Some 2,700 years ago, we went to sleep one night in a world defined by a land, its Temple, and its three levels of society: Kohanim, Leviim, and Yisraelim. We woke up the next day in grief. Our Jewish identity had been flung into the air and fallen to the ground, shattered. A Jew who had always defined himself as a Kohen or Levi had no land, no Temple, no tasks to perform. Yisraelim had no tithes to give and no opportunity for taharah, purification. As we marched into Babylon, it seemed that our entire way of life was lost.

At the same time, however, seeds had been planted to rectify this tragedy. Years before, our scholars were the first Jews to be exiled, and the institutions of learning they established had blossomed miraculously. When the rest of our nation arrived in Babylon, an infrastructure for Jewish survival was already in place. We call this era the Babylonian Exile, a brief period of 70 years that included the reign of Persia and Media. As the massive Babylonian Empire fell, Persia became a world power, controlling 127 kingdoms. And when the Persian Empire fell, in turn, those Jews who, sadly, had not returned to Israel to build the Second Temple lived in the tiny piece of the fallen Persian Empire that remained: what we today call Iran. Today’s Iranian Jews are thus Babylonian Jews whose exile began 2,700 years ago. In fact, R’ Daniel Golfeiz explains, it is inaccurate to term Persian Jews Sephardim because their exile never included a stay in Spain (Sepharad). The proper term is Edut HaMizrach (the Congregation of the East).

February 11, 2020 was a very special day for the sixth through eighth graders of the Torah Institute of Baltimore. TI entered 64 middle school competitors (14 teams) who created and programmed unique robots in the first annual CIJE Robotics competition in Maryland. The boys spent over five months of recess time in addition to evening meetings at host parents’ homes to build the robots and program them to implement assigned tasks. The Yeshiva of Greater Washington and Talmudical Academy of Baltimore came to Torah Institute’s preschool gym to compete in the robotics competition.

The students of Torah Institute are given ample opportunities to shine in all areas. Dr. Suzanne Cotter, the English Department Coordinator of TI, has been at the forefront in embracing CIJE (Center for Initiatives in Jewish Education) as a curriculum partner. The CIJE has been an amazing resource, providing the students with updated curricula in English studies as well as implementing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) deep into the curriculum. This gives the boys of the Torah Institute of Baltimore an opportunity to tap into their many academic strengths in high-interest fields, in this case engineering and robotics. TI was therefore honored to volunteer to host the first-ever CIJE Robotics tournament. 

I took two books out of the RYS library on the same day. They happened to be about the same topic – children who escaped from Germany right before the war – although one is fiction and one is non-fiction. I found them both riveting. 

The topic is especially interesting to me, because both my parents came from Germany and managed to escape before World War II. My parents left with their parents and siblings, but they could have easily been the main characters in these books, who were alone.

Recently I read another book from the RYS library. This book deals with a completely different topic, a yeshiva bachur with mental illness, but it has a similar theme.

Purim is a wonderful holiday full of fun and excitement and the getting and giving of goodies. However, Purim is also a time when some people feel extra sadness. This includes children who, for whatever reason, are no longer – or never were – in a frum school. Last year, nearly 50 frum Baltimore kids in public school almost didn’t receive shalach manos.

But, thank G-d – and thanks to you – they did!

Simcha’s Purim is a local initiative of parents of frum kids in public school who daven that our children feel the happiness of Purim and the sweetness of our Torah. It was created l’ilui nishmas my father, a”h, whose name was Simcha ben Yaakov.

Once a week, I attend an anti-lashon hara (anti-gossip) session given by Dr. Chaim Haber. It is amazing to learn the rules regarding lashon hara as revealed by the great Chofetz Chaim. It appears that to fulfill all the details of becoming a non-loshon haranik, a person should rarely make comments about other people – not any easy task!

One sunny day an interesting thought came to mind: Why not also have a class about cheerful lashon? There are many sources regarding worshipping Hashem (G-d) with simcha, joy. Hopefully, after reviewing this concept, someone will initiate such a class.

The following maiseh (story) illustrates the preferable world of cheerful lashon (speech). All names are fictitious.

I was looking at a Jewish Observer magazine from the 1980s and noticed an article about an impending crisis: the shortage of rebbeim. It struck me that the issues being raised then are the same ones we keep hearing about now. Quality teachers are the most important part of school, and we always fear that the next generation of children won’t have teachers. The main argument is that we don’t pay enough. As a teacher, I wholeheartedly agree. However, if I start talking financials, this magazine – and the community – will devolve into arguments about transparency, accountability, pensions, and tuition. I’m not going there. Instead, I’d like to explore what teachers, administrators, and parents can do, aside from giving more money, to help make sure we have teachers who can and want to teach.

The shul is a sea of white. A somber hush spreads through the crowd as the aron kodesh is opened. The haunting strains of Kol Nidrei begin….

“Like the beginning of my article?”

“Hey, didn’t you say you’re writing about Purim…?”

“Oy! You’re right. My editor will have a fit. I better start over…”

The following recipes are super-versatile. They could grace your Purim or even your Pesach table. They might even be candidates for an unusual shalach manos offering.

Before presenting my “eggciting” egg recipe, I’d like to weigh in on one of the most persistent kitchen controversies of all time: how to peel a hardboiled egg. You’d be surprised how strongly some people feel about their own tried-and-true methods. I have friends who swear by the running-under-cold-water method. Others make a pinprick or cut the egg shell in half and scoop out the inside with a spoon. (What? You haven’t heard of that? It is only for people who don’t care if the egg salad has crunchy bits of shell in it. I definitely do not recommend this method.)

Purim Sixty Years Ago

by Raphael Blumberg

Sixty years ago, we lived on Palmer Avenue in Lower Park Heights – a different planet, a different Purim. There was no drinking on Purim as celebrated on Palmer Avenue. There was no Purim seudah that I can recall. There was a Megillah reading at Rabbi Sadovsky’s shul, with groggers. Each year, I went to Beth Tefiloh Day School in an ornate costume put together by my father. And there were my mother’s hamantaschen, the best in Baltimore! (They had to be.). My mother made two types: poppy seed (which we called “mun”) and date. My father was in charge of preparing the poppy seeds. This involved cooking them and then letting them hang in a bag in the laundry room, dripping water on the floor. I recall nothing more about that process. It hasn’t been passed on to me. I don’t know if people still do that today, although something tells me they don’t, just as my mother’s salting and kashering chickens right in our own home rather than receiving them kashered from the butcher might be a thing of the past. That said, I have one special memory of Purim I would like to share.

My father, Professor Arnold Blumberg, a”h, was preoccupied with Jewish survival or, more precisely, destruction and rebirth. He had witnessed the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel soon after. In 1943, he lost an eye as a 19-year-old boot-camp soldier in a war-games training accident at Fort Bragg, North Carolina and, paradoxically, thus survived the war. All his basic-training comrades were wiped out a few months later in the battle at Normandy. His life’s experiences – the annihilation and rebirth of the 1940s, the odd twist of fate that had kept him alive – all strengthened his sense that the world had a divine order to it, and restored him to the Orthodoxy of his grandparents. He even named my brother “Michael Seth,” using the Hebrew name Sheis, Adam and Eve’s third son, born to start a new world after Cain sowed destruction by killing Abel. In my entire life I have never met another Sheis, but it was the best way my father had of expressing his appreciation of destruction and rebirth.

Thus, in 1963, when I was eight years old, our last year on Lower Park Heights before we moved up to Glen Avenue, my father sent me out with my mother’s hamentashen to go door-to-door and give out shalachmanos to all the neighbors, Jew and non-Jew. I was instructed to tell each neighbor, in two sentences, the story of Purim: how the Jewish people were almost annihilated by Haman and how we celebrate our having been spared. Today, 57 years later, it is hard for me to believe that he asked me to do that, and it is hard for me to believe that I actually agreed, but this really happened.

That was my Purim back then. Was there a conventional Purim seudah? If there was, I don’t recall it. My father had to make do with the bag lunch he brought with him to work. Our Purim was primitive, without any social milieu. Call it a “Swiss Family Robinson” Purim. There was also no men’s table, no under-the-table drunkenness, no teenage “Purim cigarettes,” no fretting over whether what you gave the neighbor was as good as what you got. There was no “dvar Torah” – I didn’t know the meaning of the words – and certainly no clever dvar Torah that I spend months looking for so I can entertain my friends after drinking my 750 cubic centimeters of sweet wine.

But there was content all the same, a clear, simple message that you could share, and I definitely benefited from it.

Raphael Blumberg lives in Kiryat Arba.

Visiting the homebound, raising money, cooking and delivering food, running Chinese auctions and plays, providing money to the underprivileged, helping the childless, providing support for the physically and mentally ill, and a myriad other tasks are done by workers who are never paid for their time, energy, and devotion. I’m talking about volunteers, of course, and we all know people who devote hours and hours, days and nights, to helping others. What motivates them? Why do they do what they do?