Leave a Will to ensure a Jewish burial
A ceremony performed by Chesed Shel Emes.
A few days before Pesach, Rabbi Yanky Majesky of Chabad North Orlando got a very disturbing phone call. A relatively young Jewish woman had passed away all alone with no known next of kin. The woman on the phone was a co-worker of the deceased and found the rabbi s cell number. A week after the passing they went to clean the apartment and found her beloved cat was still there hiding under her bed. A draft of a will was found which indicated that the rabbi should oversee her funeral arrangements and to whom the cat should be given but the will was unfortunately never signed and so it took another few weeks for the hospital to allow Rabbi Majesky to arrange a proper Jewish burial.
A Song and a Prayer By Riki Goldstein | April 27, 2021
Rebbetzin Rochel Rakow faced tragedy with a siddur in her hands and song on her lips
There’s a beautiful picture of Rebbetzin Rochel Rakow taken on her final visit to Eretz Yisrael, in May 2019. She s seated serenely in her wheelchair, in a Meah Shearim store, its walls lined with leather siddurim.In her hand is a gigantic bag of freshly popped popcorn. Together with a six-year-old grandchild, the nonagenarian great-grandmother is choosing a gift. The most precious gift ever a siddur. The child in the picture is named Hindy, after the Rebbetzin’s sister, who survived the Holocaust alongside her, and the gift they’re selecting together is the indispensable item that Rebbetzin Rakow always had within arm’s reach, during the Holocaust years a siddur, her connection to tefillah; it was this that she passed on to her family. Rebbetzin Rakow was the devoted wife of Rav B
The Most Unlikely Places
For over 25 years, renowned manuscript sleuth Moshe Rosenfeld has been traveling around the world in an effort to find and redeem ancient Jewish seforim. He’s rummaged through attics and cellars in remote locations where Jews lived in the past. He’s climbed up the Himalayas and reached the slopes of the Andes Mountains. He’s traveled across America and Europe, South Africa and Russia. And he’s managed to gain access to convents and monasteries even closely guarded sections of the Vatican library in his ongoing efforts to redeem manuscripts and sifrei kodesh.
“Once,” Rosenfeld relates, “as I was exploring a library in a remote convent, I climbed a ladder to look on the upper shelves, which no one had touched for decades, maybe centuries. Suddenly, I found something amazing an ancient tiny Tehillim from the 16th century. It wasn’t more than a centimeter tall.