Rabbi Daniel Lerfeld, Esteemed Torah Scholar and Founder of Beis Yisrael Yeshiva, Passes Away at 83

The Torah world mourns the passing of Rabbi Daniel Lerfeld zt”l, founder and head of Beis Yisrael Yeshiva in Neve Yaakov, who passed away at the age of 83. Rabbi Lerfeld was widely recognized as a towering scholar and devoted mentor who guided thousands of talmidim over the decades.

Born in Chicago, Rabbi Lerfeld was the son of Rabbi Yehuda Leib Lerfeld zt”l, a prominent member of the local Jewish community. At 16, he came to Israel to study Torah, learning in the yeshivas of Mir and Hebron, and earning the admiration of his teachers for his dedication and brilliance.

After marrying Rabbi Shlomo Yosef Tshel zt”l’s daughter in the United States, Rabbi Lerfeld returned to Israel, continuing his studies and teaching in Kolel Gur Aryeh under Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner zt”l. He later taught in Yeshivat HaNegev and co-founded Yeshivat Torat Moshe before establishing Beis Yisrael Yeshiva, first in Beit VeGan and later in Neve Yaakov, where he nurtured generations of students.

Rabbi Lerfeld authored over forty Torah works, including the acclaimed Binat Daniel series on Talmudic tractates. He was known for his deep, clear lectures and his unwavering devotion to instilling a love of Torah and fear of Heaven in his students. He maintained close relationships with many of the great Torah leaders of his time, including Rabbi Shach zt”l, Rabbi Steinman zt”l, and Rabbi Chaim Zimmerman zt”l.

He is survived by a distinguished family of sons, daughters, and sons-in-law who continue his Torah legacy, including his daughter, Rebbetzin Landa, wife of Rabbi Yisrael Landa, head of Yeshivat Heichal Yitzchak in Jerusalem.

 

Renowned Torah Scholar Rabbi Dovid Kamenetsky Passes Away at 68

 

Rabbi Dovid Kamenetsky, esteemed talmid chacham, Torah historian, and son of Hagaon Rav Shmuel Kamenetsky, passed away in Israel at the age of 68. Rabbi Kamenetsky, who moved to Israel in 1982, studied at the Mir, Brisk, and Mishkan HaTorah yeshivas and dedicated his life to Torah scholarship and education

Since 1990, he served at Yeshivat Darchei Noam/David Shapell College, teaching mid-level Gemara shiurim and guiding thousands of talmidim in understanding complex Talmudic concepts. He was also among the editors of the Schottenstein Shas, both in English and Hebrew.

A prolific historian, Rabbi Kamenetsky authored numerous works, including his acclaimed biography of Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzenski, and led Mechon Pirkei Eliezer, publishing previously inaccessible rabbinic manuscripts. He leaves a lasting legacy of scholarship, teaching, and devotion to Torah study.

Censoring Courage: Ami Magazine’s Selective Blindness in Yerushalayim

Ami's Editor Yitzy Frankfurter

Last week, Yerushalayim was rocked by a brutal terror attack. Two Palestinian gunmen opened fire on a bus, murdering six innocent souls and injuring twelve more. 

The horror was stopped by two heroes: an off-duty Charedie IDF soldier in uniform and a newly armed Chareidi civilian. Both were Chareidim. Both risked their lives. Both acted with valor.

And yet, if you flipped through Ami Magazine this week, you’d be forgiven for thinking the IDF soldier was just another anonymous uniform. No mention of his Chareidi identity. No acknowledgment of his Torah values. Just a sanitized narrative that conveniently omits the one detail that doesn’t fit Ami’s ideological feng shui.

Managing Editor Yossi Krausz penned the piece, but let’s not kid ourselves—this editorial sleight of hand has the fingerprints of Publisher and CEO Yitzy Frankfurter all over it. Frankfurter, the self-styled Satmar gatekeeper, seems to believe that admitting a Chareidi Jew serves in the IDF is akin to confessing to heresy. It’s not journalism—it’s theological airbrushing.

Let’s talk about Frankfurter’s Satmar credentials for a moment. He claims the mantle, but his lineage tells a more nuanced tale. His father, a tailor in Boro Park, was a staunch follower of the then Szigeter Rebbe, Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum, who had a shtibble in Boro Park and who subsequently became the Satmar-Szigeter Rebbe after the passing of his uncle, R' Yoel Teitelbaum the first Satmar Rebbe. Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum was the author of the Sefer called Beirach Moshe—who, for those keeping score, was no stranger to Zionist sympathies. The Beirach Moshe even married off his son Aron (now the Satmar Rebbe of Monroe) to the Viznitzer Rebbe’s daughter. The Viznitzer Rebbe, of course, being the spiritual backbone of Agudas Yisrael in the Knesset. A union that, in the eyes of R’ Yoel z”l, his predecessor, was nothing short of ideological treason.

R’ Yoel didn’t mince words. In Al Hagulah, he wrote that anyone who supports a Knesset party is a “min and a koifer.” So if Frankfurter’s trying to play purity police, he might want to check his own family tree for Zionist pollen.

But back to the real issue: Ami’s deliberate omission. This wasn’t a slip. It wasn’t an oversight. It was a calculated decision to suppress the truth that a Chareidi Ben-Torah in uniform saved lives. Because acknowledging that fact would shatter the narrative that Chareidim and Zionism are mutually exclusive.

This isn’t just bad journalism—it’s ideological malpractice. It’s the kind of editorial dishonesty that insults the intelligence of its readers and dishonors the bravery of those who act in defense of Am Yisrael.

So here’s my message to Ami: If you can’t tell the whole truth, maybe it’s time to stop pretending you’re in the business of truth at all.

Israel’s strike on Hamas in Qatar should’ve happened long ago

 

Israel’s precise strike at Hamas headquarters in the petro-state sheikdom of Qatar happened about 23 months too late.

Every one of the reported targets has been sanctioned by the US government for terrorist activities.

Each one of them, by any moral or legal understanding, was engaged in war crimes.

Not only did they orchestrate and manage an ongoing war against Israeli civilians, but they also doomed Arabs in Gaza to destitution while sitting on billions of stolen dollars and sleeping safely in their luxurious hotel rooms.

Even if it turns out that Israel missed these targets, Hamas leaders know there is no place to hide.

Among the targets was Khaled Meshaal, one of the founders of modern Hamas, whose net worth has ballooned somewhere between $2 billion to $5 billion.

Then there is Khalil al-Hayya, who praised the rape of women and murder of children as “a source of pride for our people” and bragged about using Palestinian civilians as “shields for the resistance.”

Zaher Jabarin, known as the CEO of Hamas, siphoned billions of international aid to the group and procured funding from Iran and Qatar.

Nizar Awadallah, a longtime Hamas leader, had planned dozens of attacks on civilians.

And Ghazi Hamad, who promised his group would “repeat the Oct. 7 attack time and again until Israel is annihilated.”

After 700 days of bogus negotiations with these malevolent savages, Israel said enough. None of the people were diplomats or peacemakers. Every one of them pledged forever war.

There’s no possible scenario in which Israel didn’t inform the United States about its plan to target Doha, which sits near US military installations.

It’s implausible that Israel would attack without a green light from the president.

More than likely, Israelis held off while Trump attempted to craft a broader deal.

But Hamas was never going to stop.

It might well be the case that Qatar also knew the attack was coming and decided to untether its fortunes from Hamas.

Even so, the United States should decouple from this toxic theocratic city-state, which undermines American domestic politics by dropping billions into US schools, politics and media to gain influence and normalize radicalism and Islamist ideas.

Remember that Qatar blamed Israel “alone” for Oct. 7.

Without Doha’s financial backing, the attack never would have happened in the first place.

And if Qatar wanted the hostages released, it could have pressured the Palestinians to do so a long time ago.

Qatar perpetuated this charade to lift itself as a power broker. Its duplicitous and unctuous playing of all sides does nothing to help our national interests.

Qatar also surely realized that Oct. 7 had been a colossal blunder not just for Palestinians but for Islamists across the Middle East.

Since that day, Israel has decimated Hamas, killing thousands of its soldiers and eliminating virtually its entire leadership; it has decapitated Hezbollah’s fighting force, possibly allowing Lebanon’s leaders to try to dislodge the Iranian proxy militia from their country; it has precipitated the fall of the Assad regime, which had been in place in Syria for over 50 years; it has likely set back Iranian’s nuclear program for years, not to mention knocked out a massive number of armaments and defenses; and it eliminated top Houthi leadership, as well.

It’s a shame it took this long.

Imagine, if you can, Mexico hosting al Qaeda leaders in five-star Cancun resorts and giving them space for a headquarters in the year 2002.

Now, if your contention is that Hamas is the legitimate governing entity of the Palestinian people, imagine Mexico hosting Imperial generals as Americans fought the Japanese in Okinawa.

The United States didn’t conduct cease-fire talks with al Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The only reason Israel spent years in negotiations with Hamas was to attain the release of hostages. And the Jewish state was willing to entertain unconscionable demands to save them.

It may never happen. But it was certainly never going to happen while the billionaires of Hamas conducted their operations in the safety of Qatar.\

Those days are over.

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner. His most recent book, “The Rise of Blue Anon,” is now available.

Weekend News Summary

 

1) The UN General Assembly approved by 142–10 a resolution supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state

 

2)  A Houthi missile launched toward Israel early this morning was intercepted before crossing into the country

3) In Gaza City, the IDF struck and destroyed a Hamas high-rise building used for terror activity

4) Egypt is reportedly working to create a joint Arab defense force modeled after NATO. According to Egyptian sources, this force would respond militarily even against Israeli strikes on Arab states. The initiative includes Turkey, Jordan, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman

Columbia protest leader Khalil tells far-left Jewish group that Satmar, Neturei Karta & Reform ‘give us hope’

 Mahmoud Khalil, an anti-Israel protest leader at Columbia University made famous after his arrest by the Trump administration, tells a far-left Jewish group that anti-Zionist Jews “give us hope” and that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are separate.

Khalil speaks to IfNotNow, a far-left Jewish activist group based in New York City, during a virtual membership drive for the group.

He highlights the “importance of such anti-Zionist Jewish spaces,” saying that “Palestinian and Jewish liberation are intertwined.”

“We both deserve self-determination, both deserve living in safety and peace,” he says. “My vision for Palestine, whether it’s a 10-state solution, 100-state solution, doesn’t matter as long as we want people to actually live in freedom.”

Anti-Zionism is the rejection of Jewish self-determination in Israel.

He also blames the Trump administration for antisemitism.

“This administration in specific, but also I would say the Zionist lobby at large are trying to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism and this is what really fuels antisemitism,” he says.

“Seeing people who are anti-Zionist Jews is what actually gives us hope, is what goes against the narrative that it’s a religious war,” he says.

Khalil was a leading figure in Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of student groups at Columbia that led anti-Israel protests on the campus.

The group has voiced support for violence, distributed Hamas material at a university library, and caused repeated disruptions on campus following the war. In a newsletter this week, the group applauded Hamas and defended Tarek Bazrouk, an activist who pleaded guilty to assaulting Jews in New York City, and Elias Rodriguez, who killed two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC.

A university antisemitism task force has reported widespread discrimination on the campus targeting Jews and Israelis.

Last week, at a pro-Palestinian conference in Detroit, Khalil took a more combative tone in a call to dismantle Israel.

“Zionism only depends [on] portraying Israel as a normal state, it’s an ordinary state, but our work is to strip that facade until Israel stands exposed as a pariah state, until the Zionist genocidal project and the ideology of supremacy that it’s built on collapse completely,” he said.

Zera Shimshon Parshat Ki Tavó

 

PROOF POSITIVE Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders Knew Hamas Ran Gaza Hospitals

 

Two internal Hamas documents uncovered by Israeli forces in Gaza reveal that international aid groups, including the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, were fully aware that Hamas embedded its fighters and infrastructure inside Gaza’s hospitals — even as they publicly denied or ignored the practice, NGO Monitor said.

The memos, dated February and March 2020, were translated and released by NGO Monitor after being declassified by the IDF. They describe Hamas’s systematic use of hospitals such as Al-Shifa and Nasser as command centers, gathering points for its leaders, and extensions of its terror network.

One document states explicitly that the International Committee of the Red Cross set up offices adjacent to Hamas’s movement offices in the Al-Shifa complex. Another notes that Doctors Without Borders chose a secure communications room in Abu Yousef El-Najar Hospital. The memos underscore Hamas’s position that hospitals are not neutral but integral to its operations.

“These groups clearly knew that Hamas exploited these facilities and chose to remain silent,” said Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor. “While condemning Israel for targeting hospitals, they ignored the terror infrastructure inside them.”

The documents also show that Hamas’s Interior Security Mechanism tightly controlled NGO activity, forcing foreign delegations to report staff names, accept security escorts, and operate only with Hamas approval — effectively making them complicit in the group’s system.

Anne Herzberg, NGO Monitor’s legal adviser, said it was “beyond belief” that organizations like the ICRC continue to deny knowledge of Hamas’s actions. “The documents show they had to report to Hamas. They knew they were being monitored,” she said.

When pressed for comment, the ICRC declined to acknowledge Hamas’s use of medical facilities, citing only international humanitarian law protections for hospitals. Doctors Without Borders reiterated on its website that it has “no direct information” of Hamas fighters in hospitals, despite multiple reports and hostage testimony confirming their presence.

The silence enables Hamas to continue using civilians and medical facilities as human shields. “They’re turning hospitals into military objectives,” Herzberg said. “Covering for Hamas only encourages them to keep doing it.”

The Israeli Seminary Scam

 

From a mother with a child in Seminary!

by Sandy Eller

Over the past few days, our airports have been filled with Bais Yaakov girls whose years-long seminary dreams were about to come true as they scanned their boarding passes and headed to Eretz Yisroel. Their jam-packed suitcases weren’t anywhere near as full as their hearts, which were overflowing with enthusiastic visions of the experience of a lifetime.

But there are other girls, too – broken-hearted Bais Yaakov graduates who are sitting teary-eyed in their rooms, knowing that they are being left behind. They are solid girls who never got that coveted acceptance letter from a seminary that aligned with their hashkafos, no matter how much their schools, their family rabanim, and concerned community members advocated on their behalf. While their friends floated blissfully through school and camp as they counted down the days to their seminary’s group flight, these girls sank lower and lower into the depths of despair, the pain of their rejection leaving them crushed and humiliated.

Let me tell you about those girls, because I know quite a few of them and have no doubt that there are others as well. I have spent hours on the phone with parents and rabanim trying to find placements for those girls, who have been served a triple dose of rejection after submitting their seminary applications, their choices approved by their twelfth grade mechanchos. These are girls whose dreams and faith in our educational system have been shattered, and I promise you, if you sat down and spoke to any of them, like I have, you would feel the same way too.

For the record, these aren’t the angry ramblings of a disgruntled parent – my daughter went to seminary, but the fact that my child has a place doesn’t absolve me of my responsibility to advocate for those who don’t. Right now, we have a window of opportunity, before seminary season starts again, to re-evaluate the entire process, before it destroys yet another group of girls. Let’s open up a conversation and see what we can do to make sure that next year, there are no girls being hurt and abused by the system.

Maybe we should be presenting a united front, making it clear to seminaries that we won’t be sending them our daughters until every girl is accepted.

Maybe the time has come to put an end to the notion that parents are expected to cover the astronomical cost of a year in seminary, an experience whose $30,000+ price tag is choking the average person and becoming unaffordable even for those who are doing well financially.

Maybe we should start steering our girls to other post-high school choices, quality domestic options that can offer girls a phenomenal and rewarding experience at a fraction of the cost of a year in Israel.

Maybe we need more seminaries so that the supply of slots can keep up with the demand, since we know that the number of girls graduating high school increases each year. And who knows, maybe if there is some real competition in the market, existing seminaries might be forced to rethink the exorbitant prices that they’re currently charging.

Maybe we should leave the Israel seminary experience for those who need it most – girls who are struggling in their Yiddishkeit, and create a new normal for the remainder of our high school graduates.

Maybe we need our daughters to step up to the plate and stand up for their fellow high schoolers, refusing to commit to a seminary until every girl is accepted to a school that is appropriate for her.

I don’t know what the answers are – I just know that the current seminary model isn’t working anymore and is becoming a black mark on our community.

We need to put our heads together and come up with a better alternative, because our girls are priceless treasures. I know that for most people, it’s easier to just look away than to try to change a system that has been in place for decades.

But imagine for a minute that it was your daughter watching all her friends flying off to Eretz Yisroel, while she stayed home, alone and rejected.

Would you still stay silent? Or once the problem touches your life, would you become part of the solution? The time has come for us to teach our daughters an important lesson that seems to have fallen by the wayside – kol Yisroel areivim zeh lazeh – by making sure that none of their friends or sisters will ever be left behind.

Danon Warns Qatar in UN Speech

  Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N., Danny Danon, issued a stern warning Thursday to Qatar following an Israeli strike that killed at least six Hamas leaders in Doha. Speaking at an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council, Danon said Qatar must act against Hamas or risk Israel taking matters into its own hands.

“History will not be kind to accomplices,” Danon said. “Either Qatar condemns Hamas, expels Hamas, and brings Hamas to justice. Or Israel will.”

The strike, carried out Tuesday, targeted Hamas officials gathered in Qatar’s capital to consider a U.S.-backed ceasefire amid ongoing hostilities in Gaza. Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Qatar’s prime minister, called the attack “unjustified” and said Israel’s timing showed it “does not care” about the hostages held in Gaza.

“Extremists that rule Israel today do not care about the hostages — otherwise, how do we justify the timing of this attack?” Sheikh Mohammed said, earlier telling CNN that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was directly responsible for destroying any hope for negotiations.

Acting U.S. Ambassador Dorothy Shea said “it is inappropriate for any member to use this to question Israel’s commitment to bringing their hostages home.”