DIVINE PROVIDENCE IN KIBBUTZ NIR OZ
One day not long ago, a woman from Ashkelon called me, asking for tefillin for her husband. She told me the following amazing story:She and her husband, both 30-year-old new immigrants from Russia, never had much connection with Judaism. Last summer, 2023, they planned to move to their new home in Kibbutz Nir Oz, about […]
AFTER FOUR MIRACLES, G-D LEFT HIM NO CHOICE
Nachman grew up in a Hassidic family, with sidecurls (payos) dangling from around his ears – until he began, little by little, to distance himself from the Torah lifestyle he had lived his whole life. To his parents’ great consternation, Nachman soon found himself having nothing to do with Torah. Today, it is hard to […]
PARENTS TO THE RESCUE
I was approached by a young man named Ohr (Hebrew for “Light”), from Kibbutz Kfar Maccabi in northern Israel, east of Haifa. He told me has become stronger Jewishly of late, and has started going to Torah classes, and would love to have his own tefillin to wear every morning. He emphasized how important it […]
THE COOPERATIVE FATHER – TO A POINT
One day a man named Yoav called me up and told me: “We are a secular family living in Kibbutz Regavim, and we provide our children with a liberal-secular education, nothing to do with Judaism. I don’t know why, but our son, 16 years old, has been saying for a while that he wants to […]
THE WHISPERED REQUEST
A woman named Aviva calls me one day, and tells me that she’s a religious teacher in a secular high school in central Israel, where “all the teachers are either secular-liberals or Arabs…” One of those teachers, however, was a bit different than the others. He came up to Aviva in the teacher’s room one […]
MOSHE’S MOTHER RECOVERS
One day, Chief Rabbi Yehoshua Katz of the city of Maaleh Adumim, just outside Jerusalem, called me to ask if I have a pair of high-quality tefillin for a young man in his community named Moshiko (Moshe), who had begun to come closer to Torah and mitzvot. I wasted no time, and was able to […]
FROM BOSTON TO ZIKHRON YAAKOV
Yehudit is a religious woman who lives in Sharon, near Boston, Massachusetts. After her father passed away, she decided to donate her father’s tefillin to a Jew in the Land of Israel. When the war in Gaza broke out, she resolved that the tefillin should go to an Israeli soldier, so she sent them to […]
TEFILLIN AWAKENING ALL OVER THE WORLD
A Chabad shaliach (representative) in Be’er Sheva contacted me to tell me this story: “There is an Israeli guy who has been living in Munich, Germany for several years with his non-Jewish girlfriend. Of late his heart has begun to awaken, and he has now decided to start putting on tefillin. He looked around for […]
FROM KIBBUTZ TO WESTERN WALL
Ronen was born and raised in secular Kibbutz Ein Carmel, at the foot of Mt. Carmel, near the sea. Having had no particular connection with Judaism, he did not receive an Aliyah to the Torah when he became Bar Mitzvah at age 13, nor did he put on tefillin. In fact, the first time in […]
The story of Rabbi Katz and Daniel from Tel Aviv
Rabbi D. Katz lives in the Jerusalem area. Many years after his bar mitzvah, he purchased particularly mehudar (high-standard) new tefillin and donated his old tefillin to the organization ‘Or Hadash’. Daniel from Tel Aviv does not observe Torah and mitzvos, but recently he became interested in Judaism. Talia, a lady who works at the […]
