Inspiring a Nation with stories

Rabbi Lipszyc's Story of the Week #52.  Dedicated In memory of Aharon Tzvi ben Avigdor Although I used to enjoy driving, and did quite a lot in my time, my driving habits weren’t necessarily the best. Through the years, I got into numerous accidents and only because of G-d’s kindness, am I around to talk about it. The first accident was while I was a teenager and still a new driver. My brother Heshy would let me use his car from time to time. The evening before Yom Kippur he allowed me to use his car to run an errand. In the wee hours of the morning, around 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. on the day before Yom Kippur it is customary to “shlug kaporas,” the tradition is for a female to take a chicken and a male to take a rooster and say a prayer while encircling it around the head, (three sets of three circles around the head,) and then giving it to the shochet (kosher slaughterer) to ritually kill the chicken in the prescribed manner while looking on and thinking that “I deserve the ...

5/7/2018 Rabbi Lipszyc's story of the week # 51.  Although not in chronological order, I am telling this story now because it just came to my attention this past Shabbos. It is a short but powerful miracle story that just shows how G-d takes care of problems that we don’t even know are problems, and does it in a way that we aren’t even aware that a miracle had just taken place. For many years when we were living in Crimea, I would bring 20 rabbinical students for Pesach in order for them to pair up and run 10 public sedarim, servicing more than 3,000 Jewish participants (from the estimated 40,000 - 50,000 Crimean Jews.) Just over twenty years ago, the group included 8 U.S. students who were at that time studying in Israel and thus were traveling directly from Israel to Simferopol. When they landed, of course, they had to go through passport control. They had gotten their visas from the Ukrainian embassy in Israel. Imagine their shock when they...