Mezuzah Blog

Thanks to The Lansey Brothers’ Blog

You will be happy to hear that the Israeli athletes at the Olympic village will have Mezuzahs on their door.  Rabbi Freundlach of Chabad-Beijing affixed them this week.  The Rabbi also is making sure that there will be kosher food available at all times at Dini’s Kosher Restaurant, situated near the American Embassy.

You can read the full story here.

I am gonna go ahead now and take the liberty of posting it on Mezuzah Planet.  (But it won’t qualify for the $108 gift certificate.)

I wonder how the sweet and sour chicken is at Dini’s?

Google just came out with a new service called Knol.  It seems their idea is to make a sort of Wikipedia that is written by individual authors instead of by community collaboration.  With Wikipedia, there can only be one ariticle on any given subject, and it is the job of the community to maintain it in an accurate state.

The Idea of Knol, is to allow anyone to write on any topic.  Over time, the articles that are accurate and informative will rise to the top through community ranking and commenting.   This ultimately allows authors, who publish under their real name, to establish credability in their field.

I am very excited about this.  I love to share what I know with others.  I think this Knol thing is going to become a really great platform to do it.  Here are my first two contributions:

Judaism

Mezuzah

That is what the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week.  The ruling came in a case where Lynne Bloch of Chicago, put up a Mezuzah on the door to  her condo.  The home owners association at Shoreline Towers said that it was a violation of their rule against displaying items on the doors in the hallway.  It seems that a game of cat and mouse followed with the association removing the Mezuzah and Ms. Bloch replacing it and so on.  The jist of the decision was that the association has the right to make rules of this sort, as long as the are not specific to any religion.  You can read more about the decision here and here.

My question is, why can’t a home owners association in say a gated community do the same thing?  They would essentially be able to make a no Jews allowed rule in this way.  You can almost understand the logic in a condo where the association maintains the hallways and they are saying that they want a uniform look etc.  But the fact is that when you live in a gated community or even in many planned communities, there is also a home owners association that tells you which colors you can paint  your house and how tall you can let your grass grow etc.   I would love to hear the opinion of some lawyers out there if they think that this ruling could also apply to the communities that I mentioned.

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know how I overlooked this one!  This story is from more than a year ago but was too interesting to ignore.  When I read the headline of this story from the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, I was sure that they were going to say that somehow the cops mistook the rolled Mezuzahs for joints.  During the years that I worked in my store Mezuzah Center in Los Angeles, many people commented that watching me roll the Mezuzah scroll looked like watching someone roll a joint.  I just always smiled and didn’t say anything.  I never really had much experience with rolling joints in my years in Yeshivah.

It turns out that the story is about something different, but no less intersesting…

Alex Grabiner was not a particularly religious Jew, but when he and a few friends opened a medical marijuana pharmacy last year in the San Fernando Valley, they invited an Orthodox rabbi to install three mezuzot in hopes that God would bless their business.

“We wanted to create a place where there was a drastically different energy inside than there was outside,” said Grabiner, a 22-year-old Boston transplant.

“That is what the mezuzah symbolizes: That this is a house of people who believe.”

But last month, the Karma Collective, as the pharmacy near Van Nuys Airport is known, was burglarized. The thieves didn’t take much — a few hundred dollars, no drugs — but they cut through a steel security gate and knocked down the front door and another door that opened from the lobby to the cannabis shop…Read the rest of the story here

Also, note that the Mezuzah in the picture looks strikingly like the Mezuzahs that we sell in our store.  The folks in the story are only a few miles away from our store.  I wonder if they bought it from us.  I just hope that they don’t come back and ask for a refund on the grounds that the Mezuzah didn’t stop the robbers.

You may have heard that Israeli Astronaut, Ilan Ramon took a Mezuzah and other Jewish items with him into space on the the fatal mission of Columbia in 2003.

Now Jewish Astronaut, Gregory Chamitoff is planning on affixing a Mezuzah to the door post leading to his quarters on the shuttle Discovery.

Read more here…

In October I reported to you that Florida’s Governor, Charlie Crist, had affixed a Mezuzah to his office in the Capitol. Crist, as you may have suspected, is not a member of the tribe. Some of you were in favor of this and some against.

Well, I guess that some of the Jewish members of government in Florida felt funny that the Gentile governor had a Mezuzah on his office and they didn’t. It seems that House Majority leader Adam Hasner (Jewish) called up Chabad’s Rabbi Oirchman and asked him to put up a Mezuzah on his office. Two weeks later the Rabbi got a call from the Minority Leader, Dan Gelber.

I wonder if we will see a day when there will be Mezuzahs on the White House and the Congress?

You can read the original article from Lubavitch.com here.

The Chabad Rabbis in Sderot think it may be worth a try. Here is a portion of an article that appeared recently in Israel’s Maariv paper:

Despite the many tactics being used today, from targeted killings, developing anti-rocket weapons and fortifying homes—the inhabitants of Sderot are trying to find solutions from other directions in order to protect themselves from the Qassam rockets.

Now on the agenda: repairing mezuzahs.

Religious officials in the city claim that examinations of mezuzahs there located many that were defective, and many of the defective ones were found in homes that had been hit.

They said that in places where the Qassam rockets fell in the street and did not enter the yards of houses, kosher mezuzahs were found.

Because of the security situation, ritual scribes from Lod have come to the city every Friday, checking the mezuzahs in homes and various public buildings in Sderot.

Until now, thirty percent of the mezuzahs that were checked were found to be defective or completely unfit. Seventy percent were found to be completely kosher.

In the city’s schools, many defective mezuzahs were found, and the scribes reported this to the school’s administration. Similar examinations were carried out in the Sderot municipality, where the scribes were appalled to discover an unfit mezuzah at the entrance to the office of Sderot Mayor Eli Moyal and at the entrance to the auditorium.

Although in other places the scribes had asked people to buy mezuzahs and put them up, the scribes replaced the mezuzahs in the mayor’s office on their own initiative.

“Moyal is responsible for the city and his office is the entrance to the city, so we did it,” said Rabbi Moshe Zeev Pizam, the director of Sderot’s Chabad House. “An unfit mezuzah does not do anything bad. It just doesn’t provide protection, and the inhabitants of Sderot need that very much.”

The deputy mayor of Sderot, Rabbi Oren Malka, said yesterday that the municipality intends to adopt the scribes’ recommendations and change the mezuzahs that were found to be unfit.

I think that the key thing to remember here is that it is important to have Kosher Mezuzahs on our doors just because the Torah says so and we are Jewish. If God protects us in the merit of doing this Mitzvah, it is a great fringe benefit.

Professor Elizabeth Midlarsky of Columbia U recently found a swastika painted on the door of her office.  She has decided to put a Mezuzah up on that very door.

Way to go professor!

Here is a link to an article about this in the New York Sun.

Florida governor Charlie Crist (not Jewish in case you didn’t know) has come under fire for hanging a Mezuzah on the entrance to his capitol office. He received the Mezuzah from his friend state Rep. Adam Hasner (Jewish). Of course the ACLU is not happy about this. I have linked to a few stories about this below.

Hanging of Jewish Symbol in Florida Capitol Sparks Controversy

Mezuzah doesn’t belong on Crist’s office door

Crist defends decision to hang religious symbol on office door

Florida Governor Installs Mezuza on Office Door

Stop the ACLU

So… what do you think? Should the Florida capitol building have a Mezuzah? Post a comment and let us know what you think.