“What bear in children’s literature is commonly depicted wearing a brown raincoat and a yellow hat? How many layers is the earth’s atmosphere? What would the volume of a cylinder be if it had a height of 10 and a radius of 6 pi?”
That is just a random sampling of the questions Team TABC faced on the most recent segment of the MSG Varsity’s The Challenge Quiz Show, a network on Cablevision. TABC — Torah Academy of Bergen County — is located in Teaneck.
The TABC team has advanced farther in this year’s competition than ever before, said team coach Manny Landau. Since participants are sworn to secrecy until the show is aired, he cannot divulge the final outcome, he said.
Nearly 70 years have passed since Bondi Roth perished at the hands of the Nazis. Last Thursday night, however, Yavneh Academy students breathed new life into the soft-spoken boy who loved quoting Psalms and never lost his faith, as they performed “For the Love of Bondi,” based on a true story about brothers Irving and Bondi Roth.
In what has become an annual ritual, Yavneh eighth-graders gave faces and voices to martyrs of the Shoah who might otherwise have been forgotten through their performance for 1,000 parents and area students.
The play depicts the story of two brothers who were raised in a privileged home in Slovakia and their travails during the war, including rising anti-Semitism and oppressive laws against Jews, fleeing to Hungary, deportation to Auschwitz, and the Death March to Buchenwald, where the brothers were forcibly separated. Through it all, Irving and Bondi struggle to stay together, fight to survive, and to hold onto their faith.
The festival of Purim is generally associated with frivolity, feasting, and drinking, rather than with immersion in deep thought. All the merriment that envelopes the day, however, conceals its more serious messages.
Rabbi Norman Lamm, the chancellor, rosh ha-yeshivah and former president Yeshiva University, has authored “The Megillah: Majesty & Mystery,” to aid readers who seek to delve into Purim’s deeper significance.
A leader of modern Orthodoxy who has gained wide acclaim for his writings and discourses on interpretations of Jewish philosophy and law, Lamm has authored over 10 books, including “The Religious Thought of chasidism: Text and Commentary,” which won the coveted 1999 Jewish Book Award in Jewish Thought.
Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm was the third president of Yeshiva University. After his retirement from that position in 2003, he was named the university’s chancellor and rosh ha-yeshivah (head of school). He is the author of many books, and recently completed “The Megillah: Majesty & Mystery,” a new commentary on the Book of Esther published in time for Purim by the OU Press. Publication was celebrated Tuesday night at Teaneck’s Congregation Keter Torah. Deena Yellin Fuksbrumer interviewed Dr. Lamm prior to the event. What follows is an edited version of that interview.
Q: What motivated you to publish “The Megillah: Majesty & Mystery”?
She might look like a 92-pound weakling, but do not be fooled: Ten-year-old Naomi Kutin of Fair Lawn is armed with Herculean strength.
The Yeshivat Noam fifth-grader recently broke the world record for raw squatting by lifting 215 pounds — more than twice her own weight. The previous record for her weight division was 209 pounds, which was set by a 44-year-old European woman last summer. “It was quite an accomplishment,” said her mother, Neshama Kutin, in a modest understatement.
Kutin said she enjoys every moment. “I like the whole feel of getting up there and being strong.”
There are moments when a Major Leaguer’s behavior on the baseball diamond can translate into valuable life lessons.
So says baseball great Ralph Branca.
Branca, the Dodger pitcher who played with Jackie Robinson, recalls that the baseball legend faced intense discrimination (in 1947, he broke through baseball’s color barrier), but he played his best despite the opposition. “He performed admirably under extreme pressure,” said Branca, who befriended Robinson when others on the field gave him the cold shoulder.
More than 60 years, baseball big leaguer Ralph Branca kept famously quiet about the 1951 baseball game between the Giants and Dodgers that ended with the Giants winning the pennant.
Branca, of the Brooklyn Dodgers, served the final pitch resulting in Bobby Thomson’s three-run home run, which was dubbed “the shot heard ‘round the world.”
The historic game marked a crushing defeat for Branca, who, because of that one ill-fated pitch, became known by many as a “goat,” while Thomson was crowned a hero.
Call her the Kosher Betty Crocker: For Sarah Rosenfeld, baking and selling cookies to benefit local charities is a piece of cake. The fifth-grader is turning dough into cash by selling cookies for a cause.
The longtime baking fanatic started cooking up her treats on a lark last year for a handful of relatives and friends who paid to help her raise funds for local causes. Business, however, really took off, said her father, Elie Rosenfeld.
Now, “Sarah’s Sweets” is a full-fledged business with a roster of nearly 30 regular clients. The proceeds of the confections (a small box of cookies costs $5 and a large one is $10) benefit Yavneh Academy and Tomchei Shabbos.
Classroom discussions and texts came to life for Frisch sophomores at a recent event in which they depicted the beauty as well as the travails of life in Africa.
The “Frisch Africa Encounter,” designed to enable students to shed light on the people, culture, and struggles of the so-called “dark continent,” included a multi-media presentation featuring students’ musical performances, artwork, and PowerPoint presentations focusing on life in Africa. (The sobriquet “dark continent” indicates how little the West knew about Africa in the 19th century. It was never intended as a reference to race or skin color, and is not meant in that way here. — Ed.)
Since September, explained Tikvah Wiener, director of interdisciplinary studies, the sophomores in English class have been reading “The Poisonwood Bible” and “Little Bee”; learning about the integration of Ethiopian Jewry into Israeli society in Hebrew class; and working in history class on research projects related to Africa.
Shai Rosalimsky’s goal is to quash the kvetching. And he hopes his friends and neighbors will give him a hand, or more aptly, a wrist.
Shai is selling orange bracelets bearing the message “Don’t blame, Don’t Complain. Pirkei Avos 4:1”
Pirkei Avos 4:1 refers to a passage in Ethics in our Fathers that says, “Who is Wealthy? He who is happy with his portion,” explains Shai, a 12-year-old who lives in Teaneck. “You should be happy with what you have and don’t keep asking for more and more all the time. Every time you either blame or complain about something, you need to switch the bracelet to the other wrist.”
