David Olivestone, director of communications and marketing at the Orthodox Union, contributed several biographies of famous hazzanim to the Encyclopaedia Judaica. He can be reached at davido@ou.org.
What is perhaps even more remarkable is that a 19-year-old Polish immigrant attained such a high level of fluency in a language which was not his mother tongue, and produced…
Several members of his family were there when I got to his house. “Please blow the shofar quietly,” they cautioned me, as soon as I stepped in. “He hasn’t been…
In his four decades at Sotheby’s, the renowned auction house, David Redden presided over many memorable sales.1 Among the most notable, he lists the estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the…
Then Sherwood came in and he was different. “His voice was simple and pure, but what really got all of us was how his neshamah shone through.”
If, like me, you are a man of a certain age who never served in Vietnam or the Israeli army, you have probably also never seen a gun fired in…
During the 1800s, the sending of greeting cards for all sorts of occasions, mostly in the form of postcards, became hugely popular in Europe, including among Jews. Toward the…
(The writer of this piece thinks he should probably have opted to remain anonymous, since he is afraid that his friends, who are already not allowed to talk to him…
They say that the only time you hear Ivrit spoken on Derech Beit Lechem, a major street near where I live in Jerusalem’s Baka neighborhood, is when a Russian meets…
