Jewish Action Spring 2026

SERVING “SUGGESTIONS” SINCE 1888

FEATURES

TRIBUTE

The Dispositive Word: A Tribute to Rabbi Julius Berman

By Rabbi Menachem Genack

A Friend, a Scholar, a Life Remembered

By Joel M. Schreiber

JEWISH WORLD

Under Fire, They Came Home: How War Is Drawing Ukraine’s Jews Back to Jewish Life

By Carol Ungar

A Legacy Rekindled in Kharkiv: An OU Kiruv Initiative That Impacted Generations

By Carol Ungar

The Bread of Affliction That Also Brings Hope

By Carol Ungar

COVER STORY

Torah in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Is AI the Printing Press of the Twenty-First Century?

A discussion about whether the Jewish community is ready for AI Excerpted from the 18Forty and American Security Foundation summit with Dr. Moshe Koppel, Dr. Malka Simkovich, Tikvah Wiener and Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin

How to Use AI (And How Not to Use It)

By Dr. Moshe Koppel

Can AI Make Better Teachers?

Rabbi Gil Student speaks with Chavie Kahn, principal of the Marilyn and Sheldon David IVDU Upper Boys School

33

30

50 52 60 62 66 2 8 72

When Rabbis Meet AI

For many rabbis, the question is not whether to use AI but how

By Rachel Schwartzberg

AI in Medicine: Halachic Reflections on Emerging Challenges

By Rabbi Dr. Jason Weiner

Spotify for Shiurim? The OU’s AIPowered App Provides Customized Torah Learning

By Sandy Eller

The Mashgiach’s Algorithm: Is the Future of Kosher Supervision Smarter with AI?

By Rabbi Gavriel Price

ISRAEL

The Grit Economy: How Israelis Rebuild with Faith and Strength

By Howard Blas

DEPARTMENTS

LETTERS

MENSCH MANAGEMENT

Chochmah Is Not Artificial: Why Employees Are Turning to AI—and What Leaders Are Missing

By Rabbi Dr. Josh Joseph

JUST BETWEEN US

The Power of “Yet”: Why No Child Is a Finished Product

By Richard Altabe

76

KOSHERKOPY

When “Obviously Kosher” Isn’t Why beer—and other foods you’d never suspect—requires kosher certification

78 89 92 93 96 98 100 104

LEGAL-EASE

What’s the Truth about . . . Delaying a Brit Milah for Medical Reasons? By Rabbi Dr. Ari Z. Zivotofsky

THE CHEF’S TABLE Vegging Out at the Seder By Naomi Ross

NEW FROM OU PRESS

Aggadot HaRav: The Lectures of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik on Aggadah, Stephen Neuwirth Edition Edited by Rabbi Yaakov Hoffman

BOOKS

Kisvei HaRambam: The Writings of Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon— The Rambam, Translated, Annotated and Elucidated By Rabbi Yehuda Meir Keilson Reviewed by Rabbi Moshe Maimon

Contemporary Halakhic Problems, Vol. VIII By Rabbi Dr. J. David Bleich Reviewed by Rabbi Betzalel Sochaczewski

Attached: Connecting to Our Creator—A Jewish Psychological Approach By Rabbi Yakov Danishefsky Reviewed by Rabbi Micah Greenland

REVIEWS IN BRIEF By Rabbi Gil Student

LASTING IMPRESSIONS

The Long Walk to Moving On By Efraim Jaffe

THE MAGAZINE OF THE ORTHODOX UNION

jewishaction.com

THE MAGAZINE OF THE ORTHODOX UNION jewishaction.com

Editor in Chief Nechama Carmel carmeln@ou.org

Editor in Chief Nechama Carmel carmeln@ou.org

Associate Editor Sarah Dyckman

Assistant Editor Sara Olson

Associate Digital Editor Rachelly Eisenberger

Literary Editor Emeritus Matis Greenblatt

Rabbinic Advisor

Book Editor

Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz

Rabbi Gil Student

Book Editor

Contributing Editors

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein • Dr. Judith Bleich

Rabbi Eliyahu Krakowski

Rabbi Emanuel Feldman • Rabbi Hillel Goldberg

Rabbi Sol Roth • Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter

Contributing Editors

Rabbi Berel Wein

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein • Moishe Bane • Dr. Judith Bleich

Rabbi Emanuel Feldman • Rabbi Dr. Hillel Goldberg

Editorial Committee

David Olivestone • Rabbi Sol Roth • Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter

Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin • Rabbi Binyamin Ehrenkranz

Rabbi Avrohom Gordimer • David Olivestone

Editorial Committee

Gerald M. Schreck • Rabbi Gil Student

Moishe Bane • Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin • Rabbi Yaakov Glasser

Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb

David Olivestone • Gerald M. Schreck • Dr. Rosalyn Sherman

LETTERS

WEIGHING IN ON OZEMPIC

I was pleased to read the recent article by Dr. Sharon Grossman, “Weighing In: Ozempic and Jewish Law” (winter 2025). I have been eagerly waiting for this sort of article to appear. Dr. Grossman obviously did extensive research and reported the findings with great eloquence.

There seems to be an epidemic in our community, which bears discussion. I’ve attended simchahs recently and have seen friends and colleagues who are getting thinner and thinner as a result of using these weight-loss medications. I worry. Yes, these weight-loss medications are seemingly miraculous for those who are obese or struggling with serious medical issues. But many people are using them for cosmetic reasons, hoping to lose ten to twenty pounds before their next simchah. There seems to be an addictive quality. Once they start, they just cannot stop. Or perhaps they know that once they discontinue the meds, the pounds will creep back up again.

Rebbetzin Dr. Adina Shmidman • Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb

Design 14Minds

Advertising Sales

I worry about eating disorders. With adults abusing these drugs, I am concerned about the impact on our teens. What exactly are we role modeling for young people when we willingly starve ourselves?

Copy Editor

Hindy Mandel

Joseph Jacobs Advertising • 201.591.1713 arosenfeld@josephjacobs.org

Subscriptions 212.613.8140

Design Bacio Design & Marketing, Inc.

ORTHODOX UNION

Advertising Sales

Joseph Jacobs Advertising • 201.591.1713 arosenfeld@josephjacobs.org

President Mark (Moishe) Bane

Chairman of the Board

Howard Tzvi Friedman

ORTHODOX UNION

President Mitchel R. Aeder

Vice Chairman of the Board Mordecai D. Katz

Chairman, Board of Governors Henry I. Rothman

Chairman, Board of Directors Yehuda Neuberger

Vice Chairman, Board of Governors Gerald M. Schreck

Vice Chairman, Board of Directors Morris Smith

Executive Vice President/Chief Professional Officer Allen I. Fagin

G-d created each of us differently—different traits, different personalities, different bodies. Every individual is beautiful in his or her own way. Let us learn to cherish our bodies for what they do, rather than how they look. Our bodies work well? Terrific. Our legs enable us to dance, to stroll along the boardwalk on a glorious, sunny day—how can we not love our legs? Our hips hold our babies, our children, and our grandchildren. How can we not appreciate our hips?

To use these medications for cosmetic purposes appears to be problematic on many levels, as Dr. Grossman points out. There are healthier and more wholesome ways to take off those ten to twenty pounds. Consider the long and short term effects of taking these medications. Let’s be wary.

May all be healthy and well!

Chief Institutional Advancement Officer Arnold Gerson

Chairman, Board of Governors Henry Orlinsky

Senior Managing Director Rabbi Steven Weil

Vice Chairman, Board of Governors Jerry Wolasky

Miriam Liebermann, MSW Lawrence, New York

Executive Vice President

Executive Vice President, Emeritus

Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb

Rabbi Moshe Hauer, zt”l

Chief Financial Officer/Chief Administrative Officer

Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer

Shlomo Schwartz

Rabbi Josh Joseph, Ed.D.

Chief Human Resources Officer

Rabbi Lenny Bessler

Executive Vice President, Emeritus

Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb

Chief Information Officer Samuel Davidovics

Managing Director, Communal Engagement

Chief Innovation Officer

Rabbi Yaakov Glasser

Rabbi Dave Felsenthal

Director, Jewish Media, Publications and Editorial Communications

WHERE THE GERMAN CUSTOM COMES FROM I enjoyed your excellent (as usual) recent issue. I wanted to comment on the article, “What’s the Truth about . . . Waiting Between Meat and Dairy?” (winter 2025), which was very useful in providing a comprehensive survey of the sources.

Rabbi Gil Student

Director of Marketing and Communications

Gary Magder

Jewish Action Committee

Jewish Action Committee

Dr. Rosalyn Sherman, Chair

Gerald M. Schreck, Chairman

Gerald M. Schreck, Co-Chair

Joel M. Schreiber, Chairman Emeritus

Joel M. Schreiber, Chairman Emeritus

©Copyright 2018 by the Orthodox Union Eleven Broadway, New York, NY 10004

©Copyright 2026 by the Orthodox Union

40 Rector Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10006

Telephone 212.563.4000 • www.ou.org

Telephone 212.563.4000 • www.ou.org

Facebook: Jewish Action Magazine

Twitter: Jewish_Action Linkedln: Jewish Action Instagram: jewishaction_magazine

The author, Rabbi Dr. Ari Z. Zivotofsky, noted the German Jewish custom of waiting three hours and correctly states that “there is no early clear source for this practice.”

While I do not have a source for this, it seems to me that there is a clear source for the practice that is, in fact, cited in the article as the time between meals.

Rambam (Ma’achalot Assurot 9:28) understood that Mar Ukva was saying that one must wait the typical time between meals, which Rambam defines as “kemo sheish sha’ot—approximately six hours.” The Meiri on Chullin (105a) says the waiting period is “no less than the time between meals, which is six hours or close to it,” while in Magen Avot (9; p. 58 in 5718 ed.) the Meiri says that one

My research helps make digital solutions a lasting and valuable part of aging with dignity and connection.

I AM YESHIVA UNIVERSITY.

Dr.

Soohyoung Rain

Lee, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Wurzweiler School of Social Work

Wurzweiler School of Social Work is consistently recognized among the nation’s top programs, attracting students committed to creating meaningful change. With on-campus, live virtual classroom and fully online options, plus full-time and part-time tracks, Wurzweiler offers the flexibility to fit your life. Our renowned faculty are practitioners, researchers and policy makers whose expertise keeps Wurzweiler at the forefront of the profession.

must wait “six hours or five, the time between meals.”

It is clear to me that the “typical time between meals” was different in Eastern Europe, Spain and Egypt of Rambam’s time and Western Europe and Germany.

In the former, there were typically only two meals a day, except on Shabbat, when we had the luxury of shalosh seudot People ate a meal in the morning and in the evening, which was generally at least six hours apart. However, in Germany, they typically had three meals a day, similar to our custom now, and the “typical time between meals” was considerably less than six hours, more likely closer to three.

Because of this, I believe that the custom of three hours developed based on the Rambam cited above. I am thus perfectly comfortable following my minhag avot as based on legitimate sources.

Yehuda Leonard Oppenheimer

Afula Ilit, Israel

In 1980, I asked Rabbi Shimon Schwab, zt”l, for the source of German Jews waiting three hours between eating meat and milk. He wrote in response: “The Rema brings a widespread minhag Ashkenaz to wait only one hour after meat, which is based on the Zohar. I presume that the three hours are a chumrah that the German Jews took upon

themselves over and above the one hour. Besides this, it was customary in Germany to have a meal every three hours: early morning, midmorning, dinner, vesper in the afternoon, and supper, and since the separation of milchig from the meat meal meant to wait ‘from one meal to the other,’ the obvious time would be three hours. However, none of the poskim mention the three hours.”

Joel B. Wolowelsky Jerusalem, Israel

FEELING THE FINANCIAL STRAIN

I appreciated Shalom Goodman’s analysis of the Orthodox middle class struggling with debt (“Crushed by the Costs,” winter 2025).

The article quotes a study that found that “even families with annual incomes of $250,000 to $300,000 feel financially strained. Even among those earning more than $300,000 annually, 30 percent of those who responded reported they feel as if they were struggling.”

The quality of a person’s livelihood depends on his or her trust in the Creator. Through emunah, one attains trust in the Creator. Consequently, concentrated efforts to reinforce emunah and trust in Him are capable of improving one’s livelihood.

I study modifiable brain mechanisms and psychological functions that protect against cognitive and physical decline in aging.

I AM YESHIVA UNIVERSITY.

Dr. Roee Holtzer

Distinguished Professor, Yeshiva University Professor, Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology

For over 60 years, Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology has been a trailblazer in psychology and counseling education, consistently ranked among the nation’s top institutions. We proudly attract a diverse, global student body, all drawn to our commitment to excellence. With a distinguished faculty and a supportive administration, we provide an exceptional private education designed to empower students and ensure their success in the field.

Emunah teaches us that the Creator sustains all His creations, from the one-celled amoeba to magnificent galaxies, from the whale and the elephant to human beings, who are the crown of Creation. Our sages say that He Who gives life also gives livelihood. In other words, if one believes that the Creator is the life-giving Creator, one should also believe that He sustains His creations.

Naftali Rubin Jerusalem, Israel

The financial struggle described in the article, “Crushed by the Costs,” is a struggle we live every day, and we are likely more fortunate than many. What isn’t mentioned is how much of Jewish life and connection is tied to financial means. The ability to create social connection over Shabbos and yom tov through hosting meals, which is a reciprocal endeavor, bottoms out when you can’t afford to host. It impacts your life and your children’s social lives. It also impacts your psyche to be reliant on communal funds to provide basic things for your family.

Natan Cohen Teaneck, New Jersey

Create the Warming Setup That

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU!

To send a letter to Jewish Action, e-mail ja@ou.org. Letters may be edited for clarity.

Transliterations in the magazine are based on Sephardic pronunciation, unless an author is known to use Ashkenazic pronunciation. Thus, the inconsistencies in transliterations in the magazine are due to authors’ or interviewees’ preferences.

This magazine contains divrei Torah and should therefore be disposed of respectfully by either double-wrapping prior to disposal or placing in a recycling bin.

• Available in Black or White

• Modular & Expandable - Choose the configuration you need

• 4-Plate Starter Set with cord - Expandable up to 20 Platas

• Platas Connect by Direct Plug on Multiple Sides

• High-Tech 90W Heating Element in each Plata at 270°F / 130° C

• Easy-Clean Tempered Glass Surface

• Lightweight - Stackable and Easy to Store in a drawer

• Travel-Friendly....take just the Starter Plata with Cord to go

• Great for Home, Bu ets, Catering, Housewarming, Kallah Gifts & more

• Approved by Mishmeret HaShabbat of Bnei Brak for Shabbos Use

Chochmah Is Not Artificial

Why Employees Are Turning to AI—and What Leaders Are Missing

By Rabbi Dr. Josh Joseph

Artificial intelligence has an antonym problem. Its opposites are not technical terms, but human ones: natural, real, genuine, authentic. But perhaps those antonyms are dated now that AI’s most popular uses are no longer about writing code or editing documents, but about therapy, companionship, organizing one’s life and finding purpose.

Recent analyses of generative AI use in 2025, including widely cited industry and management research, paint a striking picture. As predicted, AI has fully entered the workplace and daily life. But it has not entered primarily as a task assistant. Instead, it has entered as a friend and mentor. People are turning to AI to help them cope, reflect and find clarity. That reality should give us pause because it raises a deeper question: What kind of intelligence are people actually seeking?

This is not a new question.

When Shlomo Hamelech was presented with that genie-in-a-bottleesque opportunity to ask for anything at all, he asked for chochmah. Not wealth, not power, not security, but chochmah. But what does chochmah mean? Though it is often translated as wisdom, Tanach presents his request in distinct ways across Sefer Melachim, Divrei Hayamim and Mishlei. Chochmah refers to discernment, the ability to judge situations and people wisely, and an internal moral compass shaped by yirat Shamayim. In Chassidic thought, chochmah is seen as being made up of two words—“ko’ach mah,” or abstract potential. What the Chassidic masters mean is that chochmah is not about the result; rather, it is a journey—from abstraction through nurture, and ultimately toward insight. What is consistent in all these Biblical examples is that chochmah refers to a process.

AI has the ability to hold complexity, to integrate intellect and emotion, and to make decisions that honor both truth and people. It is still learning, but it is gaining experience at lightning speed, making it powerful, accessible and increasingly intuitive. As a tool, it can help people think through problems, organize priorities and reflect on their own behavior. However, it is precisely because it is so powerful and so quick that it cannot provide the magical experience of processing through deliberation, inspiration and most importantly, through human companionship and its inherent meaning.

Recently, a mentee presented to me the results of an AI prompt—“What should I do with my life?” Since he had interacted with AI extensively, the results reflected a deep and intimate

knowledge of this young man and provided excellent advice. When I think back to the mentors I had and the conversations we shared, I cannot always recall what they told me. What I do remember is the warmth I felt in their presence and the confidence I received from them believing in me. Is that something AI can and should replace?

In the Hadran text we recite upon completing a tractate of Talmud, we describe how “we toil and receive reward.” The Chafetz Chaim explains that this is a unique feature of spirituality: that the process is just as meaningful as the result. The efforts of one who tries to build a chair but fails translate into nothing, but one who toils over a page of Talmud and never understands it has acquired a portion of eternity. This value in process is not limited to Torah study; it is true for all spiritual endeavors, and by extension, all human interactions. People are feeling overwhelmed, uncertain of their priorities, and unsure whether their work truly matters.

They are turning to AI not because it is powerful but because it is available, patient and nonjudgmental. It listens. It responds. It helps them sort through the noise. In many cases, AI is filling a vacuum. But by turning to AI, they are missing out. They miss out on the experience, on the give and take with a friend, mentor or manager who pauses in an argument and says, “You’re right!”

Rabbi Dr. Josh Joseph is

executive vice president/ chief operating officer of the Orthodox Union.

Perhaps they do not have a human being who truly cares about them or who comforts them when they fail—a person they respect who believes in their potential. Those turning to AI for therapy and companionship may get a quicker reply, but without the process, something integral is lost.

The emergence of “finding purpose” as a mainstream AI use case should be sobering. Purpose is not a technical challenge to be solved by better prompts. It is shaped through relationships, responsibility and contribution. In Judaism, meaning comes from knowing that one’s actions matter. Should an algorithm generate meaning?

If people are asking AI to help them find purpose, leaders must ask themselves a difficult question: Do our organizations clearly communicate why the work matters and how each person’s role contributes to the mission? Or have we become so focused on inputs and outputs that we have neglected the soul that drives our employees?

This is where management and menschlichkeit meet. Good leadership is not only about strategy and execution. It is about presence. It is about noticing when a team member is drifting, when morale is thinning or when a role has lost its sense of purpose. AI can offer reassurance, but it cannot offer responsibility. It can simulate empathy, but it cannot truly see another human being. It can answer questions quickly and efficiently, but it cannot be there for the ride.

None of this is an argument against using AI (indeed, I even used AI to help me refine this piece!). Thoughtful leaders should be asking how to integrate it responsibly. AI can help managers prepare, reflect and plan. It can free up time for the work that requires human presence: listening, mentoring, teaching and exercising judgment. The danger lies in confusing assistance with authority. AI should support judgment, not replace it. It can help you think, but it should never be the place where values are decided.

Pirkei Avot teaches, “Aseh lecha rav, u’kneh lecha chaver—Make for yourself a teacher, and acquire for yourself a friend.” Wisdom and support come through relationship. That is not a nostalgic idea; it is a management principle. People grow when they are guided by those who know them, challenge them and care about their development.

For those entrusted with leading Jewish organizations, this moment calls for honest reflection. If people are turning to AI for clarity, comfort and purpose, it is not an indictment of technology; it is an invitation to leadership. Our task is not to outpace machines, but to offer what they cannot: real presence and a clear sense that the work we ask of people matters. When leaders create structures that respect human limits and cultures that nurture meaning, AI can remain what it should be: a helpful tool, not a surrogate for wisdom.

Reprinted with permission from Harvard Business Publishing: Marc Zao-Sanders, “How People Are Really Using Gen AI in 2025,” Harvard Business Review, April 9, 2025, hbr.org.

Source: Filtered.com

Copyright 2025 by Harvard Business Publishing; all rights reserved.

CHOOSE EXCELLENCE TOURO CHOOSE

Touro University is all in on one mission—your excellence. We’re here to help you become exceptional: highly successful, purpose-driven, and ready to make a meaningful impact. The first step? Choose Touro. We’ll take you where you want to go.

The Dispositive Word

A TRIBUTE TO RABBI JULIUS BERMAN

By Rabbi Menachem Genack

The world of American Jewry is often defined by its institutions, but those institutions are defined by the giants who lead them. With the passing of Rabbi Julius “Julie” Berman, we have lost not only a titan of leadership but also a pioneer of a distinctive and dignified synthesis: an unapologetic Orthodox Jew who commanded the respect of the entire Jewish world.

Julie was a man of firsts. Notably, he was one of the first Orthodox Jews to serve as chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. In an era when the Orthodox community was often viewed as insular or peripheral to the broader American Jewish agenda, Julie stepped into the breach. His profound legal mind and unshakable integrity made him the natural choice to represent the collective interests of our people.

INTELLECT AND INTEGRITY

Julie’s intellectual pedigree was unmatched. He graduated first in his class at New York University Law School, and that sharp, analytical mind informed every communal role he occupied. Nowhere was this more evident than in his work with the Orthodox Union.

Julie served as OU president from 1978 to 1984, where he launched a number of important initiatives, including Yachad, a pioneering program to enhance the lives of Jews with developmental disabilities. As chairman of the OU Kashrus Commission, Julie presided over the Joint Kashrus

Rabbi Menachem Genack is CEO and rabbinic administrator of OU Kosher.

TOURO SALUTES UNIVERSITY

OUR ESTEEMED TRUSTEE RABBI MENACHEM GENACK

You have been an extraordinary communal leader and friend of Touro University since Dr. Bernard Lander invited you to join the nascent Touro Kollel well over five decades ago and have served as cherished confidant to him as well as to current Touro President Dr. Alan Kadish.

During your historic tenure at the Orthodox Union, you have revolutionized Kashruth supervision around the globe and created OU Press, which has helped widely disseminate the teachings of your revered mentor, the Rav

We are proud of all you have achieved at the Orthodox Union, all you have done for Touro as our board member and all your efforts on behalf of the Jewish community at large as an articulate voice for Torah values in the halls of power.

We wish you and Rebbitzen Sarah continued good health and boundless nachas from your wonderful family.

DR. ALAN KADISH M.D., PRESIDENT

ZVI RYZMAN, CHAIRMAN, TOURO UNIVERSITY BOARD OF TRUSTEES

RABBI DONIEL LANDER, ROSH HAYESHIVA, YESHIVAS OHR HACHAIM

RABBI MOSHE D. KRUPKA, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

DR. PATRICIA SALKIN, SENIOR VP OF ACADEMIC AFFAIRS

Commission—a body composed of OU lay leaders and rabbis from the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA). These meetings could often be contentious, dealing with complex halachic and logistical issues. Yet, in every room Julie entered, his word was dispositive. It wasn’t because he sought power, but because everyone—from the most seasoned poskim to the most pragmatic laymen—held him in such high regard.

THE RAV’S TRUSTED COUNSEL

Perhaps the most telling testament to Julie’s character was his relationship with his rebbi, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the Rav. It is well known that the Rav held Julie in the highest esteem. In fact, the Rav once remarked to me personally that he believed Julie should have been president of Yeshiva University. In a fitting closing of the circle, Julie’s nephew, Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman, today holds that very office.

Julie served as the Rav’s legal counsel for many years, handling all of his personal and professional legal matters. The Rav, ever sensitive to the time and effort of others, insisted on paying for these services. Julie, out of a profound sense of kavod harav, steadfastly refused. In a gesture of deep appreciation for his loyalty and friendship, the Rav gifted Julie a portrait of himself—a rare, deeply personal token of their bond.

Their relationship was also marked by a shared sense of humor and a mutual understanding of the world’s absurdities. I recall a story from the aftermath of the Sabra

and Shatila massacre. A newspaper claimed that the Rav had called Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin on Yom Kippur to urge him to appoint an investigative commission. The Rav, rightfully indignant at such a ridiculous libel, wanted to sue the paper. Julie, with his characteristic wit, told him: “Rebbi, in order to sue for libel, the claim has to be credible. No one in the world would believe that Menachem Begin would pick up the phone on Yom Kippur!” The Rav couldn’t help but concede the point.

A LEGACY IN PRINT

Julie’s commitment to the Rav extended far beyond legal advice; he was the primary engine behind the preservation of the Rav’s intellectual legacy. As chairman of both OU Press and the Toras HoRav Foundation, Julie spearheaded the publication of the Rav’s sefarim. He was particularly enthusiastic about publishing the Rav’s derashot in their original Yiddish. OU Press published an English translation of the Rav’s derashot delivered at the Mizrachi conventions, but in addition to the English translation, Julie insisted that we also publish the derashot in their original Yiddish, which we did in a separate volume. (Both volumes were sponsored by Julie, and their covers bear the Rav’s portrait—the one the Rav had given him as a gift.) I remember the Rav’s daughter, Dr. Tovah Lichtenstein, asking why we were putting so much effort into publishing the Rav’s Mizrachi derashot in Yiddish. I answered her quite simply: “For Satmar.” The real answer was that Julie was adamant about preserving the Rav’s majestic Yiddish oratory in its original form, even if there were few left to appreciate it.

He moved in the highest circles of power . . . yet he remained a humble servant of the Jewish people and a loyal student of his rebbi.

Excellence Begins at Touro’s Lander Colleges

What’s your goal? At Touro’s Lander Colleges you’re part of a welcoming community committed to making your professional dreams a reality. You’ll find an outstanding education, unwavering support, and personalized attention in an environment that’s in sync with your Jewish values. From undergrad to professional school, see how Touro Takes You There.

THE HAR ETZION CONNECTION

Julie’s heart was also deeply rooted in the halls of Yeshivat Har Etzion. He shared a lifelong friendship with Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, zt”l, dating back to their days as classmates at YU. Whenever Rav Aharon would visit America, the Berman home was his home; he stayed with Julie and his wonderful wife, Dorothy.

The Bermans’ role went well beyond hospitality; they were partners in the yeshivah’s mission. Dorothy continues to

serve as president of the American Friends of Yeshivat Har Etzion, a role she has filled with distinction. This connection was emblematic of Julie’s worldview: a bridge between the American Torah center and the flourishing world of the Israeli hesder yeshivot

Rabbi Berman was a man of the law, but he was governed by Torat Emet. He moved in the highest circles of power— meeting with presidents and prime ministers—yet he remained a humble servant of the Jewish people and a loyal student of his rebbi. He taught us how an Orthodox Jew can lead with excellence, serve with humility and leave a legacy that will speak for generations to come.

May his memory be a blessing.

A Friend, a Scholar, a Life Remembered

By Joel M. Schreiber

To realize that my beloved friend of seventy years, Rabbi Julius Berman, has left this world, is extremely painful.

Just six months ago—when I celebrated my big birthday at the annual siyum at Yeshiva University—Julie surprised me by appearing—in his wheelchair—and we danced together with all the young men.

Julie, my brilliant chavrusa, is no longer here; he is gone, but what remains are the memories of a lifetime more than well lived. He was a quiet giant who accomplished more than most men I know.

Curiously, just recently, I found an old copy of Jewish Action in my home from before it became a full-color, glossy magazine—dated 1984. An organizational newsletter, it featured the news that Julius Berman was to receive the Keser Shem Tov Award from the OU—its highest honor. There was a picture of Julie and Rav Yosef Ber Soloveitchik, zt”l, and next to the photo: a tribute to him from Joel Schreiber. It seems I have been doing this for quite some time!

I remember clearly the first day I left the shiur by the Rav, entered the beis midrash, and saw Julie sitting with Stanley Rosenberg, a”h. I asked whether I could join them. Julie said, “of course,” and thus began a friendship that lasted the rest of our lives.

Julie was a talmid chacham in the finest sense of the word—a talmid muvchar as well as a talmid ne’eman of the Rav. Whenever he spoke of the Rav—or remembered being with him—tears would come to his eyes! That closeness was beautiful.

An example: Julie told me that one day—when he returned to his office at the law firm Kaye Scholer—his secretary told him that the Rav had called. Julie ran to the phone, called the Rav, and asked if there was something awry. The Rav said, “Calm down—did you ever just feel like talking to someone?”

Again, one day—during shiur—the Rav realized that Julie was not present. He said, “I miss him. When he smiles, I know my line of reasoning is good.”

Julie’s list of accomplishments is staggering. Somehow, while working full time as a top lawyer, he did the following (not a complete list):

• Was a founder of the National Jewish Commission on Law and Public Affairs (COLPA)

• Was president of the Orthodox Union

• Chaired the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations

• Chaired the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany

• Chaired the American Zionist Youth Foundation (AZYF)

• Chaired the Jewish Telegraphic Association (JTA)

The thought has passed through my mind that when he appears before the Yeshivah Shel Ma’alah and presents his

Joel M. Schreiber is chairman emeritus and co-founder of Jewish Action

This article is adapted from Mr. Schreiber’s hesped delivered at Rabbi Berman’s levayah

accomplishments, they may look at him and say: “Here is another lawyer with a bloated time sheet! How could he have done all that in one lifetime?”

His days in the beis midrash were unusual, for after graduating from Yeshiva University with honors, he enrolled in the NYU School of Law at night and in the semichah program at Rabbeinu Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary by day! Quickly making Law Review, he graduated first in his class at NYU. His unusual ability to reduce the Rav’s shiurim to key sentences, coupled with a devotion to academic endeavors, yielded both semichah and a law degree at the same time.

During those years, Julie developed the talents of a scribe—in addition to the voluminous notes required for law school, he committed each of the Rav’s shiurim to writing. Many were the talmidim who sought after those notes!

Rabbi Julius Berman with US President Jimmy Carter as part of a delegation of the World Jewish Congress-North America, in 1978. From left around the table: Freida Weiss, president of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America; Rabbi Arthur Scheiner, president of WJC-NA; President Carter; unidentified; Herb Berman, officer of WJC-NA; Rabbi Berman, president of the OU at the time; Rabbi Joseph Karasick, OU chairman of the Board and former OU president; and Rabbi Joseph Shern.

Courtesy of Mark Karasick

Here is another lawyer with a bloated time sheet!

How could he have done all that in one lifetime?

I remember clearly sitting and learning together on a Sunday morning in the beis midrash. We began discussing dates we had had the evening before. He told me about someone he had dated for the first time. Her name was Dorothy Gewirtz—he was quite complimentary—and this turned out to be the best “acquisition” he ever made in his lifetime. In one swoop, he had a wonderful wife, a full-time driver, an accountant and an investment counselor!

In a sense, Julie shaped the world I became involved in. Not only the daily learning we engaged in, the many weekends we spent at yeshivah reviewing shiurim, but also the organizational work I became involved in.

I remember celebrating his ascendancy to the presidency of the OU under the guidance and inspiration of the Rav. Julie called me the next day: “Joel, you are joining me as vice president.” He also nominated me for board membership of RIETS and to ultimately serve as its chairman.

Would any of this have happened if not for my friend Julie?

I loved Julie, and I feel now as King David felt upon losing Yehonasan: “vayishku ish es re’eihu, vayivku ish es re’eihu . . . leich leshalom—and they kissed one another and wept with one another . . . ‘Go in peace’” (I Samuel 20:41–42). Julie, I will never forget you.

A copy of Jewish Action—when it was an organizational newsletter—dated 1984 featured the news that Rabbi Berman was to receive the Keser Shem Tov Award from the OU and included a photo of Rabbi Berman and the Rav.

How War Is Drawing Ukraine’s Jews Back to Jewish Life they

By Carol Ungar

came

Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine continues to leave widespread destruction.

It was Friday night at Kharkiv’s Beis Menachem, the only operating shul in Ukraine’s second-largest city. About a hundred people, mostly parents with children, had gathered to celebrate Shabbat. To break the ice, Miriam Moskovitz, the shul’s Australianborn Chabad rebbetzin, posed a question.

“What do you associate with the word kehillah?” she asked.

“Family,” everyone responded in unison.

For many of the roughly 150,000 Jews (according to various Jewish sources) remaining in the war-torn country, the Jewish community—and the shul—has become their closest kin. Each week, more new faces appear, signaling that Ukraine’s Jews are reconnecting with their roots. The pull to Judaism is not new. A teshuvah movement began in the 1990s with the fall of the former Soviet Union. Many of that first generation of ba’alei teshuvah left for Israel or the West, but some remained.

“We are dealing with the grandchildren of people we knew as teens,” says Rebbetzin Sarah Bald. A former Brooklynite, she and her husband, Rabbi Mordechai Shlomo Bald, the chief rabbi of Lviv, have spent thirty-three years serving as emissaries of the Karlin-Stolin Rebbe in the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv, formerly known as Lemberg. The present war has surprisingly accelerated this process.

Today, thousands of Ukrainians, some halachically Jewish and others Jewish according to the Israeli Law of Return, have affiliated with the Jewish

community, most for the first time in their lives. “People who have never entered a synagogue come to us,” says Rebbetzin Moskovitz. Some come to learn about Judaism. Most lack even the most basic information. Judaism—and in fact all religions—were illegal from 1922 to 1991, when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union.

Others come for lack of other options. In war-torn areas, gyms, restaurants, community centers and clubs are closed. In those areas, the shul often serves as the only social outlet. “They come seeking connection,” says Rebbetzin Moskovitz. “Suddenly, these Jews realize that no one else cares about them except the Jewish community,” notes Rabbi Daniel Gordon of Jewish Relief Network Ukraine (JRNU), a Chabad humanitarian organization providing aid to Jewish communities in Ukraine.

Many are internal refugees who have abandoned conflict zones for other supposedly safer parts of Ukraine. They have moved from Eastern Ukraine to central or western regions. “Some communities have even tripled in size because of this internal migration,” says JRNU’s COO Judi Garrett. Rebbetzin Bald says that her community, located in the relatively safer Western Ukraine on the Polish border, has doubled in size, increasing from 1,000 to 2,000 members since the war began. “Some come from here, from Kherson, others from Kyiv, Odesa, Zaporizhzhia, or Dnipro. Many stay in Lviv,” she says. “Others go on to Hungary, England, Israel or the US.”

Some people have lost their homes. “In East Ukraine, Donetsk and Mariupol, the Jewish communities

Suddenly, these Jews realize that no one else cares about them except the Jewish community.

no longer exist,” says Rabbi Gordon. Rebbetzin Moskovitz estimates that Kharkiv’s Jewish community of 10,000 is now roughly half its prewar size. Internal migration isn’t just a Jewish phenomenon. A UN study estimates that as many as 3.7 million Ukrainians have relocated within the country. Jewish internal migrants have an advantage—the shul is the place to go for help.

“Previously, these people had never entered a synagogue. Now they are here looking for food, medicine they can’t afford, or assistance with burying a relative,” says Rebbetzin Moskovitz. The shul distributes 1,000 packages of basic

foodstuffs, such as oil, eggs and canned goods, every month.

JRNU has distributed 400,000 pairs of glasses, as well as thousands of reflector bands for people to wear around their wrists or waists when they go out at night. “Because of martial law, which imposes curfews and frequent power cuts, it’s pitch black outside at night. The reflector bands help pedestrians remain visible to drivers,” Rebbetzin Moskovitz explains. But it’s not just about material aid.

“The shuls help these people fill an emotional and spiritual need for connection,” says Garrett. She points to high attendance at shul events like Sukkot meals or Chanukah candle lighting.

“Our community has become very close-knit,” says Rebbetzin Moskovitz. Just before this past Rosh Hashanah, the community celebrated Shabbat together in a forest two hours outside of Kharkiv. One of the highlights was the communal recitation of Selichot. “For the past three years, because of the 11:00 PM curfew, we could never say

Selichot on time, but in this space we were able to,” says the rebbetzin. “We blew the shofar. We prayed for peace here and in Israel. There were programs for adults and for the children, and a lot of bonding.”

Some community members were inspired to lean into their Judaism in the most tangible way. Rebbetzin Moskovitz recently posted a video showing a group of middle-aged men celebrating the occasion of their circumcisions. And it’s not only adults. Garrett also points to a half-dozen teens who voluntarily underwent circumcision at their Chabad-sponsored religious summer camp.

Still, always in the background is the constant rumble of war. “We can have alarms all day long. It’s like Sderot,” says Rebbetzin Moskovitz, comparing Kharkiv to the Southern Israeli city that endured two long decades of missile attacks. The shul has had its windows blown out due to attacks. But it has its own generators to continue operating during the frequent power outages. In 2023, due to the Russian attacks

on power stations and other critical infrastructure, the OU helped purchase and distribute thirty-five high-powered generators, each costing up to $50,000, to community centers and shuls in twenty cities around the country. But the bombing continues.

“Everyday life means going in and out of bomb shelters,” says Garrett. For kids, that means attending school underground. “Kids may spend the entire day in basement classrooms,” she says. JRNU has raised money to retrofit these underground classrooms. Even so, the psychological toll is severe. “There is constant fear. Where is my family? Where did they go when the sirens went off? How will I get to a safe space?” says Garrett.

“Ninety-nine percent of these attacks occur in the middle of the night. That means we don’t have day or night,” says Rebbetzin Bald. And the situation is getting worse.

Over the past few months, the Russians have stepped up their attacks, sending waves of Iranianmanufactured, self-destructing attack

Previously, these people had never entered a synagogue. Now they are here looking for food [and] medicine they can’t afford . . .

drones that fly below the radar and most often at night. The deadly drones are notoriously hard to intercept. While a New York Times report quoted Ukrainian sources that claimed to intercept 88 percent of those attacks, that may not be the complete truth.

“The Ukrainians downplay the numbers to avoid causing panic, and they don’t want to let the Russians know how successful they were,” says Rebbetzin Bald. A New York Times report estimated that 80 percent of the war’s casualties have been the result of drone attacks.

When missiles or drones hit the city, people run to safety in underground parking lots, subway stations, basements and stairwells. Unlike Israel, purposebuilt shelters and safe rooms in apartments or buildings do not exist in Ukraine. It’s hard. “In the freezing cold and boiling summer, thousands squeeze into one underground car park,” says Rebbetzin Bald.

For as many as half of all Ukrainians, there is no safe place to go. “Some people spend entire nights walking the streets, figuring they are safer outdoors than in a building that could collapse on

them,” says Rebbetzin Bald. In addition to causing injury and death, the drones and missiles have wrecked apartment buildings, energy infrastructure buildings and even aid distribution sites. Working throughout Ukraine, JRNU has helped thousands of Ukrainian Jews to either repair their damaged homes or find other places to live.

With prices shooting up and salaries remaining at low prewar levels, another major problem is food insecurity. “At the moment, the biggest challenge is poverty,” says Rabbi Gordon. “People are losing hope. They are finding it difficult to support themselves, and they are not seeing an end to this,” he says.

Ukraine has always been a poor country, he notes, but because of the war, many people are living in situations beyond what most people in the West could imagine. Rabbi Gordon describes his visit to Jewish orphans in Zhytomyr in Western Ukraine. “It was snowing, the house had no heat—just a tiny oven to cook on and an outhouse.” People living in the cities are faring a bit better. “There is food in the shops,” says Rebbetzin

Continued on p. 28

An OU Kiruv Initiative That Impacted Generations

By Carol Ungar

Most of us recognize Kharkiv—or its old Russian name, Kharkov—from the headlines. Located just nineteen miles from Russia’s border, Ukraine’s second-largest city has been the scene of fierce fighting in the still-ongoing war.

But Kharkiv has another story—a quieter, more hopeful one. Beginning in 1990, the city became home to a unique OU-funded kiruv initiative that spanned nearly two decades and ultimately shaped the Jewish futures of hundreds of young people.

The OU-sponsored Joseph K. Miller Torah Center, along with the Sha’alvim school and summer camp, are no longer operating. But in the years following the fall of communism, they were vibrant, bustling institutions where young Jews

experienced authentic Jewish life for the first time.

“It [the OU’s programs] changed my whole life,” says thirty-eight-yearold alumna Esther Lavie. “Without it, I would have stayed in Ukraine and intermarried.” Now living in Tel Aviv, Lavie—a special education teacher and mother—didn’t know she was Jewish until age eleven. Today, her husband is learning in a kollel.

The OU’s Kharkiv story dates back to 1990, when then–OU president Professor Shimon Kwestel joined lay leader Joe Alpert, Rabbi Raphael Butler—then NCSY’s national director— and singer Shlomo Carlebach on a mission to what was then the Soviet Union. Along with visits to major cities and concerts by Shlomo Carlebach, they installed a Torah scroll—written

in memory of Joseph K. Miller—at the Kharkiv synagogue. An active OU board member, Miller had been deeply involved in the cause of Soviet Jewry before he was killed in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

“Thousands of people turned up [to the Torah dedication],” recalls Kwestel. “I saw that we needed to do something.” That “something” became a kiruv camp, which opened its doors in the summer of 1991.

One of the great rabbanim of the late twentieth century is reported to have said that “every generation will be judged by a singular event. Our generation will be judged by how we dealt with Soviet Jewry.”

The OU took that mandate to heart. Located in the countryside near

Every generation will be judged by a singular event. Our generation will be judged by how we dealt with Soviet Jewry.

Kharkiv, the camp was far from luxurious—there were swamps and mosquitoes—but it gave participants a genuine spiritual high. “The OU shipped in food and sent a mashgiach to make sure it was properly prepared,” recalls Kwestel.

Counselors were recruited from among American teenagers in NCSY’s Jewish Overseas Leadership Training (JOLT) program and Israeli yeshivah students from Sha’alvim. Sha’alvim’s Diaspora program was led at the time by Rabbi Mallen Galinsky, who became the OU’s key partner in Kharkiv.

Neither campers nor staff were deterred by the modest accommodations.

The two-week camp, which attracted approximately 500 participants each summer, ages twelve to twenty-six, was an overwhelming success.

“There was so much love. We wanted to spend as much time with the staff as possible,” recalls Ariel Tarafula, who grew up in Kharkiv. Now an IT engineer raising a Jewish family in the United States, Tarafula continued attending the camp even after aging out. “There was a special atmosphere,” recalls former counselor Oshrit Moti, a mother of six and a coordinator for Israeli National Service girls, who spent five summers there. “The kids didn’t know anything. They ate non-kosher food. Most of their fathers weren’t Jewish,” she recalls. “We stood on tables and taught them Jewish songs and prayers.”

For Tarafula, the camp was also where he formally cast his lot with the Jewish people by undergoing a brit milah. “The counselors held my hand and supported me. Everyone was so kind,” he recalls.

Following the camp’s success, the OU expanded its presence in the area, purchasing and renovating several apartments in Kharkiv to establish the Joseph K. Miller Torah Center. The OU recruited Rabbi Shlomo Asraf from Israel to lead the programs. A Sephardic Jew from Netanya, Rav Shlomo—as he was known—had a natural gift for kiruv. Though he spoke neither Yiddish nor Russian, he had already founded a synagogue and kiruv center in Moscow. He proved to be exactly the right man for the job. “Rav Shlomo lived and breathed Kharkiv,” recalls Kwestel.

“Rav Shlomo brought with him the spirit of Eretz Yisrael and Torat Yisrael,” recalls Moti.

It wasn’t long before Rav Shlomo became fluent in Russian. Under his

leadership, the Torah Center operated nearly around the clock. “There were Shabbat services, classes for university students, and Pesach Seders so large that we needed to rent an auditorium,” recalls Kwestel. Rav Shlomo remembers packed Rosh Hashanah services and a Chanukah concert that drew more than 1,000 people.

He also established a day school. “We started with fifty students,” he recalls. “At its peak, we had 250 kids from grades one through eleven.” The school’s goal, he explains, was to prepare students for aliyah—and it succeeded. Nearly 600 graduates eventually made aliyah, assisted by the OU Israel Center in Jerusalem. “[Today], our graduates live all over Israel. Many became religious and established religious families,” says Rav Shlomo.

Today, the Torah Center, camp and school stand empty, as many of Kharkiv’s Jews have emigrated—most notably to Israel. Yet the legacy endures.

“I am still in touch with many of them,” says Rav Shlomo. Several months ago, he officiated at a wedding. “The mother had been one of our graduates. Now I was officiating at the chuppah for her daughter.”

“This is success,” observes Alan Miller, a former OU CFO and Joseph K. Miller’s son.

“One generation later,” he adds, “students, shelichim, counselors on JOLT, and even individuals like myself still feel the kiruv effectiveness and impact left by Rav Shlomo.”

Beginning in 1990, Kharkiv became home to a unique OU-funded kiruv initiative that spanned nearly two decades and ultimately shaped the Jewish futures of hundreds of young people.

Bald, “but you need money to buy it. Money is scarce.”

“Businesses have broken apart, and people are not investing in Ukraine. We see former business people without money, food or jobs,” she says. They often turn up at her husband’s shul asking for help.

Though their stories are wrenching, fundraising for Ukraine’s Jewish community is not easy. Potential donors are tired of this war. Since October 7, many have shifted their giving to Israel. This is because they don’t understand the situation. “They [potential donors] say the Jews should leave just like they left Nazi Germany,” says Garrett.

So why don’t they? Why doesn’t the community just make aliyah? Some have tried. When the war broke out in 2022, thousands left. However, many of them have returned. “As wonderful as Israel is, it’s a different language and culture,” says Garrett. And many of these Jews identify as Ukrainians. “A lot of people feel a deep connection to the country,” she explains.

President Zelensky is popular among Ukrainian Jews. “He has come to visit our schools and has been very supportive of the Jewish community,” says Garrett. Though he himself is intermarried and unaffiliated, Zelensky’s parents are part of the Jewish community in their hometown of Kryvyi Rih in Central Ukraine. Some people do not leave because they refuse to abandon elderly parents who cannot travel. Others have husbands or sons who are in the army. Some have both. Some people are intensely patriotic. Others are terrified.

The draft is a very sticky issue. According to Ukrainian law, all men aged eighteen to sixty-two with fewer

than three children must serve in the military. Enforcement is strict. Not only are men of draft age barred from leaving the country, but they can also be pulled off the street and forcibly drafted. “Some men hide at home or change residences to avoid being called up,” says Rebbetzin Bald. She tells of one of her congregants who was snatched into the army as he was leaving davening. “He was beaten up, his teeth were knocked out, and he was taken.”

The war has negatively impacted family life. “In many homes the father is gone,” says Garrett. That leaves mothers alone to raise the children, work, and, in many cases, care for elderly parents or in-laws. Army service is dangerous— hundreds of thousands have been killed since the war began.

PTSD is rampant. And the war’s extreme demands have strained the army’s ability to attend to soldiers’ needs for health care or battle rations. “Once you are in, you are in,” says Garrett. “It’s not like they are sending people home while the war is on; it’s a huge problem.”

As hard as it is, army service is part of life, and the Jewish communities extend their support to Jews who are part of the Ukrainian military. “In shul, we say a prayer for all Jewish soldiers who are fighting. We sent arba minim, food and siddurim to keep them encouraged, and we keep in touch with them,” says Rebbetzin Moskovitz. Rebbetzin Bald recalls the soldier who

Maybe this is why the war broke out—to return us and our children to our roots.

showed up to her Pesach Seder. “He got off, and he took those few precious moments to join our second-night Seder. We were in awe of this guy, who, after months in the army, comes home to see his only child for a few hours, yet it was important to him to participate in a Seder, eat matzah and drink grape juice—his Yiddishe neshamah bright as ever.”

Rebbetzin Bald isn’t surprised. After more than three decades of living with them, she believes Ukrainian Jews possess an inner strength. “They are not so fragile, because they went through a lot even before this war. Culturally, they have the stamina. I learn so much from them.” Rabbi Mendel Gottlieb, the Chabad shaliach in Lviv, demonstrates this with the story of twenty-threeyear-old Yura Urshansky, a new ba’al teshuvah who joined the army willingly. Several months into his service, Yura’s father passed away. “Yura wanted to know what he could do for his father,” recalls Rabbi Gottlieb. “‘Say Kaddish,’ I told him.” Even under the rigorous conditions of army service, Yura tried his best. Tragically, four days after their conversation, Yura was killed. “Now our congregation recites Kaddish for both Yura and his father,” says the rabbi. These days, Ukraine has many Jews like Yura. “People are searching for meaning and hope,” says Rabbi Gottlieb. He quotes another one of his congregants, Olena Yurchin, a mother of two whose Jewish identity was awakened as a result of the war. “Maybe this is why the war broke out,” she said. “To return us and our children to our roots.”

By Carol Ungar

For the refugees of Ukraine, hope is now found in a box of matzah.

For the displaced Jewish community of Ukraine’s Tikva Children’s Home, a new brand of handmade shemurah matzah—Ateres HaMatzos / Matzos Bucharest—is more than a kosher staple; it is a vital lifeline. This year, as the matzah takes its place on grocery shelves, it is also providing essential employment to the very people who were forced to flee Odesa during the Russian bombardments of Ukraine.

“It’s really meaningful to buy these

matzos because they support an entire community,” says Zevy Wolman, an OU Board member who has been helping to bring the matzah to the US market.

The 1,200-member Tikva community grew out of the Tikva Children’s Home, founded by Rabbi Shlomo Baksht. In 1996, newly arrived in Odesa, Rabbi Baksht discovered that hundreds of Jewish children were living in government-run institutions or surviving on the streets. Many had been abandoned by parents struggling with addiction, mental illness or the sheer inability to care for them. Their futures

seemed bleak.

To change that trajectory, Rabbi Baksht established Tikva—which means hope—giving these children a chance for a new and better life.

Over time, Tikva evolved into a comprehensive school system with dormitories that have provided schooling and a home to hundreds of children from Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova.

In March 2022, as Russian bombardments intensified, Tikva’s CEO, Rabbi Refael Kruskal, concluded that Odesa was no longer safe. Under his leadership, the entire Tikva

community—including former students, teachers and 250 orphans—evacuated by bus to Romania.

Today, Tikva is based in Bucharest, where it continues to care for roughly 300 orphans.

“It’s a unique community, the only real Orthodox community that left Ukraine and stayed together,” says Tikva volunteer Menachem Siegal.

But for community members, making a living is a huge challenge. “There isn’t enough employment in Bucharest. Not having work makes people depressed. We didn’t want that to happen. We wanted our people to be able to support themselves,” says Rabbi Kruskal.

This is why the matzah bakery— providing up to seven months of steady work each year—has become essential.

Housed in an 8,000-square-foot warehouse in Bucharest, the bakery, opened three years ago, currently employs forty adults, helping them earn a living wage that offsets basic expenses.

“This gives people the ability to feel independent; even if it’s 30 to 40 percent of what they need to live for a year, it’s better than being completely dependent on tzedakah,” says Wolman.

Israeli mashgichim trained community members in matzah production. The matzah is supervised under the Kedassia certification—a stringent kosher certification in the UK—and by the US-based Minchas Chinuch-Tartikov. Today, the bakery produces around 600 pounds of matzah a day. With the help of Network for Kindness—an association of US-based Tomchei Shabbos organizations and food pantries—in partnership with the OU, the bakery is exporting more than 60,000 pounds of matzah to the US for the first time. Network for Kindness and the OU have leveraged their institutional reach to ensure that the matzah makes its way onto the shelves of kosher grocery stores, into food pantries, and into Tomchei Shabbos packages—creating a vital market for the bakery’s work.

The bakery also sells some 20,000 pounds to Jewish communities in England, Vienna, France, Belgium and other countries. But this is the first year the matzah is being marketed in a major way. “It’s a much bigger operation this year,” says Siegal. The goal, he explains,

is to keep the bakery open year-round and employ community members throughout the year.

“There is no one making money on this matzah. It’s a nonprofit—the entire motive is to support the community,” says Siegal.

EVERYONE HERE IS A REFUGEE

Back in 2022, the evacuation to Romania was an urgent necessity; the community’s rabbi ruled that it was pikuach nefesh “They left on Shabbos in the middle of the night,” recalls Rabbi Shlomo Noach Mandel, executive director of the Shema Yisrael school network, of which Tikva is a part.

“Getting them into Romania wasn’t easy,” he says. There were many bureaucratic hurdles, as many of the children were officially registered as Ukrainian wards of the state.

While aliyah might have seemed like the natural solution, Tikva’s administration ruled it out. “We wanted the orphanage and the community to stay together. In Israel, that would have been impossible,” says Rabbi Kruskal.

In Bucharest, community members live, study and work side by side in one small neighborhood, recreating the warm atmosphere that characterized Tikva in Ukraine. Though Tikva’s mission is not formally kiruv, many children—most from nonreligious, single-parent homes— find their way back to Jewish life through the care, stability and Torah environment Tikva provides.

Since the evacuation from Odesa,

the OU’s Relief Missions department, headed by Rabbi Ethan Katz, has been sending volunteers from the US and Israel to bring joy and connection to the Tikva children. High school students, college-age youth and young professionals arrive brimming with energy. They run carnivals, lead craft projects, organize spirited Shabbat meals, and—most importantly—build genuine relationships.

“It’s the highlight of these kids’ lives,” says Rabbi Katz, a much-beloved figure among the Tikva youth, who has organized more than a dozen volunteer missions to the orphanage.

“The children at Tikva are surrounded by care, stability and genuine love every day,” says Rabbi Katz. “Many come from backgrounds where their natural homes could not provide that and the war only intensified their trauma. When people travel from around the world on relief missions to see them, it adds an extra and powerful dimension of love and affirmation—something they did not experience in their early lives. Many of these children are carrying significant PTSD, and knowing that the world sees them, values them and cares deeply about them makes a profound difference.”

As difficult as the upheaval has been for the children, the transition has often been even harder for the adults. Few speak Romanian; meaningful employment is scarce; and what was expected to be a short relocation has stretched into years, leaving the Children’s Home under severe financial strain.

“Everyone there is a refugee,” says Rabbi Katz. “When you buy this matzah, you are literally buying hope,” he says.

AGE

TORAH THE IN OF

INTELLIGENCE ARTIFICIAL

Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant abstraction or a theoretical debate; it is already shaping how we write, teach, learn and make decisions. Its presence is felt in our classrooms, institutions, shuls and homes. This cover story explores AI’s emerging impact on education, health care, the rabbinate, kashrut, Torah study, and more, and asks a question we are only beginning to confront: How will AI shape our lives and the lives of our children?

Is AI the Printing Press of the Twenty-First Century?

A discussion about whether the Jewish community is ready for AI

Excerpted and edited for length from the 18Forty and American Security Foundation summit on Artificial Intelligence held this past September. The summit featured a panel discussion— moderated by Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin, host of the 18Forty Podcast—with Dr. Moshe Koppel, Dr. Malka Simkovich and Tikvah Wiener.

Moderating the conversation, Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin framed AI as a communal challenge, akin to the advent of the printing press in the fifteenth century, and pressed the question of how the Jewish people should respond.

Dr. Moshe Koppel is a computer scientist, Talmud scholar and political activist. He is a professor emeritus of computer science at Bar-Ilan University and a prolific author of academic articles and books on Jewish thought, computer science, economics, political science and other disciplines. He is the founding director of Kohelet, a conservative-libertarian think tank in Israel, and he advises members of the Knesset on legislative matters.

Dr. Malka Simkovich is the director and editor-in-chief of the Jewish Publication Society and previously served as the Crown-Ryan Chair of Jewish Studies and director of the Catholic-Jewish Studies program at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. She earned a master’s degree in Hebrew Bible from Harvard University and a doctoral degree in Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism from Brandeis University.

Tikvah Wiener is the CEO of Kadima Coaching, a professional development organization in student-centered learning. Previously, she founded and co-directed The Idea Institute, which, since 2014, has trained close to 2,000 educators in project-based learning and innovative pedagogies. From 2018 through 2023, she was also the head of school of The Idea School, a Jewish, project-based learning high school in Tenafly, New Jersey.

Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin: AI is slowly but surely becoming a part of most of our daily lives, and undoubtedly all of us are wondering: Where does this take us next? How will artificial intelligence shape the future of our lives and the lives of our children? We are often described as the People of the Book, and our tradition has long been shaped by how we engage with and interpret the written word. At the same time, Judaism makes a unique distinction between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. So when the printing press emerged in fifteenth-century Europe, it raised a very real and practical question: What does it mean to speak of an Oral Torah when suddenly anything we say can be written down and passed along to future generations? How to understand and respond to the printing press became a major debate in Jewish law.

The Rema Mi’Fano, Rabbi Menachem Azariah da Fano, a kabbalist, was probably the first to weigh in on this, but the debate lasted for centuries: Does “printing” legally qualify as “writing”? This distinction was critical for a get (divorce document) as well as for sifrei Torah, tefillin, and mezuzos, all of which the Torah explicitly requires to be “written.”

Mechkarim BeSifrut HaTeshuvos— a collection of responsa published in 1973, which addressed questions facing the Jewish people over time

cites from the responsa of Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Chajes (19th responsum), where he acknowledges the fact that technological innovation is disruptive. Rabbi Chajes writes that every generation faces its own struggle to adhere to our mesorah while determining how new technological advancements should be understood and integrated.

There are times when there are bursts of innovation, and he says, “ve’ein lecha davar she’ein lo zeman u’makom—there’s nothing that doesn’t have its time and place”: everything is given its time to disrupt the world, and the Jewish people need to figure out how that aligns with Yiddishkeit. Do we retreat, do we move forward, or do we integrate? Throughout history, we’ve had different responses to these challenges. I would like to start the conversation by asking how your work and life have been affected by the advent of AI.

Dr. Malka Simkovich: There’s a huge panic in academia right now, as well as a stagnancy, as a psychological response to what’s happening with AI. A colleague of mine put in the following to ChatGPT: “Use my own scholarship (and he put in his name) to write a new article on a topic that I am an expert on, in the voice of Malcolm Gladwell.” What ChatGPT put out was so outstanding, so intriguing and well-written with such a good introductory hook that

my friend said, “I’m done; I am never writing again. I’ll teach and I’ll engage with my community, but I will not write anymore. It is simply not worth my time. The algorithm has exceeded my own creative capacity.” And he hasn’t written anything since. This was some months ago.

On the other extreme, you have older generation academics refusing to use AI, and that’s myopic. It’s unrealistic to think they can get through the next few decades of their careers and just ignore AI. The big question is going to be what happens to those of us in the middle who want to use AI as a tool but also want to believe that we have

the capacity for our own creative ideas and that we have something unique to contribute.

I ask myself this question very often, and I’ve tricked myself into thinking that I do have something unique to contribute. And if you sincerely believe that, then you must work outside of AI before you turn to it as a tool.

Tikvah Wiener: For the past ten years, I’ve been focused on studentcentered learning, an approach that seeks to change education so that students have greater agency in the classroom. It involves many different components; it’s not one single method

or philosophy.

In my work, I am already seeing just how artificial intelligence can simplify this process. Work that took so long without it can now be done quickly, making student-centered learning easier and giving students greater agency.

If you’re any kind of educator, general or Jewish, you can see how differentiating lessons can be made much easier using AI tools. If you go to Khanmigo, Khan Academy’s AI platform, for example, or Magic School, you will find numerous tools available to educators. So one thing that’s already become de rigueur in our workshops is asking how participants are using AI tools for their own work. And then, of course, the conversation shifts to how the kids are using AI tools themselves.

I remember when everyone flooded schools with iPads, and in many cases, the iPads just ended up in a drawer. Now we know that the iPads were not the best idea—because there was no plan. So how do we go into this new technology with a plan? For example, consider a teacher who really doesn’t want to use it. You’re the administrator. Formulate a comprehensive plan for the school. When you ban cell phones, that’s freedom from. What’s freedom to? How do you develop a proactive plan that moves everyone along with you? That’s what I would love to see happen in the field of Jewish education today.

Jewish Action is the Orthodox Union's quarterly magazine, bringing readers intelligent, relevant, and thoughtful essays from leading voices across the Orthodox world.

Fresh, new voices

Monthly digital newsletter

Access to our archive

Broad range of perspectives

Get Jewish Action by becoming an OU member

After June 30, 2026, Jewish Action will be available only through OU membership. Standalone subscriptions will no longer be offered. We will honor all current subscriptions through their expiration dates.

ou.org/membership | jewishaction.com | Questions? ja@ou.org

For those people, and that is most people, who find meaning through the creative work they do, AI is going to be an absolute catastrophe.

Rabbi Bashevkin: Moshe, I was wondering if you could speak about the genuine panic, almost like the fear of watching a computer do what you have spent your entire life distinguishing yourself by. What is your position on the angst that people feel when they see the magnitude of what is coming?

Dr. Moshe Koppel: I think that angst is completely justified. For those people, and that is most people, who find meaning through the creative work they do, AI is going to be an absolute catastrophe.

There are many potential dangers from AI, but I’m not a crazy “doomer.” The one issue that I think is very frightening is the fact that most people will have absolutely nothing to do with themselves. And I’m not talking about people whose jobs are drudgery in the first place—people who would be perfectly happy to be relieved of them.

I’m talking about people who are doing creative and interesting work and find satisfaction in it. Young people will not be in those professions—whether it’s law, computer programming, medicine, education, all the white-collar jobs. It’s not that the current employees are going to get fired; it’s that the people who are up and coming and learning those things now are not going to get hired. And I’m not talking about the economic effects of this, which I think are minor. The real effects are psychological, in terms of people’s sense of purpose and meaning in life.

This is going to be an absolute catastrophe.

Rabbi Bashevkin: How do you personally use AI in your work?

Dr. Koppel: I use AI essentially in the same way that I used Google until now, except it’s better. Instead of putting a search term into Google, I ask a question to Claude and get back a much better answer. But for the most part, I find that, for me, AI does more harm than good.

I used to just sit down and write an essay—and I was pretty good at it. Now, I write something between an outline and the full text, quickly and informally.

Then, I’ll throw it into ChatGPT and say, “clean this up.” I iterate because it often doesn’t sound like me, so I repeat the process a number of times. By the time I’m finished iterating, A) it has taken me more time than if I had just thought it through more carefully and written it myself, and B) it still doesn’t sound like me. That’s one of the main ways I use it, and it’s bad. It actually is harmful. It saves me nothing, and it makes things worse.

Rabbi Bashevkin: When internet use first began to spread, there was a large gathering within the Chareidi/ Chassidic community known as the asifah about the dangers of the internet. If you were to imagine an asifah for the broader Jewish community about the advent of AI—one that fills a baseball stadium with Jews from every stripe and background who are concerned about this question—what should the messaging be?

Tikvah Wiener: If I were to attend the asifah, I would say this: I hear what Moshe is saying, and I hear others who say that AI can be harmful, but I’m a big acolyte of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, zt”l And Rabbi Sacks was not a person who spent time in despair. He talked about having hope (which also happens to be my name). Hope is an action verb. Aside from the dangers of AI, we are all living, post–October 7, in very challenging times. I don’t think it’s helpful to live in fear.

Moreover, when we make decisions out of fear, we tend to make bad decisions. So I think if I were gathering the Jewish people, I would remind them that we’ve been in moments before that challenged our notion of what it means to be human. Imagine being a Jew when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. You would have been thinking: What about Bereishit, the story of Creation? But now we have responses to that.

I love this discussion because it’s proactive. And we have an important role to play—to say clearly that we have the Torah, and that everything we do is filtered through that lens.

If I were convening a gathering of the broader Jewish community, I would

remind everyone of that and urge us not to live in the darkness.

Rabbi Bashevkin: I really appreciated that response. Malka, I’m curious specifically about historical precedents from your vantage point as a historian how Jewish communities have responded to moments of disruption.

Dr. Simkovich: In ancient times, when writing first appeared, it threw the world into upheaval and eventually changed society in fundamental ways. (Many view writing as a form of technology). But in my view, the second great technological development in this early history is more important, and that is the advent of mail.

The Persians introduced mail at the end of the sixth century BCE and into the fifth century BCE when they built roads for the emperor’s postal system. When the Persians built those highways and used them specifically to dispatch edicts and official statements of the emperor, suddenly people were held accountable to a higher voice than their local homes, neighborhoods and immediate communities. They had to think about a world beyond their immediate reality. Of course, this is way before there was any social media, but the mail of that time was the social media of its day.

This caused people to contend with very big questions about human freedom and accountability and whether they had a unique contribution to make, knowing that there was a higher authority they had to answer to in a much more immediate way. Of course, there were always rulers and emperors, but with the mail system, there was closer connectivity and a sense of more immediate obligation to the host country under which people were living. Also, the concept of mail led people to think about others that they would never have direct connection with. Maybe they’re producing something that threatens us. Or maybe they’re producing something that perfectly aligns with us, and therefore we no longer have anything new to contribute.

Now, there must have been some panic when mail started to show up, but the Jews living under Persian rule

The algorithm has exceeded my own creative capacity.

used it as an incredible opportunity. Certainly, Jews responded right away to this technology by producing their own writings and disseminating those writings. The end of the Book of Esther is a great example of this, but it’s one of many examples of Jews writing, dispatching, transposing, sharing and translating. It’s not a mistake that the end of the Book of Esther provides a lot of detail about this dissemination and the reaches and the extent to which these letters made their way through this vast empire.

This is what Jews have done for centuries. They have faced massive changes with resilience and creativity. And I don’t want to be too optimistic—it would be against my nature—but the willingness of the Jewish community under Persian rule to adopt this technology and then incorporate it into their own frameworks of thinking really ensured their survival and their unity.

Rabbi Bashevkin: That’s absolutely fascinating. I’ve been thinking about how the human body adapts when it loses one of its senses. G-d forbid, when someone loses sight, their sense of hearing is often sharpened. As AI begins to reshape writing and other creative work, what kinds of training or skills do we need to cultivate in a world where certain forms of thinking and writing are no longer giving people the same opportunities for exercise?

Tikvah Wiener: If you’re standing in front of a classroom and suddenly ChatGPT can provide the information more effectively, then you have a problem. But one of the things we do a lot in our schools is teach the

Socratic seminar, which is a student-led discussion in which participants use open-ended questions, close reading and evidence-based dialogue to deepen understanding of a text or idea. It’s an approach guided by thoughtful questioning rather than direct instruction.

We’re Jews, so we like to talk and discuss. When you give students agency, and you teach them how to have conversations, that is actually the antidote to social media and even the antidote to AI, because students have to engage with texts in evidence-based, text-centered ways. So you’re teaching them how to do the research. You have to show them that they have to come to a conversation with both knowledge and skills, and then they have to discuss and take on someone else’s perspective. So having students collaborate, communicate and be creative with each other is the perfect antidote to AI, which says, essentially, just let me do it all for you. And you as a teacher can now say, “Actually, I need you students to be in this room and present and bring all of you to this conversation.”

Rabbi Bashevkin: Moshe, I’m curious as to which human skills you think are most at risk?

Dr. Koppel: Thousands of years ago, communities consisted of just a few hundred people, and altruism was enough to keep those communities functioning reasonably well. Once you had things like mail and roads and other forms of infrastructure, the size of the community became much larger. And there’s what’s called the Dunbar number. According to British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, people can “handle” up to about 150 relationships. Once

you’re in a group that has more than the Dunbar number of about 150, altruism no longer functions sufficiently to keep a society together. At that point, you need to develop social norms—particularly norms regarding commerce and so forth—that make it possible for people who don’t have any kind of kinship relationship with each other to function as a society. In fact, everything that we call social norms developed as a result of communities getting bigger because of transportation and communication.

What’s happening now is that transportation and communication are becoming much more refined, so that essentially you can interact with billions of people. As a result, the communities we have now are generally divided along other lines than we were accustomed to. Once it was proximity. Now people are dividing up into virtual communities— you can be in a community of lefthanded knitters, for example.

We need to start developing new social norms that are appropriate for billions of people. And I don’t think it’s possible for those norms to develop

very slowly. The speed with which these changes are happening is on a completely different scale than the scale at which norms generally evolve.

Aside from all this, social skills are getting worse. If people are interacting mostly virtually, walking around with their faces in their phones all day, this leads to really poor social skills. Intellectual skills are also going to get worse—we are growing lazy. Instead of thinking things through, we outsource our thinking to AI. And when that happens, it’s like what happened when we got Waze. Nowadays, even when I drive to the corner, I turn on Waze. I can’t get anywhere without it.

The same thing is going to happen with our intellectual abilities, because we’re farming them out. We’re losing essential skills, and at the same time we’re fundamentally changing the way we interact with people. We’re going to have to evolve norms that regulate the way we do these things so that they don’t end up catastrophically—and I don’t think we’re going to be able to do that in time.

Dr. Simkovich: One thing that AI doesn’t do well right now is express doubt and humility. When you ask AI a question, it might invite you to refine the question, but what the chatbot will ultimately give you is a highly confident answer that leaves you with a sense that it has reached the objective threshold of truth. AI, in that sense, is very unhuman-like, because when we’re in dialogue with another individual, you can gauge, even if you’re speaking over Zoom, facial expressions, body language, intonations, hesitation, doubt and also all those infinite gradations of humility. And then you have many more tools of discernment to assess critically whether you’re going to accept the information you have received.

AI right now is not very insecure. Over time it could become more humanized and say, “I’m not sure this is my answer, but I advise you to go to Claude and Grok.” But that’s not where it is right now.

Panelist Dr. Moshe Koppel warned that once AI becomes a part of daily life, “most people will have nothing to do with themselves.”

Pictured, Dr. Koppel seated next to Rabbi Gil Student, OU director of Jewish Media, Publications and Editorial Communications.

undeniably awesome. We have even parties. My morning to cupcakes and cake waiting for them. Interestingly, when we first introduce Shabbos when my kids are young, they react with resistance. Shabbos. I’ve had conversations with every one of my children, asking, “Why are you scared coming?” And it’s always the same answer: “We don’t get to watch TV.” So I ask, “What do you get to do? What do we do differently? Am I ever on my computer? Am I ever at work?” And we really put in a great deal of our parenting energy into Shabbos not just into a fun and exciting time, but

is just one example of how Jews have already developed tools for dealing with the coming crisis well before that crisis ever existed. Here

One of the things I’m worried about, as I mentioned earlier, is intellectual outsourcing. Conveniently, we actually have a tradition of arguing, as in the and Beit between the Amoraim Shmuel. We also embrace the idea that learning for its own sake is a value; we think about moral dilemmas, et cetera, and all of this serves us well. We have a tradition of dealing with moral dilemmas, arguing about them, and pondering them. Even with the concerns of outsourcing our moral and intellectual thought, we are in a very

I also mentioned earlier that we won’t have anything to do, and we won’t find meaning in our jobs. But it so happens that there is a Jewish . The really does anticipate a society in which there is so much leisure that people won’t find meaning through their professions but will instead find lishmah. It is an institution that will serve us very well. If we adapt the Shabbat Torah learning model, and model, we will mitigate a lot of the problems we are facing with AI.

Dr. Simkovich: A lot of what we’re talking about right now concerns the need to create real community. Across religious faiths, people agree that it is very hard or impossible to build genuine, authentic communities through a screen. AI can present a false sense of community, but really it’s narcissism when you’re engaging with a robot.

A recent New Yorker article discussed how hundreds of thousands of people are now in the process of “marrying” their chatbots, and millions more report being in “romantic relationships” with them. They’re able to curate the chatbot’s personality to correspond exactly to what they would imagine would be an ideal partner. But that really is narcissism because you can’t get beyond your own preferences, your own projections and your own imagination. Jewish tradition understands that community is not built based on monolithic ideas. It is built through relationship and dialogue. There’s a shared higher purpose. Judaism doesn’t tolerate monolithic ideas; it demands tension, discussion and debate. And that shared higher purpose is what keeps us together. And for reasons I can’t fully articulate, in-person gatherings that happen on Shabbos take us even further in terms of community building, far beyond what we can accomplish on a screen.

Public Shabbos observance is really the fabric that ties together the Orthodox Jewish community across the board— whether in the Chassidic community or in the Modern Orthodox community. As an Orthodox Jew, I wish there were greater pride in the fact that we have sustained public Shabbos observance— not in a triumphalist way, but in a gracious, suggestive, curious way. How can we share with the rest of the world the wisdom we have accrued through Shabbos observance?

Shabbos is a vehicle for selfacceptance, for familial acceptance, for communal acceptance, for learning to spend time without changing, just being. It is a skill we so desperately need to rediscover.

Although AI has many applications, for most people it refers to large language models (LLMs) such as GPT, Claude or Gemini. These models respond to “prompts” formulated by users, asking them to answer questions, perform tasks like translation and editing, or even solve difficult problems in science, mathematics or Torah.

Although most users barely scratch the surface of these tools’ abilities, anyone can appreciate their benefits. They put information at our fingertips and remove the drudgery from necessary but boring tasks.

Still, we need to be cognizant of the price we pay for this convenience. To understand what that price is, consider another commonly used AI app: the navigation tool Waze.

Waze is so terrific that nobody who uses it can imagine living without it. Which, in a sense, is exactly the problem. To put it bluntly, as a result of Waze, many of us have become tourists in our own cities. We follow the blue line and arrive on time, but if the battery dies, we are lost. We may

How to Use AI

(And How Not to Use It)

By Dr. Moshe Koppel

have reached our destination, but we never learned the way.

LLMs are Waze for the mind. They solve all kinds of problems quickly. But if we use them without discipline, the muscles we need to think—to work through a difficulty and actually own the answer—begin to atrophy.

Can we use AI to get to our destination without forgetting how to navigate?

The Generational Divide

For clarity, let’s focus on two common uses of AI: summarizing and explaining difficult texts, and writing up our own thoughts on a topic.

If you’ve spent decades cracking your teeth on difficult texts before ChatGPT existed, you are probably fine. You already learned how to think the hard way. For you, AI is a convenience. You are using a crutch, but you have functional legs; you’re just resting them.

The real concern is the next generation. A student who never has to sweat over a Tosafot isn’t just saving

time; he is skipping the very process that makes the material his. When the answer arrives before the question has even fully formed in his mind, he remains a consumer of Torah rather than an owner.

These tools are useful, and the walls of the beit midrash have always been porous. But they must be disciplined. AI should be treated as a shamash servant who handles logistics—not as a rav. The shamash isn’t the teacher. He’s the one who unlocks the door, arranges the benches and sets out the books. That is the proper role for AI.

Dr. Moshe Koppel is a computer scientist, Talmud scholar and political activist. He is a professor emeritus of computer science at Bar-Ilan University and a prolific author of academic articles and books on Jewish thought, computer science, economics, political science and other disciplines. He is the founding director of Kohelet, a conservativelibertarian think tank in Israel, and he advises members of the Knesset on legislative matters.

When the answer arrives before the question has even fully formed in his mind, he remains a consumer of Torah rather than an owner.

Nobody gets credit for wasting an hour on a hard abbreviation. If you are stuck on a sugya in Gemara because you can’t decipher an acronym or translate an obscure Aramaic term, use whatever tools are available. Clear the technical obstacles out of the way so you can actually learn.

AI is very good at giving you the big picture. It has read everything, which means it knows who is arguing with whom. Ask it, “Who disagrees with Rashi here?” or “What are the standard approaches to timers on Shabbat?” It will map out the positions, distinguish the strict from the lenient, and identify the fault lines. That can save hours of hunting. You are free to contemplate the arguments rather than search for them.

In short, use the machine to find the sources. Then close the laptop and read them.

Clearing the Barriers

The problem with AI is that it can be too smooth. It produces confident summaries that hide the mess. But Torah is the mess—the arguments, the contradictions, the tensions that do not resolve neatly.

We learned this the hard way at Dicta, my AI group in Jerusalem. We built a tool that functions like a halachic answering machine: You ask a question in plain language, and the system processes the literature and generates a response. It is technically very clever— and it is a mistake.

It became clear that many users treated the tool like a vending machine—insert coin (question), receive product (answer). Too often, they weren’t looking at the sources at all. They were outsourcing understanding.

As a result, we removed the conclusion from the next version. The new system assembles the applicable sources, links directly to the relevant passages, highlights the key lines, and stops. The judgment is yours.

We made that change for a reason that goes beyond interface design. It’s about the nature of pesak. There is a temptation to ask these models for a ruling because they’re so capable. In many cases, AI can make a reasonable guess at what Rabbi Moshe Feinstein might say because it has, effectively, digested the responsa of Iggerot Moshe.

But a pesak isn’t a statistical prediction. A computer can tell you that a ruling hinges on whether the pot was hot or the food was solid. It can’t see the family standing in the kitchen or weigh the financial loss against the spiritual cost in that particular home. It has no skin in the game.

Real scholars rely on shimush (apprenticeship). A posek brings a lifetime of watching how his own teachers navigated the gap between the text and lived reality. You get that from serving a master, not from processing data.

And even if most of us are never going to be issuing halachic rulings ourselves, we won’t learn how to be good Jews solely from a one-size-fits-all oracle. We learn from teachers, from our community and from wrestling with the texts on our own.

Putting Together Your Own Ideas

If a machine writes your devar Torah, you haven’t acquired Torah; you’ve rented it.

This principle extends beyond Torah. We live in an age in which generating fluent, persuasive text is essentially free. This makes it very easy to be lazy. Using AI to draft emails, summarize news, or plan your finances often saves time—and is almost inevitable. But be careful not to let the machine take over your thinking. If you have an LLM help you draft a text, you need to then question every assumption, verify every claim and ensure it hasn’t misrepresented your views—by which time you might discover that you’d have been better off just drafting the whole thing from scratch yourself in the first place.

In short, treat AI output like a rumor in shul: possibly true and possibly useful, but you better think twice before you pass it on. Use it to turn an outline into a draft, then edit ruthlessly. If you can’t spot the errors in the output, you aren’t competent to use the tool for that task.

We are moving from an era of searching to an era of generating. Fluent answers are now a keystroke away, and it’s tempting to skip the slow parts. But the slow parts are where you actually form and test your own thoughts. That only happens if you do the work.

Let AI speed up the drudgery. The learning is on you.

Can AI Make Better Teachers?

How one school is putting AI to work in the classroom

To some educators, AI is a genuine game changer: a tool that can personalize learning and free teachers from the administrative grind. To others, it simply robs students of the deep thinking, productive struggle, and slow, disciplined work that real learning requires.

As educators are discovering, the truth is rarely that simple. AI can explain a math problem step-by-step or function as a kind of always-available tutor. AI can help explain a Rashi or generate Chumash worksheets tailored to a student’s needs. Used thoughtfully, it has the potential to help students learn at their own level—even in large classrooms. But educators and schools are still struggling with this technology and trying to figure it all out. Does AI belong in Jewish classrooms? If so, how? At the IVDU network of schools, those questions are already being tested. IVDU, part of the OU’s Yachad network, serves students with mild-to-moderate learning, social and developmental delays. Before the school

year began, IVDU Head of School

Rabbi Michoel Druin invited Rabbi Gil Student, OU director of Jewish Media, Publications and Editorial Communications, to train faculty and staff in the thoughtful use of AI as an educational tool. After several months of experience, Chavie Kahn, principal of the Marilyn and Sheldon David IVDU Upper Boys School in Brooklyn, New York, spoke with Rabbi Student about how AI is being introduced in practice at the school.

Rabbi Gil Student: How has AI been working in the IVDU schools? How are teachers and students responding to it?

Chavie Kahn: Working with AI has generated tremendous enthusiasm among staff across all levels. Before the AI training we had some months ago, we had some staff members who were already using it, some staff members who were intrigued, and some staff members who were totally disinterested. Since the training,

everyone has gotten on board. Everyone is coming to the realization that AI is a tool that, when used correctly, could really do what the staff is doing in a better, richer and more efficient way.

RGS: What have you been seeing and hearing about how teachers are using AI? Are they using it to save time on lesson preparation? And is it effective in helping them do their job better?

CK: My teachers are innovators. You give them the platform, and they invest time in learning how to bring it to the classroom in a way that will improve their teaching and their efficiency. Every month, they’re using it more and more in different, greater ways. They’re definitely using it to save time and help with lesson preparation, but they’re also using it to do a better job with the lesson execution. It’s helping them differentiate more and create more opportunities using multiple modalities in the lesson. For staff members who are great with breaking down instruction but are less creative,

they’re using AI to help them bring more creativity into the classroom. And vice versa, for the staff who are very creative but less grounded, they’re using it to ground the instruction.

RGS: You referred to differentiated instruction. Can you explain what that is?

CK: Sure. Differentiation is a teaching approach where you tailor instruction, content and assessment to meet students’ needs. For example, in one class, the students were reading a book, and one of the students in the class has strong comprehension skills but struggles with decoding. For this student’s homework, the teacher was able to generate a similar text to the text that the students were reading, but this was on a lower reading level, so the student was able to complete the homework independently.

RGS: Wow. Have staff created classroom visuals and games using AI?

CK: Yes. My teachers use AI to create educational games, interactive activities, quizzes and even “Escape the Room” activities.

RGS: In what way has AI not worked well? Can you recall any failures or frustrations that teachers have encountered?

CK: I wouldn’t say there are frustrations, but I do think teachers grapple with the question of how we are really going to teach our students to use AI responsibly. We’re using AI in the school quite a lot. The students are learning how to use it to brainstorm ideas and for pre-writing drafts when they’re working on an independent project, et cetera. On the one hand, we want to give our students with disabilities the ability to do things that would have taken them a very, very long time to do without the support of AI. We view AI as a calculator; it’s a tool. They need to learn how to use a calculator.

On the other hand, we want to help them use it responsibly. And that’s

Some of them don’t view AI as a tool; they view it as a way of cheating . . . . It was interesting to hear their perspective on it.

something that we feel is our achrayut, to give them that chinuch on how to use AI al pi Torah

In terms of failures, we saw pretty quickly that AI can’t be relied on completely and that it can be very flawed. Our staff has learned to look at an AI output carefully. Recently, we were looking for a transliterated Kiddush Levanah. We asked AI to produce it, and it was completely incorrect. We ended up finding it in an online siddur and using that instead. So we’re using it to make our jobs easier, but we’re not relying on it. You need an intelligent human to make sure that it represents the views of the teacher and the views of the school—because it will make mistakes. Additionally, you should be consulting your rabbi rather than attempting to rely on AI for halachic pesak or Torah guidance.

RGS: How do kids respond to AI?

CK: I was covering for a class one day, and I asked the students to write an essay using AI about something that happened in history, as if they were writing from the perspective of a character who was living at that time. Interestingly, the students were really opposed to using AI for this task. My

assumption was that my high school students would be very pro-AI. I was surprised to see that the class was split in half, and some of them don’t view AI as a tool; they view it as a way of cheating, which is really not the way I view it. It was interesting to hear their perspective on it.

RGS: That’s something to be proud of, that the students are evaluating technology, not just running toward it.

CK: True.

RGS: So what are your overall thoughts about AI in a school environment?

CK: In IVDU, we’re using AI thoughtfully. And we’re lucky to work for the OU, which enables us to bring these tools into our school setting. As long as there’s no issue with security or safety, and students are using it responsibly, we learn and we implement. It’s incumbent upon our students and ourselves to keep learning because AI is rapidly changing, so I think the only limitation is ourselves and our level of knowledge.

I use AI a lot. My students are in a special education program and need very specific texts—highinterest but highly decodable. A nine-year-old with dyslexia isn’t going to be engaged by Cat in the Hat. So I’ll go to ChatGPT and ask it to create a short, highly decodable story on a topic I know the student loves, like space travel.

YEHUDIT

Reading teacher

Monsey, New York

For years, the Gruss Foundation provided computers to teach math and reading at a student’s own level. With AI, you have that advantage as well . . . learning through AI is almost like having a personalized teacher.

DOVID TEITELBAUM

STEAM director and teacher

Marilyn and Sheldon David IVDU Upper Boys School Brooklyn, New York

One night before a big Chumash test, one of my students uploaded her Bamidbar review sheet into NotebookLM. Within minutes, she had a narrated video overview of her notes, a full set of flashcards and even a short quiz to test herself.

The next morning, she told me, beaming: “Rabbi, the video helped me finally understand how Bamidbar fits together better than I ever understood in class.”

RABBI TZVI PITTINSKY

Director of educational technology, The Frisch School Paramus, New Jersey

We use a program called Flint, which is a school-based AI system designed with built-in guardrails for our students. Because all our classes are recorded, I can take a transcript of the day’s lesson and upload it to Flint to create a review of the previous class.

The program also makes differentiation much easier, allowing each student to work at his own pace and level. Our students come from diverse backgrounds with varying levels of Jewish education, and Flint can walk them through the material to ensure everyone stays on track.

RABBI DR. DAVID SHABTAI

Educator, Jewish Leadership Academy Miami, Florida

What Jewish Educators Are Saying About AI

I use AI to add vowels to Hebrew text, which is very tedious to do manually. I also use it to provide translations for some texts. I would not rely on the AI; I take its translation and check it closely, fixing any errors. This can be very risky if the teacher does not know what the proper translation or nikud should be.

RABBI DANIEL FREITAG

Judaic studies teacher Atlanta Jewish Academy Middle School Atlanta, Georgia

Because of a method I’ve developed over more than seventeen years of teaching twelfth-grade English Language Arts, I’ve been less affected by AI than many of my colleagues. All essay assignments are written in class, over two or three periods. I photocopy the students’ handwritten drafts and return them, while keeping one myself. Students then take the essays home and type them. Because the original work is done in class, it’s much harder for students to rely on AI, and I always have the original for comparison.

I also remind my students that when it comes time for the New York State English Language Arts Regents, AI won’t be available. They’ll be on their own.

SHARI WEISS

Educator

Queens, New York

When we outsource thinking to machines, we don’t make learning more efficient—we make it shallower. Real learning depends on effort, struggle and human connection, all of which are weakened when AI replaces the cognitive work students must do themselves, especially in the early years.

DR. DORAN KATZ

Senior director of Jewish day school strategies and dean of Truman Scholars Program, Tikvah Fund

I use AI to create images to support my teaching—I teach Mishlei using visuals. For example, for the pasuk “Nezem zahav be’af chazir . . .—like a golden ring in the snout of a pig,” I asked AI to generate an image of a large pig in a dress. That strong visual helped the students remember the pasuk. On a test, I used AI-created images and asked students to identify and explain the pasuk associated with each image.

Educator, Valley Torah Girls High School Los Angeles, California

Since educators are using AI behind the scenes, primarily as a planning aid, my students notice this. And they ask a fair question: If teachers can use it, why can’t we?

AHUVAH Teacher

Brooklyn, New York

I use AI for ideas. I’ll say: “I have four seven-year-olds with different learning disabilities— how can I make a lesson on Yetziat Mitzrayim interactive, multisensory, and engaging?” It comes back with six fantastic ideas.

SARAH Teacher Teaneck, New Jersey

With students, we’ve done a lot with AI. We started using AI to help build things; for example, using 3-D modeling and 3-D printing, we created Chanukah menorahs. For the boys who do coding for robotics, we use AI to help write the code.

DOVID TEITELBAUM

STEAM director and teacher

Marilyn and Sheldon David IVDU Upper Boys School

Brooklyn, New York

What worries me the most is that kids won’t learn how to write or express their ideas. If they use AI for their writing assignments, they’ll never have to think of a creative idea in their lives again. And they’ll get no practice writing.

ABBY SCHNEIDER Teacher Chicago, Illinois

Before Yom Kippur, I uploaded two complete machzorim—Ashkenaz and Eidot Hamizrach—both freely available on www.Sefaria.org.

NotebookLM compared the texts and produced a set of flashcards and quizzes highlighting differences between the two liturgies.

A flashcard asked: “Which custom, listed in the Eidot Hamizrach machzor, involves symbolic lashes before Yom Kippur begins?”

A quiz question explored: “Which prayer associated with Eliyahu HaNavi appears in the Eidot Hamizrach Shacharit but not in the Ashkenaz version?”

In minutes, the class had a full interactive review built from authentic sources.

RABBI TZVI PITTINSKY

Director of educational technology, The Frisch School Paramus, New Jersey

I don’t use AI because it feels disingenuous to tell my students not to use it if I am using it myself. It certainly makes my life more difficult, but it also feels more honest. I believe AI has its place—I just don’t think that place is in the school.

SHARI WEISS Educator Queens, New York

What most schools have not addressed yet is putting AI in the hands of the actual students.

And that’s where we have to be extremely cautious. However, schools need to recognize that by not introducing AI to students, they are also not teaching them important skills: how to be transparent with AI use, how to spot bias, and how to understand when and how to use it responsibly.

RIVKAH SCHACK

Senior director of educational technology and digital strategy

The Jewish Education Project New York

When Rabbis Meet AI

For many rabbis, the question is not whether to use AI, but how

By Rachel Schwartzberg

Rabbi Dr. Jason Weiner has been very pleased with his newest chavruta. Its name is ChatGPT.

“It’s always beneficial to work with any sort of partner, and that’s the main thing I use AI for,” explains Rabbi Weiner, rabbi of Knesset Israel Congregation of Beverlywood and the senior rabbi and executive director of the Spiritual Care Department at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California. “It’s like having a chavruta who is always available to talk things through. It helps me formulate my ideas. And it’s great for asking for feedback.”

Rabbi Weiner isn’t alone. As the use of artificial intelligence apps and tools becomes more mainstream, many congregational rabbis are exploring how the emerging technology can

support their work—though not without a good measure of caution.

Rabbi Yitzi Genack of Shaare Torah in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shares a telling experience. “I asked AI to prepare a source sheet for a class I was going to give,” he recalls. “It gave me an Iggerot Moshe, quoting a paragraph with an exact citation. To be safe, I took the sefer off my shelf and looked it up—and it wasn’t there. The source was entirely fabricated.”

While prudence is important, most rabbis interviewed emphasized that the question is not whether to use AI, but how.

Rabbi Genack, undeterred, has continued using AI regularly for various tasks—“some more successfully than others”—but never to prepare derashot or divrei Torah

Rabbi Weiner is similarly

“reluctant to use AI for Torah study” because of its widely acknowledged tendency to “hallucinate,” or give inaccurate or misleading information. “That’s not its place. But if I’m working on a derashah, I might ask AI for help finding a contemporary anecdote or a thought experiment that illustrates a point.” However, he always asks ChatGPT to provide links, and he verifies every source before using it.

“Like anything else, we need to know what it can do and what it can’t do,” says Rabbi Menachem Penner, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA). “It’s well known that AI hallucinates incredibly well for Jewish sources. If you ask it for help writing a devar Torah or a shiur, it will find excellent sources and quote them all in the original Hebrew . . . except they often don’t exist.”

“Even when its sources are accurate, AI produces low-level Torah content,” Rabbi Genack says. “It gives you random ideas that might be cute or interesting, but not real substance.” He notes that as technology continues to improve, there will be serious questions about how AI might impact true Torah scholarship.

Rachel Schwartzberg is a writer and editor who lives with her family in Memphis, Tennessee.

The halachic encounter with AI is the latest chapter in a long history of rabbis wrestling with the tools of their time. Each technological leap has triggered a battery of practical questions. The printing press forced authorities to grapple with whether machine-printed books possess kedushah and whether mass production leads to more textual errors. Later, the matzah-baking machine sparked a fierce debate: Is an act through a machine considered as if it is done lishmah (with intention), and does the heat from its mechanical rollers accidentally leaven the dough?

The telephone likewise forced a re-evaluation of human presence: Does a voice converted into electrical pulses still count as a human voice for a mitzvah, and can one fulfill an obligation while listening over the wire? Today, AI presents new challenges, but it’s simply the latest tool raising questions similar to those prompted by earlier innovations.

Rabbis are, however, approaching it proactively. Indeed, at the last annual RCA convention, Rabbi Gil Student, OU director of Media, Publications and Editorial Communications, gave a seminar on “Rabbis and AI,” which helped spark ongoing conversations about how rabbis are using AI in their own work. Unfortunately, he says, “every conversation about AI begins with people complaining about hallucinations. That’s the real barrier for us.” He believes rabbis can learn to give better prompts to avoid getting false information, or make use of AI in ways where hallucinations are less of an issue, such as for administrative tasks.

Other practical ways rabbis are using AI include creating source sheets, translating and transcribing. “I’m not asking AI to pull my sources,” says Rabbi Weiner, “but I can put in the sources I want to include, and it will make it look outstanding and bring it to life.”

better job than most rabbis!”

Rabbi Student finds that AI is very helpful in translating German Torah scholarship, for example, into English. “AI is also pretty good at adding vowels to Hebrew,” he says. “It might even do a

AI as an Administrative Assistant

AI can be especially helpful for a rabbi in a smaller shul without a lot of administrative support. For Rabbi Genack, who does not have an executive assistant, AI has proven to be very useful for “office work” and “writing that is not creative,” like formal letters to clients in his role on the Pittsburgh Vaad Harabonim.

“It helps me to churn out something quickly, if I know what I want to say, but I don’t have an hour to write it,” he says.

“AI can handle the tasks a rabbi does that aren’t particularly rabbinic,” says Rabbi Weiner. “As an example, I send out the zemanim for the week to my shul email list. You don’t need to be a rabbi to do that job, but the rabbi gladly does it for his congregants. It’s great to find a way to have AI automate that email.”

AI can also be helpful with planning the logistics of travel. “I had to visit four cities in eight days when I was in aveilut,” Rabbi Penner recalls. “AI found minyanim in every city—it even reminded me to say Tefillat Haderech.”

Where to Draw the Line

As society as a whole is grappling with questions of where to draw the line when it comes to using AI, rabbis are figuring out when it might make sense to use a shortcut—and when it may not.

There is definitely a risk in overusing AI tools, says Rabbi Penner. “Shortcuts can lead you the wrong way,” he says. “There is one basic question to ask about anything that is a time saver: What does it give you more time to do?” By that calculation, most would agree that having more time for Torah learning and doing mitzvot is a net benefit.

“The value of a rabbi in 2026 is to be with his congregants,” says Rabbi Penner. “[Congregants] can find a thousand shiurim to listen to online,

but no one else can sit and be with them in their time of need. That’s the rabbi’s most essential function.” If a rabbi can make use of AI tools to do his desk jobs more efficiently and thereby spend more time away from the computer and with his congregants, that’s ideal.

Rabbi Penner shares a scenario that could be all-too-familiar to any shul rabbi: “He has to run to the hospital to be with someone in crisis, but he had planned to use that time to prepare a devar Torah for sheva berachot that evening. So he should use AI to get started on the devar Torah and get over to the hospital. Yes, he’ll still have to fine-tune the devar Torah and check every source, but he’ll be able to be where he is needed.”

“Shul rabbis undertake an enormous number of varied tasks,” says Rabbi Penner. “The rabbi wants to teach and to be there for everyone, but we need to be realistic about how many things he can stay on top of. At the end of the day, with the help of AI, we can be better rabbis.”

Rabbi Penner and Rabbi Student are working together to build a series of AI prompts to help rabbis keep up with their long-term pastoral care responsibilities. Using Gemini, for example, one could automate reminders for common situations.

“Let’s say Mr. Schwartz is sitting shivah this week,” Rabbi Student explains. “AI tools can mark your calendar with reminders to arrange a daily Shacharit minyan at his house, call him every other day, and reach out to him in advance of the sheloshim.”

Despite the adoption of new technology tools by their clergy, Rabbi Student says that no one need be concerned that their rabbi will be replaced by AI. Not only is much of their work done on Shabbat and yom tov, but their pastoral role—comforting, guiding and celebrating—cannot be automated. “AI cannot replace a human being,” he says. “And it certainly cannot replace a rabbi.”

Halachic Reflections on Emerging Challenges Artificial Intelligence in Medicine

By Rabbi Dr. Jason Weiner

AI’s potential in healthcare is vast. It can improve detection and diagnosis, increase efficiency and access to care by minimizing geographic, economic and time barriers, reduce medical errors that lead to accidental deaths and injuries, and alleviate administrative burden and clinician burnout. It may even enable the generation of new scientific knowledge and discoveries.

Given the seemingly boundless promise of AI in healthcare, it is imperative to ask whether halachah discourages, encourages or possibly even obligates its use. Jewish law obligates healthcare professionals to save lives, provide the best possible care to their patients, and not stand idly by when they have potentially lifesaving information. If AI enhances healthcare providers’ ability to deliver care and improve patient outcomes, one might argue that its responsible use may itself be halachically required. Such an obligation would also entail a corresponding duty to mitigate the

ethical concerns associated with AI in healthcare.

Indeed, such use of AI has been met with resistance from healthcare professionals. Their concerns include confidentiality, data security and privacy; patient autonomy and informed consent; misinformation and liability when mistakes occur; overreliance leading to diminished critical thinking skills; an increased generational divide among providers; and bias and equity concerns. Moreover, some AI companies have been accused of cutting ethical corners in their haste to release new products.

Taken together, these promises, potential obligations and ongoing concerns highlight the need to explicitly consider what Jewish law has to say about healthcare-related uses of AI, and whether such uses raise unique religious concerns, in order to help ensure that these emerging technologies develop in alignment with halachah.

This article will focus on the role that values play in medical practice, how

this becomes particularly significant when AI is used for medical predictions and decision-making, the implications for end-of-life care and surrogate decision-making on behalf of patients who lack capacity, and rabbinic precedents that may help navigate this rapidly evolving field.

Why Medical AI Is Never Value-Neutral

To appreciate the challenges that AI can pose in clinical decision-making, it is helpful to begin with the role that values play in medical decision-making more broadly. Although concerns about bias

Rabbi Dr. Jason Weiner, BCC, serves as senior rabbi of CedarsSinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and rabbi of Knesset Israel Congregation of Beverlywood. He also serves as senior consultant to Ematai, which educates Jewish individuals and families about end-of-life issues.

Donate today at MagenDavidAdom.org or call 866.632.2763. NO ONE SAVES MORE LIVES IN ISRAEL IN TIMES OF CRISIS.

There are many ways to support Israel and its people, but no gift is more transformative than one to Magen David Adom, Israel’s emergency services system. Your support of MDA isn’t just changing lives — it’s literally saving them — providing critical care and hospital transport for everyone from victims of heart attacks to rocket attacks, and every emergency in between. Donate today at MagenDavidAdom.org or call 866.632.2763. NO ONE SAVES MORE LIVES IN ISRAEL IN TIMES OF CRISIS.

There are many ways to support Israel and its people, but no gift is more transformative than one to Magen David Adom, Israel’s emergency services system. Your support of MDA isn’t just changing lives — it’s literally saving them — providing critical care and hospital transport for everyone from victims of heart attacks to rocket attacks, and every emergency in between.

in AI are frequently raised, typically due to biased clinical data in which some populations are not well represented, there are also concerns about valuesbased bias. As with human decisionmaking, AI-supported decision-making is not value-neutral. What may appear to be objective, computerized output can in fact embed particular assumptions and priorities reflecting the values of certain groups rather than those of the individual patient.

When making even the simplest medical decisions, a multiplicity of values comes into play, reflecting various social norms, professional commitments, institutional and economic considerations, and personal beliefs and perspectives, such as definitions of “healthy,” societal “importance,” or assumptions about quality of life. These values may not always align with the patient’s own values, potentially imposing standards upon patients who do not share those values.

Patients may have a legitimate concern about what values underlie AI systems and whether the systems’ primary focus is on the patient’s best interests alone. Given the soaring costs of healthcare, it is reasonable to presume that some healthcare systems will be motivated to utilize AI support systems to reduce costs or improve reimbursement or profitability, rather than focus solely on what is most clinically beneficial for the patient. We hope our physicians always have their patients’ best interests in mind and will be transparent with their patients, but they might not even be aware of what factors are taken into account in AI decisions. Although certain decisions, such as a surgical AI

determining the optimal placement of a prosthetic knee or recommending a specific chemotherapy regimen, appear purely clinical or technical, they may nonetheless be shaped by underlying value assumptions. For instance, an AI developer might prioritize maximizing revenue or operational efficiency over what is best for the patient. In one case, a large language model (LLM), GPT-4, generated opposite medical recommendations depending on whether it was prompted as a physician or as an insurance reviewer. Although the patient and clinical facts were identical, the AI’s moral and clinical judgment shifted based on the assigned role.1

This situation can be especially concerning for observant Jews, who base major life decisions on Jewish law and hold specific views regarding crucial issues such as the sanctity of life. While AI provides significant medical benefits through decision support and outcome prediction, values-based bias is a significant ethical concern and potential source of conflict for people with distinctive religious values, such as those inherent in Jewish tradition.

This issue is exacerbated by the fact that AI algorithms are not always intelligible or transparent. Such a system is often referred to as a “black box,” in which patients and even healthcare providers have little access to details of how its decisions are made, hindering the ability of anyone to scrutinize the output of such systems. AI could therefore undermine patients’ ability to receive care aligned with their own values and preferences, as well as their meaningful participation in shared decision-making. This could

Some AI companies have been accused of cutting ethical corners in their haste to release new products.

also undermine patients’ willingness to accept AI decision-making and erode public trust in the healthcare system more broadly.

The desire to make medical decisions in accordance with one’s own values heightens the need for transparency and explanation. This need becomes even more acute when AI is involved in medical decision-making, as people tend to overtrust and overrely on computer systems and AI decisionsupport systems, a tendency known as “automation bias.”

How Values Guide Medical Decisions

The role of values in medical decisionmaking has previously arisen in rabbinic literature, such as in the context of determining the definition of death. Although many assume that it is the physician’s role to define what it means to be deceased, Jewish law recognizes that death is more than a medical or scientific issue. Death is a process, and the point at which a human being no longer retains the status of a living entity is the subject of ongoing complex religious, philosophical and moral debate. Modern medicine has articulated its own definitions of death, and medical tests have been designed to help determine when a patient’s condition meets those criteria. However, this definition itself represents a choice of a particular point in the dying process that medical tests can isolate and assess.

There is no purely “scientific” justification to choose that point in the process. Even the medical establishment must rely on metascientific considerations, whether ethical, social, philosophical or some combination thereof, to justify its position. The medical tests are valid, but only insofar as they determine whether specific criteria corresponding to a predefined definition have been satisfied.

Religious values establish the foundational definition, while the clinician’s role is to identify and assess the criteria that satisfy that definition. While the implementation of criteria

and appropriate tests to determine death is best done by physicians based on contemporary science and technology, when it comes to religiously oriented patients and their families, the process of determining death cannot end there. Rather, decisions about patients in such liminal states should be made in consultation with the patient’s family and should be facilitated by the patient’s spiritual care providers to ensure that they are made in accordance with their values and worldview.

When Prediction Shapes Care: DNR, DNT, and the Risk of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

While much of what has been discussed above can relate to any healthcare activity, not just AI, AI is developing capabilities that further accentuate these issues. For example, AI can provide predictive tools, sometimes referred to as “outcome prediction models” (OPMs), that help generate clinical predictions and assist in decision-making by offering personalized assessments of how a given patient is likely to fare. To the extent that this reduces

better-informed decision-making and alleviating some of the burdensome tasks placed on physicians so that they can focus on providing good patient care, such systems can be very beneficial. However, they also raise significant concerns.

Some experts caution that AI outcome predictions could lead to a “self-fulfilling prophecy” by steering clinicians toward one treatment path over another without adequately considering the individual patient’s goals, values and preferences. While this is true of non-AI decision-making as well, the concern with AI is that clinicians may feel compelled to follow the decisions or recommendations of the system due to automation bias, as discussed above.3 For example, if a model predicts a very poor prognosis for a patient, clinicians may overly rely on that prediction and decide that it is therefore appropriate to limit life-sustaining interventions and focus only on comfort measures. Suggestions that an AI model makes may be very accurate, but they can thus also cause harm when such predictions are trusted and followed without question. A patient whose life could have been saved may be allowed to die as a result.

A similar issue was raised years ago by rabbinic bioethicists. Although Jewish law sometimes permits a Do Not

While the impact of prayer on patient outcomes is complex and nuanced, it is a central factor in Jewish thought, one that predictive AI models do not account for.

approved such orders emphasized that even if resuscitation is not required in the event of cardiac arrest, all routine care must still be provided at all other times. They cautioned that a DNR must never become a “DNT” (Do Not Treat).4 Although healthcare providers typically strive to avoid equating DNR with DNT, some studies have unfortunately shown that clinicians may sometimes subconsciously interpret DNR orders as indicating a desire to reduce the intensity of care provided to these patients.5 This issue is thus not a new one, but with the excitement surrounding the integration of AI into all aspects of healthcare, it may become especially acute and pervasive as a result of these predictive models and the realities of automation bias and selffulfilling prophecies.

There are also particularly salient concerns for those who follow Jewish law. For example, hospitals could benefit significantly from AI assistance in triage and resource allocation by using predictive tools that estimate mortality rates and the effectiveness of interventions, though these predictions are highly influenced by value judgments, such as prioritizing patients based on age or assumptions about quality of life. Predictive data about various patients’ survival may be taken into account by rabbinic authorities, but value judgments about the worth of different individuals’ lives—or decisions to withdraw life-sustaining interventions based on such predictive models—are not. Furthermore, algorithms make predictions that can give us a sense of what is likely to occur, but humans are dynamic and unpredictable. Thus, algorithms are most valuable not for predicting inevitable outcomes, but rather for guiding people toward changes that can help prevent worst-case scenarios.

Additionally, from a traditional Jewish perspective, the future is not considered entirely predetermined,6 which raises theological concerns about making absolute predictions. Notwithstanding Divine foreknowledge, Judaism affirms that prayer and repentance can influence outcomes. For example, the Talmud teaches that even if a sharpened sword

is on one’s neck, one should not despair of G-d’s mercy.7 Similarly, the Talmud states elsewhere that if two patients have identical conditions but only one recovers, the differences can be attributed to prayer.8 While the impact of prayer on patient outcomes is complex and nuanced, it is a central factor in Jewish thought, one that predictive AI models do not account for.

Finally, end-of-life care in Judaism is governed by highly specific guidelines. Predictions of a patient’s mortality could be beneficial if they encourage conversations that facilitate the implementation of practices mandated by Jewish law, such as advance care and estate planning as well as the recitation of end-of-life prayers. However, Jewish law also addresses how much detail a fragile patient should be told, whether they should be told such information at all, and how it should be shared, all of which must be handled cautiously and respectfully.9

An increased emphasis on predicting patient outcomes could have a significant impact on these aspects and should therefore be approached with appropriate religious and cultural sensitivities.

Who Speaks for the Patient When the Patient Cannot?

Another emerging AI capability is decision support (sometimes referred to as “Clinical Decision Support” or CDS), which can assist with weighing risks, potential benefits, and burdens of a given intervention to help inform medical recommendations. However, this raises significant concerns for patients who lack decision-making capacity and whose preferences are unknown in a given situation.

An AI algorithm designed to predict patient preferences seeks to determine what a patient would likely want in various situations by extracting values from available data. This may include demographic information, social media activity, electronic communications, charitable donations, organizational affiliations,

and recordings of past interactions with healthcare providers collected using ambient AI documentation. Using this data, the model aims to infer the patient’s values and predict the decisions the patient would make.10 While there are valid concerns about which data should be used and how it is interpreted, some studies suggest that, given the vast amount of information available, these models may actually predict patient preferences more accurately than the patient’s own family. (In an as-yet unpublished study conducted at the University of Florida College of Medicine, family members acting as surrogate decision-makers demonstrated an accuracy rate of approximately 40 percent, whereas an AI system achieved an accuracy rate of about 75 percent!)

The current standard for making these decisions is to consult, when possible, with the patient’s family to determine what the patient would prefer (the “Substituted Judgment Standard”). In Jewish law, the role of the family in making these decisions is a matter of some dispute. Some rabbinic authorities contend that the family does not have any independent status as decisionmakers, and that the healthcare team should simply decide what is the best course of action for a given patient, based on the clinical realities and whatever is known about the patient’s own goals, values and preferences.11 If that is the case, and AI is able to make the most accurate prediction of what a patient would prefer, then it seems clear that it should indeed be consulted to help inform the decision.

By contrast, Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach suggests that the reason the family is asked is because they are presumed to be able to best determine what the patient would have

preferred.12 According to this view, if the family is unable to determine the patient’s wishes, their input regarding treatment may carry less weight.13 In such cases, consulting an AI that can reliably predict the patient’s preferences could be beneficial. It would follow, then, that the AI’s recommendation could override the family’s judgment in cases where the AI’s predictions are more accurate than the family’s presumed knowledge of the patient’s wishes.

However, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein implies that the primary reason the family makes decisions for the patient is because it can be assumed that the patient would want what their family suggests, since they have the patient’s best interests at heart.14 According to this approach, the input of the patient’s family (or close friends) is valuable even if they do not know what the patient would have preferred.15 It would therefore seem that the family’s perspective should take precedence over an AI prediction model, regardless of its accuracy. This is because, from this standpoint, the central factor is the love and commitment inherent in these relationships, not merely the precision of any predictions.

This becomes especially significant given that, as previously discussed, we cannot guarantee that an AI will prioritize the patient’s best interests. Furthermore, the accuracy of such predictive models typically depends on collecting data from large populations and assessing how closely those data align with the AI’s predictions. Given the unique values of observant Jews discussed above, effectively using such predictive models may prove particularly challenging for our community. Additionally, engaging family members in meaningful dialogue during the decision-making process often has intrinsic value for familial relationships, something that relying solely on AI predictions might preclude. Although consulting an AI algorithm can indeed serve as a helpful aid in decision-making, and its insights can certainly be taken into account, the final decision, when all of the above

rabbinic rationales are considered, should remain with those closest to the patient.16

Keeping Human Judgment at the Center

There have been numerous suggestions for how to address these issues. Ideally, AI systems should be transparent and as explainable as possible to those who use them, particularly when it comes to how they reach their conclusions and which values inform those decisions. Although some advanced AI systems are inherently difficult to explain, we can either advocate for the use of simpler models when appropriate, especially when we know they align with our values, or push for more complex models to be adapted so that their reasoning can be meaningfully evaluated, if not by all users, then at least by qualified experts.

Ethical considerations are sometimes ignored when they conflict with profit or speed of development. Just as a good clinician is expected to be able to explain why they arrived at a particular recommendation was reached, AI should be able to describe its core values and reasoning. This ability would make AI accountable and is essential for an observant Jew. In fact, such capabilities could give AI decisionmaking an advantage over human decision-making, since so many human biases remain unconscious and are very difficult to explain. Nevertheless, this may not be fully practical or possible with AI either.

The Need for Oversight

Clinicians may be uncertain about whether they can trust AI-generated recommendations in the same way they trust their colleagues or peerreviewed studies. As a result, some have proposed subjecting AI programs to clinical trials and publishing their results in the medical literature before integrating them into practice,17 along with conducting periodic audits of AI performance and its impacts on clinical decision-making and health outcomes.18 This approach might also help us better understand how these models function, which leads to another approach: human oversight.

In the Orthodox community, in order to permit the use of artificial reproductive technologies (ART), many rabbis required the safeguard of specially trained (female) religious supervisors (mashgichot) to oversee the IVF process before permitting ART in their communities.19 Here too, there may be a need for specially trained individuals who have both religious and AI expertise to understand how a given AI is being utilized in relation to a given patient’s own value system. These individuals can serve as patient advocates and liaisons for rabbis when AI is utilized in values-based medical decisions. Indeed, it is generally wise to keep humans in the loop to provide oversight, guarding against unforeseen consequences and addressing concerns as they arise.

The use of AI in healthcare raises numerous ethical concerns, which

can be particularly acute for religious individuals who adhere to distinct value systems. Many of these ethical challenges are not entirely new, and Jewish tradition can offer valuable guidance. Nevertheless, these issues are evolving rapidly and may become significantly more pronounced with AI than in the past, making careful thought and proactive preparation essential as we adapt to this changing reality. Regardless of the strategies employed to address these concerns, it is increasingly important for clinicians to guide families with humility and with an awareness of the multiple biases that can influence decision-making. Clinicians should receive training to avoid overreliance on AI predictions and to prevent such predictions from becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. While we should utilize AI to enhance healthcare, we must simultaneously strive to preserve patients’ human relationships—with their loved ones and healthcare providers—to ensure that healthcare remains as effective, compassionate and appropriate as possible for all patients.

Notes

1. Olivia Farrar, “AI Is Making Medical Decisions — But For Whom?” Harvard Medical School Department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Magazine, May 23, 2025. https://dbmi.hms.harvard.edu/ news/ai-making-medical-decisions-whom.

2. James L. Bernat, Charles M. Culver, and Bernard Gert, “On the Definition and Criterion of Death,” Annals of Internal Medicine 94, no. 3 (1981): 389–94.

3. Charles Binkley and Tyler Loftus, Encoding Bioethics (California: University of California Press, 2024), 29.

4. Nishmat Avraham, YD (English ed.), 325.

5. Patricia A. Kelly, et al., “Original Research: Nurses’ Perspectives on Caring for Patients with Do-Not-Resuscitate Orders.” American Journal of Nursing 121, no. 1 (2021): 32; Fuchs, et al., “Quantifying the Mortality Impact of Do-Not-Resuscitate Orders in the ICU,” Critical Care Medicine 45, no. 6 (2017): 1019–27.

6. See, for example, Rambam, Shemoneh Perakim, 8.

7. Berachot 10a.

8. Rosh Hashanah 18a.

9. See Rabbi Dr. Jason Weiner, Jewish Guide

to Practical Medical Decision-Making (Jerusalem/New York: Urim Publications, 2017), chap. 1C.

10. Teva D. Brender, Alexander K. Smith and Brian L. Block, “Can artificial intelligence speak for incapacitated patients at the end of life?” JAMA Internal Medicine 9 (2024): 1005.

11. Rabbi David Zvi Hoffman, Melamed Leho’il 2:104. This approach is endorsed by Rabbi Zalman Nechemia Goldberg (Jewish Medical Ethics, vol. 2, 346) and Rabbi Hershel Schachter ( HaTzon [“Eilav Hu Nosei et Nafsho”] 228).

12. Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, Shulchan Shlomo: Erchei Refuah 75.

13. She’eilot Uteshuvot Minchat Asher (3).

14. Iggerot Moshe, CM 2:74 (5). See also Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron, Refuah BeHalachah, 40.

15. She’eilot U’teshuvot Minchat Asher (3).

16. Personal conversation with Rabbi Asher Weiss.

17. Encoding Bioethics, 29.

18. Kristin M. Kostick-Quenet, “A caution against customized AI in healthcare,” Digital Medicine 8, no. 13 (2025): 3.

19. Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach and Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv ( Avraham, Even Ha’ezer 1:6 [2] [1:13 (29) in 3rd ed.]); Yabia Omer 2, Even Ha’ezer 1 (13).

People tend to overtrust and overrely on computer systems and AI decision support.

Spotify for Shiurim

The OU’s AI-Powered App Provides Customized Torah Learning

By Sandy Eller

Like it or not, artificial intelligence is here to stay. And believe it or not, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Sure, we’ve all heard the horror stories of deepfake videos being used to manipulate public opinion, and students passing off reports written by ChatGPT as original work. But AI’s tremendous power has incredible potential, as evidenced by Ohrbit, a new OU app that harnesses cutting-edge machine learning to create a platform offering a wide variety of Torah topics that are accessible, customizable, approachable and, best of all, free.

“We built what I call a ‘Spotify for shiurim,’” explains Rabbi Gil Student, OU director of Jewish Media, Publications and Editorial Communications. “The app learns your preferences, both by what you tell it

and through your behavior—what do you listen to for a long time and what do you listen to for only a short time— giving you more of what you like and the Torah you want to learn.”

The idea for Ohrbit was born approximately a year ago, when Executive Vice President Rabbi Moshe Hauer, zt”l, convened a group of rabbis and technology experts, professionals and lay leaders, to develop a project that would use AI for Torah purposes. Numerous conversations were held to identify the best way to harness artificial intelligence to promote Torah study. Rabbi Hauer believed strongly in bringing talented individuals together for this project to make sure that the app was carefully planned, with guidance from top experts in the field.

In keeping with its mission, Ohrbit’s name blends Torah and technology, with “ohr” meaning light and “bit” referring to the smallest measurement of data in the computer world. While the app may be AI-powered, its content comes exclusively from trusted sources, including the OU’s massive library of shiurim, the Rabbi Sacks Legacy Trust, OpenDor Media and England’s United Synagogue, among others in the rapidly growing list of partners. Ohrbit’s goal is simple and straightforward: getting people who don’t know what they want to learn hooked on learning that resonates with them.

“Users can engage with the app however they choose,” observes Rabbi Simon Taylor, OU national director of Community Engagement. “Some may want a quick dose of daily inspiration, while others may prefer to explore specific topics in depth or learn on a more advanced level. It really depends on what kind of learning they’re seeking.”

But what makes Ohrbit truly one of a kind is its ability to learn its users’ preferences. Like Spotify and Amazon, which tailor items presented to users based on their previous selections, Ohrbit offers users options based on their prior viewing and listening habits. The app has a fun side as well, offering daily challenges à la Duolingo that give users opportunities to extend their daily learning streaks or expand their learning habits to new teachers or topics.

“We’re trying to engage people,” says Rabbi Student. “We don’t want people addicted to anything, but if they’re addicted to something, it should be Torah.”

Ohrbit also draws people in by giving them tremendous flexibility in customizing their learning experience.

When setting up their accounts, users can let the app know if they prefer to learn by reading articles, watching videos or listening to lectures. Similarly, they can choose which topics interest them from a list that includes Tanach, Gemara, halachah, Jewish history, hashkafah and inspiration, with an array of presenters that spans the gamut of Orthodoxy.

Ohrbit’s chatbot is designed to handle questions from users about their learning, albeit with specific guidelines in place. While the app can draw on its library of some 150,000 shiurim and several thousand sefarim to come up with the proper answer, there is one thing it won’t do.

“We want Ohrbit helping people learn Torah rather than offering definitive answers to halachic questions,” noted Rabbi Student. “The app is programmed to explain to people why they need to ask practical questions to their rabbi, and to note the limitations

of AI. Additionally, this is the only AI chatbot of which I am aware that will voluntarily admit when it does not have a source for something rather than make up a source.”

The OU is hoping that Ohrbit will particularly appeal to those with a limited Jewish education who are looking to increase their knowledge. It also gives users the comfort of being able to learn at their own pace, on their own schedule, serving as a virtual onramp to Judaism. Additionally, having that content delivered by an app, instead of in person, may be a good starting point for those who may be intimidated by rabbinical figures.

“There are so many people who are thirsty for Torah, especially now after October 7, who want to know more, and we’re trying to find ways to help them by using technology in a way that can promote Torah study without diluting Torah content,” explains Rabbi Student.

And while yes, AI can be a double-

edged sword, it can also be a valuable support tool with virtually endless potential, when used responsibly.

“If we can figure out how to get technology to provide a really trustworthy and wholesome experience that can inspire so many more people to learn Torah, it’s a tragedy if we don’t pursue the opportunity,” concludes Rabbi Student. “Shame on us if we don’t figure out a way to harness AI to help fellow Jews.”

“Just as light flows into the streets and meets anyone who passes by, the ‘ohr’ of Ohrbit brings Torah directly to the learner, wherever they are,” adds Rabbi Dr. Josh Joseph, OU executive vice president and chief operating officer. “That is its gift: to reach those seeking it, and even those not yet seeking, and spread the light of Torah farther than ever before.”

PESACH TOURS

The Mashgiach’s Algorithm

Is the Future of Kosher Supervision Smarter with AI?

Rabbi Gavriel Price

Q: What are some of the ways OU mashgichim in the field are using AI?

A: Mashgichim often leverage AI to analyze, digest and distill complex information that would otherwise be difficult—or even impossible—to gather.

Consider this example: Rabbi Mordechai Tarkieltaub, an OU field representative in Chicago, was assigned to supervise a special production run at a hard candy manufacturer. The equipment had already been kashered, and the ingredients—including sugar and flavors—had been reviewed by the OU office. Before his visit, Rabbi Tarkieltaub asked AI: “What is the most expensive ingredient in hard candy production?” The answer: sugar. While sugar seems straightforward, in food production even sugar can be tricky.

He followed up with another question: “How does a hard candy

company save money on sugar?”

Answers included using flavors for sweetness or adding fiber. The third answer caught his attention: recovering candy from a previous batch that didn’t meet quality specifications, purifying it, and reincorporating the recovered material into production. This process, known as rework, allows a company to reuse partially processed—or fully cooked—products instead of discarding them, reducing waste and salvaging imperfect batches.

With this in mind, Rabbi Tarkieltaub asked the plant manager, “How are you recovering your sugar?” The answer was revealing: The facility had equipment to purify imperfect candy and to isolate the sugar for reuse. In this case, the reworked candy had been dairy, so the recovered sugar was dairy as well. The OU ensured the final product was labeled correctly as dairy.

Another example: Mashgichim frequently work with highly sophisticated industrial machinery, such as beverage pasteurization systems used to eliminate bacteria in juice, soda or milk. They must determine how—and whether—these systems can be kashered. AI helps by providing precise, structured explanations of both the conceptual logic and technical mechanics of the equipment, making it easier to identify which parts require kashering

Q: How is OU Kosher headquarters planning to capitalize on AI resources?

A: OU Kosher maintains a vast repository of decades’ worth of reports, memos and correspondences, created by everyone from rabbinic field representatives (RFRs) to headquarters staff and poskim, covering virtually every issue in the food industry. After every plant visit, a mashgiach or RFR files electronic reports documenting problems encountered. These reports are reviewed by the Rabbinic Coordinator (RC) back at OU Kosher headquarters, and together, they solve whatever problems arose. Over time, these reports create a comprehensive storehouse of institutional knowledge.

The challenge is that much of this information, while stored, is not easily accessible to other mashgichim and RCs when similar situations arise elsewhere.

A large language model can organize and summarize existing records, making it easier for mashgichim to find relevant information when needed.

For example, whenever we certify a new plant, we want to equip the field representative with an understanding of what we call the critical control points—stages in the process that require special attention because they present potential vulnerabilities to the kashrus of the product.

Rabbi Gavriel Price is a rabbinic coordinator at the OU and, as a member of the Ingredients Department, conducts research in ingredients manufacturing.

Let us say, for example, that we are setting up a certification at a hard candy manufacturer that produces both pareve and dairy candies. The possibility of recovering already used sugar—the issue of rework we discussed earlier— should be flagged as a potential critical control point for the administrator of this account to consider.

Years ago, I was the RC responsible for managing the kashrus of a company that produced OU-certified grain vinegar. The company also operated a separate production line for non-kosher red wine vinegar. The two lines were entirely separate—or so it seemed.

At one point, we discovered that environmental regulations required the manufacturer to capture vapors released during the vinegar production process. Those vapors had to be collected, diluted and then disposed of in some way. The company devised what it considered an elegant solution: adding the diluted vapor-water back into the grain vinegar. We, of course, had to address this immediately and require a reconfiguration of the system to ensure that wine vapors could not be introduced into the kosher product.

The entire episode was documented in reports and correspondence. For years afterward, I reminded anyone working with kosher and non-kosher vinegar facilities that vapor recovery is a critical control point. By digging into OU Kosher’s vast repository of such cases, AI can help identify these critical control points—the stages of a process most vulnerable to crosscontamination.

As another example, the OU has an Ingredients Department, one of

whose responsibilities is determining which ingredients are considered innocuous—meaning an OU-certified company may purchase them even if they are not formally certified. I work in this department. We maintain a listing for an ingredient called guar gum, a plant derivative that must undergo processing before it is usable. What kinds of kashrus processing of guar gum? Our database includes reports from who have described these processes in different contexts. Being able to access and synthesize those reports to assess potential risks is invaluable. AI can pull together years of scattered documentation and summarize the findings, saving both time and effort.

Beyond offers practical administrative benefits. With nearly 1,000 worldwide and thousands of weekly visits, OU Kosher can use AI to optimize RFR routing by mapping locations against accounts, quickly identifying whether current routes make sense or if another could cover a visit more efficiently.

Questions about technology replacing a mashgiach long predate AI.

Consider a full-time mashgiach in Belgium, a part-timer in Spain, and a plant in Portugal that needs a visit—who should go? Routing decisions cannot be based on geography or cost alone. Some mashgichim bring specialized technical expertise that may justify a less obvious choice. AI can take all the variables into account and provide clear, constructive guidance that facilitates smarter decisions overall.

Q: Is AI forcing the OU to consider when technology can replace the need for a mashgiach?

A: Questions about technology replacing a mashgiach long predate AI. Certain tasks can be performed by automated systems as well—or even more effectively—than a mashgiach. For example, facilities that process whole eggs often use robotic detection machines to identify blood spots and remove them immediately. Given operations that handle over a million eggs per day, a mashgiach

kosher cheese production: Halachah requires mashgiach oversight, and video monitoring has been proposed as a substitute for on-site supervision. Rabbi Yisroel Belsky, zt”l, former OU Kosher senior halachic consultant, maintained that an OU representative must be physically present. Similarly, the OU still requires mashgichim at restaurants despite monitoring technologies that could theoretically replace on-site supervision.

Rabbi Moshe Feinstein addresses a related case in a teshuvah (Iggeros Moshe, YD 1:35) concerning insect infestation in sauerkraut. In Europe at the time, cabbage was heavily infested. In the United States, however, pesticides were demonstrably effective in reducing infestation to a level at which the cabbage could be considered acceptable even without further checking. Rav Moshe was asked whether the use of pesticides could be relied upon—meaning, assumed to have been used and to have been effective—without additional inspection. He concludes that, technically, for the

We should not allow our own analytical skills to atrophy.

and not rely solely on presumptions. This teshuvah illustrates a key principle: There may be sound technical grounds for relying on technology, but the OU, in certifying a product, must take responsibility to ensure that all systems are functioning properly.

Q: Still, would you not agree that AI, in its capacity to learn and develop, is a new paradigm?

A: Yes. But the more pressing question is not whether AI could replace a mashgiach—it’s what is irreplaceable

mashgiach

The answer may seem obvious but is

There is an intangible—but nevertheless very real—advantage to a mashgiach. Among other things, he is able to assess an entire situation as a whole. Over time, he develops a sense of whether something is amiss or whether a new development warrants closer mashgichim have followed an instinct that led them to probe more deeply into a situation, only to discover that their concern was well founded. Sometimes the trigger is something seemingly minor, such as the body language of a production operator—for example, avoiding expected eye contact when . I would (insight) that mashgichim We all want someone with that sensitivity visiting our companies.

Q: What are some pointers on how not to use AI?

A: OU Kosher staff regularly work with proprietary information. The OU AI Committee has issued a best-practices guide stressing that large language models may incorporate uploaded data into their learning models, potentially compromising confidentiality. Staff must be mindful of this risk.

Another issue—common across professions—is the risk of laziness. At times, using AI will result in people

relying on superficial searches or quoting responses without verifying the source. We should not allow our own analytical skills to atrophy or dull.

Q: How is the OU using AI to help consumers?

A: All departments at the OU, including OU Kosher, are working with a consultant who is providing introductory and advanced sessions on meaningful AI use.

We are currently focused on using AI to help the kosher consumer, starting with making our product search— oukosher.org/product-search—smarter and more intuitive. The site already offers the most up-to-date list of thousands of OU-certified products, but our goal is to make searching faster, more precise and genuinely helpful.

With AI, a search for “dairy-free” could surface oatmeal or soy milk—even if those words don’t appear in the product name. In other words, the system doesn’t just match keywords; it understands what people are actually looking for. We are also exploring several other ways AI can assist kosher consumers.

At the same time, we are mindful of AI’s limits. Baruch Hashem, we have a staff of professionals with real intelligence and expertise. Ultimately, any suggestions from AI must be reviewed and validated by senior OU Kosher staff before implementation. AI is a powerful tool—but at the end of the day, it’s just a tool, and nothing more.

We are here t o share our expertis e with you.

ASK OU

Advanced Kashrus Seminars

Training and Educational Programs including internships and week long intensive kashrus immersive program

C ommunity programs

Speakers available for your school, shul or organization

VISIT OU

Bring your scho ol or organization to OU Kosher’s world headquar ters to learn more ab out the world of kosher.

ASK OU Virtual

Can’t make it out to our office, or we can’t make it to you? Try our virtual option.

Contact Rabbi Eli Eleff at 212.613.0602 or koshereducation.org

HOW ISRAELIS REBUILD WITH STRENGTH

By Howard Blas

The hidden economic cost miluim—and the resilience that carried Israeli families through

ast May, Miriam, originally from Cleveland, Ohio, walked away from her role as vice president of marketing at a start-up with offices across Israel. With her husband, Natan, thirty-seven, serving more than 450 days in Gaza since October 7, the demands of work became impossible to balance with raising their three children under seven on her own. “I made the decision very quickly,” she says. “I was spread too thin.”

The choice came during months of sleepless nights, when sirens sent her racing down four flights of stairs to the building’s miklat (safe room), neighbors grabbing her half-asleep children as they ran. The shelter was stifling, airless, crowded. “We were dripping with sweat, completely exhausted,” she recalls. “It was an incredibly intense time.”

In recent months, Natan, who has been away from home for up to six months at a time, was assigned a better army schedule, and so Miriam recently found a new job. For now, she is focused on keeping daily life manageable.

Miriam is not alone.

While a ceasefire has been in effect since the fall of 2025, thousands of miluimnikim (Israeli reservists) and their families spent two long years under sustained financial strain as the conflict upended daily life and household income. An underreported aspect of the war is how Israelis, from recent olim to veteran immigrants to Sabras, navigated these pressures while also dealing with the emotional and logistical toll of a conflict that seemed to stretch endlessly forward.

Yet, in a pattern familiar to anyone who has lived in Israel long enough, many responded with creativity, faith and resolve. They drew on fortitude to keep their families afloat—paying bills, caring for children and elderly parents, and serving their country all at once.

Remarkably, and in ways that defy easy explanation, despite the war and a surge of global anti-Israel sentiment, Israel’s economy has demonstrated striking resilience. As of this writing in mid-2025, the Israeli stock market has posted strong gains, reflecting investor confidence.

But national indicators, however encouraging, obscure the human cost beneath them.

These numbers do not fully capture how individual families actually lived through the war—how income was lost, careers stalled and routines dismantled.

Natan, an attorney by training, made aliyah from Toronto in 2006. Miriam proudly refers to her husband

Howard Blas is a social worker, special education teacher and inclusion specialist. He frequently leads Birthright Israel trips for people with disabilities and is the author of a recent book on b’nai mitzvah and disabilities. He recently made aliyah and lives in Tel Aviv.

as a “front-line soldier,” though she is quick to acknowledge the reality behind the phrase. For much of the war, he was, as she puts it, “very absent”—from his job and from his family.

Before the war, Natan worked at a large Israeli law firm before moving to an in-house counsel position, a shift he hoped would bring greater predictability.

“The new job had the promise of better, family-friendly hours,” Miriam notes wryly. Instead, since October 7, he was rarely at work. Fortunately, his employer continued to pay his salary while he served in miluim.

What no employer could compensate for, however, was his absence from home.

“For the majority of his time in miluim, he had no cell phone, and we had no real conversations,” Miriam says. Only in recent months has some measure of routine returned. “He has a set schedule: ten days in, five days home, ten days in, five days home. And it is the first time he has had his phone.”

Atzmaim: When Miluim Meant Losing a Paycheck

For salaried employees in larger firms, the economic safety net—though stretched—largely held.

In the case of miluimnikim working in high tech, finance, law and other large organizations, employees generally continued to receive their regular salaries during long periods of reserve duty, even when absent from work for months at a time.

For the self-employed, however, there was no such buffer.

Self-employed workers (known as atzmaim, or freelancers) entered the war without the institutional protections of payroll continuity. They faced the financial consequences of reserve duty directly.

Shlomo Wiesen grew up in New Rochelle, New York, watching siblings and fellow congregants from the Young Israel of New Rochelle serve in

A self-employed digital marketing professional, Shlomo Wiesen did not have the benefit of an employer continuing his paycheck while he served in miluim Courtesy of Shlomo Wiesen

As a freelancer, it was very difficult; there was no paycheck waiting for me when I came home.

the IDF. He joined the army at age twenty-five and has been serving in miluim for the past twelve years. A self-employed digital marketing professional, Wiesen did not have the benefit of an employer continuing his paycheck. “As a freelancer, it was very difficult; there was no paycheck waiting for me when I came home,” he says. While he does not have children to support, the Tel Aviv resident served extended stints in southern Hebron. “It was impossible to get any work done in the first month of the war. There was just too much going on.”

And yet professional obligations did not simply disappear. Both Wiesen’s Jewish and non-Jewish clients in the United States were understanding and supportive, though expectations remained. “I told the non-Jewish clients I was on pause, out of commission,” he says. While Wiesen managed to make ends meet, and is grateful for that, he recounts stories of fellow soldiers in his unit who did not fare as well, including a psychologist in private practice who was forced to close his office and work instead in a public clinic.

Wiesen describes the amount of responsibility he and fellow soldiers faced early in the war, as well as the “very spotty internet on the base,” which made it nearly impossible to get any work done. As he began getting short leaves, he was “checking in” and “looking at my sites,” though he wasn’t doing any “real work.”

Gradually, amid the instability, a routine emerged. Wiesen’s schedule became more regular. “Work picked up,” he says, “and I could more aggressively pursue new clients.”

Wiesen was pleased that the army began giving freelancers priority in choosing days off so that they could “go home and do work.” This flexibility made it possible for some to remain professionally afloat. He reports that he and other religious soldiers would request to go home during the week so that they could do their computer work and other tasks. “As painful as it was to not go home for Shabbat, we needed to be home on a day when we could use the computer.”

Wiesen is grateful to his clients for their understanding and notes that one Jewish client insisted on paying him even while he was in miluim and not working. “I definitely appreciated that.”

While the war disrupted Wiesen’s professional life, it deepened his spiritual one.

Serving in miluim strengthened his faith. “The religious guys in the army would go out of their way to make a minyan—three times a day. You’d even see nonreligious soldiers helping to make minyan, especially during Chanukah with candle lighting.” He describes singing “Shalom Aleichem” together on Friday night, eating Shabbat meals huddled indoors, and praying in makeshift spaces. “There was a strong sense of spiritual community,” he says.

Looking back on his months of service, Wiesen speaks with quiet pride. “I am grateful that I had the opportunity to do something so important.”

Professor Manuel Trajtenberg, professor emeritus of economics at Tel Aviv University and senior faculty at the Mandel Leadership Institute, describes Israelis as “incredibly resilient,” recounting stories of reservists in Gaza “with laptops who keep running their start-ups.”

Professor Trajtenberg, who has held diverse positions in the Israeli government, including chairman of the National Economic Council at the Prime Minister’s Office and chairman of the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Council for Higher Education, is also careful to note the limits of that resilience. Israel, he says, cannot sustain a prolonged war, in large part because more than two-thirds of its army is made up of miluimnikim. “They are not a marginal addition to a standing army.”

He emphasizes that miluimnikim like Natan and Wiesen “are the best of the workforce—twenty-five- to forty-five-year-olds who are in their prime working years.” Those in combat units, intelligence units and the air force, he adds, “are the very highest-quality people in the workforce.” Mobilizing them for extended periods, he says plainly, “is a serious blow to the economy.”

The Entrepreneurial Spirit:

Keeping a Business Running during the War

Chaim Jacobson describes his life in high tech as “good.” Still, he was uneasy about long-term stability.

Jacobson, forty-one, of Tel Aviv, began his career as a computer engineer in Israel’s famed high-tech industry. When he later encountered an opportunity to open retail stores, he took a calculated risk. Aware of highly profitable makolets in Jerusalem, he thought the approach could be replicated in Tel Aviv. “I realized that if owning a store worked, I could make a comfortable salary,” he says. “I thought, why not? I could open a bunch, maybe even a reshet (chain), and then exit. I took a chance.”

Five years later, Jacobson owns two makolets and a café in Tel Aviv. He attributes his success partly to the affluence of the surrounding community, but just as much to relationships. “You need a real connection with the community,” he says. Known for his friendliness, he emphasizes service and quality—and recounts going out of his way to secure basic products like milk during shortages, even when it meant no profit. “Sometimes I don’t make a penny,” he says, “but people need what they need.”

Jacobson himself has not been called up for reserve duty. “I guess I’m not relevant anymore,” he jokes. His business, however, has not been spared the effects of the war. Several of his employees were called to miluim, forcing him to scramble. For small business owners, this created immediate staffing challenges.

“You have to find replacements,” he explains. “When they were gone for months, we hired new employees.”

The logistical burden was compounded by bureaucracy. At the start of the war, employers were required to continue paying the salaries of employees serving in miluim, with reimbursement from the government coming later. “We didn’t know how much or when,” Jacobson says. “For months, we were paying double salaries.” Eventually, Bituach Leumi (the National Insurance Institute) reimbursed him and later shifted to paying reservists directly. “It worked out,” he says simply. “But it wasn’t easy.”

Professor Trajtenberg notes that the government has generally been “very generous in supporting miluimnikim.” At the same time, he corroborates Jacobson’s experience, noting that “owners of small businesses were affected” in a range of ways. Some, like those who own businesses in the north of Israel and had been evacuated, suffered. Others, like Jacobson, are doing well but dealing with all the red tape.

Some sectors, Professor Trajtenberg explains, actually performed well during the war. With fewer Israelis traveling abroad and more consuming locally, supermarkets flourished, as did banks. Defense-related industries prospered too.

Tourism: A Livelihood on Hold

Not all sectors, however, were able to adapt. Tourism was hit especially hard during the war. Tour guides, hostel owners and zimmer (private guesthouse) operators found themselves with little or no work for months at a time. Having barely recovered from the economic toll of the Covid-19 pandemic, Israel’s tour guides were once again among the first to feel the ground shift beneath them.

“Tourism has always been a volatile profession,” says Shulie Mishkin of Alon Shvut, a thirty-year resident of Israel and a tour guide for two decades. “Over the past five years, we’ve been knocked down over and over again.” While Mishkin found “guiding-adjacent” teaching work during both the pandemic and the war, others temporarily switched fields.

Patrick Amar, a tour guide who made aliyah from Montreal to Modi’in twenty years ago, was forced to reinvent himself. Before October 7, his calendar was full. “I plan my schedule a year in advance,” he says. When flights stopped and tours were canceled, the work vanished overnight.

After spending several months in the United States visiting family and speaking to communities, Amar returned to Israel and confronted reality. With guiding opportunities scarce, he enrolled in cooking school, then spent four months running a local burger restaurant with a friend.

Still, Amar, a father of five children ages twelve to eighteen, insists that guiding remains his calling. What sustained him—beyond adaptability—was faith. “I lost 90 percent of my income. I am a man of faith. I have emunah, especially when it comes to making a living. I grew up in a Sephardic business community where

If you’re a businessman without emunah, you won’t survive!

Patrick Amar, a tour guide who lives in Modi’in, was forced to reinvent himself, as Israel’s tour guides were among the first to feel the economic shock of wartime. Courtesy of Patrick Amar

people have faith. If you’re a businessman without emunah, you won’t survive!”

By late December, Amar reported that guiding work had resumed. “Thank G-d, I’ve been busy since the end of the holidays. It’s quiet now, but 2026 is already filling up.”

High-Tech Growth

The Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel reports that the largest employment gains during the war were in the health, welfare and social services sector, as well as in education, while the steepest declines occurred in hospitality and food services and in information and communication services. The high-tech sector continued to grow, albeit at a slower pace; according to the Taub Center, fewer than 2,000 high-tech jobs were added during the war, compared with roughly 14,000 during equivalent periods in previous years.

Much of Israel’s economic strength is anchored in its high-tech industry. The sector accounts for roughly 14 percent of the economy, making it not only a central driver of growth but also a critical contributor to government revenues.

Professor Trajtenberg offers a playful perspective on the role of high tech in Israel’s economy. “Israel’s economy is very easy to describe—we sell brains and we buy everything else! Fifty percent of the economy is high tech.” Even agriculture, he notes, is deeply intertwined with

greatly, Israel’s “brain economy” proved more resilient than industrial economies dependent on physical infrastructure.

Unquestionably, however, the war impacted reservists’ career trajectories. In fact, Professor Trajtenberg’s main concern is the war’s negative effect on “human infrastructure.”

Ahuva Ross Cohen understands this firsthand. Her husband, Meir, who works in venture capital, served extensive periods in miluim. “After seven months,” she says, “from the company’s perspective, you’re not here.” While they managed financially, she worries about missed opportunities and long-term career impact.

Cohen compares the situation of miluimnikim returning to work to new mothers returning to work from maternity leave. “It can feel challenging to return and quickly get up to speed. There’s an inherent pressure to be fully reintegrated and productive within the next few months. Even though you may physically be back, the mental switch from war zone to high tech is a hard context switch.”

Cohen works for the global high-tech firm, monday.com. Given her husband’s extensive miluim service and the need to care for her children, ages four and one, she has been affected at work. She praises monday.com. “They were amazing,” she says, citing grants, gifts and sustained attention to families of reservists.

By this past winter, her husband had served over 200 days. “We’re managing,” she says, “but the war isn’t really over,” as many of the men are still serving in reserves. Their faith, she explains, was central. “It carried us emotionally.” So much so that they named their daughter, born in September 2024, Lielle Emunah. “Our faith has given us both comfort and confidence in knowing our role throughout this war, that our fight is a moral one and that Hashem will perform miracles if we do our hishtadlut.”

While the war strained Israelis across every sector, those interviewed for this article share a common determination: to continue building lives in Israel, despite uncertainty and cost.

Miriam and Natan insist they “are grateful to live in Israel and to raise our children here.” Miriam currently works in real estate, and Natan has returned to his role as in-house counsel—though another miluim date looms ahead. They feel a deep sense of gratitude that they have been able to continue making ends meet during these difficult times.

“We really believe in this,” Miriam says. “It comes with a price. But we want to live in Israel, and we’re doing it for the Jewish people.”

Her husband puts it more plainly. “Every generation pays a price,” he says. “This one has to be paid. It’s the only real option for the survival of the Jewish people.”

Ahuva Ross Cohen compares the situation of miluimnikim like her husband, Meir, returning to work to new mothers returning to work from maternity leave. Courtesy of Ahuva Ross Cohen

Readers are invited to use this forum to express personal views and address issues of concern to fellow Jews. Send submissions to ja@ou.org.

The Power of “Yet”

Why No Child Is a Finished Product

By Richard Altabe

The memory will last forever.

Eight hundred students of the Hebrew Academy of Long Beach (HALB) elementary school on New York’s Long Island gathered in the gym on the last Monday of the school year to surprise me with an adorable song they had created in my honor. The love they showered upon me was hard to fathom. Looking back, I often wonder what, in my nine years at HALB, had led to such a moment.

Perhaps a clue could be found in one of the verses of the song they sang: “Students come to see you anytime you’re free, Wednesday bentching, Laffy Taffy just for me!”

Was it just the Laffy Taffy I handed out as a reward? Or was it something deeper—about a school culture where even the youngest children felt noticed and welcome? (Though I imagine the candy didn’t hurt.)

I spent my time disciplining students, as any principal must. I set rules for teachers and curriculum standards that needed to be met. There were plenty of days when students—and parents—were

unhappy with me. Yet even months after my retirement, when I see children in New York’s Five Towns, where I live, they often run up to hug me or give me a high five. As one parent wrote to me: “Thank you for believing in my son and not giving up.” That line meant more to me than any formal praise.

This mindset guided my nearlyfour-decade career in education. I was fortunate to learn from two giants of chinuch: Rabbi David Eliach, z”l, and yibadel lechaim aruchim, Rabbi Yaakov Bender, shlita. Brooklyn’s Yeshivah of Flatbush High School, which I joined in 1984, had a culture of high academic performance shaped by Rabbi Eliach’s dedication to helping every student strive for excellence. When I shared success with my students, Rabbi Eliach encouraged me to reach higher. “They can do it if you expect it of them,” he would say. Kids rise—or fall—to expectations.

In 1988, I moved to Yeshiva Darchei Torah in Far Rockaway as a young general studies principal. There, I had the zechut of working for Rabbi Bender, who believes that all children

can succeed when given the right environment and support. I recall a sixth-grade student who arrived from a Chassidic yeshivah with minimal preparation in reading and math. I asked Rabbi Bender how to integrate him among peers years ahead. His answer: “You’ll figure it out.” That was all he said—and that was the point. With support from the Gruss Foundation–sponsored computer labs and one-on-one resource help, the student reached grade level within two years. Today he is a successful nursing home administrator.

Another story: A boy arrived at our school diagnosed with dyslexia

Richard Altabe is currently serving as the chief education officer at the JIEM Education Initiative Foundation, working as a consultant to various yeshivahs across the US. Mr. Altabe also currently serves on the Blue Ribbon Commission of the New York State Education Department, working on graduation standards for all students in the State of New York.

Don’t confuse accommodation with limitation. I need glasses to drive, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t learn how to drive.

and was unable to read until the third grade. Recognizing his mathematical gifts, we allowed him to take Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science by ninth grade—a bold decision that raised eyebrows but paid off when he scored a perfect 5. Later, he gained the confidence to tackle AP European History, a course requiring extensive reading skills that had once seemed impossible for him. He passed that exam as well. Today he holds a PhD from Yale University and develops computer models for theoretical physics.

Communicating Motivation: The Art of Leadership

I gravitated toward research on motivation theory because it helped put words to what I had already seen work with students, day in and day out. Carol Dweck’s mindset theory taught me the importance of the word “yet”— that a child who hasn’t succeeded yet still can. I’m also a fan of Angela Duckworth. Her research showed that success isn’t driven by IQ alone, but by grit—the ability to persevere through challenges. The question was: How does one develop grit? My answer: Parents, teachers and rebbeim must communicate belief in a child. When a child knows you believe in them, you

help build resilience—and grit follows. I recall a student who struggled greatly in school despite multiple interventions. Though our team exhausted every tool we had, we recognized that he needed a different environment to flourish. When we helped transition him to a school better suited to his needs, I made sure he knew something crucial: I believed he had the capacity to succeed—we simply hadn’t found the right key yet. Years later, he called to share his success in his new school, and when he asked me to donate to that school, I knew he had found his place. That taught me that while I may not have the solution for every child, I must believe the solution exists.

I applied these ideas at Yeshivat Shaare Torah Boys High School in Brooklyn, where I served as principal from 2011 to 2016. My staff and I helped students understand that their abilities were not fixed and that setbacks were simply part of the process. One case stands out: A senior was devastated after failing the English Language Arts Regents Exam because that failure meant he couldn’t participate in his planned gap-year learning in yeshivah in Israel. I showed him Angela Duckworth’s TED Talk on grit, and we spoke about what it means to keep going when things don’t work out the first time. I told him what I genuinely believed: that he could pass, though it would take real effort.

He passed with a 75, which opened the door to his Israel experience. Years later, when I met Duckworth at a conference, she was so moved by the story that she sent him a signed copy of her book. These moments confirm what Chazal teach: that anyone who withholds teaching from a child is as if they stole from him. Low expectations are a form of loss. Every child should be pushed to learn as much as he or she can.

Children with learning differences can be just as successful in a school setting as their peers. It’s not about lowering expectations; it’s about changing how a child accesses the material. If a child is a visual learner, present it visually. If a child needs questions laid out differently, then lay them out differently. But don’t confuse

accommodation with limitation. I need glasses to drive, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t learn how to drive. Everyone can learn the material; they may just need different lenses.

A Full Circle Journey

In 2016, I became the principal of HALB, an institution I had attended as a child. As a student there, HALB not only helped me grow into a frum Jew but helped my entire family grow in frumkeit as well. I have unbelievable hakarat hatov to the school. My work there was a labor of love, and my goal was to create programming that would help all learners succeed, including those with differing abilities.

A. was one such child. He was a non-reader in early grades, struggling with both English and Hebrew reading. Instead of pulling him out of his class for remedial services, we created a program so that there are two teachers in the classroom—one with expertise in special education who can work more closely with kids like A. Slowly but surely over time, he developed the skills to read and ended up graduating with an A average in middle school. But ultimately, A. learned how to overcome his disability because we taught him how to believe in himself.

Timeless Truths

I left HALB after nine meaningful years. On that final Monday, when all 800 children gathered to sing, I shared the most important lesson I had learned: “I believe in you—and if you believe in yourself, you can achieve anything you set your mind to.”

I have spent almost forty years in chinuch, teaching children who grow up to be remarkable adults. There’s no greater honor than that. As I have often said, some people make money; I try to help make people.

When “Obviously Kosher” Isn’t

Why beer—and other foods you’d never suspect—requires kosher certification

Q: Beer never used to require kosher certification. What changed?

A: Historically, many beers were considered acceptable without kosher certification. However, that is no longer reliably the case. Due to the growth of craft beers, flavored varieties, barrelaged products and shared equipment, OU Kosher has updated its beer policy for all OU establishments and certified events. Beginning in 2026, only beers with reliable kosher certification may be served in OU-certified restaurants and at OU-certified catered events.

The OU is joined by the OK and Star-K, along with several local kosher supervision agencies, in adopting this policy to maintain consistent and reliable kosher standards across the industry.

A list of nearly 1,000 currently certified beers and breweries is available at oukosher.org/kosher-beer-list. The list includes products from major brands like Coors and Budweiser.

Q: Why are beer policies changing now?

A: The long-standing assumption that beer did not require kosher certification was based on the idea that it contained only four basic ingredients—grain, water, hops and yeast—all of which are inherently kosher. Government regulations also reinforced this assumption. For example, US law requires added flavorings to be disclosed on packaging.

However, the explosion of craft breweries—small, independent manufacturers—has significantly changed beer production. These breweries now produce sours, stouts, flavored beers and barrel-aged products and account for nearly 14 percent of US beer sales by volume.

According to OU Kosher’s COO, Rabbi Moshe Elefant, the introduction of additives creates concerns even for beers that appear “plain” because breweries often use the same vats for multiple recipes. While equipment is cleaned between batches, cleaning is not the same as kashering, and therefore new kashrus issues have arisen that did not exist in the past.

Q: What kinds of beer flavorings can be problematic?

A: Rabbinic inspectors may encounter unexpected non-kosher ingredients in breweries, including oyster broth, clam juice, wine and milk products.

Some beers contain dairy ingredients, which add a subtle creaminess and opacity. Without realizing it, you could be drinking a beer that contains lactose. This, of course, has very serious kosher ramifications.

“The good, old-fashioned beer everybody would drink was simple,” says Rabbi Elefant. “Now, to give them an edge, manufacturers enhance the beer by adding all sorts of flavors.”

While the OU seeks to make kosher food widely available and accessible, these developments in the beer industry are concerning. “We’re not looking to be onerous,” explains Rabbi Elefant. “But when we tell someone they can consume a product, we need to be fully confident that it is kosher without question.”

Q: What other products look like they wouldn’t need a hechsher but actually do?

A: Many foods that appear inherently kosher should not be consumed without certification. Common examples include ice cream, bread and coffee.

Q: Isn’t ice cream just milk and sugar? Why does ice cream need kosher certification?

A: Ice cream was once considered a straightforward dairy product, made from simple ingredients such as fresh cream, sugar and natural flavorings like vanilla, cocoa or fruit. Today, however, ice cream often contains processed ingredients—such as emulsifiers, stabilizers and artificial flavorings— that may be derived from non-kosher animals. Even the cream can come from a non-kosher source. One common issue is whey cream: A byproduct of the cheese-manufacturing production, whey cream can be non-kosher.

Emulsifiers are a particularly serious kashrus concern. For example, diglycerides—emulsifying agents made from fatty acids and glycerol—may be derived from animal sources and therefore require kosher certification. In addition, manufacturing equipment is frequently shared with non-kosher products, creating a risk of crosscontamination. Dried dairy ingredients such as powdered milk, lactose or whey are spray dried and therefore require hashgachah to ensure that the spray drier (a heated chamber) was properly kashered before use.

For these reasons, ice cream requires reliable and careful kosher supervision.

Q: What if the brand of ice cream is kosher, but the shop itself is not kosher-certified?

A: If a non-certified establishment sells kosher-certified ice cream, one may only purchase it if the original carton bears a visible hechsher, and the scoop used is clean and has not been used for non-kosher products. This precaution is necessary to avoid cross-contamination.

Q: What could be the concern with purchasing bread from a noncertified bakery?

A: At first glance, bread may seem simple enough. But without kosher

certification, there are a few issues that aren’t always visible to the consumer. Bakeries can bake breads that contain non-kosher cheese, non-kosher raisin juice or even animal fats on the same pans and in the same ovens. The shortening used in the bread requires kosher certification. Even if it is an all-vegetable shortening, it may be produced in a facility that processes both animal and vegetable fats, which can compromise its kosher status.

In a situation where the ingredients panel for a bread does not list oil, it is still possible that oil was used to grease the pans to prevent sticking. The oil is not viewed as an ingredient in the bread but rather as a processing aid, and the FDA does not require processing aids to appear on ingredient labels, so they may be present even when they are not listed. Finally, if a bakery is Jewish-owned, challah must be separated. Without kosher supervision, there is no way to ensure that this requirement has been fulfilled.

Q: Can one buy a cup of coffee anywhere—such as at a rest stop— without kosher certification?

A: Plain black coffee may be purchased as long as it is served in a paper cup, which avoids the use of utensils that may have been used with non-kosher foods or washed together with non-kosher dishes.

Other coffee drinks—such as lattes and cappuccinos—use frothed milk, which introduces concerns about shared equipment: The steam wand and the metal cup used to froth milk may have also been used for non-kosher beverages or may have been washed in a non-kosher dishwasher, and one should ensure this is not the case before ordering.

Flavored coffee should not be purchased without kosher certification, as flavoring ingredients may be derived from non-kosher sources.

Q: What does a “K” on a product mean?

A: Quite simply, it may mean nothing at all. Unless you know who stands behind that “K,” it offers no real assurance of kosher supervision. In some states, a manufacturer can place a “K” on a label even if there is no supervision whatsoever. The letter “K” is meant

to stand for “kosher,” but it is not a protected symbol; anyone can use it. By contrast, the OU is a registered trademark. No company may place an OU on a product without authorization and ongoing supervision.

Rabbi Yaakov Luban, a recently retired OU Kosher rabbinic coordinator who served in that capacity for decades, often illustrated this point with a story.

An OU-certified company once asked whether it could use breadcrumbs from another manufacturer whose product bore a “K.” To clarify, Rabbi Luban contacted the breadcrumb company and asked a simple question: “Who is the rabbi behind the ‘K’?”

They provided a name. Rabbi Luban didn’t recognize it, so he called a colleague who lived in the same community. “Do you know this rabbi?” he asked. “Of course,” the colleague replied. “He passed away five years ago.”

When Rabbi Luban relayed this information back to the company, there was a long pause. Finally, the person on the line said, “Oh—that explains why we haven’t seen him in so long.”

The lesson is straightforward: A “K” on a label does not necessarily mean there is a rabbi—or any supervision— behind the product.

WHAT’S THE TRUTH ABOUT... Delaying a Brit Milah for Medical Reasons?

By Rabbi Dr. Ari Z. Zivotofsky

MISCONCEPTION: (1) When a brit milah is delayed for medical reasons, it may be done as soon as the infant recovers, and (2) once it is delayed, there is no rush and it may be pushed off until a convenient time, such as Sunday in the US or Friday in Israel.1

FACT: If an infant had a localized medical issue that precluded a brit on day eight, he should be circumcised as soon as medically acceptable. If he had a systemic ailment, following his recovery (even before day eight)— even if there are no medical contraindications—there is a mandatory complete seven-day waiting period until the circumcision may be performed, at which point it should be done without delay.

Background: The Torah twice states (Bereishit 17:12; Vayikra 12:3) that a brit milah, circumcision, should take place on the eighth day2 after birth. This rule is so inviolable that when the eighth day is Shabbat, a yom tov or even Yom Kippur, the brit nonetheless takes place on that day (Shabbat 132a).3 However, because of the concern for the life of the newborn, the Mishnah in Shabbat (19:5 [137a]) gives a major exception to eighth-day circumcision and states: “An infant who is sick is not circumcised until he recovers.” This is the source for delaying the brit milah of a sick infant.4

A powerful, emotional rationale for this principle is offered by Rambam (Hilchot Milah 1:18; cited in Tur and Shulchan Aruch, YD 263:1): “We only

circumcise a child who has absolutely no illness, because the danger to life takes precedence over everything. And circumcision can be performed at a later date, while it is impossible to ever restore a single Jewish life.”5

The Amora Shmuel, commenting on the mishnah (ibid.), says that if a baby had a high fever, then once the fever has subsided, the circumcision is delayed seven days6 to allow for his body to further strengthen. These seven days are seven twenty-four-hour periods (Yevamot 71a–b), and thus, a child declared healthy from his fever at noon on Tuesday is not supposed to be circumcised before noon the following Tuesday,7 and it is then done as soon as possible.

Shmuel’s statement mentioned only fever. Rambam views fever as an example and adds (Hilchot Milah 1:16): “recovers from fever or from a similar illness.” Rav Papa discussed

(Yevamot 71b) an ailment for which the brit can take place as soon as the infant is healthy. This has led to a distinction (Shulchan Aruch, YD 262:2) between two categories of ailments: choli shebechol haguf (“systemic disease”) or only be’echad me’eivarav (“local illness”). In the former, there is a mandatory seven-day wait, while in the latter the brit should be performed as soon as the infant recovers—in other words, if he is deemed “healthy” at 4:00 PM, the brit should be done that afternoon.

Then there is the Thursday/Friday conundrum: Once it is halachically and medically permitted to perform the brit, it is forbidden to delay the brit for even one day (Rema, YD 261:1; Magen Avraham 249:5; Chochmat Adam 149:2), for example, to a day more convenient for the guests (Gilyon Maharsha 262:2).8 Nonetheless, in order that the second or third post-op day—the most difficult days for the child (Maggid Mishnah, Shabbat 2:14)—not fall on Shabbat (which might necessitate violating Shabbat for necessary medical treatment), some authorities prohibit doing a delayed brit on Thursday9 or Friday (Taz 262:3). This position received support among Sephardic poskim (Knesset HaGedolah and Birkei Yosef cited in Kaf HaChaim 331:31; Yabia Omer 5, YD 23). On the other hand, Ashkenazic poskim in general ruled that once the baby is ready for the brit, it should be done even on Thursday or Friday and not delayed further (Shach

266:18 and Nekudot HaKesef 262:3; Gilyon Maharsha 262:2; Mishnah Berurah 331:33).10

Determining whether a particular medical condition warrants postponing a milah, and if so into which category it fits—local or systemic—is not always obvious. The Aruch HaShulchan says that one should consult a doctor and the doctor can be relied upon (YD 262:18).11

Modern authorities have expressed opinions on some examples.12 Regarding the Talmudic example, Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach ruled that if the fever was above 38 degrees Celsius (100.4 degrees Fahrenheit), then after it returned to normal there should be a seven-day wait (Nishmat Avraham, YD 262:6:4). In 1964, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein ruled that a full-term infant who needed to be placed in an incubator gets the seven-day wait after being taken out of the incubator (Iggerot Moshe, YD 2:121; cf. Tzitz Eliezer 13:82:4). Rabbi Auerbach opined that the circumcision of an infant on antibiotics is delayed seven days from the time he is asymptomatic, not from the end of the course of antibiotics, which often continues longer (quoted in Nishmat Avraham, YD 262:6:5). On the other hand, Nishmat Avraham quotes opinions that a forceps delivery, a broken leg due to birth trauma, a cleft lip or a cleft palate likely should not delay the brit at all, but if they do, the delay is only until the infant is deemed healthy and there is no seven-day wait (Nishmat Avraham, YD 262:8, 10).

In the course of a long discussion on delaying a brit on account of eye ailments (which are often taken very

seriously—see YD 262:2 and Nimukei Yosef to Yevamot 71a; Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook, Da’at Kohen 137), Rabbi Chaim Pinchas Scheinberg (Am HaTorah, Mahadurah 2, vol. 4 [5742]: 22–28) says that regarding an infant covered with pus-free pimples over his whole body that are considered normal,13 if the doctors say he is not suffering and will not be harmed from the milah, the brit may be on time.

An interesting topic that has merited much discussion is that of a “yellow baby.”14 The Gemara (Shabbat 134a) and Shulchan Aruch (YD 263:1) say that the brit of a baby that is yarok15 is postponed. Is that referring to neonatal jaundice, a relatively common condition in which there is a yellow tone to the infant’s skin and possibly to the sclerae and mucous membranes?

There are two broad categories of jaundice in newborns. The less common is “pathologic jaundice,” which indicates an underlying medical issue in the infant and would be treated as choli shebechol haguf.

In contrast, the overwhelming majority of cases involve “physiologic jaundice.” Although it results in elevated levels of bilirubin, a yellowish byproduct resulting from the breakdown of red blood cells that causes the yellow appearance, the infant is usually otherwise healthy. In a healthy newborn, this may be due in part to the newborn’s natural high hemoglobin level and an immature liver that has not yet fully developed the capacity to effectively metabolize and clear bilirubin from the bloodstream.

Jewish Action is taking the c beyond the magazine with o new podcast.

Listen in as our host Rabbi sits down with leading voic explore ideas shaping our c

Stream wherever you get yo podcasts

Scan here to listen

Most doctors would assert that physiologic jaundice is usually not an impediment to circumcision. Yet, if the “yellow baby” in the Talmud refers to jaundice, halachah mandates delaying the brit milah until after the skin color returns to normal, possibly with a seven-day delay. Contemporary authorities have weighed the conflicting issues: There is a strong prohibition to unnecessarily delay a brit; the Talmud says to delay a brit of a baby who is “yarok”; and modern medicine does not view physiologic jaundice as a reason to delay circumcision. Should the brit of an otherwise healthy jaundiced baby be delayed, and if yes, is there a need for a seven-day wait? And does treatment of an infant with bili lights [special blue lights used to treat newborn jaundice at higher levels] affect the halachah regarding when to perform the brit?

Some authorities (e.g., Chochmat Adam 149:4; Aruch HaShulchan 263:2) say the milah should be done as soon as the yellow subsides, while others (e.g., Tuv Ta’am Vada’at, YD 1:220; Shu”t Beit Yitzchak, YD 2:91) treat it as systemic and require a seven-day wait.

Rabbi Dr. Moshe Dovid Tendler (in the Yeshiva University journal Beit Yitzchak, vol. 27 [1995]: 112) felt that with non-dangerous physiologic jaundice (he writes—with a bilirubin level of less than 20 milligrams per deciliter on day eight), the brit can be done on the eighth day. On the other hand, Minchat Yitzchak (3:145, 6:92, 8:88) and Moadim u’Zemanim (3:205) ruled to follow the halachah literally and postpone the brit for even mild jaundice, even if the doctors said that the brit could be done earlier. Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg (Tzitz Eliezer 13:81, 83) was uncomfortable ignoring the Gemara and thus ruled to delay the brit, but in deference to modern medicine felt that we could rely on the opinions that do not require a seven-day wait.

Rabbi Auerbach is quoted (Nishmat Avraham 263:1:1) as saying that for intermediate bilirubin levels (11 to 18) one should wait until the yellow has subsided, while for higher levels one should wait seven days after it returns to 12. Yet he is also cited (ibid.) as permitting a brit on day eight in a particular case of an infant whose bilirubin level had been 19 on day three but was 13 by day five.

When to do the brit of a jaundiced baby is still the source of much discussion and disagreement, and like everything regarding the proper timing of a brit, a mohel should be consulted in conjunction with competent rabbinic and medical authorities.

Brit milah is a sign of the eternal covenant between G-d and the Jewish people. As a surgical procedure, it is one of two mitzvot that inherently contain risk16, the other being milchemet mitzvah (an obligatory war).17

The Midrash (Bereishit Rabbah 46:9; see Bereishit 17:7–11) links the two by noting that G-d states that if the Jews keep the mitzvah of circumcision, they will merit entering the Land. Conquering the Land, is, of course, a milchement mitzvah. Nonetheless, in both of those mitzvot we are obligated to minimize the risk; accordingly, the milah of a sick infant is delayed but only

to the extent medically and halachically required. During that period, it should not be done (and performing the brit is not a chumrah); once that period has passed, it should be done as soon as possible.

Notes

1. For specific cases, halachic and medical authorities should be consulted.

2. All britot, eighth day or delayed, must be in the daytime (Shulchan Aruch, YD 262:1).

3. The Talmud (Shabbat 132a) suggests three derivations for why circumcision, which involves drawing blood—an activity generally prohibited on Shabbat—is nonetheless performed on Shabbat or yom tov. There are important exceptions to this. For example, the milah for babies born via Caesarian section (Shulchan Aruch, YD 266:10) or during twilight Friday afternoon/before chag or Shabbat/chag twilight, is postponed until the next available weekday. Also, non-eighth-day britot are not done on Shabbat or a chag. Modern poskim discuss whether a child conceived via intrauterine insemination (IUI) or in vitro fertilization (IVF) may be circumcised on Shabbat.

4. Usually at the brit milah ceremony, in addition to the surgical circumcision, the infant is named. However, if the circumcision will be significantly delayed, there is a preference to name the child before the brit, both to aid in parental bonding and to have a name for prayers for his welfare (Rabbi Dr. Avraham Steinberg, ed., Sefer Assia, vol. 4 (5743): 234–44).

5. The Chochmat Adam (149:4) quotes Rambam and then reports that he witnessed a case in which the midwife greenlighted the milah of a sick infant who then died that day. He writes that he likes the custom in Prague that the mohel goes to check the health of the infant the day before the brit.

6. The Yerushalmi (Shabbat 19:5, Yevamot 8:1) says thirty days; all codifiers follow the Bavli’s version.

7. Rabbi Yaakov Ettlinger (Binyan Tzion 1:87; Aruch LaNer, Yevamot 71b) suggests that this seven-day waiting period is of Biblical origin, a suggestion that Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach finds surprising—he says it is a rabbinic caution to avoid a danger to the child (Nishmat Avraham, YD 262:4) and adds that it applies to an adult circumcision as well. Thus, for example, according to Rabbi

Auerbach, an adult convert should not be circumcised within seven full days of a fever or other systemic condition. Minchat Yitzchak (6:92:3) says that one should wait seven days even if the doctors are encouraging doing the milah earlier, but if it is done within the seven-day waiting period, it is kosher. Note that a brit of a healthy boy done before day eight is post facto valid according to the Rema (YD 262:1), but the Shach (262:2) disagrees and requires hatafat dam on day eight (or later if not done on day eight).

8. Pitchei Teshuvah (YD 262:2) quotes an extreme case in which a brit was delayed for health reasons and the father decided to delay it until erev Pesach so the firstborns could eat at the meal. The Noda B’Yehudah thought this abhorrent and ruled that if erev Pesach arrived and the brit had not yet been done, they should not do the brit so as not to set a precedent.

9. See Shach 266:18, Nekudat HaKesef, and Rabbi Akiva Eiger 262 that maybe Thursday is a problem but Friday is okay.

10. Similarly, and based on the halachot (Shulchan Aruch, OC 248) regarding when one may set sail, contemporary authorities discuss the permissibility of elective surgery on Thursday and Friday (Shemirat Shabbat Kehilchatah, 32:33; Tzitz Eliezer 12:43; Emet LeYa’akov, OC 331:3—who specifically mentions not electively inducing labor on Thursday or Friday).

11. A doctor is relied upon for categorizing the medical condition but not for authorizing a brit against an explicit halachah. For example, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein says (Iggerot Moshe, YD 2:121) that a “blue baby” who had a blood transfusion is certainly considered choleh bechol haguf and thus must wait seven days after he is better even if the doctors opine that he can be circumcised sooner. Rabbi Chaim Pinchas Scheinberg (Am HaTorah, Mahadurah 2, vol. 4 [5742]: 26) and Minchat Yitzchak (3:145, 6:92, 8:88) expressed similar views.

12. Two important references with lists of medical conditions are Rabbi Dr. Avraham Steinberg, “Brit Milah—Medical and Halachic Aspects,” Techumin 2 (1981): 306–24 and Avraham-Sofer Abraham, Nishmat Avraham (5774), YD 262–63. Note that some of these halachic decisions were proffered decades ago and medical opinions, which affect the halachah, may have changed. Also note that many mohalim will want an infant to reach a certain weight, often about 2.5 kg (5.5 pounds), before circumcising him.

13. Rabbi Scheinberg might be referring to either erythema toxicum or transient neonatal pustular melanosis.

14. An issue that seems to have not merited sufficient discussion is that of an otherwise healthy premature baby who spends time in the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit). Certainly, a seven-day wait is warranted, but when should the count start? From the last desaturation or bradycardia or temperature instability, etc., or from the discharge itself?

15. “Yarok” in modern Hebrew means green. In the Talmud, there are fewer words for colors and “yarok” was used to refer to green, yellow-green, indigo (blue-green) and pale green, depending on context. The Mishnah (Niddah 2:6 [19a]) refers to “yarok” blood, which Meiri understood as green blood, while Tosafot (Niddah 19b) said it is yellowish like a ripe etrog. See Tosafot, Sukkah 31b, s.v. hayarok kekarti, where they struggle to identify the color yarok. When used to describe an animal’s lung, yarok can be the color, for example, of an egg yolk and not kosher (YD 38:1) or green and permissible (38:4). Yarok is also used to describe non-kosher milk (Avodah Zarah 35b) and the face of a man after death (Avodah Zarah 20b; Ketubot 103b), where it most likely means a pale green (see Julius Preuss, Biblical and Talmudic Medicine, trans. Fred Rosner [New York 1978], 164–67). On “yarok,” see Nadav Shinrav, Techumin 23 (5763): 509–11, 514. In the context of milah, it is unlikely that they were referring to a green baby, while a yellow baby (jaundice) is a relatively common occurrence.

16. Chatam Sofer (Shu”t YD 245), based on Rashi to Gittin 57b, suggests that milah on the eighth day is actually much more dangerous than it seems, and that the fatality rate is as low as it is only because the merit of the mitzvah is protective.

17. See Rabbi Dr. Ari Z. Zivotofsky, “What’s the Truth about . . . Milchemet Mitzvah?” Jewish Action 85:1 (fall 2024): 90–92, https://jewishaction.com/religion/ jewish-law/whats-the-truth-aboutmilchemet-mitzvah/.

$1,000,000 +

Drs. Felix A”h and Miriam Glaubach

The Kohelet Foundation

Jewish National Fund - USA

The Marcus Foundation Inc.

$500,000 - $999,999

Becky and Avi Katz

Mordecai A”h and Monique Katz

The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles

UJA-Federation of New York

$250,000 - $499,999

Dr. Shmuel and Evelyn Katz

Mayberg Foundation

Olami Launch

World Mizrachi

$100,000 - $249,999

Andrew and Corey Morris-Singer Foundation

Hyman A”h and Ann Arbesfeld

The Associated Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore

Irving and Melody Boime Dailygiving.org

Diamond Foundation

Gershon and Aviva Distenfeld

Mitchell and Annette Eichen

Jack and Harriet Feintuch

Fieldgate Cares Foundation Foundation for Jewish Day Schools, Greater Philadelphia

Elliot P. and Deborah Gibber

Alan and Barbara Gindi

Amir and Stacey Goldman

Joseph and Ellen Goldstein

Lance and Rivkie Hirt

In Memory of Anne Samson A”h

Jewish Federation of Broward County

Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia

The Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago

The Jewish Federations of North America

The Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey

Natalie and Davidi Jonas

Benefactor Circle members are part of a devoted community of visionaries whose leadership and philanthropy make it possible for the OU to serve and uplift Jews at every stage of life. With heartfelt appreciation, we recognize the individuals whose generosity during Fiscal Year 2025 - 2026* reflects a deep commitment to this mission.

We are honored to celebrate all members of the Benefactor Circle—those listed by name and those who choose to remain anonymous—for the impact they create through their steadfast partnership.

We invite you to join them in making a difference.

To learn more about the OU Benefactor Circle or to become a member, please contact Chaya Schechter at Chaya.schechter@ou.org.

* Donors are recognized based on date of donation payment.

Dr. Ezra and Lauren Kest

Edward and Inna Kholodenko

Harry and Esther Lebovic

Michael and Andrea Leven

Marc Levine

The Margaret and Daniel Loeb Foundation

The Meyer and Idelle Weinstock

Charitable Foundation

Eitan and Debra Milgram

Vivian and David Luchins

Yehuda and Anne Neuberger

Raphael and Rivka Egozi Nissel

Ralla Klepak Foundation for Education in the Performing Arts

Jeff Rubenstein

Genie and Steve Savitsky

Mark and Barbara Silber

Daniel and Ellie Stone

Moris and Lillian Tabacinic

Berry and Raizy Weiss

Drs. Yechiel and Suri Zagelbaum

$50,000 - $99,999

Raanan and Nicole Agus

Martin and Barbara Ast

Lewis and Lauri Barbanel

Jeffrey Barr

Bart Baum

Saby and Rosi Behar

Phil and Connie Beinhaker

Hillel and Charlotte A”h Brachfeld

The Cayre Family

Charles Crane Family Foundation

Crain-Maling Foundation

Tzippy and Daniel Cohen

The Conduit Foundation

Isaac Dabah

The Dan-Hytman Family Foundation

Robert and Michelle Diener

Grant and Jennifer Dinner

Jonathan Ditinis

Eisenreich Family Foundation

Brett and Alana Fine

Ezra and Racheli Friedberg

Bentzion Friedman

The George Weinberger Music Program

Goldring Family Foundation

Joseph Goldstein

Dr. Ephraim and Rita Greenfield

Shaul and Tammy Greenwald

Robyn and Shukie Grossman

Moshe and Tira Gubin

Hahn Family Foundation

Klein, Jaffa, and Halpern Families

The Hidden Sparks Fund

Lior and Janet Hod

Ed and Robyn Hoffman/Hoffman Catering

Thomas Hofstedter

Dr. Allan and Sandy Jacob

Chavi and Paul Jacobs

Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco

Jewish Federation of St. Louis

Howard and Debbie Jonas

Warren and Debbie Kimel

Jonathan and Mindy Kolatch

L&D Charitable Foundation

Joshua and Erica Legum

Daniel and Elana Lowy

Iris and Shalom Maidenbaum

Chuck and Allegra Mamiye

Ezra and Lauren Merkin

Minneapolis Jewish Federation

Gabriel and Beth Nechamkin

Gil and Shani Orbach

Drs. Jay and Susan Pepose

Gabe and Yara Plotkin

Ian and Carol Ratner

George and Martha Rich Foundation

George and Pamela Rohr

David and Adeena Rosen

Eric and Gale A”h Rothner

David and Gail A”h Rubin

Moshe and Helen Sassover

Bryan Schon

Enoch and Leah Schulgasser

Scott and Sharon Seligsohn

The Shamah Family

Les and Andi Silver

Jonathan and Michelle Spetner

The Staenberg Family Foundation

Alan A”h and Ina Taffet

Toronto Gaming Charitable Association

Jeffrey and Sharona Weinberg

Michael and Arianne Weinberger

The Weiss Family, Cleveland, Ohio

Jerry and Sora Wolasky

Wynn Family Charitable Foundation

Daniel and Alicia Yacoby

Ben Zussman

David and Becky Zwillinger

$25,000 - $49,999

Aaron Laub Memorial Foundation

Emanuel and Helen Adler

Jeff Aeder

Mitch and Lita Aeder

Scott and Sally Alpert

Lior and Drora Arussy

Sue and Bill Auerbach

Mark and Joanne Bane

Saby and Rosi A”h Behar

Max and Elana Berlin

Brian and Dafna Berman

Judi and Jason Berman

The Blackman Foundation

Maxx and Liraz Blank

Julie and Paul Candau

Vivian and Daniel Chill

Drs. Benjamin and Esther Chouake

Jeff and Helena Cohen

Combined Jewish Philanthropies

Eli and Chasi Davis

Shimon and Chaya Eckstein

Jeffrey and Shira Eisenberg

Linda and Michael Elman

Jonathan and Ariella Eltes

Ezra Erani

Ariela and Benito Esquenazi in Honor of The Mendel Balk Yachad Community Center

Seth and Nealy Fischer

Matthew and Julia Fleisher

Murray and Frimmit Forman

Sheara Fredman

Gerald A”h and Miriam Friedkin

Howard Tzvi and Chaya Friedman

David and Kathleen Gamzeh

Steven and Gail Gerzof

Raymond and Elizabeth Gindi

Yaacov and Monique Ginsburg

Murray and Batsheva Goldberg

Dan and Annie Goldish

Jerry and Anne Gontownik

Barnard A”h and Rachel Gottstein

Seth and Orit Gribetz

Ari and Estee Gross

The Gryfe Family

James and Amy A”h Haber

Marc and Ruki Halpert

Robert and Debbie Hartman

Heitner Charitable Foundation

The Herbert Smilowitz Foundation

David and Lorraine Hoppenstein Charitable Fund of the Dallas Jewish Community Foundation

Alissa and Shimmie Horn

Ira Waldbaum Family Foundation

J. Samuel Harwit and Manya Harwit-Aviv

Charitable Trust

Jay and Diane Zidell Charitable Foundation

Jerry & Helen Stern Grandchildren’s Fund

Jewish Federation and Family Services of Orange County

Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta

Jewish Federation of Greater Washington

Jewish Federation of San Antonio

Dr. Julie and Rabbi Dr. Josh Joseph

Chaim and Suri Kahn

David and Michal Kahan

Benyamin and Esti Kaminetzky

Rabbi Mark and Linda Karasick

Jack Albert Kassin

Michael and Elissa Katz

Laizer and Jessica Kornwasser

Michelle Kuhl

Marc and Rena Kwestel

Albert Laboz

Jon and Dina Leader

Lisa and Michael Leffell Family Foundation

Kenneth and Libby Lehmann

Bruce and Cheryl Leon

Eli and Raizy Levitin

Howard and Elayne Levkowitz

Shlomo and Racheli Lobell

M. B. Glassman Foundation

Lynn and Joel Mael

Steven and Aliza Major

Malcmacher & Meystel Families

Azi and Rachel Mandel

Elliott and Chavi Mandelbaum

Mrs. Fegi Mauer

Stephen and Eve Milstein

Yale and Gail Miller

Steven and Sarah Morgan

Mosaic United

Jason and Jessica Muss

Martin and Elizabeth Nachimson

Sharona A”h and Irwin Nachimson

Nathan and Louise Schwartz Tzedaka Fund

Steven and Martine Newman

NOF Foundation Inc

Michael and Naomi Nudell

Scott and Grace Offen

The Oved Family

Ethan Penner

David and Elana Pollack

Moishe and Nicole Posner

Drs. Nathan and Rachel Rabinovitch

Heschel and Adinah Raskas

Yaron and Lisa Reich

Jason and Shani Reitberger

Mel and Karen Rom

Henry and Vivian Rosenberg

Yossi and Simi Rosengarten

Karen and Shawn Rosenthal

Rowan Family Foundation, Inc.

Rabbi Daniel and Elisheva Rubenstein

Gabriela Saiewich

Robert and Tamar Scharf

Dr. Josef Schenker

Menachem and Rena Schnaidman

Joe and Jessica Schwartz

Dr. Allan Seidenfeld

Yaakov and Sari Sheinfeld

The Martin Silk Foundation

Meyer and Baila Silverberg

Jeremy and Dahlia Simons

Michael and Jessica Singer

Silver Family Foundation

Stephanie and David Sokol

Alex and Sandy Solomon

David Sonenstein

Ed Sonshine

Daniel and Diana Sragowicz

Avi and Deena Stein

Jonathan and Rachel Strauss

David and Randi Sultan

Adam and Tali Tantleff

Travel Insurance Israel

Daniel and Zahavah Uretsky

Alan Wecker

Richard and Diane Weinberg

Dovid and Gila Weinstein

Ari and Caroline Weisman

Gary and Hildee Weiss

Moshe and Dr. Ilana Wertenteil

Joyce and Jeremy Wertheimer

Howard and Batia Wiesenfeld

Esther and Jerry Williams

Daniel and Becky Wolf

Shimon and Hennie Wolf

Yaad Yisrael - Israel Destination

Leon Zekaria

Maurice and Michelle Zekaria

$18,000 - $24,999

Craig and Yael Ackermann

Jonathan and Leah Adler

Art Harris Foundation

Isaac Ash

Ezra and Isaac Ashkenazi

Beker Foundation

Dr. Moshe and Bryndie Benarroch

Benjamin and Deena Berkowitz

David and Shira Berkowitz

Dennis and Debra Berman

Andrea Bier

Marc Bistricer

Rabbi Glenn and Hennie Black

B’nai Sholom and Beth El Foundation

Kalman and Esme Jennifer Bookman

APH HE Ltd

Jeffrey Brown

Jon and Sima Burstein

Comerica Wealth Management

Dahan Family Philanthropies

Dov and Tamar Deutsch

Alan and Judi Eisenman

Yisroel Epstein

Bari and Daniel Erber

Federation CJA

Joseph and Dana Feldman

Sam and Jessica Farber

Jeffrey and Sharon Fishman

Joshua and Shifra Fox

Isaac Franco

Allen and Rachel Friedman

Seth Gerszberg

Don and Marina Ghermezian

David and Sara Gibber

Joseph and Laura Goldman

Ezra and Lilly Gontownik

Nelson and Esther Goodman

Gottesman Family

Greater Miami Jewish Federation

David and Shira Greenberg

Dr. Alan and Miriam Greenspan

Harvey Greenstein

Adam and Claudine Grossman

Yoseph and Yael Gurevich

H and R Rothenberg Family Foundation

Dr. Barry and Shira Hahn

David and Ava Hamburger

Harri Hoffmann Family Foundation

Harvey L. Miller Family Foundation

Steven Heller

Joan and Peter Hoffman

Dr. Shalom and Lori Huberfeld

The Jack Weinbaum Family Foundation

Joseph and Esther Jerome

Jewish Community Federation of Richmond

Jewish Federation of Greater Houston

Steven and Pesh Katz

Ranon and Stacy Kent

Jonathan Kier

Etta Brandman Klaristenfeld and Harry Klaristenfeld

David and Sara Knee

Kenneth and Bev Kraft

Lawrence and Evelyn Kraut

Harry Kramer Memorial Fund

Jack Landsmanas

Meyer and Sheila Last

Jonathan and Shari Lauer

Reuven and Rivky Levitin

Shari and Nathan J Lindenbaum

Liuna Community Foundation

Jonathan Mael

Dr. Menachem and Judy Marcus

Yigal and Caryn Marcus

Yaacov and Esther Mashiach

Michael and Aliza Mermelstein

Daniel and Elana Miller

Gershon and Tamara Miskin

Marshall and Jean Mizrahi

Michael and Michelle Nachmani

Cal and Janine Nathan

Eli and Talia Neuberg

Avishai and Elisheva Neuman

Isabelle and David Novak

Ronie and Julie Ovadia

Adam and Arielle Parkoff

Gil and Melissa Perl

Yossi Rabinowitz

Jona and Rachel Rechnitz

David Reichmann

Roby Brachfeld c/o H.B.S Diamonds Inc

RIK Enterprises

Jonatan and Warren Rosenblum

Eliyahu Rosenthal

Marc and Alissa Rossman

Idelle Rudman

David and Diana Safier

James and Fancy Saka

Samis Foundation

Sarah Shamah Foundation

Bruce and Jill Schanzer

Lisa and Jonathan Schechter

Jonathan and Brigitte Schoen

Cyrus and Sarra Schwartz

Mauricio and Joan Schwarz

Robert and Erica Schwartz

Joseph Shamie

Amos and Barbara Shamir

Benjamin and Mor Shapiro

Sharon Shapiro

Joseph Chaim and Nina Shenker

Tzvi Simpson

Mendy and Susan Sokol

Max and Irina Stesel

Adam and Stephanie Summers

Marilyn Rabhan Swedarsky and Dr. Robert Swedarsky

Victor and Alice Tawil

Gary and Malke Torgow

Lizzy and Josh Trump

Kirill and Mary Vorobeychik

Marcus and Carole Weinstein

Aryeh and Yael Wielgus

Wilf Family Foundation

Dr. Moshe and Rachel Yudkowsky

Zalik Family Foundation

Atta and Henry Zieleniec

Uri and Effie Zisblatt

Elie Zrihen

$10,000 - $17,999

Ora and Maury Aaron

Chanan Ben-Abraham

Jason and Lisa Ablin

Avi Adelsberg

Daniel and Liora Adler

Ari and Rebecca Adlerstein

Zev and Tali Aeder

AEG Contracting, Inc.

Ahavas Yisroel Charity Fund

Michael Aingorn

Lorraine Allen and Rita Mae Allen Family Foundation

Patrick and Leah Amar

American Unity Fund

Mark Applebaum

Sol and Nicole Appleman

Ariel Tours, Inc.

Ateret Marjsn

Mendel Balk Yachad Adult Community Center

Richard and Maureen Axelbaum

AYS Tzedakah Foundation

Yaacov Azrad

Ralph Azrak

Bryan Badzin

Rachel and Avrumi Bak

Balanoff Foundation

Yale and Ann Baron

Gershon Bassman

David and Natalie Batalion

Jonathan and Beth Bennett

Abbey and Helene Berkowitz

Ashley and Lisa Berman

Yvonne Berman

Mrs. Rochel Leah Bernstein

Saul and Leslie Bernstein Family Foundation Inc

Stanley and Vivian Bernstein

Carol Lasek and Howard Bienenfeld

Yehuda and Faige Bienstock

Tomer and Jennifer Bitton

Michael Bixon

Aaron and Eileen Bleeman

Steven and Daniele Bleier

Zev and Vivian Blumenfrucht

Ian and Sarah Boczko

Kenny Bodenstein

Michael and Darlene Bokor

Alyssa and Joseph Boris

Yossi and Dalia Brandman

Lee and Aliza Braverman

Mr. Ludwig Bravmann

David and Nancy Brent

Keith and Lauren Breslauer & family

Yishai and Bluma Broner

Joshua and Amy Buchsbayew

Buckingham Pavilion Nursing and Rehabilitation

Barry and Ellen Carron

Center for Jewish Philanthropy of Greater Phoenix (CJP)

Vanessa and Raymond Chalme

David and Tamara Charnowitz

Jouky Chehebar

Igor and Galina Chernizer

Elliot and Elana Chovev

Donny and Freyda Cohen

Uriel and Yael Cohen

Gobbie and Shayna Cohn

Eduardo Cojab

David and Kathleen Colburn

Contra Costa Jewish Community Center

Ari and Yael Cukier

Shlomo Dalezman

Daniel and Vera Rubinstein Charitable Foundation

The David and Barbara B. Hirschhorn

Foundation, Inc.

John Davison

Tabitha and Brian Dror

Esty Edell

Fred and Suzan Ehrman

Yechiel and Nechy Eisenstadt

Noah and Lisa Elbogen

David and Devora Elkouby

Leon Elmaleh

EMT Action Fund

Benjamin and Yael Englander

Danny and Binah Englander

The F&R Hauer Charitable Foundation

Patricia Falus

Gloria Feldman

Alex Fenigstein

Martin and Leora Fineberg

David and Sharon Fishel

Nancy and Eric Fremed

Ernest and Regina Frenkel

Natalio and Anne Fridman

Akiva and Mimi Friend

Mark and Tamara Friedman

Nathan and Beth Fruchter

Joseph and Stephanie Gabbay

Paul and Diane Gallant

Joshua Ganjei

Mordechai and Zipporah Gasner

Pierre and Reyna Gentin

Eli and Shoshana Ghoori

Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher

IG Gindi

Isaac Gindi

Jack and Marjorie Gindi

Jeffrey and Debbi Gindi

The Gisela and Daniel Ades Foundation

Jillian Gliksberg

Zev Glina

Brian and Gila Gluck

Mark Goldberg

Barry and Judy Goldgrab

Mark and Anne Goldin

Yonatan and Bellene Gontownik

Rabbi Daniel and Judith Goodman

Tomas and Aviva Gorny

Elisha and Daniella Graff

Daniel and Tova Green

Rabbi Micah and Rivkie Greenland

Philip and Aviva Greenland

Seymour and Penny Greenstein

Aryeh and Goldie Gross

Ethan and Yael Gross

Daniel and Chana Grove

Dr. Daniel and Tsipora Gurell

Gustave & Carol Jacobs Center for Kashrut Education

Abe and Ronit Gutnicki

Moshe Hager

Marc and Vivian Hammerman

David and Chaya Tova Hartman

Rabbi Moshe A”h and Mindi Hauer

The Helen and Irving Spatz Foundation

Joseph and Daniella Hellerstein

Chaim and Ariella Herman

Steve and Raquel Herz

Larry and Kimberly Ende Heyman

Yisrael and Shira Hochberg

Cathy and David Hoffman

George Hofstedter

Jason Ingber

Fred Isaac

Isaac H. Taylor Endowment Fund

Rabbi Moshe and Devora Isenberg

Mike and Nava Izak

Michael and Batya Jacob

Joshua Jacobs

The Jacoby Family

Jacobson Jewish Community Foundation

Jewish Federation and Family Services

Jewish Federation of Greater Kansas City

Jeffrey and Ellie Kagan

Miriam Kahn

Dr. Bernard and Melanie Kaminetsky

Dr. Eliezer and Dr. Ilana Kanal

George and Denise Karasick

Joel and Darcie Kassewitz

Yitzy and Gila Katz

Barak Kaufman

Joseph and Esther Kazarnovsky

Aaron and Tobi Keller

Karmela A”h and Jerry Klasner

Robin and Brad Klatt

Gary Klein

Michael and Naomi Klein

Nachum Klugman

Daniel and Eugenie Kohanchi

Dana and Jeffrey Korbman

David and Cyndilee Kosloff

Marcel and Esther Kremer

Scott and Aviva Krieger

Josh and Daniella Kuhl

Steven and Danielle Kupferman

Chana and Josh Kutin

Ira and Sara Landsman

Aaron and Pamela Lauchheimer

Adam and Dania Lauer

Shloimy and Yita Lazar

Mark and Eta Levenson

Emily Levine

Paul and Linda Lewis

Richard and Leora Linhart

Dovid Meir and Faige Loeb

Josef Loeffler

Lucius N Littauer Foundation

The Lubin-Green Foundation

Michelle Mankoff

Daniel and Cindy Mann

Joseph and Meryl Mark

Alex Markowitz

Yechiel and Malkie Mashiach

Morris and Caroline Massel

Eli Mechlovitz

Shmuel and Pamela Melamed

Pinchas and Michal Mikhli

Mordechai and Tova Milch

Joshua and Melissa Mitgang

Marcus and Aimee Mizrachi

Samuel and Debbie Moed

Michael Mondrow

Maurice and Sharleen Moradof

Dr. Zev and Susan Munk

Avi and Debra Naider

Elliot and Cara Neumann

Bernice Novick

Daniel Laifer and Amanda Nussbaum

Howard and Jaclyn Oppenheimer

Russel and Charlene Orelowitz

Drew and Careena Parker

Hillel and Amanda Parness

Prof. Martin Patt

Allen and Miriam Pfeiffer

Michael Pinewski

Pepperdine University

Israel and Nechama Polak

Rabbi Yakov and Frumie Polatsek

Moshe and Yaffa Popack

Adir and Hindi Posy

Michael Potack

Yitzie and Nancy Pretter

Dr. Steven and Belinda Raikin

Jonathan and Anne Rand

Adam and Ilana Rauzman

Dr. Azriel and Ilana Rauzman

Eli Reinhard

Shlomo and Jessica Ressler

Alex and Rachel Rindner

Mel and Karen Rom

Todd Rones

Debbie Rosalimsky

Malki and J. Philip Rosen

David Rosengarten

Aaron Rosenson

Jonathan and Nechama Rosenstein

James and Loren Rosenzweig

Mark and Natalie Rosovsky

Yechiel and Nomi Rotblat

Joshua and Lisa Rothstein

Joel and Lisa Rubinstein

Eileen Ruby

Chaim Rutman

Andrew and Rachel Saka

Allen and Esther Samson

Judah and Bayla Samter

Stephen and Jessica Samuel

David and Shira Sandel

George and Irina Schaeffer

Ilan and Diana Scharf

Joshua A”h and Eileen Schein

Kenny and Naomi Schiff

Steven and Elisheva Schlam

Marc and Ronnie Schlussel

Jordan Schnitzer

Justin and Alyssa Schussheim

Heshe and Harriet Seif

Andrew and Stephani Serotta

David Shabsels

Asher and Cheryl Shafran

Hyman and Liza Shamah

Robert and Mara Shlachter

Myra Shulkes

Aaron Siebzener

Brian Siegel

Helen and Gerald Silver

Hillel and Saritte Silvera

Barry and Joy Sklar

Ivan and Marilyn Soclof

Jared and Aliza Solomon

Michael and Fran Sosnowik

Jewish Federation of South Palm

Beach County

Jonathan and Anat Stein

Estate of Melvin and Mirele Steinig

Peter and Elizabeth Steinlauf

Marvin and Debra Sternberg

Daniel and Mira Stokar

Sullivan and Cromwell

Elliot and Laurie Sutton

Joshua and Beth Sydney

Eli Tabaria

Tell Construction and Projects, LLC

Dr. and Mrs. Shimmy Tennenbaum

Jonathan and Rachel Tiger

Fred and Susan Toczek

Tree of Knowledge

Julius and Stephanie Trump

Shlomo and Ronni Troodler

Daniel Turkel

UJA Federation of Greater Toronto

Shuli and Marc Tropp

Charles and Rachel Wagner

Samuel and Tami Wald

Weil, Gotshal & Manges

Barbara and Howard Weiner

The Weininger Foundation Inc.

Dr. Neal and Bonnie Weinreb

Adam and Jodi Weinstein

Mark and Lois Weintrub

Lyle Weisman

Shlomo and Blimy Weiss

Marc and Cindy Weisskopf

Adam and Ava Weisstuch

George and Joni White

Eli and Rhona Wilamowsky

Aron Wolf

Rabbi Shabsai and Debbie Wolfe

Morris and Arielle Wolfson

Zev A”h and Nechama Wolfson

Jonathan Wornick

Alan and Lori Zekelman

Alan and Lenore Zelinger

Mark and Jessica Zitter

Abraham Zonana

Shlomo and Ariela Zuller

$5,000 - $9,999

Brian and Lynn Abrams

Zev Abramson

Leon and Sofia Achar

Gershi and Aliza Adler

ADM/ROI

Leor and Evelyn Alon

Charles and Myrna Alpert

David Altbaum

Jeremy and Rebecca Amster

Eric N. and Heather Andron

Yakira and Jeremy Apfel

Ari and Naomi Klein Charitable Trust

Alan and Roberta Aronoff

Arnold & Porter

Jack and Regine Ashkenazie

Prof Michael and Dr Daphna Atar

Richard and Sharon Auman

David Azar

Natan and Tzippy Bane

Shai and Lori Barnea

Lowell and Lisa Baron

Jonathan and Sara Barzideh

Martin and Mayann Baumrind

Don and Miryam Benovitz

Avi and Liba Benus

Samuel and Deborah Beran

Sabrina Bercovitch

Daniel Berger

Jack Berger

Dr. and Mrs. Yitzhak and Ellen Berger

Betzalel Berkman

Ari Berkowitz

Barry and Erica Berkowitz

Jordan Berman

Craig and Jan Berne

Avromi Bernstein

Michael Betesh

Leora and Jules Bienenfeld

Binah Charitable Foundation

Donald and Aliza Bixon

Yehuda and Roni Blinder

Harvey and Judy Blitz

Ben and Tamar Blumenthal

David and Barbara Blumenthal

Doris Blumkin and Mark Blumkin A”h

Sandy and Shoshana Bodzin

Enid and Harold H. Boxer Endowment

David and Renee Braha

Avrumi and Sarah Bram

Chesky Braunstein

Susan Braverman

Igor and Olga Braylovskiy

Kevin Brown

Jonah and Jo Bruck

Yonah and Sonya Budd

The Burning Bush Foundation

Yerachmiel and Bracha Caine

Lorein Cassab

Eddie Chabbott

Daniel and Devorah Chefitz

Josef Chehebar

Chelm Family Foundation

Isaac Chera

Thechesedfund.Com

Adam and Ilana Chill

Gerald and Michelle Cohen

Yoni and Tzivia Cohen

Ethan and Amy Corey

Rick and Marcy Cornfeld

Mark and Andrea Coronel

David Cutler

Jason and Rachel Cyrulnik

Yosef Dancykier

DAAT Charitable Foundation

Erica and Michael Dachs

Benjamin Dahan

Eliana Dahan

David Daniel

Shimon Danieli

Anthony Daniels

Susan Danziger

David and Inez Myers Foundation

Melvin David

Deloitte & Touche

Den Labor Law

Charles and Naomi Ruth Deutsch

David and Debra Diamond

Kayla Diamond

Jared and Ilana Dinkes

Dorothy Philips Michaud Charitable Trust

Sari and Shlomo Drazin

Jared Dubin

Dr. Caryn Borger and Mark Dunec

Ezra and Adena Dyckman

Ari and Nechama Eckman

Daniel Eckstein

Eric and Yvette Edidin

Leah Edidin

Yossi Eisenberger

Gary and Karen Eisenberg

Michael and Shelley Eizelman

Dov and Nina Elman

The Ember Foundation

Alan and Rachel Engel

Ari Erlichman

Sherri Esformes

Jeffrey and Linda Esses

Lorne and Yaffa Factor

Melvin Farber

Seth and Zahava Farbman

Paul and Lorraine Fein

Dennis and Amy Feit

Joseph and Sarah Felsen

Jonty and Juli-Ann Felsher

Brian Ferber

Naftali and Pnina Fessel

Hillel and Shani Feuerman

Zev and Laurie Finkel

Aryeh and Dorit Fischer

David Fishel

Nussin and Pamela Fogel

Joseph and Rachel Fox

Joseph and Raquel Franco

Dovid and Adina Frankel

Aaron and Miriam Frankel

Dr. Ben and Cara Freedman

Jeeremy and Dana Frenkel

Marc and Gitty Freund

Daniel and Ariella Freundlich

Rabbi Yitzchak and Debbie Fund

Joey Gabay

Paul and Diane Gallant

Ehud Gaon

Shai and Tova Gerson

David and Rachel Gerstley

Risa and Zev Gewurz

Nechemia and Dr. Chanie Ginsburg

Sheldon and Fran Gittleson

Robert and Leah Gladstein

Ari and Abigail Glass

Lenny Glass

Yoel and Yehudit Goldberg

Mr. and Mrs. Ernie Goldberger

Diego and Sandy Goldfarb

Michael and Rena Goldman

Gadi and Shira Goldress

Daniel and Tova Goldring

Allen A”h and Shulamith Goldstein

Ben and Aviva Gonsher

Hillel Gontownik

Rafi and Alyson Goodman

Daniel and Aviva Gordon

David and Naomi Graber

Neil and Rachel Grafstein

Noah and Nava Greenfield

Heshy and Chaya Gross

Noah and Rivka Gross

Solomon and Ahuva Gurwitz

Cheryl Haas

Steven and Jodi Halper

Lee and Frumie Hanover

George and Barbara Hanus

Leon Harari

Robert and Jan Hardcastle

Steve Harris

Rabbi Yechezkel Hartman

HC Staffing and Payroll Solutions

Bobby Hedaya

Andrew and Terri Herenstein

Chani and Daniel Herrmann

Ronald and Michelle Herzlinger

Orin and Esther Hirschman

Gary and Cheryl Hoberman

Adam and Sarah Hofstetter

Norma Holzer

Akiva and Chana Horowitz

Richard and Beverly Horowitz

Dr. David and Barbara Hurwitz

Jon Hurewitz

I.Rice & Co., Inc.

Jay and Yael Idler

In Memory of Dovid Ben Reb Yosef

Weinberg A”h

In Memory of Stan Jaspan Z”l

Gilon and Barbara Irwin

Moshe and Devora Isenberg

Benjamin and Yehudis Esther Israel

Deborah Laub Israel

Ovadiah and Leila Jacob

Howard and Rosalyn Jacobson

Vladimir Jaffe

Nouri Jaradeh

Norman Jemal

Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Kansas City

The Jewish Education Project - Board of Jewish Education

Jewish Federation of Las Vegas

Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit

Jewish Federation of Northeastern New York

Jewish Legacy Charitable Foundation

Jewish Women’s Foundation of South Palm Beach County

JG Funding Corp

Tzvi and Miriam Juskowicz

Mark Kahan

Alexandra and David Kahn

Allan and Nechama Kahn

Michael and Judith Kaiser

John and Julie Kaplan

Michael Kaplan

George Kaplan Memorial Foundation

Dr. Jodi Wenger and Stuart Karon

Max and Nina Karpel

Aaron Kasper

Ari and Shari Katz

Gary and Shelley Katz

Jacob Katz

Lance Katz

Stuart and Carol Katz

Steven and Marjorie Kellner

Benjamin Kellogg

Dov and Amy Kesselman

Chaim and Bayla Kiffel

Mitchell and Anne Kirschner

Shmuel Klahr

Elli and Ashley Klapper

Benjamin and Samantha Klein

Nancy I. Klein

Reuven and Leah Klein

Robert A”h and Ita Klein

Daniel Klugman

Jonathan and Marian Koblenzer

Richard and Susan Kofkoff

Jeffrey and Leeann Kole

Avi and Ravital Korn

Samuel and Maxine Kosofsky

Allen Koss

Harry Kotler

David and Deborah Kramer

Daniel and Rachel Kraus

Rachel Kraut

Kranzberg Foundation

Kroll LLC

Edy and Jacob Kupietzky

Robert Kushner

Ophir and Sharron Joan Laizerovich

Joseph and Rena Landes

Benzion Lasker

Armand and Esther Lasky

Eliot and Marilyn Lauer

Pinchus and Deborah Schick Laufer

Shlomo Lazar

Robert and Jennifer Lebovits

In Memory of Judy Lefkovits

Nathan Lefkovitz

Hugo Leibovitch

Gerald and Tsipi Lerman

Tova and Seth Levine

Reuven and Ilana Levinson

Zachary Levovitz

Adam Lewis

Andrew and Leah Lewis

Daniel Lewis

Ilana Lewis

Alexander and Sherry Libin

Netanel and Aviva Lichtenstein

Jason and Miriam Lieber

Joe and Shira Lieberman

Hylton and Leah Lightman

Ari and Mindi Lind

Bradley Lipman

Shabsa and Susan Lis

Michael and Leslie Litwack

Jeremy and Tamar Lustman

Matthew Luterman

Elijah Magerman

Lawrence and Milagro Magid

Michael Mann

Shimon Margoline

Shari and Yaakov Markovitz

Aaron and Lisa Martin

Rena Krasnow and Robert Marx

Shmuel and Talia Mashiach

Leonard and Beatrice Mauskopf

Pesach and Nancy Mehlman

Moises Meichor

Gershon and Tzipporah Meisel

Tzachi and Elisheva Meisel

Benay and Ira Meisels

Adam and Francine Mermelstein

Barbara Merzel-osband

Avi and Adina Metchik

Avraham Metta

Dror and Jennifer Michaelson

Miller Families

David and Desi Miller

Victor and Susan Mindlin

Daniel and Jessica Minkoff

Meyer and Lisa Mintz

Etan and Valerie Mirwis and Family

Dr. Daniel and Stephanie Mishkin

Isaac and Laurie Mitrani

Jonathan and Shoshana Mizrachi

Randy and Rebecca Modell

David and Jill Mogil

Aryeh and Mirlana Morris

David A”h and Candace Muhlrad

Adam and Karen J. Myers

David A”h and Naomi Myers

Shulamis Nadler

Rabbi Yaakov and Sara Nagel

Edward and Devorah Neiger

Harry and Dorit Nelson

Adam Nesenoff

Ira Neuberg

Zachary Neugut

Terry and Gail Novetsky

Mark and Rena Nussbaum

Lee Omer

Aaron and Ahuva Orlofsky

Leslie and Josh Ostrin and Family

Joe Oved

Debra Panitch

Ari and Cheryl Pearl

Bella Picciotto

Louis and Lynne Pillemer

Shimshon and Naomi Pitterman

Isaac and Bonnie Pollak

David and Deborah Popper

Dov and Naomi Prero

Donald and Esther A”h Press

Mitchell and Katia Raab

Isaac and Susan Rabinowicz

Nachum and Chava Rabinowitz

Meir and Sara Raskas

Michael and Arianne Rauchman

Georgia Ravitz

Anne Read

Andrew Rechtschaffen

Max and Susan Reichenthal

Drs. Craig and Jackie Reiss

Remark Foundation

Lonnie Richardson

Gail and Binyamin Rieder

Ralph and Leah Rieder

The Rita J and Stanley H Kaplan Family Foundation

Michael Ritzer

Dr. Jay and Marjorie Robinow

Nathaniel and Devora Rogoff

Ben Rogowski

Donny and Arielle Rosenberg

Jacob Rosenberg

Marcos and Dalia Rosenberg

Phillip Rosenberg

David and Miriam Rosenwasser

Yechiel and Margo Rosman

Abie Rosow

Brian and Naomi Ross

Eli and Racheli Roth

Henry and Golda Reena Rothman

Michoel and Selina A”h Rovinsky

Richard Rubenstein

Ronald Rutman

Shlomo and Tamar Rydzinski

Rafi and Elimor Ryzman

Joseph Sabbagh

Milton and Shirley Sabin

Kenneth and Mindy Saibel

Noam and Aliza Salamon

Marvin and Roz Samuels

Sapphire Wealth Advisory Group

Zev and Shuly Safran

Adam and Dana Sasouness

Avi and Cheryl Savitsky

Schachter Family Trust

Joseph Scharf

Robert and Andrea Schechter

Dr. Josef and Debra Schenker

Yaniv and Michal Schiller

Arnold and Sheri Schlesinger

Steven and Rhonda Schottenstein

Debra Schreck

Miki Jona and Shmuel Schreiber

David and Ruthie Schwartz

Joseph Schwartz

David and Debra Segal

Mark Segal

Ari and Shoshana Shabat

Howard and Alissa Shams

Mazyar K. Shamshoni

Tamar and Aaron Sheffey

David and Sima Sherman

Neil Shore

Kenneth and Bonnie Sicklick

Moishe and Deena Siebzener

Leigh and Sicily Silver

Tuvia and Miriam Silverstein

Mark and Jennifer Smith

Mordecai and Vivienne Soloff

Jacob and Yosepha Solomon

S. Jan and Marsha Spector

Jonathan and Dodi Spielman

Gil and Elysa Stein

David Steiner

Jack S. and Ianna Sterenfeld

Gary Stern

Rachelle and Zev Stern

Tom Stern

Daniel and Joyce Straus

Joseph and Diana Straus

Moshael and Zahava Straus

Ted and Linda Struhl

Josh Sultan

Richard and Alison Sutton

Swieca Children Foundation

Kalman and Chaya Tabak

Morris and Rachel Tabush

Bruce and Michelle Taragin

Maurice Tempelsman

Joshua Ternyak

Traditions

Sam and Tzipi Tramiel

Jonathan and Irit Tratt

Jay and Peggy Umansky

United Congregation Mesorah

Steven and Murielle Uretsky

Eliana Vidan

Avner and Lisa Vider

Ephraim and Aviva Vilenski

Danny and Tirtza Vizel

Avi and Aviva Vogel

Bonnie Vozar

Adina Wagman

David and Rachel Warschawski

Chaim and Aviva Wealcatch

Janet Weinberg

Lee and Liora Weinberg

Avrum and D’vorah Weinfeld

Joshua and Ariel Weiner

Tova and Howard Weiser

Howard and Rita Weiss

The Wengrowsky Family

Michael and Jennifer Wiederkehr

Jeffrey and Rita Wilder

Alan and Denise Wildes

Zev Wolf

James and Caryn Wolfe

Lorne Wolfe

Norman Wolk

David Wolkinson

Herschel and Debbie Wrotslavsky

Rafael Zakinov

Ari Zaltz

Ron and Sarah Zanger

Cheryl and Marc Zeffren

Ariel and Beth Zell

Erez Zevulunov

Danny and Dawn Zouber

Yechiel and Aliza Zucker

This list is updated regularly, and the most up-to-date version can be found at OU.org/Benefactor/. We apologize for any omissions. If you wish to be acknowledged or your name is listed incorrectly, please email Chaya Schechter at Chaya.Schechter@ou.org.

Vegging Out at the Seder

By Naomi Ross

Kosher products have come a long way since the canned macaroons and jarred gefilte fish of my youth. Having a large variety of kosher l’Pesach products available on the market today is certainly a blessing we ought not take for granted. While modern manufacturing and kosher supervision have made our holiday cooking so much easier, it has become increasingly challenging to eat healthy throughout a week of heavy foods. By the end of the week, it is not uncommon to feel bloated and weighed down. Toward that effort, my goal is to keep my Pesach cooking healthy and clean, maximizing fresh produce and minimizing how many convenience products end up in my food. Stay simple and pure in ingredients, eat moderately, rely less on processed carbs, and your body will enjoy Pesach that much more!

Sheet-Pan Zucchini and Tomatoes

Yields 4–6 servings

Sheet-pan roasting on high temperatures in an even layer is your answer to flavorful, evenly-cooked vegetables.

4 small zucchinis, scrubbed, trimmed and cut into half-moons (¼ inch thick)

1 pint grape tomatoes, rinsed

2 large cloves garlic, minced or crushed

½–1 teaspoon Kosher Salt (or more to taste)

¼ teaspoon black pepper

½ teaspoon dried oregano 1–2 tablespoons olive oil

Preheat oven to 450°F. Line sheet pan with foil or parchment. Arrange oven racks in the upper third of the oven. Combine all ingredients in a very large mixing bowl; toss to coat.

Spread out in an even layer on baking sheet.

Roast for about 8 minutes; give vegetables a quick stir and roast for another 2–4 minutes or until all vegetables are tender and tomatoes are starting to split or burst.

Braised Lamb Shanks with Root Vegetables

Yields 4–6 servings

A roasted lamb is not permitted at the Pesach Seder (Shulchan Aruch, OC 476:1–2), and many Ashkenazim avoid any roasted meat at the Seder, but braised lamb is a wonderful option as a holiday entrée. This super savory and homey lamb stew is cooked low and slow for satisfyingly tender results.

2 tablespoons olive or avocado oil

5–6 meaty lamb shanks

2 onions, thinly sliced

3 large carrots, peeled and cut in 1-inch chunks

1 fennel bulb,* fronds and stalks discarded, halved and sliced crosswise

2 celery stalks, sliced

1 medium potato, peeled and cut into 1-inch chunks

2 small parsnips, peeled and cut into 1-inch chunks

3 cloves garlic, minced

1½ teaspoons Kosher salt or more to taste

½ teaspoon ground black pepper or more to taste

1½ teaspoons dried rosemary

1½ teaspoons dried thyme

3 tablespoons tomato paste

¼ cup orange juice

2 cups dry white wine (like Chablis)

2 tablespoons potato starch

½ cup water

½ teaspoon grated orange zest (optional)

*Can be omitted if your custom is not to eat fennel on Pesach.

Naomi Ross is a cooking instructor and food writer based in Woodmere, New York. She teaches classes throughout the country and writes articles connecting good cooking and Jewish inspiration. She is the author of The Giving Table (New York, 2022).

Heat oil in a Dutch oven or large soup pot over high heat. Sear the shanks on all sides until golden brown—you may need to do this in batches. Transfer to a plate and set aside. Reduce heat to medium; add the onion, carrots, fennel, celery, potato, parsnips, garlic and spices. Cook, stirring often, until vegetables begin to soften, about 10 minutes. Stir in the tomato paste; cook for 1–2 minutes. Add orange juice and wine, mixing and scraping the bottom to loosen any browned bits. Bring mixture back to a simmer. Mix potato starch and water together in a separate cup until dissolved, then add to the pot and stir to blend. Add optional orange zest. Return the shanks to the pot, arranging them to fit comfortably in the pot. Bring back to a simmer, then reduce heat to low. Cook covered for 1½ –2 hours or until lamb is tender and starts pulling away from the bone. Skim off excess fat from the surface if necessary. Season braising liquid to taste, adding salt or pepper as needed.

Roasted Balsamic Cauliflower

Yields 6–8 servings

Glazed sweet and sour cauliflower is a simple and healthy side dish any time of year.

4–5 tablespoons olive oil (depending on size of cauliflower head)

3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

2–3 teaspoons brown sugar or honey

¾ teaspoons garlic powder

1 teaspoon salt

Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

2 heads cauliflower, cores removed and florets cut into bite size pieces (Fresh cauliflower should be checked for insects.

See The OU Guide to Checking Produce and More at http://oukosher.org/ouguide-to-checking-produce-and-more.)

Preheat oven to 450°F. Line a sheet pan with aluminum foil or parchment paper.

Combine the olive oil, balsamic vinegar, brown sugar/honey, garlic powder, salt and pepper in a large bowl; whisk to blend. Add the cauliflower and toss to coat; spread the mixture into an even layer on the lined baking sheet. Roast in the preheated oven, stirring occasionally, until glazed and tender, about 20–25 minutes.

Yields 6 servings

Spiced Poached Pears with Red Wine Syrup

The richness of red wine infused with sweet spices makes for a luxuriously rich dessert. . . . Who would ever believe it’s fat-free?!

2¼ cups dry red wine (like cabernet or merlot)

½ cup honey

½ cup water or orange juice

1 teaspoon orange zest

1 cinnamon stick

6 whole cloves

3 green cardamom pods (optional)

6 bosc or anjou pears

In a large pot, combine wine, honey, water or orange juice, zest and spices. Place over medium heat and bring to a boil; reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes.

While liquid is simmering, peel pears, leaving stem intact and slice ¼ inch off the bottom of the pears to create a flat bottom. Gently place pears in poaching liquid, adding additional water as needed for liquid to come up at least halfway on the pears. Cover and simmer for 30–40 minutes, using tongs to turn pears every 8–10 minutes to ensure even color and cooking. Pears will take on a gorgeous purple hue and should be cooked through and tender but still firm. Carefully transfer pears from liquid to a separate dish to cool. Meanwhile, continue simmering liquid uncovered over a medium-high flame until reduced

by half, about 10–15 minutes, and until liquid is thickened and slightly syrupy. Remove from flame; drizzle each pear generously with syrup and serve warm.

Chef’s Note

This is a great “make-ahead” dish—it can be made up to one week in advance and stored in the refrigerator.

NEW FROM OU PRESS

Aggadot HaRav: The Lectures of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik on Aggadah, Stephen Neuwirth Edition

Edited by Rabbi Yaakov Hoffman

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik— known as the Rav—is renowned for explicating the philosophy of the Halachic Man, the archetype figure who views all of reality through the prism of halachah. This new volume, Aggadot HaRav, containing shiurim delivered by the Rav in the Moriah Synagogue on the Upper West Side during the 1950s and 60s, displays another facet of the Rav: as a master interpreter of Aggadah, the non-legal sections of the Talmud.

The shiurim in this volume were skillfully translated from Yiddish by Rabbi Shaul Hutner and thoroughly edited by Rabbi Yaakov Hoffman to maintain the Rav’s oratorical power. Covering the Aggadic portions of Masechet Berachot, folios 10a through 20a, these shiurim reveal the Rav’s method of interpretation. As noted by Rabbi Menachem Genack in his Publisher’s Preface, while many roshei yeshivah traditionally confined their analyses to the “classic” legal tractates of Nashim and Nezikin, the Rav knew no such boundaries. He applied the same piercing lomdus—the search for precise definitions and conceptual categories—to the stories and ethical maxims of the Talmud as he did to the laws of torts or sacrifices. Aggadot HaRav demonstrates the rich body of ethical teachings and Jewish philosophy to be found in the Aggadic passages which are too often glossed over.

A striking example is the Rav’s analysis of the verses in Psalms 103 and 104, based on the Gemara in Berachot 10a. The Rav distinguishes between two fundamental types of song: praise (shevach) and thanksgiving (hoda’ah). While praise is an aesthetic reaction to the grandeur of creation and the order of nature (din), thanksgiving is an ethical response to G-d’s kindness (chesed) and personal intervention. The Rav proceeds to explain not only the Gemara at hand but also the overall Jewish approach to these two fundamental concepts and their interrelationship.

In another chapter, the Rav addresses the philosophy of Jewish history, triggered by the dialogue between Beruriah and a heretic regarding the verse “Sing, O barren one” (Isaiah 54:1).

A certain Sadducee said to Beruriah: “It is written: ‘Sing, O barren one, who has not given birth.’ Because she has not given birth, is she to sing?”

She replied to him: “You fool! Go down to the end of the verse, where it is written: ‘For the children of the desolate one are more numerous than the children of the inhabited one, said the Lord.’ But what then is the meaning of ‘O barren one, who has not given birth’? Sing, O Congregation of Israel, who resembles a barren woman, in that she has not given birth to children destined for Gehinnom, as you” (Berachot 10a).

In the Rav’s hands, a cryptic exchange becomes a treatise on Jewish demographic destiny. He argues that the “barrenness” of the Jewish people—their historically small numbers—is not a curse but a Divine strategy to preserve the purity of the Torah. The Rav posits that had Judaism become a universal religion of the masses, it would have inevitably been diluted and compromised. (Today, this everpresent phenomenon is sometimes referred to as “audience capture.”) By remaining the “fewest of all peoples,” the Jewish nation could maintain the absolute, uncompromising ethical demands of the Torah.

In contrast to the Rav’s shiurim on halachic topics, his shiurim on Aggadeta are peppered with personal reflections, childhood memories, and observations about American Jewish life. One small anecdote that the Rav relates illustrates the relationship between mitzvah observance and enjoyment of this world:

This is the story that is told about Rabbi Alexander Ziskind, author of Yesod VeShoresh HaAvodah. Others say it was told about Rabbi Yaakov Meir Padwa, rabbi of Brisk. He was once walking on the street when an earl from the city passed by. That gentleman happened to be fat. The rabbi commented: Okay, I’m fat; that’s because I pray a delicious Shemoneh Esrei! But how is the nobleman fat?

That is a joke that people tell, but it actually expresses a great principle. A Jew who is not rooted in Judaism, who does not observe Judaism and does not learn, is an unhappy Jew. . . . When we observe and learn Torah, we are doing a favor not only to the good inclination, but to the evil one, as well. There is simply no greater happiness—I don’t mean metaphysical happiness but simple peace of mind and thisworldly happiness—that a Jew can experience.

This volume will be part of a series which will contain Rav Soloveitchik’s shiurim on Aggadah, constituting a monumental contribution to the library of Jewish thought. Aggadot HaRav is a must-read for all who are interested in discovering the Aggadah’s subterranean layers of meaning, as revealed by a master interpreter.

Kisvei HaRambam

The Writings of Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon

— The Rambam, Translated,

Annotated and Elucidated

By Rabbi Yehuda Meir Keilson

ArtScroll Mesorah Publications

New Jersey, Vol. 1, 2023; Vol. 2, 2024 Vol. 1, 500 pages; Vol. 2, 654 pages

Reviewed by Rabbi Moshe Maimon

The two recently published volumes of ArtScroll’s Kisvei HaRambam are a remarkable tour de force that offer scholars and laymen alike a profound wealth of insight into the Rambam’s writings and worldview.1 Whereas the first volume focuses on the Rambam’s introduction to Perek Cheilek and other writings of his on the fundamentals of Judaism, the second volume is dedicated to an exposition of the master’s writings on ethics and character perfection.

Both volumes stand out for their clear elucidation of often complex material and are immeasurably enhanced by the section entitled “Insights”—the author’s scholarly essays that expand on issues

raised in the notes to the texts. These essays—which are substantial enough to form a full-length sefer of their own—seek to position the Rambam firmly within the continuum of rabbinic thought as it has evolved over the ages, while addressing the very issues he himself confronted.

From a broader perspective, the publication appears to reflect a significant shift in the intellectual climate of the English-speaking yeshivah world, where the Rambam’s writings have become the focus of renewed scholarly and rabbinic scrutiny.

The Rambam’s works have long been foundational texts in Jewish law and thought. Every facet of our tradition— our laws and customs, our theological frameworks—bears the indelible imprint of the Rambam’s creative genius. Orthodox life as we know it would not only be diminished without him—it would be unrecognizable.

The Rambam’s Legal, Theological and Philosophical Influence

Consider the Rambam’s legal writings. The very concept of a binding legal code of halachah—now taken for granted— was pioneered by the Rambam with the publication of Mishneh Torah. More significantly, an estimated 60 to 80 percent of the Shulchan Aruch consists of direct citations from the Rambam, meaning that much of the practical halachah observed by Orthodox Jewry today is rooted in his rulings.

In the realm of theology as well, our conception of the Almighty owes its character to the Rambam’s lifelong campaign against anthropomorphism. Likewise, his Thirteen Principles of Faith

have profoundly shaped Jewish belief; the daily declaration of these articles of faith reflects Orthodoxy’s adoption of these principles in determining an individual’s standing within the community.

Yet, it is perhaps his philosophical writings that have had the most enduring effect on Jewish thought. Every major intellectual movement in Jewish history—whether adopting or reacting against Maimonidean thought—owes its emergence, in one way or another, to him.

The Rambam’s philosophical influence persisted well beyond the medieval period. The Rema (Toras Ha’Olah), Ramchal (Da’as Tevunos2) and other spiritual giants engaged deeply with Moreh Nevuchim, and, later, the intellectual currents of the Enlightenment era were shaped by his rationalism. While Rambam’s legal works continue to be diligently studied today, interest in his philosophical writings within yeshivah circles has weakened over time. The publication of Kisvei HaRambam may signal that the pendulum is swinging back and that engagement with Maimonidean thought among English-speaking yeshivah students is becoming increasingly prevalent.

Rabbi Moshe Maimon, editor of a recent two-volume edition of Peirush Rabbeinu Avraham ben HaRambam al HaTorah, is a beis midrash rebbi and a general editor for Machon Aleh Zayis. He lives with his wife and children in Jackson, New Jersey, where he serves as a rav of Khal Chasidim D’Jackson.

The obvious question, then, is what has changed? Has the yeshivah world grown more open to the Maimonidean tradition, or has the Rambam been repackaged in a framework more palatable to this audience?

Engaging with the

Rambam’s

Views

To explore this question, I examined Kisvei HaRambam’s treatment of several instances in which the Rambam’s views diverge from the mainstream yeshivah perspective. In every case, the editors have presented his views faithfully, with candor and sensitivity, mitigating the claim that the Rambam’s approach has been adapted to align with contemporary yeshivah views.

Notably, the volume includes an appendix featuring the Ritva’s staunch defense of the Rambam, in which he acknowledges his own adherence to the Ramban’s Kabbalistic worldview, while simultaneously affirming that the Rambam’s non-Kabbalistic perspectives, as expressed in Moreh Nevuchim, deserve full scholarly consideration and honor.

The Occult

Conspicuous in the Vilna Gaon’s critique of the Rambam3 is his position that philosophical leanings led the Rambam to reject supernatural occurrences described in the Gemara, such as those involving demons and witchcraft. In the Rambam’s defense, a strong case can be made that for the most part he was not formulating these views independently but was instead following Geonic precedent.4

Still, the Rambam was unique in developing a worldview in which a firm boundary separates the physical from the metaphysical, with the sole point of intersection occurring in the realm of seichel (human intellect). Thus, a person who attains a high level of spiritual and intellectual refinement can receive prophetic communication through a malach (angel) with the experience itself being internal, occurring within the mind rather than through an embodied creature.

In keeping with this perspective, and in contrast to contemporary Chareidi and Chassidic thought, which is far more mystically inclined, the

Rambam consistently argued for a narrow interpretation of supernatural references in the Torah and Talmud. He viewed such passages as allegorical, symbolic or the product of mystical visions rather than literal occurrences. He applied this approach even to openly miraculous events, seeking to understand them within the framework of natural order rather than as occurring outside the laws of nature.

Various aspects of this approach are explored by the Rambam in his Letter on Resurrection and in his Letter on Astrology; Kisvei HaRambam treats these texts with scholarly rigor, addressing their themes with intellectual honesty and sensitivity.

“Accept the truth from whoever says it”

One of the most striking elements of the Rambam’s worldview is his openness to integrating truths derived from nonJewish sources. In Shemoneh Perakim5 (Vol. 2, pp. 6–7) we encounter his famous declaration:

Know that the matters that I will discuss in these introductory

Orthodox life as we know it would not only be diminished without the Rambam—it would be unrecognizable.

chapters—as well as what will be said in the commentary to the mishnayos of this tractate—are not ideas that I conceived of on my own, nor are they explanations that I innovated; rather they are ideas that I have gleaned from the words of the sages in the Midrashim and the Talmud, and other works of theirs, and also from the words of the non-Jewish philosophers, both early and more contemporary. Do not be surprised that I utilize the teachings of non-Jewish scholars, because these teachings that I utilize are true, and the rule is that one should accept the truth from whoever says it. Throughout history, some have sought to downplay this statement, arguing that it was merely a concession to an audience steeped in philosophy. Today, as well, Chareidi sensitivities dictate that only authors within the Orthodox tradition are cited in Torah scholarship, a policy adhered to by ArtScroll (including in Kisvei HaRambam). Yet, as Kisvei HaRambam itself notes, the approach that wisdom and truth can be found in non-Jewish sources is a theme that runs throughout all of the Rambam’s writings, and “although Rambam concedes that some readers might have qualms about some of his sources, he gives no impression that he shares those qualms” (162).

A fascinating historical parallel— only vaguely referenced in Kisvei HaRambam—can be found in an account by Rabbi Yosef ibn Aqnin (a protégé of the Rambam whose own commentary on Pirkei Avos is cited frequently in Kisvei HaRambam) concerning Rabbi Hai Gaon, who instructed a student to seek a linguistic interpretation of a verse in Tehillim from a Christian cleric, emphasizing that wisdom can be gained from any source.6

Financial Support for Torah Study

The issue that perhaps presents the sharpest contrast between the Rambam’s ideology and contemporary Chareidi thought is one that touches the very core of its sociological foundations—the Rambam’s strong censure of those who rely on financial support for Torah study.

Acknowledging that his viewpoint ran counter to the rabbinic society of his time, the Rambam asserts that Torah study is a personal duty that should not become a profession sustained by public funds. Basing himself on the mishnah in Avos (4:5), the Rambam criticizes those who make Torah study their profession and depend on public funds, arguing that this diminishes the Torah’s dignity. His ideological outlook emphasizes personal responsibility, self-sufficiency and a clear separation between Torah and material dependency.

In contrast, Chareidi ideology views the financial support of Torah learners as a collective obligation essential to ensuring the endurance of Torah scholarship for future generations. This approach treats Torah study as a communal responsibility, where sustaining Torah scholars is considered a merit for the broader Jewish people. Accordingly, much of the contemporary Chareidi world embraces and institutionalizes full-time Torah study supported by communal funds, government subsidies and private philanthropy. This model, particularly dominant in Israel, is rooted in later rabbinic justifications—particularly those of the Shulchan Aruch, the Chasam Sofer and the Chazon Ish. In its treatment of these texts, Kisvei HaRambam treads carefully, showing sensitivity to contemporary Chareidi norms while simultaneously exploring the full scope of the Rambam’s viewpoint, placing it within the broader framework of rabbinic discourse.

Final Reflections

With the publication of Kisvei HaRambam, ArtScroll and Rabbi Keilson have produced an outstanding work of scholarship that not only makes the Rambam’s writings accessible to the English-speaking public but also offers a depth of analysis that meets the highest standards of rigorous study.

This edition strikes a rare balance, offering clarity for newcomers while maintaining the intellectual richness that serious scholars demand. A significant contribution to the study of the Rambam, it reflects a noteworthy shift in contemporary Torah scholarship on the writings and worldview of the great master, one that may continue to influence the study of Torah for generations to come.

Notes

1. In the interests of full disclosure, I acknowledge my modest involvement in this project. I had the opportunity to discuss aspects of its preparation with its primary editor-author, Rabbi Yehuda Meir Keilson, and was honored to review an addendum comprising a newly edited chapter from Rabbeinu Avraham ben HaRambam’s sefer, HaMaspik L’Ovdei Hashem. However, I hope that my observations will be evaluated on their own merit rather than through the lens of my involvement.

2. Compare to Rabbi Avraham Shoshana’s introduction to Mesillas Yesharim (Machon Ofek, 2019, p. 20 at n. 8).

3. See Biur HaGra, YD 179 and 246.

4. Especially Rabbi Saadiah Gaon. Compare also to the sources referenced in my annotated edition of the Rambam’s grandson Rabbi David HaNagid’s commentary to Parashas Va’era in Mechilta, vol. 4, pp. 197ff.

5. ArtScroll’s spelling follows the popular pronunciation, though grammatically speaking the “peh” in the second word, coming on the heels of the “heh” in Shemoneh, should be soft; hence: Shemoneh Ferakim

6. A full treatment of this account, along with an English translation of the Judeo-Arabic original manuscript, can be found in Yosaif M. Dubovick, “‘Oil, which shall not quit my head’: Jewish-Christian Interaction in Eleventh-century Baghdad,” Entangled Religions 6 (2018): 95–123.

Contemporary Halakhic Problems, Vol. VIII

By Rabbi Dr. J. David Bleich Maggid Books

Jerusalem, 2024

648 pages

Reviewed by Rabbi Betzalel Sochaczewski

Writing on Judaism in October 1978, David Novak noted that “[o]ne of the happier signs of the intellectual maturity of the American Jewish community is the growing publication of halachic literature in English.” Thus he began his review of the new work Contemporary Halakhic Problems, which had emerged the previous year from “[o]ne of the foremost Jewish thinkers in this area . . . the Orthodox cleric and professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University, Dr. J. David Bleich.”

Fast forward nearly half a century and one would be hard pressed to identify an individual other than Rabbi Dr. J. David Bleich—still an Orthodox cleric, yet more commonly titled rosh yeshivah and rosh kollel le’hora’ah at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS), professor of law at Cardozo School of Law, and Herbert and Florence Tenzer

professor of law and ethics at Yeshiva University—who is more closely associated with the genre of English-language halachic literature. In what can indeed be an indication of the intellectual maturity of the American Jewish community, that initial volume has grown into a series by the same name, most recently expanded by its eighth volume. Suffice it to say that these works—primarily culled from Rabbi Bleich’s regular installments (now numbering over 150 since 1967) of “Survey of Recent Halakhic Periodical Literature” in the Rabbinical Council of America’s periodical, Tradition—have become staples of an advanced Anglo Judaica library.

This newest addition to Rabbi Bleich’s oeuvre hews closely to its predecessors: exhaustive aerial tours of some thirty complex contemporary halachic landscapes, populated by meticulously sourced footnotes, enriched by parallels from a broad background in secular law, medicine and ethics, and presented with his signature precision of exposition, graceful expression, and flourishes of good humor. And despite the passage of time, Rabbi Bleich’s writing has not mellowed; it continues to eschew the “pop halachah” format in favor of the dense, academic style. (I imagine that I am not alone in wondering if thinning out some of that density would not be beneficial in making these essays more accessible to those not equipped with a mental machete.) Make no mistake: This is not company for the post-cholent visit to the couch.

True to its title, the current volume surveys halachic applications to matters born of the modern age. Some are “vintage” topics of the genre, such as the relationship of the laws of Shabbos to refrigerators, instant soups, internet sales and diabetes management; or the permissibility of Shema recitation in a foreign language. Others, while also not of recent provenance, have generated controversy as of late, such as the kashrus of pineapple; yet others have recently

come into the spotlight due to shifting social and legal attitudes, such as the status of cannabis.

But perhaps the issues likely to generate the most interest are those on the cutting edge of science and technology. The classic philosophical dilemma of the “Trolley Problem” receives a modern twist in the moral challenges relating to self-driving automobiles. And the seemingly inexhaustible subject of in vitro fertilization (IVF) is addressed once again, this time regarding the disposition—or ownership—of fertilized ova.

The most noteworthy section of this volume relates to that singular experience of our lifetime, the Covid-19 pandemic. The unprecedented (for modern times) circumstances that it produced in the realms of physical and mental health, medicine, relationships, education, economics, communication, society and religion generated a stream of fresh halachic challenges, many of which needed to be addressed in real time by Klal Yisrael’s dedicated senior poskim. The result was a veritable new subsection of halachic literature—“Hilchos Corona” or “Hilchos Pandemic”—with entire volumes dedicated to its treatment. Indeed, it is difficult to think of another modern phenomenon which achieved such a distinction with such expeditiousness.

As all of this unfolded, Rabbi Bleich was on site. Readers of his columns in Tradition thus traversed the pandemic with his digests of the freshly printed halachic literature—collated, analyzed and appraised—held up against the backdrop of the emerging and everamorphous medical and legal data. In

Rabbi Betzalel Sochaczewski is a freelance writer, editor and translator, residing in Lakewood, New Jersey. His original work has appeared in Hakirah, and includes a forthcoming English-language adaptation of Toldos Yaakov Yosef. He is also the host of the parashah podcast Der Pshat in Posuk

this first collection of this material, we are transported back to the world of masks and gloves, of porch minyanim and social distancing. What to do about a missed bar mitzvah? Missed Kerias haTorah? Is there an obligation to follow through with tuition payments if schools are shuttered? Rabbi Bleich’s positions on these and other issues renders this section an important resource (one hopes, only theoretical—lehagdil Torah uleha’adirah).

As in the previous volumes of the series, this one is headed by an introductory essay on a broader theme of the halachic process, in this case, primarily, the methodology of pesak (halachic decision-making). While the veteran reader will recognize various arguments and anecdotes from previous such essays, this is seemingly the author’s fullest expression of his halachic philosophy. Utilizing a threefold division into halachah’s “substantive, adjudicative, and prophylactic” components, Rabbi Bleich pointedly and unapologetically limns what constitutes authentic, traditional and responsible pesak—and what does not.

There are, of course, some points which are open to dispute. For example, Rabbi Bleich writes (p. 5) that “the halakhic

system regards elucidation of the law by legitimate exponents to be infallible. Since such interpretation was licensed by G-d, it could not possibly be erroneous.” While this idea is possibly reflected in classical sources, namely the Kuzari (3:41) and Ramban (Devarim 17:11), it would seem to be belied by the very institution of the par he’elem davar shel tzibbur, the sacrifice prescribed to atone for mass sinning due to an error in halachic judgement by the Great Sanhedrin (Vayikra 4:13–21; Horiyos, chap. 1).1

Yet another is Rabbi Bleich’s firm endorsement of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s marginalization of the halachic value of literary latecomers, such as Meiri. Meiri’s writings were (for the most part) discovered in the twentieth century in the Biblioteca Palatina of Parma (not the Cairo Genizah, as Rabbi Bleich states [pp. 10, 51]) and have since become a staple of Talmudic analysis. While acknowledging their value in abstract learning, Rabbi Bleich asserts that Meiri’s writings are of minimal halachic value due to their absence from the historical halachic process. “Applied halakhic decisionmaking is also subject to masorah. Me’iri is not part of that tradition” (p. 50). While the esteemed author

is certainly entitled to his approach, perhaps it would have been appropriate to take note of the dissenting view, that of halachic greats such as the Mishnah Berurah, who did take Meiri’s positions into account in their halachic analyses.2 The same could be said for Rabbi Bleich’s wholesale rejection of the halachic value of the Cairo Genizah (p. 51)—this is by no means a universal position.3

In sum, Contemporary Halakhic Problems, Vol. VIII, may deservedly take its place alongside its well-thumbed predecessors in gracing the bookshelves of serious students of halachah—while leaving space for, it is hoped, many others to follow.

Notes

1. See Rabbi Rephael Yosef Hazan, Shut Chikrei Lev (Jerusalem, 1998), YD 1:84 , p. 418.

2. See, for example, Shut Divrei Yatziv, OC 132, regarding the late publication of Maharam Halavah’s novellae on Pesachim.

3. Rabbi Uri Tieger, in his comprehensive survey of Chazon Ish’s halachic methodology, Derech Ish (Jerusalem, 2009), pp. 25–26, concludes that he was not averse to making use of new sources—including Meiri and Genizah material—in matters of halachic import, so long as he was convinced of their authenticity.

Connecting to Our Creator A Jewish Psychological Approach

By Rabbi Yakov Danishefsky Mosaica Press

Beit Shemesh, Israel, 2023 166 pages

Reviewed by Rabbi Micah Greenland

At its heart, Judaism is about relationships. In my own work, I am constantly reminded of how much we invest in strengthening our ties with family, with community and with ourselves. We devote effort to learning how to communicate better, to forgive, to nurture love, and to extend kindness not only to others but also inwardly. Yet while we invest great energy into these areas, we often leave underexplored the question of how to build and sustain our relationship with G-d. This is so despite our knowing, as David Hamelech reminds us, that “kirvat Elokim li tov—closeness to G-d is the very definition of good” (Tehillim 73:28). Few pursuits, then, are more valuable than developing an authentic, enduring connection with our Creator.

In Attached: Connecting to Our

Creator—A Jewish Psychological Approach, Rabbi Yakov Danishefsky takes this challenge head-on. A rabbi and clinical social worker, he draws from relationship psychology and attachment theory—an approach developed by British psychologist John Bowlby that explains how early bonds shape emotional security in relationships—to provide a paradigm for connecting with G-d that is both practical and deeply resonant. Just as human relationships require trust, communication, forgiveness and steady investment, so too does our relationship with the Divine.

This comparison is what makes Attached stand out. Rabbi Danishefsky does not simply borrow psychological jargon; he uses the insights of experts in human intimacy to illuminate our spiritual lives. For example, renowned psychologists and researchers Drs. John and Julie Gottman encourage couples to ask: “When I’m with this person, how do I feel about myself?” Rabbi Danishefsky applies the same question to our relationship with G-d. “How do you feel about yourself,” writes Rabbi Danishefsky, “in the relationship with the G-d you currently engage? Do you feel loved, accepted, wanted, able to make and own mistakes, confident enough and motivated to expand beyond your comfort zone, and happy being in your own skin? Do you feel that you can be you—without putting on an act?” To whatever extent we struggle with our answers, it is likely that our relationship with G-d needs further careful reflection and intentional work.

Classic Jewish sources echo this relational model. Rav Tzadok HaKohen of Lublin teaches that our national bond with G-d began with a dramatic moment of inspiration as we left Egypt, but it matured only through steady, deliberate growth. Rabbi Danishefsky, who is coming out with an “Attached Haggadah”

shortly, develops this theme, offering guidance for those times when the initial spark seems to fade. What do we do when we feel distant, when we fear we have angered G-d, or when the intensity of connection wanes? Just as couples or friends must learn to navigate conflict, repair trust, and rekindle love, so too must we bring those same skills into our avodat Hashem.

The result is a book that is as honest and practical as it is hopeful. Rabbi Danishefsky acknowledges the reality of anger, doubt and estrangement in our spiritual lives rather than glossing over them. Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev was famous for channeling his feelings of anger and exasperation with G-d into opportunities to turn more intentionally toward Him, rather than allowing them to lead to estrangement. Rabbi Danishefsky quotes the story of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak pausing in contemplation for many minutes during a Pesach Seder before asking the Mah Nishtanah.

“Master of the World! I don’t have four questions . . . I have four million questions! How could You take our neighbor’s husband and leave little children without a father? How could You give this one such an illness and this one such bitterness and this one such poverty?” He was exasperated with holy anger, but ultimately concluded, “as long as I know that it’s all in Your name, that it’s all for You, I can live and continue to live in Your Name.”

Rabbi Danishefsky insists that such feelings of anger or estrangement are not signs of failure but invitations to deepen the relationship with G-d in new ways. Elsewhere, drawing on bestselling author Dr. Gary Chapman’s “love languages” framework, Rabbi Danishefsky similarly posits that there are four “spiritual

Rabbi Micah Greenland is international director of NCSY.

love languages” into which Jewish practices can be categorized: words of affirmation, quality time, gifts and acts of service (combined as one category in Rabbi Danishefsky’s framing, whereas Dr. Chapman treats them as two), and physical touch. Each of these has a particular set of mitzvot to which it relates, serving as an additional channel through which to strengthen our relationship. When we feel unloved by G-d, it is likely that we are neglecting to nurture this vital spiritual relationship in one or more of those ways. Choosing one of them to focus on will invariably help us feel closer. Additionally, Rabbi Danishefsky suggests, “just as a good marital therapist will help a couple find their love languages even if it doesn’t come easily, genuine teachers, rabbis, and conveyors of Judaism will help you find your love language with G-d, even if it doesn’t come easily.” His tone throughout is compassionate and concrete, guiding readers with examples and exercises that make the work of spiritual growth tangible.

Rabbi Danishefsky also puts into words what I see every day in NCSY: how much authentic relationships matter, especially for Jewish teens. Many teens struggle not only with questions of belief, but with whether Judaism feels safe enough, personal enough and real enough to sustain them. A recent report by the OU’s Center for Communal Research reinforces this reality. The study shows that belonging, emotional security, and authenticity are essential for meaningful Jewish engagement, noting that “Jewish meaning deepens when it is layered onto environments that already meet teens’ developmental and emotional needs.” This resonates deeply with our work. In NCSY—an organization devoted to teens’ spiritual growth and their human relationships—we work to help teens build real connections with mentors, friends and community, and through them, with G-d Himself, so that these relationships strengthen one another rather than compete.

I am also struck by how a growing relationship with G-d can quietly reshape a person’s human relationships. One recent NCSY alumna comes to mind. She had been estranged from her father for several years and had come to believe that his flaws made reconciliation impossible. Her spiritual journey began in high school, and today she is fully observant and feels deeply connected to G-d. That connection brought her a sense of calm and inner stability and, unexpectedly, the courage to reach out to her father. Despite his imperfections, she rebuilt the relationship. Today, she speaks with him regularly and feels genuinely grateful to have him back in her life. She sees her relationship with G-d as the framework that made that reconciliation with her father possible.

What Attached demonstrates is that the very skills that make for healthy human relationships—listening, consistency, empathy and forgiveness—are also the skills that can draw us closer to G-d. For our teens, this message is invaluable, but it is equally relevant for adults of all ages who seek to make their religious lives more real and more personal.

In a cultural moment where many are searching for authenticity and depth, Attached bridges the world of psychology and Torah to show that our relationship with G-d can be nurtured with the same intentionality we bring to our human relationships. It neither oversimplifies nor overintellectualizes. Instead, it provides tools—drawn from both clinical practice and Torah wisdom—that can help us sustain closeness with G-d through joy, through struggle and through the ordinary rhythms of life.

Ultimately, Attached left me—as I believe it will leave many readers—with a powerful challenge: to treat our relationship with G-d with at least the seriousness we treat our human relationships. That means asking ourselves not only whether we believe or how we observe, but also whether we feel loved, understood and strengthened in G-d’s presence. With warmth, clarity and practical wisdom, Rabbi Danishefsky shows us how to answer that question in the affirmative. For anyone seeking to make their religious life more authentic, more grounded and more connected, Attached is an invaluable guide.

Just as human relationships require

Quarterly and Passover. 5. No. of Issues Published Annually: Five. 6. Annual Subscription Price: $16.00. 7. Complete Mailing Address of Known Office of Publication: Orthodox Union, 40 Rector Street, 4th Floor, NY, NY, 10006. Contact

Floor, NY, NY, 10006. Editor: Nechama Carmel, same address; Managing Editor: Rabbi Gil Student, same address. 10. Owner: Orthodox Union, 40 Rector Street, 4th Floor, NY, NY, 10006. 11. Known Bondholders, Mortgagees,

Reviews in Brief

The Making of the Siddur: The History, Development, and Halachos of the Siddur

By Rabbi Moshe Walter Feldheim Publishers

New York, 2025

313 pages

We often take for granted the content of the siddur, the repository of our personal and communal prayers, because we grew up using it. We don’t realize that it is the result of thousands of years of evolution. Understanding the journey our prayers took gives us insight into what we say and why we say it. However, the story of the siddur easily becomes a complex and boring tale that alienates lay readers. Rabbi Moshe Walter, in his The Making of the Siddur: The History, Development, and Halachos of the Siddur, makes the history accessible with a number of delightful literary tactics.

One way Rabbi Walter, rav of Woodside Synagogue Ahavas Torah in Silver Spring, Maryland, and the executive director of the Rabbinical Council of Greater Washington, keeps the textual history lively is by focusing on controversy, which always

By Rabbi Gil Student

captures the reader’s attention. The second and third chapters of the book are titled “ Nusach Sefarad ” and “ Nusach HaGra .” Rabbi Walter not only tempts the reader who is naturally curious about these different prayer versions popular among Chassidim and their detractors, but he delivers with a faithful discussion of their origins and a lively description of their controversies. For Nusach Sefarad , the debate between the Chatam Sofer and the Divrei Chaim , and their students, was over the propriety of an Ashkenazi praying in this relatively new prayer text. For Nusach HaGra , it is the long challenge and debate over what exactly the Vilna Gaon’s siddur contained. Particularly since most people are used to praying the way they were taught, the examples of differences are fascinating and help everyone think more about their own prayers.

The bulk of the book focuses on specific prayer sections of weekday, Shabbat and yom tov services, explaining their origins and purpose. There is a progression in the prayer service, an overall structure designed to guide the individual and community through a process of praise and prayer. Rabbi Walter shows the reader the concepts underlying the prayers with sweeping reviews of the sources and varying customs, along with “takeaways” that simplify and summarize each chapter.

While the text remains accessible to the layperson, the scholar will find valuable sources and references. The Making of the Siddur serves as an introduction to the prayers while also contributing to the scholarly literature on the subject. Thanks to the author’s accessible style, the book can be used equally for light reading in small sections on Shabbat afternoon or as a textbook for a class on prayer.

Stories & Halachah from the Psychiatrist’s Couch

By Dr. Yaakov Freedman and Rabbi Akiva Dershowitz Adir Press New York, 2025 190 pages

Ifind myself wondering why Dr. Yaakov Freedman’s stories of psychotherapy are so compelling. He is an accomplished storyteller but hardly the only one. And yet, I read his accounts with greater interest than other such books. Perhaps there is an element of voyeurism, seeing a brief glimpse of other people’s private struggles. Perhaps there is also a quiet sense of relief when encountering challenges I do not personally face. Given the wide range of cases and treatments described, nearly every reader will recognize both unfamiliar problems and familiar emotions.

More importantly, however, Dr. Freedman, a board-certified psychiatrist practicing medicine who maintains a private practice in

Rabbi Gil Student serves as OU director of Jewish Media, Publications and Editorial Communications.

“Torah is a commentary on life, and life is a commentary on Torah.”

RABBI LORD JONATHAN SACKS

from korenpub.com or

Jerusalem, portrays the frum community as it actually is: a community of sincere, striving people living complicated lives. Idealized visions of perfect families and perfect communities do not exist. Yet that realism does not diminish the beauty of Torah life. On the contrary, it reinforces a crucial truth: The Torah is not meant to eliminate all human struggle. It provides a framework to live meaningful lives dedicated to Hashem, even as we go about our mundane activities and struggle with our human frailties. The Torah refines us; it does not render us flawless.

In Stories & Halachah from the Psychiatrist’s Couch, Dr. Freedman presents thirty case studies drawn from his psychiatric practice, not all of which conclude with neat or happy endings. Some patients grapple primarily with chemical or neurological conditions, while others confront emotional or psychological turmoil. Across these varied stories, a consistent theme emerges: the courage required simply to seek help, followed by the sustained effort demanded by treatment itself. Improvement, when it comes, is rarely quick or easy. Dr. Freedman depicts patients who struggle honestly and persist with dignity, often over long periods of time.

The reader would be mistaken to conclude that Dr. Freedman is the hero in these stories. While he diagnoses, prescribes and guides the patients, the real labor belongs to the patient who wants to live a better life. A recurring element in that effort is faith, not as a substitute for professional care, but as a source of motivation and resilience. Dr. Freedman recognizes the centrality of faith and knows how to respect it, support it and integrate it into treatment as appropriate.

This is where the unique structure of the book proves especially effective. Each chapter concludes with a brief halachic reflection by Rabbi Akiva Dershowitz. At first glance, the combination of psychiatric case studies and halachic analysis might seem incongruous. In practice, it underscores the book’s deeper message. The halachic discussions highlight that faith

sustains both patient and practitioner through the inevitable setbacks and uncertainties. In that sense, every reader is Dr. Freedman’s patient who can benefit from his faith-affirming practice.

Va’Achabda

Shimcha: Gilyonot Ve’Alonim B’Halachah

By Rabbi Moshe Shimon Bineth 2024

316 pages

One of the unusual features of the Orthodox Jewish community is the continued proliferation of paper publications in this increasingly digital world. Because Shabbat remains digital-free, Orthodox Jews still consume books, magazines and weekly newsletters even while the broader world moves away from print. Among the benefits of this religious phenomenon is the preservation, at least one day a week, of the classical culture of reading rather than the contemporary replacement of viewing and swiping. But print culture also brings its own challenges.

Already in the sixteenth century, about a century after Gutenberg

popularized his printing press, halachic authorities struggled with the challenge of an overabundance of sacred writings. How do we respectfully dispose of these books so that they do not overrun our homes? In Va’Achabda Shimcha: Gilyonot Ve’Alonim B’Halachah (“And I Will Honor Your Name”: Sheets and Pamphlets in Halachah), Rabbi Moshe Shimon Bineth offers a survey of the four approaches that have been proposed over the ages for disposing of sacred writings: burning, respectful placement in the garbage, burial and recycling. This full-length halachic work focuses primarily on Torah newsletters, addressing with impressive thoroughness the many questions they raise. May they include advertisements? May they be placed atop sacred books? Does a newspaper with a minority of Torah content retain any sanctity? Following the now-familiar model of halachic compendia, Rabbi Bineth presents clear rulings in the main text while using extensive footnotes to survey earlier authorities and apply their views to modern cases. Because the subject is so narrowly defined, the book explores virtually every conceivable angle, including unusual scenarios such as whether a litigant in a beit din may swear an oath on a Torah newsletter rather than on a traditional sacred text. The creativity of the book’s organization and the care with which its halachic insights are developed are evident throughout. Yet, what may be most striking is not any single ruling but the very existence of a halachic monograph devoted to Torah newsletters. As much as this volume contributes to halachic literature, it also documents a significant aspect of Orthodox Jewish culture in the first half of the twenty-first century: a community so committed to Torah handouts that it must now confront its own abundance.

The Torah is not meant to eliminate all human struggle. . . . The Torah refines us; it does not render us flawless.

Jewish learning that revolves around you

Meet OHRBIT, the AI companion that turns your curiosity into clarity. Explore any Jewish topic with confidence through a personalized learning path that is tailored to your interests and life.

Your Daily Feed:

Tell OHRBIT what inspires you and get a curated stream of videos, audio, and articles about philosophy, halacha, parsha, history, and more.

Your Personal AI:

Ask anything—from life’s big questions to help with a Dvar Torah for the family table. Get instant insights drawing from a library of 100,000+ trusted Torah sources.

The Long Walk to Moving On

By Efraim Jaffe

So, that’s it,” the rabbi says. “You’ll be gone; you won’t be coming back. I already told my wife. I figured you’d move on. I mean, we’ll miss you and Susan on Friday nights, but I told my wife that Efraim is the most easygoing person; he can move on. Sometimes I feel like I should move on too. I don’t blame you. You’ll stay in Great Neck. It’s nice there. Right? There’s space there—why wouldn’t you move on?”

We are at a wedding together, alone in the quiet of the hall where a chuppah will soon take place. The rabbi is dressed in black, his reddish beard turning white, the two of us next-door neighbors of thirty-five years, looking back and looking forward. I had just told him that I was selling the house. I’d received a good offer, unsolicited, to sell the 100-plusyear-old house as is—no hassles, no open houses, no tire kickers or bargainers to contend with. I took a month to think about it, to live with the idea.

The morning after I agreed to sell, I started looking through my drawers for items to discard. The first thing I grabbed was a prescription bottle with fading print: “Klonopin, 30 pills,” dated 03/02/2023, the day before Esther died. That mind-numbing prescription, a daily part of her diet for twenty-five years, stood as a kind of shrine to a long decline, sealed in a plastic bottle.

Even as I tell myself I am moving on, my three adult children want to organize a final Shabbat get-together on Waverly Place. They are surprisingly nostalgic about letting go. “Abba, it makes sense. The house is just going to fall apart if you’re not there to keep an eye on it.”

Oh boy, I feel the tears coming.

“Yes, I think we need to have a last get-together,” my daughter messages from Israel.

That house is their childhood—they call it “the museum of our lives.” Letting the house go feels like letting their

mother go. Her voice is still ringing in the walls. My kids tell me they hear her voice at times. “Why don’t you get married, Ely?” But she died before he got married. “Why don’t you have a baby, Manny?” But she died before he had his first baby; now the second is expected soon.

And I have been letting go in stages, even though I am remarried to Susan and have moved on. Still, one scene doesn’t cut to the next like in a movie. One scene fades while another phases in, a gray overlap of love, anguish, loneliness, shared lives and dissolution in a messy mélange of hopes and dreams, battered lives and renewal.

Moving on . . .

I tell myself that it’s okay to move on. A perimeter of guilt surrounds the decision like an electric fence designed to gently shock the dog into remaining on the property. You can’t see that fence. But a time comes to turn off the electricity and let the dog run wild. The little voice asks me: “What justice is it that Esther lies in the cold ground and you galivant to warm destinations and laugh and share deep conversations because you can and a few years ago you couldn’t?”

I guess you could call it survivor’s guilt. Living with a child of survivors for so long, I absorbed some of the survivors’ malaise.

Time to move on . . .

I think about the four-mile round-trip walk to shul in Great Neck, New York, that I originally said I would never do. But now the walk is the thing I look forward to all week, rain or shine, cold or hot. I leave at 7:15 am, the streets deserted and quiet on Shabbat morning. The first mile takes me into town through Kings Point, landscaped and serene. The second stretches along Middle Neck Road, the commercial drag of little shops and stately apartment buildings, past the white Persian shuls along the way, the kosher French bakery, CVS and all

the kosher take-out places closed for Shabbat—Bistro Burger, Elite Pizza, Grill Time Express, Bagel Mentch, La Pizzeria, Amal Catering, Cho-Sen Village, Middle Neck Glatt and 27 Dressings. I cut through the JFK School shortcut across the soccer field, the hypotenuse of a triangle shortening the walk by a minute or two. Sometimes I pause to read the headlines of a New York Times or Wall Street Journal wrapped in plastic on a driveway, but mostly I think about the magic of a new life.

I focus on moving on as a template for my adult children as they approach middle age. Now I feel that they look to me as a role model. Not so much when they were growing up or as young adults. I’ve been thinking about this idea of “moving on,” internally as well as externally, on my peaceful Shabbat morning walks. As I approach my seventieth birthday next year, I’m aware that despite my best efforts, things eventually fall apart. Will I still be able to do this walk in five years? In ten? Someday, I will look back on this walk fondly. In my old neighborhood of Passaic, New Jersey, the shul is around the corner. For almost thirty years, I made that walk every Shabbat.

When I first moved to Great Neck, I felt like I was in a dream. I pictured Esther’s grave back in Clifton, my sons in Teaneck and Los Angeles, and my daughter in Israel, and I felt I had stepped out of a family photograph and walked away into a picture without a frame on an Island that was Long, into a house that was not really mine, like I was a guest in somebody else’s dream, waiting for something. Waiting. Until a voice came from somewhere deep within me: Time to move on.

Efraim Jaffe is an independent certified financial planner. He lives in Great Neck, New York.

Total Peace of Mind

Kevura in Yerushalayim is the highest honor, yet can be fraught with a web of impossible logistics: negotiating for a scarce plot, transport from America, and Shiva overseas are common challenges.

Sha’ar is now building two new magnificent cemeteries to a standard of construction and aesthetic unmatched in Israeli burials. Beyond a beautiful plot, their unparalleled service ensures that with one single call, every essential detail is expertly managed.

With Sha’ar, you’re not just getting a plot; you’re gaining a plan.

Our beautiful new cemeteries will be developed on private land: an exclusive extension of Har HaMenuchot, and the last available land for development on Har HaZeitim

Planned to the highest Mehadrin standards of design and Halacha

Exceptional access, including ample pathways and parking

Complete handholding from Tahara through Shiva

Exclusively at Sha’ar HaMenuchot: Wheelchair accessibility

Large elevators to fit the niftar and a minyan