-born Democratic socialist who beat out former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and radio talk show host Curtis Sliwa. What is known, however, is that Mamdani supports “global jihad,” defunding the police, raising taxes, building affordable housing, and having City-run grocery stores buy and sell at wholesale prices from centralized warehouses.

Mamdani’s rise from community activist and social media star to mayoral candidate and now mayor-elect has raised alarms both in the New York City Jewish community and the wider world. Who will pay for the socialist policies of this new mayor? What will the implications be of a hands-off approach to policing? Will Mamdani’s rhetoric against Israel spark violence against Jews?

Here’s a classic riddle about foreign language learning:

What do you call someone who is fluent in two languages? (Bilingual)

What do you call someone who is fluent in many languages? (Multilingual)

What do you call someone who knows only one language? 

American! 

Rav Yitzchak Blaser, often called Rav Itzele Peterberger, is usually considered the most prominent of the disciples of Rav Yisrael Salanter and is the source of most of the writings attributed to Rav Yisrael. Rav Itzele wrote several works, Ohr Yisrael, Kochavei Ohr, and Nesivos Ohr, which he states are comprised completely of the thoughts and opinions he learned directly from Rav Yisrael.

Aside from the many articles that Rav Itzele published in various rabbinic journals, his primary published work is called Pri Yitzchak. At the time he published the first volume of this work, he had no children, and he was the only surviving descendant of his father. Rav Itzele had two brothers, both prominent talmidei chachamim and rabbanim. Unfortunately, both passed away as young men without progeny.

Today I interviewed Ariel Goodman, owner of Pikesville Remodeling.

 How did you start your business, Pikesville Remodeling?

 When I was in fourth grade, our house was being remodeled. When I came home from school each day, I would play with the extra construction materials and look around at everything as it was being built. As I got older, I learned to work with my hands and got involved with carpentry and construction. At the beginning of my career, I worked for a carpentry company in Owings Mills. I learned many skills on the job and got my license. Soon after I got my license, I started my own company, Pikesville Remodeling.

If I had a dollar for every time someone has asked me in the past two years whether, and how, campus life has changed since October 7^th, I could probably retire from the very work that brought me to the campus in the first place.

But I wouldn’t. The task feels too vital.

Since that dark day, there have been shifts. Some are visible from the outside. Many are subtle and internal. And the truth is more complex than the headlines appearing on Jewish news sites and WhatsApp groups.

There are certainly students like Taylor, a young woman from a secular background who, almost overnight, became a fierce campus advocate. She tracks every incident of antisemitism from fellow students, professors, and administrators. Her documentation has been used by major national organizations. She has become, in some respects, an avatar of Jewish student activism.

Dear Rabbi Beren,

I’ve had children, both boys and girls, go through mainstream Jewish schools; some were bullied, some not. What I’ve seen is that when a child is bullied and perceived negatively, that perception becomes very powerful. You can’t just change one person’s mind; you have to change how a whole group thinks. How is it possible to shift a perception that so many people share and that seems completely set in stone?

Dovid

It’s that time of the year again when donuts will soon be everywhere. Those luscious and creamy confections will be in abundance as far as the eye can see. Large boxes, whose mysterious contents are hidden from view, will appear in the schools where I work. Grocery stores will display them with tongs at the ready to plunk into waiting boxes. My mouth waters just thinking about biting into a soft, fresh donut – something that is forbidden to me.

I haven’t had a donut since last Chanukah, and I’m proud of my year-long hiatus. Intellectually, I know that eating a donut can make me sick. Psychologically, I know that eating one donut is like eating one potato chip, and I’ve only met one person in my entire life who can pull off such a feat. I’m better off not indulging in any soft and creamy cravings, but it will be hard when I go grocery shopping and see wall-to-wall donuts. It won’t take much to convince me that eating them would be a festive thing to do.

My father, Henry Hausdorff, z”l, had a very heavy and cumbersome menorah. Made of solid brass and estimated to be 200 to 250 years old, based on some research, it might be a museum piece. Over 35 years ago, I saw a display of similar ones in in Tel Aviv at the ANU – Museum of the Jewish People (formerly the Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish Diaspora.) Back then, those menorahs were valued between $800 to $1,200! Current values begin at $3,000, with more intricate ones valued much more.

According to that display, the menorahs were made in Poland. This makes me chuckle since Dad’s paternal family was very proud of their German ancestry. (Actually, the family roots can be traced to Posen, which was the Prussian name of the Polish town of Poznan, when it was part of East Prussia – from about 1815 until after World War I.)

Back to Dad’s menorah: Following his petira, I put the menorah on top of a tall bookcase in our house. We never used it. Dad’s menorah stayed on the bookcase, slowly accumulating a thick layer of dust.

Sarah Bickford is a young member of our community, a former Bais Yaakov student and former teacher at the JCC and Khal Chasidim childcare programs. Tamar Schulman, director of Khal Chassidim daycare said that Sarah is a much beloved, creative, and thrifty teacher.

Unfortunately, Sarah cannot work anymore. After a severe illness, her kidneys no longer function properly, and she must spend most of her time taking care of her health. Sarah’s diet is very restricted, and she is often very tired and weak. To stay alive, she must go to dialysis three times a week for three-and-a-half hours each time. If the kidneys are not working properly, the dialysis machine does the kidneys’ job of filtering the blood and removing waste products from the body.

Sarah has been accepted into a program at John Hopkins Hospital Transplant Center, which means she will be able to receive kidney if one becomes available. This could take from two to seven years according to the doctors. She must always be prepared to receive a kidney if a suitable donor is found. She works with a nurse transplant coordinator to make sure she is prepared.

Beth Abraham shul, affectionally known as “Hertzberg’s,” is tucked away on a small side street, a simple brick-faced building set back on a green lawn. You could pass it by without ever guessing its history and unique personality among the shuls of Baltimore.

I had the opportunity to interview Mrs. Chava Rosenfeld, the daughter of its first rav, Rabbi Tzvi Elimelech, zt”l, and Mrs. Nechama Shifra, a”h, Hertzberg. I was interested to hear from Mrs. Rosenfeld about her parents, her shul, and how life has changed since she was a girl growing up in Forest Park.