Not Too Early For The Pesach Falafel Fund
The Falafel Fund sends entire poor religious families to our neighborhood falafel store in Yerushalayim so that harried mothers get a break from cooking one meal for 10-15 kids the week before Pesach.
For $12 per person, we send entire families for a falafel, a portion of French fries, and a canned drink. One meal for an average family (12 children and 2 parents) costs $168 – an amount way beyond even the dreams of these families. (The bigger children and the parents eat the extra half falafel not needed by the little children.)
All the families are carefully chosen. Every penny of all money goes directly to the falafel store owner, with a voucher to the chosen families. We thus ensure that no money gets redirected for anything else by the financially-strained parents.
Last year we were able to send quite a few families to the local falafel store. But the project is so appreciated that people are already asking to get on the falafel list.
Please join this unique mitzvah by sending checks made out to Tzvia Klein –Arzei Habira 49, apt. # 32, Jerusalem, Israel. And include your e-mail address if you have one so I can personally thank you.
Help make life happier for these families and easier for the wives and mothers. Checks arriving after Pesach will go toward the ingredients to make a Shavuos cheesecake for other families.
Please do not make checks out to Falafel Fund as it costs more to cash such checks. And money orders can’t be cashed.
Thank you.
Tzvia Ehrlich-Klein
Jerusalem
Celebrity Great-Grandmother
I must tell you what a celebrity I have become since the article about me appeared in the Dec 22 Jewish Press Olam Yehudi magazine (“Can a Great-Grandmother Serve in the IDF?”)
So many people stop me to tell me they saw the article – including people I hadn’t even known are Jewish Press readers – so congratulations on publishing such a fine newspaper.
I can only imagine the courage it must have taken for Rabbi Sholom Klass to start a newspaper almost 60 years ago geared specifically to our community. And look at how it has grown and all the imitators that have followed. He is no doubt looking down and smiling with nachas from his seat on high.
Perrie Nordlicht
(Via E-Mail)
No Parkland Editorial?
Thank you to The Jewish for your Feb. 23 coverage of the Parkland, Florida school massacre. Your coverage brought home the trauma suffered by the people there in general and the Jewish community in particular.
However, it was rather conspicuous that your paper had no editorial about the specific event or about the ease with which guns are bought in America. Instead, one of your two editorials focused on – what else? – Barack Obama, even though he’s been out of office for over a year, while the other offered yet another rehash of the ongoing Mueller investigation.
Is it possible that after so many young people were slaughtered The Jewish Press has nothing to say? Can it be that you’ve adopted a policy of not criticizing anything Donald Trump or the Republican Party does?
Here’s a word of advice: If problems like gun violence continue, and The Jewish Press says nothing, readers like me may begin to assume the NRA is giving donations to you as well. Let’s not let have that happen.
Yosef Tannenbaum
(Via E-Mail)
Church Protest In Jerusalem
Re “Church Leaders Shut Holy Sepulcher in Protest of Bill Protecting Jewish Homeowners” by David Israel (JewishPress.com, Feb. 25):
The leaders of the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian churches in Jerusalem have locked the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in protest of Jerusalem Mayor Barkat’s appropriate efforts to review and correct the abuses by the various churches of the Arnona land tax exemptions they now enjoy on the highly lucrative and purely commercial uses of their real estate.
In America, organized religious denominations are responsible for income and real estate taxes on their purely commercial enterprises.
Moreover, the Roman Catholic Church and its instrumentalities have many times gone beyond the taxation plan proposed by the Barkat administration to place the commercial enterprises of churches on equal footing with all other commercial enterprises, specifically singling out Jews and Jewish communities for special taxation over and above that imposed on the citizenry at large.
One example that comes to mind is Pope Paul IV’s 1555 papal bull “Cum nimis absurdum,” which, in addition to its many oppressive and humiliating conditions it imposed upon the Jews of Rome, compelled the Jews to live in a designated ghetto and pay a special exorbitant tax for the privilege.
The irony of the Catholic leadership locking up a place of worship in the holy city of Jerusalem is not lost, for in 1099 Godfrey’s crusaders, in the name and with the backing of the Catholic Church, locked up Jerusalem’s synagogues with the Jews inside before setting the synagogues afire.
Kenneth H. Ryesky
Petach Tikva, Israel