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Shlock Rock hits Mobile! August 21-27, 2026 • Ki Teitzel • 8 Elul 5786 • Vol. 25, No. 25
By Jessica Russak Hoffman, JNS Lenny Solomon of the Jewish music group Shlock Rock stepped off a plane in Mobile, Ala., on Monday to perform in the city for the first time. In 1987, he released the song “Minyan Man,” which is set in the city. “Of all the things left for Shlock Rock to do, this was one of them,” said Solomon, who lives in Israel. “I had played Birmingham, I had played Montgomery, but I had never played Mobile.” The song, which found a cult following at Jewish summer camps in the 1990s, is told from the perspective of a Jew, who “stepped off the bus in Mobile, Ala.” when “Shabbos was an hour away.” The man wanders the town and finds a fellow Jew, who invites him to be the 10th man in a minyan. Solomon told JNS that when he arrived in Mobile, he started crying, thinking of the song’s lyric, “When I make this trip through Mobile once every year, I remember the men who prayed here.” Robin Meyerson, founder and director of the Shabbat Project Arizona and the Meis Mitzvah Project, which works to ensure Jews opt for burials instead of cremation, invited him. Meyerson, who lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., told JNS that she was searching for her uncle, Donald, 90, because he “went off the grid, and the family lost touch with him.” The family located him in a Jewish-owned nursing home in Mobile. “I told my kids where I found him, and my daughter-in-law started singing ‘Minyan Man’,” she said. “What are you singing?” Meyerson asked. Her daughter-in-law told her, “Well, we always used to sing this song in camp every Friday before Shabbat would come in.” Meyerson was inspired to invite Solomon to play for the residents of the nursing home. “His music touches the soul,” she said. On Monday, Solomon played for nearly two hours. “My uncle remembered all of the Jewish songs from when he was a little boy,” Meyerson said. “It all came back to him.” She brought her uncle a kiddush cup and a tallit. Meyerson told JNS that after she located her uncle, she contacted a local Chabad rabbi, who began visiting him, bringing him challah and helping him put on tefillin. “One mitzvah ripples,” she told JNS. “I was trying to find my uncle, and now he’s reconnected with his family. He’s putting on tefillin. He’s saying prayers.”
FROM ‘MINYAN MAN’ I stepped off the bus in Mobile, Alabama The sun was slowly setting on the bay It was 6 o’clock on a summer Friday afternoon, Shabbos was an hour away. I walked around the town wondering what to do ‘Cause Shabbos is no time to be feeling blue See Minyan on page 2
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Lenny Solomon arrives by plane (not bus) and then performs for Jews in Mobile, Alabama.
Courtesy Robin Meyerson
Mamdani and the rabbis Speak truth to power or fall in line? YISRAEL MEDAD
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s you may have read last week, a group of rabbis recently met with Mayor Zohran Mamdani. While City Hall did not release an official list, JNS reported that there were nine rabbis and one lay leader present (she represents herself as a rabbi nevertheless) with an overrepresentation of the liberal-oriented synagogues. The New York Times noted 10 rabbis. The New York Board of Rabbis and the Rabbinical Council of America, representing many hundreds of more Orthodox rabbis, were not invited. According to Jewish Insider, the previous week, the mayor had met with leaders of the anti-Zionist Satmar community based in Williamsburg. A JTA report quoted Rabbi Jonathan Leener of the Modern Orthodox Prospect Heights
Mamdani has the rabbis right where he wants them.
Shul as saying, “There were certainly moments of tension and passion, particularly as people tried to convey how isolated and vulnerable many Jewish New Yorkers feel right now.” The Times decided to characterize the meeting with a headline that the rabbis had been “pleading” with Mamdani to gather and talk. (If there is a way by which that newspaper can twist and turn a story upside-down if it relates to Israel, it will do so.) I have a concern that what they were doing was bleating, instead of speaking truth to power and making demands. Mamdani has succeeded, in a fairly short time, in instilling a sense of fear into the Jews of New York. or his part, Mamdani expressed the feeling that the conversation was “candid and productive” and that he “appreciated hearing from them.” In the words of Satmar Rebbe Zalman Leib Teitelbaum of Williamsburg (his brother, Aaron Teitelbaum, lords over the Chassidic haven of Kiryas Joel upstate) very much revolves around the element of fear. According to a quoted Yiddish recording, he condemned attacks by Orthodox Jews against Mamdani. “We must remember that we are in exile,” he said during his annual address at the yahrzeit of his uncle, Yoel Teitelbaum. “To denounce the mayor and brand him an antisemite constitutes a true provocation against the nations.” Interestingly, one of the main Haredi news
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websites in Israel, Kikar Shabbat, headlined its story on the speech on Aug. 10 in a very inyour-face fashion as “The Satmar rebbe is for the antisemitic mayor of New York.” The summary reads: “Recently, we have seen a terrible ‘provocation of nations’ [a reference to Rav’s dictum to his son, Hiyya at Tractate Pesachim 113A] by ultra-Orthodox Jews — the provocation against the mayor of New York. We know that we are in exile. … Fearful and peaceful Jews should behave according to the ways of the Torah and accept the decrees of exile. By shouting against it and labeling it with antisemitism, we are only expressing true provocation. It is not enough that there is provocation of nations in the Land of Israel, but they are bringing the provocation of nations here to America as well.” hat is obvious is that Mamdani has the rabbis right where he wants them. Both supporters and semi-opponents are coming to him, trying to soothe and placate his rough approach. They aren’t demonstrating. They didn’t issue an agreed-upon summation for the media. Their political maneuverings, including the buffer-zone legislation to protect schools and synagogues, have been low-key. Were they pleading, as the Times published, or were they bleating in a cowering fashion? And how did the general public, especially those unfavorably inclined towards the Jews See Mamdani on page 2
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