Eric Cantor, the House Republican leader and highest-ranking Jewish member of Congress, told an off-the-record gathering of pro-Israel supporters that other Middle Eastern countries share Israel’s distress over Iran’s suspected pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Speaking in Teaneck Feb. 11 to members of the pro-Israel NORPAC, Cantor described a bipartisan congressional mission he led to the Middle East that included meetings with regional leaders.

They included Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey, said NORPAC president Ben Chouake a day after the meeting.

When social work professionals engage fully with their clients, inevitably they take on some of their burdens.

“Imagine each of your clients as a backpack,” Rozetta Wilmore-Schaeffer recently told 23 staff members at Jewish Family Services in Teaneck. As that backpack fills — containing the work one does with clients, as well as their own “stuff” — “it can get pretty heavy,” she said.

Speaking with the JFS staff recently about the concept of vicarious traumatization, Schaeffer said professionals can sometimes become overwhelmed by the amount of “stuff” they are asked to carry.

Crossing state lines to tackle international issues, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that “America should stand by its friends and its democratic allies even, and sometimes especially, when it’s unpopular to do so.”

Christie was widely quoted at a technically off-the-record Feb. 10 address to a packed grand ballroom at the New York Hilton Hotel.

The Republican governor quoted a Democratic president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, to underscore his support for Israel.

“Please judge me by the enemies I have made,” said Christie, citing FDR as his source, adding, “In that same spirit, I would like to say to all of you tonight: I admire Israel for the enemies it has made.”

When a congregant approached Joel Pitkowsky in December suggesting that he consider replacing the Hershey’s Kisses distributed to children after Shabbat services, the rabbi of Congregation Beth Sholom in Teaneck took the suggestion quite seriously.

“Hershey’s is kosher, self-contained, and easy to distribute,” said Pitkowsky. “But she told me about the company not wanting to get on board with fair trade.”

“I noticed the rabbi handing out Hershey’s Kisses,” said Marcia Minuskin, the congregant who brought the issue to the rabbi’s attention. “They’re easily recognizable. I told him about the issue and he said to send him the information.”

More than 100 Princeton University alumni and current students gathered on Feb. 12 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Yavneh House, the university’s Orthodox Jewish student organization.

Participants in the daylong celebration reminisced about the challenges of forming a Yavneh chapter at Princeton in the early 1960s, at a time when a “silent quota” on Jews was easing at the Ivy Leagues.

And they celebrated the efforts to launch a Princeton chapter of Yavneh National Religious Students Association, to provide kosher food, Torah studies, prayer services, and social opportunities.

An intensive afternoon Jewish studies program for area high school students is being planned for next year.

Yoel Kaplan says the Community Talmud Torah that he plans to open in September will serve public school students and others who are not being served by the community’s yeshivah high schools.

“There should be alternatives for students who are not living up to their fullest potential with the current models of Jewish education,” he says. “There are a lot of students who could do better in an alternative program that addresses their individual needs and is a little bit less cookie-cutter.”

On January 1, 2012, Joe Frost turned 107.

Honored last year by the city of Clifton as its oldest resident, Frost has lived in that city since the age of 12.

“He was born in Passaic in 1905,” said Bill Frisch, Frost’s 80-year-old nephew, also a Clifton resident. “We have his birth certificate.”

His uncle, however, moved to the neighboring town as a child and is still there, albeit now at Daughters of Miriam.