NEWS

This Google Custom Search looks only in this website.

Salomia Korznik and Rochele Pecher, two Jewish eighteen-year-old girls who were murdered during the Holocaust, will be brought to reburial in separate graves at a new site.

The decision to exhume their remains and rebury them according to strict Halachic norms is the initiative of a Polish organization "People Don't Tell" which operates to restore and keep up Jewish cemeteries in Poland so as to preserve remembrance of the Holocaust.

Funded by the German government, the restoration of the ancient Botei Knesset in Izmir, Turkey, will soon be under way, at a cost of 67,000 Euro. The rebuilding plans have been in preparation for several years.

This project is an international initiative of the Kiriti Foundation to restore the unique synagogue in Izmir, coupled with a cultural monument as a living testimony to the rich Jewish heritage of the city.

This hesped for HaRav Eliezer Kahan of Gateshead was originally published in 1993 (5753).

"He, Damesek Eliezer, drawing and watering [others] from the Torah of his mentor."

Subservience to and mesiras nefesh for Torah, were the secrets of the man, and the driving force of the movement. The man - the gaon and tzaddik, R' Eliezer Kahan, zt"l of Gateshead, who developed and cultivated a "Novardoker reserve" within stately England. Twenty-five years since his demise, on the eighth of Tammuz, 5728.

He arrived in Vilna, the "capital," and like many other good Jews, headed directly for the home of the gaon hador, R' Chaim Ozer Grodzensky. The yeshiva's desperate material situation—its empty coffer, and the problems of its students—weighed heavily on his heart. Without a doubt, only R' Chaim Ozer could help!

The Rosh Hayeshiva reached the threshold of R' Chaim Ozer's home, only to discover that the gaon wasn't in Vilna, but in a not-too-distant vacation spa. Seemingly, this bit of information should not have posed any particular problem for him. If he had come so far, what was so difficult about continuing a bit further? However, he had not a penny in his pocket. In those difficult times, he had barely managed to secure enough money for a one-way ticket to Vilna. Even if he had wanted to return home, then and there, he couldn't have done so.

Without hesitating, R' Eliezer began to walk to the spa. Rain fell in torrents, and the cold intensified. A storm raged. Winds howled. Yet he continued to trudge on, mile after mile. It took him an entire day to reach his destination.

He reached the village in which the spa was located, after midnight. He knocked on R' Chaim's door, only to be greeted by the gaon himself. R' Chaim Ozer was stunned by the sight of the man who was drenched from head to toe, and in amazement, gasped: "Surely you are a Novardoker. Only Novardokers are capable of such mesiras nefesh for Torah."