Gal won’t be furthering his basketball career to Argentina this year.   Gal is a teenager who was one of Israel’s best basketball players in his age group, was slated to spend the coming year furthering his career in Argentina. Instead, he will be involved in a different type of “throwing” – the “back and forth” of intricate gemaros and sevaros! Gal has joined Acheinu’s Yeshiva, where he is investing every last bit of his considerable energy into finishing Masechtos.   This is all due to Acheinu and Gal’s Acheinu mentor, Rabbi Eli Rubinstein who first met Gal, who comes from a traditional home, when he was an 8th grader in a Torani school. He befriended Gal and their relationship blossomed until Reb Eli literally became like Gal’s big brother.

“There is nothing more important that we can do before the Yamim Noraim than to try fixing and rectifying our klei hadibbur, our mouths and our tongues that enable us to speak!” These were the powerful words of Rav Yissocher Frand, Rosh Yeshiva at Yeshiva Ner Yisrael in Baltimore and one of the prime mashpiim of our time. Rav Frand’s words were said during a drasha that was seen by untold multitudes throughout the globe on Dirshu’s groundbreaking pre-Rosh Hashana videocast in conjunction with Dirshu’s ninth annual Yom Limud and Tefilla. The Yom Limud and Tefilla was designed to bring chizuk and hisrorerus to Klal Yisrael in advance of the Yamim Noraim, through the message of the Chofetz Chaim on his yahrzeit.

[New York, August 15th ] – Hatch.ai, a trailblazing platform leveraging data for nonprofits, proudly announces the launch of “OpenGiving,” an innovative AI-powered search engine that revolutionizes donor discovery for nonprofits. OpenGiving (an add-on service to Hatch’s donor enrichment product) empowers organizations to find new donors outside their existing database, leveraging the comprehensive IRS filings of nonprofits, grant-giving foundations, and the individuals associated with them. In honor of the High-holidays, and the beginning of the new school year, Hatch will be granting all Jewish Day Schools 1 year complimentary access to OpenGiving. When a School signs up, they will be given immediate free access to OpenGiving.

An inspiring photo recently went viral of a Chassidish bochur so immersed in learning Torah that he fails to even see a bear passing by. The incident occurred a week ago in the early hours of the morning. The bochur in the photo, a Belzer bochur named Yehoshua Gantzfried, was standing on the porch of the Belzer Beis Shimon yeshivah in the Catskills and learning with great hasmadah. Suddenly a black bear appeared on the grass in front of the porch and walked the full length of the yard but the bochur didn’t even notice it until it was already well past him.

Rabbi Mendy Zirkind, a Chabad chassid who together with his wife Chani, runs a kosher farm on the island of Maui in Hawaii, where the death toll from the deadliest wildfires in the US in over a century reached 99 as of Monday evening, told Israel’s Kan News “that there may have been major safety lapses here.” “On Tuesday morning we started receiving messages asking us if we had electricity, internet, and cell phone connection,” Rabbi Zirkind said. “Then we started hearing that there were some fires in the west. That wasn’t anything new, there are always some fires there.

The US National Archives recently published never-seen-before footage of the liberation of 2,500 Jews from a Nazi death train that was transporting them from Bergen-Belsen to Theresienstadt, Ynet reported on Monday. The Nazi soldiers on the train had been ordered to blow the train up over the Elbe River if they couldn’t make it to Theresienstadt. However, when the Nazi cowards spotted American tanks on April 13, 1945, they fled and the Jews were liberated by soldiers from the 30th Division of the U.S. Army. A third of the train’s passengers were children. Ynet quoted George Gross, the commander of the American tank: “Everyone looked like a skeleton, so starved, their faces sick. And there was something else. When they saw us, they began to laugh with joy, if you can call it laughter.

Rav Shneur Maidanchik, a Chabad shaliach in Columbo, the capital of the southern Asian island country of Sri Lanka, wrote a moving story [in Hebrew] on his Facebook page on Tuesday. He wrote: “A few months ago, two Sri Lankans arrived at our Chabad house in Colombo. To this day I don’t know why they came, but they mentioned that there are twin Israeli brothers – monks who live in a temple named Samanalawewa in the jungle. They gave me a phone number of a person who’s familiar with the temple. I started trying to track them down and realized it would be difficult since they’re in an area that is a 5-hour trip from Colombo – through rainforests and jungles – with no normal access road.” “Today, I made a decision that I have to find them.

The radical far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party with a history of antisemitic rhetoric saw its first head of a county administration elected Sunday in a rural eastern region, a win that comes as national polls show its support at record levels. A runoff election in Sonneberg county pitted Alternative for Germany’s candidate, Robert Sesselmann, against center-right rival Jürgen Köpper. Official figures showed Sesselmann, who had been well ahead in the first round two weeks ago, winning by 52.8% to 47.2%. Sonneberg has a relatively small population of 56,800, but the win is a symbolic milestone for Alternative for Germany, or AfD. The 10-year-old party has been polling between 18% and 20% in national surveys lately.

A federal judge in Argentina has called on Interpol to detain four Lebanese citizens, so they can be questioned for their suspected role in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center that killed 85 people. “Regarding these individuals, there are well-founded suspicions that they are collaborators or operational agents of the … armed wing of Hezbollah,” Judge Daniel Rafecas wrote in a resolution dated June 13 that the Associated Press obtained Thursday. Argentine prosecutors have long alleged that Iranian officials used the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah to carry out the deadly attack. Iran has long denied any involvement in the incident. Both the United States and Argentina have designated Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday claimed that Jews think Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky isn’t Jewish. “I have a lot of Jewish friends,” Putin said at an economic forum in Saint Petersburg. “They say that Zelensky is not Jewish, that he is a disgrace to the Jewish people.” “This is not a joke and not an attempt at irony, because today neo-Nazis, Hitler’s disciples, have been put on a pedestal as heroes of Ukraine,” Putin added, the TASS Russian News Agency reported. Putin admitted that Zelensky “has Jewish blood” but ” covers for these freaks, these neo-Nazis, with his actions.” (YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)