Opinion

This Shabbos, I was 0-for-2 in private discussions I had in shul following davening. Before I addressed a bar mitzvah boy, I opened with the following question to the audience: Imagine if David Duke, of KKK fame, succeeded in becoming a Republican congressman, G-d forbid. He then decides to visit South Africa. The South African government rejects his entry on the basis that he is a notorious hate-filled racist. Would anybody in the world have a problem with the decision of that country to keep that harmful person out? Would Republican colleagues have rallied behind him? Would there have been a threat to our bipartisan relationship with South Africa? The answers are obvious, as is the point. I did not need to spell out what I was driving at.

In just a few short weeks, Queens will elect a new District Attorney for the first time in 28 years. As criminal justice issues have come to the forefront of mainstream attention, the DA race has become the campaign to watch for those with their finger on the political pulse of the city.

The story is told of a man named Yankel whose wife had just given birth to a baby boy. All excited, he decided to share the good news with his brother Berel, a butcher.

A few weeks ago, Dr. David Hurwitz, well-respected local pediatrician, returned from a trip to Israel and handed me an article that appeared in the April 25 edition of The Jerusalem Post. The article, written by Joshua M. Davidson, senior rabbi of New York’s renowned Reform Congregation Emanu-El, was titled “Separating Biblical Mythology from Biblical History.”

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article critical of Reform Rabbi Joshu a Davidson who had written an article in The Jerusalem Post critical of the Bible, worthy of some of history’s worst anti-Semites.

Last week on Yom HaAtzmaut, our good friend and former KGH resident Moshe Markovitz spoke at Congregation Etz Chaim. Moshe gave a personal account of his very young days growing up as a child in the newly declared State of Israel in 1948. Although just a few years old at the time, his recollections remain vivid of the very day David Ben-Gurion declared Israel’s independence, on Erev Shabbos as it were. The jubilation, the dancing in the streets, accompanied by the preparation for Shabbos, still swirl in the inner recesses of his mind.