Browsing the archives for the Mezuzahs in the News category
El Al decided to take advantage of all of the publicity from the recent Tefillin scare. They have published this ad in some newspapers.
I was trying to think of a way to sell some pairs of Tefillin from this story, but it has alluded me. I am glad to see that El Al is on the ball though.
Here is an interesting article from Ynet:
Can mezuzot thwart water crisis?
Government ministers’ attempts to come up with ideas to deal with depleting levels of Lake Kinneret prompt agriculture minister to suggest replacing all of Water Authority’s parchment scrolls for good luck
Itamar EichnerThe escalating water crisis plaguing Israel has its ministers racking their brains in an attempt to come up with ways to deal with the predicament.
Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee) is Israel’s main freshwater reservoir; and a recent succession of dry winters has left it nearly depleted.
The Knesset has heard suggestions the likes of partially shutting off the water supply to prisons or organizing mass prayer rallies, but Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon has come up with an original idea: Changing all the mezuzot in the Israel Water Authority offices.
Jewish tradition calls for a mezuzah, a piece of parchment inscribed with specified Hebrew verses from the Torah and places in a special case, to be affixed to every doorframe.
Simhon’s peers found the suggestion somewhat puzzling, prompting the agriculture minister to explain the logic behind his proposal: “I would like to remind everyone that Labor was at an all-time low in the polls, but after I had the mezuzot at the Labor House changed we doubled our strength.”
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert suggested, fondly, that the next government consider keeping Simhon in the Agriculture Ministry so he may continue handling the water crisis.
The government has held three sessions on the water crisis in the past few weeks, at National Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer’s request.
Ben-Eliezer claims he want his fellow ministers to be fully updated on the situation, so that none of them claim they were unaware of its severity.
“This has been an extremely dry winter, with the lowest recorder rainfall since Israel started keeping track.”
Head of the Water Authority, Prof. Uri Shani, said that “the rainfall we’ve had so far is about 45% of what we were supposed to see at this time. Water consumption, however, has increased. The probability of us having a dry winter for the fifth year in a row was minute.
“We have prepared an emergency contingency plan meant to see the water system though this hard time. The government has already approved these steps and we have been implementing them uncompromisingly. The Water Authority is also working on several other emergency contingencies to cope with the drought.”
Here’s an interesting article from Haaretz.com:
Who puts up a mezuzah in space? A Jewish astronaut
By Ofri Ilani, Haaretz Correspondent
If Dr. Garrett Reisman did not exist, then Mel Brooks or Woody Allen would have had to invent him. The veteran astronaut, who spent three straight months in space, looks like a character from a comedy about Jews in space: He is short, an engineer and full of self-deprecating humor that is often missing in astronauts.
Reisman, a native of New Jersey, is the first Jew to have lived in the International Space Station.
“The mission went pretty well, I did not break anything that was too expensive,” he says.
When he got to the space station, via the space shuttle Endeavor, he was quick to put up a mezuzah in the bunk where he slept.“I did not consult any rabbi, so I hope I did not get into any trouble,” he says.
Reisman is in Israel for the fourth Ilan Ramon International Space Conference, which is organized by the Science Ministry and the Fisher Brothers Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies.
The NASA delegation will make a presentation on progress in its most ambitious project: sending humans to Mars. Its schedule is for a manned mission to Mars by 2030.
However, at this stage, there are still problems to be resolved. The round trip is expected to last at least three years and will require enormous amounts of food, water and fuel.
No less troubling is how best to assure the health of the crew while millions of kilometers from earth.
Dr. Johnston Smith, a medical officer at NASA, who is also visiting Israel, is one of those dealing with this challenge. “If someone experiences a standard medical problem, like appendicitis,” he says, “a decision will need to be made on what to do. Therefore, on the voyage to Mars one of the crew will be a doctor and will have the means to undertake simple surgery.”
Those traveling to Mars will also be away from family and friends for years. According to Johnston, the missions to the International Space Station are meant to build up experience in dealing with psychological dilemmas. Thus, for example, a year ago, NASA had to inform astronaut Daniel Tani, who was at the space station, that his mother had died in an accident.
“Every astronaut decides before a mission whether they want to know [such news] immediately or not. But on a voyage to Mars these questions will be more significant, and we need to think about how to deal with them,” Johnston says.
It seems that NY state has a whole section of business law that protects the consumer from being sold non-kosher Mezuzahs and Tefillin.
Here is a link to the section Just type Mezuzah in the search box and it will come up.
Pretty amazing huh?
Thanks to xerpentine for the tip.
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:
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.
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.
