Questionable Source

There’s nothing (okay, almost nothing) worse than printing something that shouldn’t have been printed and then realizing it was read by thousands of teens all over the world — and there was no way to take it back.

Well, that’s what happened once in Teen Talk, a forum where we publish teen submissions, and what an experience it was. One of our readers sent in two poems. What she didn’t tell us is that they were close copies of songs written for a non-Jewish audience. We weren’t aware of the original source, and they ended up going to print.

We found it so upsetting that one of our readers passed off someone else’s work as her own, and we were very disappointed that words from a hashkafically questionable source appeared in our magazine.

Beyond that, it was a shame that one of our readers felt the need to look to the outside world for inspiration. If she had only looked within herself, she surely would have found wellsprings of creativity, individuality, and talent. That’s what Teen Talk was really all about: material by teens and for teens that celebrated the talent and perspective of our own readers.

—Daniela Thaler

To Be Continued

Rav Nota Greenblatt passed away close to our print deadline, and we published a short tribute piece that week with a note: A comprehensive article detailing the life and timeless accomplishments of Rav Nota Greenblatt will be printed for his shloshim.

This article was published on May 3rd, 2022. Immediately, I got to work on the more comprehensive article we had promised our readers. What readers didn’t know is that up until mid-April, I had been working at a large law firm, but it wasn’t a great fit and we decided to part ways. The deal was that the firm would continue paying me through May.

Thankfully, I had a new job lined up beginning June 1st. That left the month of May completely open. I had no work, but was on full salary. That gave me all the time I needed to research and write. I spent an enormous amount of time on it; to this day, I don’t think I ever worked so hard on an article.

When it finally went to print, the sigh I breathed was a mixture of relief and sadness. It was hard to say goodbye to Rav Nota. But time would prove that sigh premature. The Greenblatt family greatly appreciated the article and, a few months later, hired me to write a biography that would try its best to tell the amazing story of Rav Nota Greenblatt, which was released earlier this year by ArtScroll/Mesorah with the simple title, “Rav Nota.”

—Shmuel Botnick

Small but Huge

Last Pesach, Family First ran a feature called “Parenting the Marrieds,” which shared the perspective of mothers who host their married kids. After Yom Tov, I heard from a friend that this had been her best Yom Tov ever. Why? Because she’d read the article, and it had helped her see things from her mother-in-law’s point of view. Her shalom bayis was also better as a result, and in general, there was more shalom and simchah all around.

Small changes like that are huge, and I hear this kind of feedback all the time.

—Ricky Boles

Bashert Penname

Once my daughter had a date with a boy who had the same last name as a pen name I use often — let’s call it “Yenta Reiter.” On the date, the subject of names arose, and the boy mentioned that he found his name quite boring. If he were choosing a name, he said, he’d choose something more unique, cooler sounding.

“Funny you should say that,” my daughter said, “because my mother actually did choose that name as a pseudonym that she writes with all the time.”

The bochur stared at my daughter for a long moment and then asked, “Wait. Reiter is your mother? Yenta Reiter? She wrote that thing about _____! And about ______! And she’s doing that column on _____! Oh gosh, that’s your mother? Tell her she’s major hock in the BMG dorm!”

Realizing belatedly that he had just incriminated half the Irv by spilling the beans that they read Family First and Teen Pages on their downtime rather than Michtav MeEliyahu or Rav Hirsch’s Nineteen Letters, the young man went on to elaborate on what, specifically, bochurim appreciate in today’s fine kosher literature and why Yenta Reiter is on their thumbs-up list.

Over the years I’ve been told that this piece was clipped, that one used in a seminary class, another posted on a shul’s WhatsApp group — but no feedback ever puffed me up as much as being told that I was major hock in the BMG dorm.

—Shoshana Itzkowitz

From One Small Sidebar

As I worked on the piece about the collaborative efforts of the Ohel Sarala/Bonei Olam organizations, I connected with its founders, staff members, and singles. I realized how important it was to write about fertility preservation. Aside from raising awareness, writing about it in Mishpacha would normalize it.

At first Mishpacha was hesitant, but after seeking rabbinic guidance, we included a short and very sensitively phrased sidebar about Bonei Olam’s fertility-preserving initiative.

That is when I saw the power of the magazine. Bonei Olam told me that in the ensuing days and weeks, the office was inundated with questions and requests for help from all over the world. “You can’t imagine the effect of this,” one staff member told me, “how many women may be able to have children one day because of this short sidebar.”

—Sarah Massry

Back to the Family Nest

Shortly after Rabbi Mordechai Sufrin passed away, I conducted a memorable interview with his sons — singer/chazzan Shlomo Simcha and his seven brothers. I spent a memorable Zoom hour with all eight brothers as, continental divides notwithstanding, they laughed, cried, and reminisced about their father. To get a fuller picture, I spoke to their sisters too.

They described their father as an inspirational, multi-faceted figure who was on fire for Yiddishkeit. One mitzvah that he was particularly invested in was shiluach hakein — sending away the mother bird — and he had even written a sefer on the topic.

So, in tribute to their father and his affinity for that particular mitzvah, his musically talented sons recorded Yigal Calek’s legendary “Ki Yikorei Kan Tzipor” as a music video.

Right after the feature was printed, a woman reached out to me. Her maiden name was Sufrin, she said, and although her branch of the family had completely assimilated, she and her sister had returned to religious observance two decades earlier. She recognized Reb Mordechai from the pictures in the piece and was looking to reconnect with the family again.

I passed her contact details on to the family, and within days, she had reconnected with her relatives, thanks to a feature in Mishpacha magazine!

—Yoni Klajn

A World of Special Friends

The pieces I wrote about my special-needs son Saadya introduced me to a world of new friends — whether parents of children with special needs or readers at large, who vicariously shared his adventures, challenges, and ultimately his loss with us, Saadya’s family.

Years after his demise, I remember standing in a shop in Brooklyn when a chassidish woman overheard my daughter giving her name to the storekeeper and asked, “Are you related to Saadya Ehrenpreis? I followed his life and mourned his loss.”

In a pizza shop in upstate New York, the woman behind the counter scrutinized my credit card as I checked out, asked if I was Saadya’s mother, and gave me a hug.

In a bookshop in the Gush Etzion area of Israel, someone overheard my name and shared what his story had meant to her.

Perhaps most touching of all: I recently received a phone call from someone I didn’t know at all, the mother of a child with severe issues. “I tracked down your phone number to tell you that I let my 15-year-old child go to the grocery store herself for the first time. I told myself, “If Saadya’s mother could allow him to go on the subway himself, I can find the bitachon to allow my daughter to walk down the street on her own.”

The very last thing we tried to get to Saadya in his hospital room (Covid at that point was thought to be spread through objects) was a copy of Mishpacha with his picture in it! I still daven that he saw it, as I know how much joy he would have gotten. “Hey, Mom… are you going to write about me this month in Mishpacha?”

—Ahava Ehrenpreis

Swiss Account

My husband and I once met a fellow from London who was newly married to a Swiss girl. He got to chatting about Mishpacha with my husband, and then he explained that while dating his wife, he’d looked up information about the Jewish community in Switzerland in order to gain an understanding and to have topics to converse with her about.

But where do you go when you need a crash course on Swiss Jewry? He searched online and found my article featuring a tour of the old shuls in Endingen and Lengnau, describing the history and lifestyle of Switzerland’s Jews. He read it avidly, mastered the material, and had conversation for his date.

It looked like all worked out well, since they were happily married.

—Riki Goldstein

Cleared for Takeoff

Back in November 2020, when Libby Tescher, editor of Mishpacha Jr., asked if I’d like to interview a frum air traffic controller in Miami, I was all in. Who hasn’t wondered about what it’s like in the control tower of an airport?

But I never expected to so thoroughly enjoy the interviewee as a person. Ethan Addess was warm, friendly, had a great sense of humor, and just sounded like an all-around nice guy. And as the interview progressed, I discovered he was also… single. Why wasn’t this guy married?!
The more I thought about it, the more I thought, Why shouldn’t I try to find him a shidduch? Hadn’t I just spent at least as much (if not more) time with him on the phone than a shadchan would have spent? Hadn’t we already exchanged numerous emails, too?

I called him back and asked — hesitantly — if I could have his shidduch résumé.

“I knew this was going to happen,” he joked. “My friends warned me!”

I got to work, calling a cousin who knew some single woman and describing Ethan to her. She sent me the résumés of two single women who seemed like a possible fit. Erin Mann jumped out at me, and not just because her name started with E. They seemed to share values and goals.

Ethan and Erin agreed to meet each other. It was at the height of Covid, so they did some phone and Zoom “meetings” first.

One day in April, a few months after the article was published, I got an email from Ethan, letting me know that he was planning on proposing to Erin!

I sat and stared at that email and then read it again and again… and again. And then I called my cousin in Chicago, and we squealed into the phone together. Ethan and Erin were married in the summer of 2021, and I heard they even recently celebrated the birth of a baby boy.

When people say, “You never know,” it’s really true. You never do know; Hashem has His ways of bringing couples together. After all, this was a shidduch made in the sky — or, at least, the control tower — and it all began with a quest to give Mishpacha Jr. readers a story they’d never forget.

—Malka Winner

Perfect Timing

I once got an email from a mother whose daughter was in the hospital over Shabbos because of a health condition. She was very down, but then she opened Mishpacha Jr. and read in our “Hidden Heroes” column about a girl going through the same health challenge, living a full and vigorous life. This really uplifted her and changed her perspective.

The interesting twist is that we had planned to publish that specific piece a while earlier, but for some reason it was repeatedly postponed. Finally, I saw just why it had to be published that week!

—Libby Tescher

Gift of Life

“Blood Relatives,” a LifeLines story about a woman who donated a kidney, was printed in Adar of 5774/2014. About a year or two before I wrote up this story, a dear friend of mine was hospitalized for dehydration, and it was discovered that her kidneys were inexplicably malfunctioning. This friend is the mother of a large family, and until her hospitalization, she was a vibrant, busy, and unusually energetic person.

I watched this bundle of energy rapidly deteriorate to the point where she had to spend most of her day in bed, venturing out of the house only for frequent medical appointments and treatments. She was placed on a draconian diet — no salt, no sugar, no fruit, nothing with any taste — and also placed on a waiting list for kidney donation.

Then came the tests. It’s not only kidney donors who go through months and months of testing — potential recipients have to demonstrate their suitability for a transplant and subsequent anti-rejection drugs by presenting a clean bill of health for every last tooth and toenail.

A family member offered to donate a kidney to her, but after exhaustive testing, this relative was rejected as a donor. For months after that, my friend dragged herself to dialysis appointments every other day, all the while anxiously awaiting the phone call that would herald her salvation. Finally, Rav Yeshayahu Heber ztz”l, founder of the Matnat Chaim organization and himself a kidney recipient, informed her that a suitable donor had been found.

When I saw my friend a few weeks after the transplant, it was like witnessing techiyas hameisim.

Shortly afterward, I wrote up the story “Blood Relatives,” and I added a “Between the LifeLines” sidebar describing the personal thanks I felt to Hashem for having granted my friend a new lease on life.

Three years later, I received a story submission from a reader. While she was telling me her story, she mentioned that she had donated a kidney. “It was because of an article I read,” she said. “But I can’t remember the name of the article or which publication it was in. The article was about a woman who was suffering from kidney disease, and her life turned around because of a kidney donation.”

“Well,” I said, “I once wrote a story about kidney donation, but it was about someone who donated a kidney, not someone who received a kidney. I can send you the article, if you’re interested.”

She was interested, so I emailed her the “Blood Relatives” article, which contained my “Between the LifeLines” sidebar.

She wrote back: I am in awe! It was this story and your personal addition at the end that inspired me to proceed with donating a kidney.

—C. Saphir

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1008)