My Aging Parents Want to Move But Still Need So Much Help mishpacha.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from mishpacha.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
For over half a century, Rav Moshe Heinemann has been setting the bar high on kashrus, as head of the STAR-K and as a foremost authority in the ever-more-complex field of kosher certification
Photos: Eli Greengart
When the time came to build a mikveh in Lakewood shortly after Rav Aharon Kotler’s petirah in 1962, that all-important mission was entrusted to a talmid for whom the Lakewood rosh yeshivah had forseen a shining future as a moreh hora’ah for Klal Yisrael: Rav Moshe Heinemann, then a Beth Medrash Govoha yungerman in his mid-twenties.
As we sit together in the conference room of the STAR-K, the Baltimore-based kashrus certification agency Rav Moshe Heinemann has led for half a century, he recalls his visit to the venerable Rebbe Yoel of Satmar to discuss the mikveh project. “I asked the Rebbe, ‘What’s the best way to make a mikveh?’ and he replied with customary wit: ‘The best way is not to make it based on the Shulchan Aruch.’ After a pause, he continue
On the Money: the conversation continues mishpacha.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from mishpacha.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
There’s much truth to the idea that a sefer can have a soul
There’s an old saying that “sefer bli hakdamah k’guf bli neshamah,” a sefer without an introduction is like a body lacking a soul. I don’t know the source for that epigram and I’ve wondered if it was perhaps coined by someone who just wanted license to write a really long hakdamah to his sefer, or perhaps just liked the way hakdamah rhymes with neshamah.
But whatever one may say about the importance of a hakdamah, people who love seforim know there’s much truth to the idea that a sefer can have a soul. And the longer the sefer has been around and the more warm Jewish hands it has passed through, the more keenly you can sense it.