Mishpacha insiders know that the creative process is often a lot messier than the polished final product

When you get your weekly Mishpacha package, it’s perfectly bound and wrapped, with every i (hopefully) dotted and every t neatly crossed. But the insiders know that the creative process is often a lot messier than the polished final product. What kind of challenges, misadventures, and occasional heartache are weathered behind the scenes to produce your weekly Shabbos reading?

As It Happened

Rav Ovadia Yosef was niftar on a Monday, after the weekly magazine had already gone to print. We all got a call to come back to the office, to produce a special tribute supplement – while the levayah was taking place.

Usually the art studio imports ready text into our programs as we design articles, but this time we inverted the process. Our art team quickly built a design, collected photos, and began building the “look” of the supplement as our writers and editors were still creating the text.

Our offices at the time were in the Har Hotzvim area, and the historically large crowd flooding Jerusalem for the levayah stretched all the way down Golda Meir Boulevard. As I worked, I could hear the buzz of the procession happening outside, and I really wished I could have been out there with everyone. It’s not every day you see hundreds of thousands of people from different backgrounds coming together like that.

But by the time I wrapped up my work, it was all over. I knew I had my own contribution to make, to help readers appreciate the gadol we’d lost — but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d missed out on something truly significant.

—Menachem Weinreb, art director

Paper Crisis

During Covid, when the world ground to a halt, it became difficult to procure paper. Things reached a point where one week we were stuck with no paper anywhere on the American continent to print the magazine. Dozens of frantic calls to paper companies and brokers got us nowhere. But it isn’t Shabbos without Mishpacha, and we knew we had to come through for our readers. So that week we ended up printing the magazines in Israel, where the printer still had access to paper, and shipping them via air ship. The cost of shipping was $45K — but everyone got to enjoy their Mishpacha that week.

—Avi Lazar, CEO, North America

Step by Step

AS office administrator, my secretarial and bookkeeping responsibilities were augmented by a lot of odd jobs, including arranging a big print order for a travel agency that provided all its clients with a free copy of Mishpacha’s mega Yom Tov edition.

One year, our giant stacks of Succos editions were delivered to the office so I could label and send them out, but the elevator broke — so we needed to go up and down two flights of stairs multiple times, lugging magazines.

Erev Yom Tov was super-hectic. The phones were ringing off the hook with subscribers frantically calling to say they didn’t get their magazines, office employees were picking up magazines for their families, and a little party was taking place, too. On top of this, someone from the travel agency needed to come pick up their order, which was now down in the basement.

A woman finally showed up with a baby carriage — and we used that to transport the magazines! I just hope that in all the chaos, no one made off with more than their fair share.

—Lori Friedman, administrator

The Ultimate Editor

This is a story about stories that never happen. A few weeks ago, I drove down to a Beersheva government office early on Sunday morning for a scoop: to meet a Gazan who had saved many Jews on October 7th.

It would have made a fascinating interview: the man knew Gaza like the back of his hand and had important things to say about the war. But as soon as I got there, I learned that the story would never see print. The man had decided that he wanted to lie low, given that his brother had just been killed by Hamas.

It was disconcerting to have put hours into a dud, but in that eloquent phrase, it was what it was.

I drew a couple of lessons. One, that journalism is about the many conversations that don’t go anywhere. They may not result in a column now, but they build you as a more developed writer.

More importantly, it was another example of something that I experience constantly: we have to arrange our thoughts, we say on Yamim Noraim, but ultimately “Me’Hashem ma’aneh lashon” – the final words, or whether indeed there will be final words, are in the hands of the Ultimate Writer.

—Gedalia Guttentag, Editor