\”Rescued From The Reich: How One of Hitler\’s Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe,\” by Bryan Mark Rigg, Yale University Press, 2004.
When a German army officer trawled the streets of Warsaw in 1940 looking for Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, people either pleaded ignorance or ran away in fear.
Daniel Handler looks like a character in one of his own \”Lemony Snicket\” novels. At a breakfast interview with The Journal at a New York café, he wears a pinstriped suit with a handkerchief in the pocket — reminiscent of something the bumbling Mr. Poe might wear when he deposits the unfortunate Baudelaire orphans at the home of a relative who wants to kill them and collect their fortune. In repose and in photographs, Handler\’s face turns dole, as if, like Snicket, he is turned melancholy by the events he narrates.
Circuit; Fine Thing for Feinstein; The Stem Cell Circuit; A Visit from The Rebbe; In Memory of Hindy; A Dance for Barbara; Baby Love.
Now, 40 years later, The Sarah Sommer Chai Folk Ensemble (Sommer died in 1969) is no longer dancing in basements or clicking their heels to accordion music. The nonprofit troupe is run by a board of directors and has a full artistic staff, including costume designers, choreographers from Israel and Argentina, and a technical team that ensures that Sommer\’s Israeli folk-dancing vision stays alive. The troupe itself now numbers 47 — including eight vocalists, nine musicians and 20 dancers. They perform in large venues all over the world.
El Al, Israel\’s national airline, is the only airline that keeps kosher, observes Shabbat and even gives out doughnuts on Chanukah, but recently it has been doing other mitzvot as well.
So is it possible to squeeze 5,765 years of history, culture, law and food into a 380-page book? Yes! While academics might snub their noses, the books actually can teach both the idiot and the dummy quite a bit about Judaism.
In his keynote address at the Orthodox Union West Coast Torah Convention last weekend, Judge Daniel Butler told the crowd of 300 the harrowing tale of the difficult but celebrated life of his son, Mikey.
\”Mikey\’s sign-off line was \’Day by glorious day,\’ said Butler, describing how Mikey spent his truncated life in and out of the hospital, coughing up phlegm in his lungs from cystic fibrosis.
Before he died earlier this year, at age 24, from lung transplant complications, Mikey graduated from Yeshiva University, where he was vice president of the student body. He was also a counselor at Camp HASC (a New York camp for children with special needs), a drummer in a band — and his story inspired hundreds of Orthodox communities across the United States to pray and do good deeds in his merit.
Wolpe\’s goal with this book and with his columns is to achieve the most coveted accolade of all newspaper columnists — to have his column posted on someone\’s refrigerator.
Rabbi Joseph Telushkin said that he was inspired to write the book, which CBS plans to bring to the small screen in fall 2005, after he conducted a hypnotic regression with a friend of his who went back to a life in the year 1853.
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