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Parsha Achrei Mot-Kedoshim • May 5, 2017 • 9 Iyar, 5777 • Candlelighting 7:37 pm, Havdalah 8:38 • Luach page 19 • Vol 16, No 17
The Newspaper of our Orthodox communities
Harav Binyomin Kamenetzky, Zt”l, a pioneer of Orthodox Five Towns
He brought the Torah to a L.I. midbar Harav Binyomin Kamenetzky, a pioneer in the establishment and growth of Orthodox Judaism in the Five Towns, was niftar on erev Shabbos. Thousands attended his levaya on Sunday at the Yeshiva of South Shore. He was 93. The eldest son of Harav Yaakov Kamenetzky, zt”l, Rav Kamenetzky was a founder of YOSS as well as TAG (Torah Academy for Girls), the Young Israel of Woodmere and many other institutions. He touched more lives than can be imagined. While serving as a rebbi in Yeshiva Toras Chaim in East New York, he encountered a child who was travelling there from Cedarhurst. When he realized that the South Shore lacked the institutions of Yiddishkeit, he and his rebbetzin, with the encouragement of his father, moved there in 1956 and began building a Torah-true community. At the levaya for Rebbetzin Tzirel Kamenetzky, a”h, in 2015, Rav Kamenetzky recalled that after the couple moved to the Five Towns, any thought of returning to the more familiar and yiddishe Brooklyn was pushed aside with the knowledge that “the Torah was given in the midbar [and we] have an obligation” to bring Torah to a place where it was lacking. This was a theme echoed frequently at his levaya. More on the life of Rav Kamenetzky, and special tributes, in next week’s edition.
Remembering a rabbi who marched
Rav Kamenetzky affixed a mizuzah at the 2015 grand opening of Gourmet Glatt in Woodmere. As the number of observant Jews grew, the number of kosher markets grew as well.
By Rafael Medoff Special to The Jewish Star
W
Will Omaha be next frumtown?
hen I first invited Rav Binyomin Kamenetzky to speak about his participation in the 1943 march by rabbis in Washington, I assumed he had spoken about that episode on many previous occasions. I was startled to learn that, in fact, his address to the June 2007 national conference of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies would be the first time he had ever publicly addressed the topic. Rav Kamenetzky, like all of the other marchers whom I have interviewed, assumed that the protest had been a failure. After all, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had refused to meet with the rabbis. Their petition was handed off to a low level staff member. Mainstream Jewish leaders publicly disparaged the march as a “stunt.” And the Bergson Group and the Va’ad ha-Hatzala, which organized the march, were dismissed as radicals and troublemakers. I was honored to be the bearer of good news. I explained to the rav that recent research had found the march accomplished much more than he and his fellow-marchers had realized. The rabbis’ high-profile protest helped galvanize members of Congress to press the Roosevelt administration for action to rescue Europe’s Jews. t was that crucial congressional pressure, combined with protests by the Bergson Group and behind-the-scenes efforts by Treasury Department officials, which compelled President Roosevelt to establish the War Refugee Board — exactly the step that the rabbis had urged in their petition. During the final 15 months of the war, the Board helped save more than 200,000 refugees. It did so by bribing Nazi officials, financing the sheltering of refugees, and sendSee Rabbi on page 19
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Several hundred New Yorkers visited the Orthodox Union’s Communities Fair on Sunday, meeting representatives from 56 Orthodox-friendly communities — including such arguably unlikely venues as Omaha, Nebraska, as well as (pictured) Memphis, Tennessee, and Cincinnati, Ohio. More in centerspread.
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