The songs we sang

"Water to wash the dishes, water to wash the floor, water to wash Rachel and water to wash Tamar."





"Oh do you know my Grandpa Ralph, my Grandpa Ralph, my Grandpa Ralph, oh do you know my Grandpa Ralph who lives in Englewood."





"!יעקובי,יעקובי, אין כמוך בעולם"



I can't find a better version of this one





Grandma Anita sang us these:







We used to sing Shir Hamaalot to this tune:

The Tamir Goodman-Shaki connection

Our family connection to this story: My daughter, Tamar, is married to David Shaki, son of Avner, z"l and Nehama.

From http://www.collive.com/show_news.rtx?id=34275

Feb 18, 2015

The Rebbe's Bracha Saves...Again

A blessing from the Lubavitcher Rebbe to late Knesset member Avner Shaki obm was a life-saver for famed basketball star Tamir Goodman, many years later.

At an elegant Yud Shvat Melava Malka celebrating the 7th anniversary of Chabad of Baka, Mrs. Nechama Shaki, wife of the late Knesset member Avner Shaki z'l, and Tamir Goodman, Jewish basketball star, shared the fascinating story of how their lives became intertwined through the Rebbe's bracha.

Here is the story they shared, as written by Tuvia Bolton and posted on the Ascent website.

Career Hinges
by Tuvia Bolton

A week ago I attended the celebration of the circumcision of the eight day old son of a good friend: Tamir Goodman. Close to a hundred friends and family were there. In the middle of the festive meal, a well dressed, perhaps sixty year old woman suddenly stood up, asked for silence, and began to speak.

She introduced herself as the widow of the departed Knesset member Professor Avner Shaki, of blessed memory (a native of Tsfat --ed.). She then went on to explain the reason for her being there. About a year ago Tamir called her home, asked for her husband, and when he heard that he had passed away, asked if he could speak to her. He introduced himself and began thanking her profusely saying repeatedly, "You and your husband saved my life!"

At first she thought it was a prank from some old political enemy or from a madman until she calmed him down and heard his story.

Tamir Goodman, an observant Jew, is well known in Jewish circles as a star basketball player from Baltimore. In high school in the USA he had averaged 35.4 points per game. In 1999, he was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated and interviewed by ESPN, 60 Minutes, and Fox Sports. A follower of Chabad, he wore both a kippah headcovering and a tallit katan fringed undergarment during all his games, and continues to do so until this day. In 11th grade, he was ranked the 25th-best high school player in the country.

In university all the games his team played were re-scheduled so as to not fall on the Sabbath; an unheard of precedent in America.

When he graduated college, the best team in Israel, Macabbee Tel Aviv, signed him to a long-term contract. It was in all the papers. He became the darling of the Israeli media and was interviewed countless times in all the newspapers and on television. He made aliyah, served in the IDF, married and had a daughter before this son.

But suddenly his luck changed. He began having troubles with his left knee. It was giving him such pain and discomfort that the team doctors were pessimistic. He had to sit out many games. The team that brought him over traded him away, he was demoted to a minor league, and the future looked dim. And the Israeli media that once adored him began attacking him like crows. Every week someone had a vicious remark to make about him which made his life almost unbearable.

Intense physical therapy helped only temporarily. There was no other recourse than to operate. But the experts told him that the chances for success were very small… maybe five percent.

So, being a follower of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, he decided he needed the Rebbe's advice and blessing. He went to the Ohel (the place in Montefiore Cemetery in Queens, N.Y. where the Rebbe's grave is) wrote a letter asking for help and read the letter aloud. He poured his heart out asking for some sign as to whether he should make the operation or not.

Then, exhausted, he left the Ohel and went to the Chabad House which is located adjacent to the cemetery. He sat down to rest in the reception room, where a screen shows around the clock thousands of hours of videos of the Rebbe speaking, often to individuals.

Mrs. Shaki continued, "The reason he called to thank me has to do with one of these videos. But I have to first give you some background.

"Some forty five years ago in 1963 the Israeli government passed a horrendous law that could have been low point in the history of Judaism and, indeed, threatens to this day the entire Jewish world. The law of 'Who is a Jew'.

"A certain officer in the Israeli Navy married a gentile woman from Ireland who underwent a illegitimate conversion and bore him several children. He then brought them all to Israel and wanted the government to register them as Jews to make them eligible for government benefits. (Israel is, ostensibly, a haven for Jews. The only question is…who exactly is a Jew. Previous to this awful episode, the Torah definition i.e. one whose mother was Jewish or who converted to Judaism according to Jewish law, was law). But the Israeli 'High Court' agreed to change it!

"They decided five to four that the Torah was no longer a factor! Rather anyone called Rabbi, whether truly observant of the Torah or not, could make Jews.
"True their pitiful decision had to be ratified by the Israeli parliament, but at that time the Knesset was controlled by a 'leftist' coalition of nearly one hundred out of 120 members that were all for the change.

"This is where my husband of blessed memory, Professor Avner Shaki, came in. His party, the National 'Religious' Party, was officially part of this ruling coalition, and their orders were to abstain, which everyone understood is the same as token support of the change. So although he, personally, was abhorred by and totally opposed all this, he was obligated by party loyalty to keep his opposition to himself.

"We discussed it and decided he had no recourse other than to bite the bullet. In any case his one vote would have no real swing value anyway, and if he broke coalition discipline we would lose everything.

"But then, the night before the vote we received a long distance telephone call from New York. It was the Lubavitcher Rebbe himself!

"The Rebbe asked for my husband and when he answered the Rebbe introduced himself and actually begged my husband to stand up and vote 'No'!

"My husband explained that to do so would mean the end of his political career. The leftist media would make mincemeat from him, and he would almost certainly get expelled from his party. And in any case his nay vote wouldn't be significant; one hundred votes were against him and the law would go through in any case.

"But the Rebbe replied as only the Rebbe could. He said SOMEONE had to be willing to sacrifice themselves for the truth, to M'kadish Shaim Sh'maim (publicly sanctify G-d's Name).

"Well, it was hard to believe and, look, after all, we are not Chabad Chassidim. But the next day my husband did it! He actually stood up, raised his hand and voted against! I don't know if such a thing every happened in Israeli politics.
"The Israeli newspapers and television ridiculed him; his fellow party members were blazing mad! They despised him. He made hundreds, if not thousands of political enemies. We were suddenly alone. But we refused to sell out.

"Shortly thereafter we went to New York to visit the Rebbe. When my husband entered the huge auditorium where the Rebbe was speaking to thousands of Chassidim, the Rebbe actually stood for him. Afterwards we had a private audience with the Rebbe that was videotaped.

The Rebbe thanked us for our bravery, especially thanking me for supporting my husband. But then when my husband complained of how he was fired from his party position and the media was descending on him, the Rebbe replied.
"Pay no attention to the media. And regarding your job; you are like a professional athlete; you are just taking a step back in order to jump ahead with doubled and redoubled power and success."

"Sure enough it was just like the Rebbe said. Several years later my husband, Professor Avner Chai Shaki, was asked by his party to return, but this time as its leader! He truly jumped to redoubled success. But we never understood why the Rebbe talked about athletes. After all, my husband was certainly no professional athlete.

"Well, about a half a year ago; twenty five years after the Rebbe said those words to us we found out.

"Tamir Goodman was sitting in the Chabad House near the Ohel wondering about his operation, when suddenly our video appeared on the screen before him and the Rebbe said the words he was waiting to hear:

"'Pay no attention to the media. You are like a professional athlete; taking a step back in order to jump ahead with doubled and redoubled power and success.'

"The words perfectly fit his predicament! The Rebbe was encouraging him. He returned to Israel and made the operation, despite the reservations of the Professor who was to operate. It was, thank G-d, a complete and miraculous success! That is why he called to thank us and that is why I'm here at this meal today!"

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Where in the World is Yehuda?

Yehuda went through a period when he was about 6 or 7 when he kept on getting lost.

One of the more notable occasions was at a Mordechai ben David concert in Nof Ayalon. At the time, Nof Ayalon was a community on paper only. The concert was in the middle of a huge field, where a large white plastic circular structure had been erected to enclose the performance area. There were a few doors in the structure labeled either "Men" or "Women," but no one paid any attention to the signage, entering and seating themselves with no separation between the sexes.

The concert began in the early evening. The warmup entertainment continued beyond the listed time for the MBD performance and the audience started getting rowdy, throwing food and even chairs onto the stage.

Then, MBD came on stage and announced that he wouldn't begin his performance until the men and women in the audience sat separately. Well, that really heated things up. Some of the children in our group were frightened by the increasingly chaotic atmosphere and started crying, so we decided to leave.

By then, night had fallen. There was adequate lighting within the enclosure, but outside in the parking lot, it was quite dark. We exited towards the minibus that we had rented for the day, and before we alighted the bus, we took a head count and found that Yehuda was missing.

Several of the adults tried looking for him in the semi-dark and Aryeh aka Lennie was the one who found him. When we asked Aryeh how he found Yehuda, he said that he closed his eyes and said a prayer invoking Rabbi Meir Baal Haness, the Jewish equivalent of the patron saint of lost things, and when he opened his eyes, Yehuda was standing there.

Another notable disappearance occurred at the Klezmer Festival in Tzfat. During that festival, from 6:00 to 10:00 pm, there are numerous performances at various venues throughout Tzfat, every hour on the hour, with a few hundred people in attendance at each performance. At 10:00, all attendees convene in one large venue for the final concert of the night, so that the final concert includes an audience of thousands of people.

The night that we were there, we went from venue to venue enjoying the music and the lovely atmosphere. When we arrived at the venue of the final concert, we discovered that once again, Yehuda was missing. We searched the area that contained thousands of seats unsuccessfully. I then decided to return to the venue of the previous concert that we had attended.

When I got there, I saw 2 paths. The one on the right was full of throngs of people proceeding towards the mass concert, and the one on the left was mostly empty. I followed the path on the left and soon encountered a phalanx of police officers advancing towards me along with little Yehuda.

It turned out that when he realized that he had gotten separated from us, he sat down on a doorstep of a house and started crying and someone saw him and called the police.

I was so flustered and so relieved to find him, that I think I scooped him up and took him back to our group without even thinking of thanking the police.

More than the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews

Uncle Joe and Grandpa Ralph co-owned a hardware business for 60 years. Over the years, they participated in many trade shows. A popular venue was Cologne, Germany, home of the fourth largest exhibition center in the world.

During one of the shows in Cologne, Grandpa closed his booth on Friday afternoon, posting a sign saying that the booth would re-open on Sunday morning. When he returned on Sunday, he found this card at his booth.

When I asked Karen to photograph the card for me yesterday, I was able to tell her exactly where to find it, as Grandpa treasured it and had shown it to me a number of times.

The significance of the story occurring in Germany was lost to no one.

Cologne Exhibiton Center

By © Raimond Spekking / CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons), CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3620206

The case of the falling tombstone

Ten years ago, shortly before Rosh Hashana, when my father was 86 years old, he went to visit his parents' graves. Dad's parents are buried in the Yekke section of a very large cemetery in Clifton, NJ. He went on a drizzly, cold Friday morning and didn't tell anyone that he was going. He was still quite independent at that point and was still driving. Probably due to the inclement weather, dad was the only one in that area of the cemetery.

Somehow or another, dad's father's tombstone tipped over and fell on his leg. Fortunately, dad had a cell phone in his pocket and was able to call 911. Once emergency services arrived at the cemetery, it took them quite a while to locate dad, and once they did, they needed 4 men to lift the 500 lb tombstone off his leg.

Dad's injuries included multiple bone fractures, muscle damage and skin damage. Over the next seven months, he had seven surgeries, including a skin transplant. Eventually he recovered fairly well, despite his age.

One of the members of the medical staff later told my sister Karen that when Dad first arrived at the hospital after the accident and his wounds were assessed, she was sure that Dad would lose his leg.

More than one person has asked me what I thought of the mystical implications of a father's tombstone falling on his son's legs, but I prefer not to speculate about that. I certainly never brought it up with my father.

Later on, I did internet searches for "falling tombstones" and "cemetery accidents." I had never heard of such a thing before, but apparently it happens more often than you might expect, and in cases where children are involved, they are often killed. It's not common enough to induce anyone to start a cemetery safety campaign, but cemeteries are dangerous places, especially with the vertical tombstones used in many places, and more so when the stones are old enough for the materials used to have deteriorated. It makes me appreciate the flat ones that are common here in Israel.

Now we can go off the road, now we can't...

Whenever we traveled from Efrat to the airport, we would take a rather serpentine road down to Emeq Ha'Ela.

One time, as we drove along, alternating between an inside curve followed by an outside curve and then again, I heard Yehuda, then about five years old, muttering to himself, "Now we can go off the road, now we can't, now we can go off the road, now we can't..."

Bed Jumpers

Betthupferl {n} [regional]
bedtime candy [Am.]gastr.
bedtime sweet [Br.]gastr.

When we were very young, our parents followed the old German tradition of giving the children betthupferl, or bed jumpers, before we went to sleep. These were sweet treats meant to ensure sweet dreams. In our home, it was usually cookies with milk.

Eventually, our parents became more nutritionally and dental hygeinically savvy and abandoned the tradition, but it was fun while it lasted.