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This is TLV1. Hey podcast people, this is Noah talking to you from my Languorous Lassitude, presumably lounging on some beautiful sandy beach with an exotic drink, watching the tides wash in and wash out. I said when I left on this lark that I would check in a few times along the way. And so there is this thing that you have now downloaded. If you're hearing my voice A Matter in Memoriam For a person who was great, though certainly not only great, and who lately left us, and whose legacy I have been thinking about, this thing that you're about to hear is unaccountably long. Maybe you're about to hear the beginning of it until you get tired of it. And I am sure that it will serve you to remind you why. Every time you listen to this podcast you find yourself wondering why? Why doesn't that guy have an editor? Which is a worthwhile thought and one of the many thoughts that I too am thinking about as I while away my hours in my languorous lassitude. I hope that you and yours are well. I and we will be back for you in less than two months with the start of the Promise podcast's 15 years long season two. But for now, here is the intro music that you may remember to this show. Yaakov Kroch was born in Leipzig on November 23, 1923, in fine circumstances. His father, Hans Zvi Kroch, had also been born in Leipzig 36 years before, also in fine circumstances. As his father, Martin Samuel Kroch had in Leipzig succeeded beyond anyone's hope or imagination in the grain trade at first, and having succeeded in grain, in 1877 he set up the Bankhous Kroch, the Kroch bank first, to give loans to the farmers who grew the grain that he bought, financing their wheat while it was still waving in the winds in their fields. Soon though, the Bankhouse Kroch was a success and with its profits Martin Samuel Kroch bought fields of his own. And then he bought a grain mill and a sawmill. And in 1900 he put in motion a plan to build in Leipzig what he called an industrial palace, a plan that was realized in 1913 with the inauguration of the stately and huge Art Nouveau construction on Brandenburg street, not far from the train station, a five story gable roofed building occupying a full city block. You can still visit this industrial palace today. In 1903, as the head of the Leipzig Talmud Torah Society, Martin Samuel Kroch bought a two family home on the Keilstrasse and converted it into what would become the Brody Schul, the only shul in Leipzig that somehow survived the Nazis and. And the only Scholl still standing in Leipzig today. In 1922, Hans Kroch joined the bankhouse. Kroch as his father's partner, pressing the operation to modernize, including by commissioning in 1926, Leipzig's first high rise building, 12 stories, rising 23 meters. Der Krochois, patterned as a homage on the Torre del Orologio, the clock Tower in St Mark's Square in Venice. Which homage was most obvious in the bell at the top of the building, which, like the bell in Venice, was struck every hour by two men fashioned of bronze, holding strikers in their hand, though the men banging the 1497 bell in Venice were known as the Moors, while the bronze men in Leipzig were clearly proletarians, and their strikers wore hammers. And beneath them, set in the building, in lead letters, are the words Laber omnia vincit or labor conquers all, a paraphrase of Virgil and a sentiment that one would not expect to find in lead inset on marble on the facade of a bank, of all things. Adding to the oddity of it all, a frieze just above the ground floor, visible from the street, shows the binding of Isaac. A Jewish scene. The new Krochog House bank building won prizes, though it troubled some Leipzigers, as, for instance, the author of a long anonymous poem published in the Leipziger Tags Zeitung paper on April 30, 1933, in the event, the day my father turned 7 in Brooklyn. And the poem was called Der Judenturm, the Jewish Tower. And though it does not say outright that it is about Kroch, it starts, es war einmal vist IR est noch ein reicher Jude wie heist er doch. Once upon a time there was a rich Jew. As everyone knows, the noch and doch in that poem put you in the mind immediately of Kroch. And the poem goes on here in the translation of Yossi Avron, emeritus professor of quantum physics and superfluidity at the Technion. He built a huge tower for us all to admire. These were bad times for us all. But the Jew, he had a ball. The tower, clear as broad daylight, was the Jew's display of his might. With money made from petty haggling, the Jew mocked all those struggling with cunning, slyness and deceit. He put subversive artwork into concrete. The mighty hand the hammer swings, production lines and sickle sings. Is this indeed just mere chance that we can see a Soviet stance. Star, hammer and sickle tightly flank the tower of a Jewish bank. On the right, Isaac the boy, his father, his knife for the ploy. A bloody story with a ram is depicted in this frame. And it goes on like that for a while, finally ending with Work will always win. The Jew says with a grin, A Jew with two left hands, you goyim, I have plans, I reap Yahweh. Be my witness the fruits of your goyish fitness. It may be worth remembering that this poem was printed 62 days after the Reichstag fire and 38 days after the Enabling act that transferred the power to make laws from Parliament to Adolf Hitler and his Cabinet, ending the Weimar Republic. Things had by then gotten bad for the Krach and for the 11,000 some odd Jews in Leipzig. And I do not need to tell you that they would get still worse. On November 10, 1938, the morning after Kristallnacht, Hans V. Kroch was arrested and sent to Buchenwald and from there to Sachsenhausen, where he stayed until he and his family signed a waiver, transferring to the National Socialist government the bank and the mills and the fields and the Kroch Hoch house, with the proletarians striking the bells on the hour. And after the papers were signed, Hans V. Kroch was let out of Sachsenhausen and he and his four living children. A fifth had died five years before. Yaakov Ernst Kroch, who was 15, and Ilse Kroch, who was 13, Edith Kroch, who was 11, and Hedda Kroch, who was 9. They all fled by train to Amsterdam. The kid's mother and Hans wife, Ella Baruch Kroch. She stayed back in Leipzig. At first her being there kept the police from searching for her husband and children. But when it came time for her to flee, she was arrested and deported in 1940 to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, where she was murdered two years after that, in 1940, as the Germans invaded Holland, Hans Kroch and his kids sailed to Argentina, where they got a place, the kids going to school and Hans Kroch trying time and again, but without ever succeeding, to find a way to get Elleborough Croch back to him. After the war, each of the five Crochs made their way to Palestine with Yaakov Ernst Kronch making the trip with his friends from the Noar Hationi youth movement in Argentina, joining the group assigned to build Kibbutz Nizanim between Ashdod and Ashkelon on Kibbutz Nizanim. Yaakov Kroch worked in the cowshed and then as a wagon driver and then planting in the fields. In 1947, the youth movement sent Yaakov Kroch to Cyprus to teach Hebrew and farming and to build morale in a displaced person's youth camp set up by the Brits to stow orphan survivors who wanted to get to Palestine. Palestine in this DP camp for kids, although the Brits provided barely the drinking water that people needed, Yaakov Kroch somehow managed to get a hold of farm tools. He had hoes and trowels and mattocks and hand cultivators and spades, and the kids used these to make a garden over near the barbed wire perimeter fence. When the war of Independence broke out back in Palestine, Yaakov Ernst Kroch, who had trained in the Haganah and was a squad commander, returned to Nizanim on the very first ship, taking command of the northern border of the kibbutz. Which is how it came to pass that when the 9th Battalion of the Egyptian army captured Nitsanim on June 7, 1948, just 23 days after the war had started, and only a few days after he had gotten back from Cyprus, Yaakov Ernst Kroch fell. He was One of the 33 Jews killed at Nitanim, which was captured and which surrendered Somehow in the 23 days before when the war broke out and when Yaakov Ernst Kroch was killed, he got off a letter to his younger friends in the youth movement, still back in Argentina, saying, dear comrades, we are fighting because we want to plow, to build and to live. And they, on the contrary, fight to kill, steal and destroy simply to sow evil. Therefore, we have no other option than fighting to live. Which, of course, Jacob Ernst Kroch himself did not do. Hans Zvi Kroch moved from Argentina to Jerusalem in 1949, not long after his boy Yaakov died in battle. In 1953, after the Luxembourg agreements were signed, setting out a schedule by which Germany would pay reparations for people whose property had been taken, giving Hans Zvi Kroch back at least a small portion on the Deutsche mark of his once vast fortune, Teddy Kollek, then the director general of the Prime Minister's office under David Ben Gurion, proposed to Hans Fikroch that he invest his new old money in a plot of land in the west of Jerusalem. Off by it Vagan, just 200 meters from the border with Jordan, not far from what is today Malcha, many dunhams of sparsely forested land rising up to a hill with a spectacular view. And the land was Che. And the idea of buying it appealed to Hans V. Kroch, who resolved to build there a hotel that he called at first Eretz hat Zvi, the Land of the Gazelle Hotel. Though of course it was also the land of Zwi, meaning Hans Zvi Kroch himself, a monument to himself. And he hired the great Hungarian born architect Zoltan Harmatt, who had designed the Scottish Church in Jerusalem and Jerusalem's town hall and the Barclays bank building on Yaffo Road, who built the hotel, which Hans Zvi Kroch resolved would not be just a homage to himself, but would also be a homage to his boy, Yaakov Kroch. And with this in mind, Hans V. Kroch contacted a Hebrew University archaeologist named Professor Michael Avi Yonah, who he heard about from his friend, the legendary Jerusalem bookseller Ludwig Meyer, who'd had his shop in Jerusalem since 1908, when his clientele included Eliezer Ben Yehuda. And he'd kept it going for the decades since. It was Ludwig Meyer the government turned to to provide books to Adolf Eichmann to read in his cell before and during his trial. And Ludwig Meyer told Hans Fikroch about Michal Aviona's passion for Jerusalem in the Second Temple period. And Hans Wikroch asked him if he would build a 1 to 50 scale model of Jerusalem in the Second Temple period. And the offer enchanted the professor. It was Hans V. Kroch's hope that the model would do several things. It would be a monument and a memorial to his boy Yaakov. Also, as the newsman TZVI Lavi wrote of it, when it was finally unveiled, it would quote, teach, enlighten and educate people to remember the Jerusalem on the other side of the wall. End quote. Where since 1948, all of East Jerusalem, all of the historical, ancient parts of Jerusalem were on the other side of the wall. Hans Fikroch said, if Jews cannot get to the holy places, the holy places will come to them. What's more, the model would be a proof text that Jews had rights to the city and to the country. And it would remind all who saw it of the most glorious time in the people's history. At least the most glorious time until the present day, which was glorious as well. An irony of Jerusalem in the late 1950s and early 1960s was that it was a city with as rich and ancient and important a history as any city in the world. Rome, Athens, Istanbul, Mecca. And at the same time, what was then the Jewish part of the city anyway? In West Jerusalem there were no holy sites and there were no historical sites. In 1960 there was no reason why a Christian, a Muslim or a Jew seeking to understand her or his history was or to see the birthplace of all that they held sacred. There was no reason for them to come to Jerusalem. Not the Israeli part of Jerusalem anyway. And Hans V. Kroch resolved to solve this problem by rebuilding all the great sites at 1:50 scale. The temple Mount and Herod's palace and the Hippodrome and the tomb of King David, bringing to life the setting of whatever testament you hold dear. For good measure, Hans V. Kroch also built on the grounds of his hotel a miniature golf course and tennis courts and the nicest pool that you could find in Jerusalem in those years, as well as a sculpture garden. And in 1959 he added a philately museum, a museum of stamps, which would much later be re established at the Land of Israel Museum in Tel Aviv. By 1963, Michael Avellona's Second Temple model was under construction, though it would be officially inaugurated only in 1966, by which time Hans Wiecroch renamed the entire hotel in honor of the model. And once removed in honor of his boy Yaakov Kroch, it was now called the Holy Land Hotel. The model was a sensation when it was launched in 1966, though just a year later. The 1967 Six Day War made it possible for Jews once again to visit some of the real holy and historical sites and what remained of them. The Temple Mount, the Western Wall, the tomb of King David, and all at once the model at the hotel had become an odd building thing, though not without interest. And I still remember on my first trip to Israel, before my bar mitzvah with my parents on a two week Mizrachi tour, how fascinated I was and moved by the thing that our tour guide had brought us to see. So many things I'd learned about at Yeshiva were brought to life at once at 1 to 50 scale on that four basketball court. Big expanse of miniatures. After 1967, Jerusalem was a city on the maker. Teddy Kollick, who was now the mayor of the city, convened something he called the Jerusalem Committee to scrutinize the new master plan for developing the city that his people had put together, which committee included as members some of the greatest planners and architects and theorists of public space in the world. Louis Kahn and Philip Johnson, Isamu Noguchi, Oscar Kokoschka, Louis Mumford, Buckminster Fuller, to name just a few of the famous and brilliant men who answered Khalek's call, alongside then just 30 year old Israeli archite Moshe Safdie, who had lately become an international star, designing Habitat, a prefab modular housing project that had started as Moshe Safdie's thesis project at McGill University Architecture School, where apartments are set on apartments by tower cranes and winches, this way or that, after the fashion of Lego bricks, which housing development was the star of Expo 67, the World's Fair in Montreal, where it was presented as the future we would all of us soon be living in. The committee had mostly criticism for the new Master plan, with Buckminster Fuller in a withering memo of dissent, arguing that it was filled with, quote, unnecessary streets and highways and parking lots, and arguing that its authors were thinking like developers and not like stewards of the place, with maybe the most symbolic importance to all of humanity of anywhere on earth. And in fact, soon there was construction everywhere in Jerusalem, higgledy piggledy and before long as the Plaza, the Hilton, the Ramada, the Hyatt and the Don, the Holy Land Hotel was left behind. By this time Hans V. Kroch, who was now in his 80s, had handed off control of the hotel to his daughter Elsa and her husband, Gershon Charney, who had met and married in Argentina and moved with Hans V. Kroch to Jerusalem. In the 1990s. Some of the grounds of the hotel were expropriated to build the New Begin highway that now runs from north to south along the western side of the city. By this time the Holy Land was managed by Elsa and Gershon's son, Hillel Charney was his name, who was a baby when his parents and grandparents moved to Jerusalem from Argentina and who had been sent at eight to school at Carmel College in Oxfordshire, a boarding school founded by Rav Yaakov Kopol Rosen, where upper crust Jews got an education not that different than the education that upper crust Anglicans got at Eton, the acronym made by the name of Rabbi Yaakov Kopol Rosen. Yaakov Kopol Rosen is Yakar, which in Yaakov Kopol Rosen's honor is the name of the beautiful, open hearted synagogue up the street from us, where my girl's boy served for a time as the Shamash or the Beatle, before he left to get his PhD in Yiddish abroad, and whose rabbi is Hananel Rosen, the grandson of Rav Yaakov Koppel Ro, the one time Headmaster of Hillel Croch. Who? Hillel Croch, that is, somewhere in the late 1990s, finally came to the conclusion that his grandfather's Holy Land Hotel was over. And he donated the Second Temple period model to the Israel Museum and decided to take down the Holy Land Hotel and build new structures on the land that was by now worth hundreds of millions, maybe more. Kristallnacht, the knight that changed so much for the fortunes of Hans V. Kroch and his family, of course changed the fortunes of so many Jews. Beside, one of these was named Yaakov Lupoliansky. Yaakov Lupoliansky was born in Karlsruhe on the Rhine in Germany. His mother, Sara Lut Polyansky, had been born Sara Landau, the great granddaughter of Yechezkel Landau, who is known as Hanodah Be Yehuda, after his book Noda Be Yehuda, known in Judea, a celebrated 18th century halachasist who had famously tried to mediate between Yaakov Emden and Johonatan Aibshitz, two great rabbis who argued viciously about Shabtai Zfi and about Kabbalah and about amulets. The Landau family tree went back to Rashi. Yaakov Lupoliansky's father was Yuspa Lupoliansky, a Talmud Hakham, a Torah scholar. In 1932, when Yaakov Lupoliansky was still a young man, though I could not learn in just what year he was born, Yaakov Lupoliansky moved to Mandatory Palestine, settling in Haifa. And not long after that, he was granted British citizenship, though just a year after that, when his father, Jospa fell sick, he moved back to Germany to help his mother and four sisters care for the man during the last year of his life. This is how it came to pass that Yaakov Lupoliansky was once again in Germany on Kristallnacht. And why, right after Kristallnacht, he was with so many other Jews, holding foreign passports, sent straight away to Dachau, where he was imprisoned for a year, discovering on his return that his mother, too had been taken to a concentration camp, though no one knew which. And no one ever heard a word from her again, not then or ever since. Yaakov Lupoliansky arranged passage for his sisters to America, and he himself went back to Haifa, where he set up a shoe and leather goods store, married Malka, and the two had a daughter, Dvora, and three sons, Yosef, the oldest named for his father, Eliezer or Elie, And Uri, the youngest, and the Loupolianski set themselves up in a small apartment on a working class street in the crowded Hadar section of the city. Yaakov Lupoliansky was. He would spend the rest of his life he died in 1977, trying to puzzle out what exactly had happened to his mother. But this was a mystery he would never solve. The Lew Polyanskis were a religious Zionist family. The boys studied at the Beit Hasefer Hariale Yavne, the Yavne Realschul, or Polytechnical Institute, a religious school where science, too was revered. Uri Lu Poliansky went from there to Yeshivat Bne Akiva Pirche Yaharon, the first municipal Yeshiv high school in the country, a famously intellectually sharp and religiously mild place. It was when he was in high school that Ori Lu Puliansky got in the papers for the first time. There would eventually be tens of thousands of articles that would follow. On July 2, 1968, Mariev published a notice under the headline, instead of a fine, they got a prize. And it told how Ori Lopuliansky and his friend Abraham Weinberger, both boys aged 17, had gone to Jerusalem to see the big military parade on independence. And after it was over, they got on the train in Jerusalem for Ramla, where they would catch the connecting line to Haifa. But the car was so crowded with revelers that they could not make it to the ticket seller on the train to pay their fine. That night, back at home, the boys wrote to the manager of Israel Rail saying, we see it as our obligation to pay for our trip, as well as the fine assessed for passengers who do not buy their ticket from the ticket seller in the station, end quote. Orilu Poliansky attached a 10 Israeli lira note to what he had written, and he sent it off. The letter arrived at the desk of Avram Zwick, the secretary general of Israel Rail, himself a Haifa man born in Vienna who had replaced as Israel's head train man Menachem Savidor, after whom the main train station in Tel Aviv today is named. And Avraham Zwick had a boy of his own named Ori, today an emeritus professor of computer science at Tel Aviv University. And Avraham Zwick decided not only not to accept the boys fair and fine, but to create for them a commendation for offering a model of fine citizenship, end quote. And Avram Zwick created a prize to go with accommodation, free and unlimited travel on the trains for three months, anywhere they went, anytime. Avram Zwick came to the yeshiva to meet the boys and to give them the prize. And an assembly was assembled, all the kids in both the science track and the humanities track. And faced with all the to do, Uri Lupoliansky insisted he deserved none of it, saying, but we did nothing special, end quote. Which of course was wrong. And at the same time, it was right. After high school, Ori Lupoliansky felt the pull of a Judaism that was more total than the Judaism he'd grown up with, and he put off the army to study for a year at the Torah, or yeshiva in Jerusalem, a yeshiva that had started in Bensonhurst. It was what you could maybe call a gateway yeshiva, introducing kids to the world of ultra Orthodox Haridi Judaism in a way that was maybe kinder, gentler, more American, really, than more hardcore Yeshivot. For Yaakov Lupoliansky, Uri's father, it was a worrying thing, seeing his youngest boy enchanted by the life he saw in Kiryat Mattesdorf in Jerusalem, a neighborhood founded by the modest Dorfer Rebbe Rav Shmuel Ehrenfeld, the great, great grandson of the Chasam Sofer who had famously said, chadash asur mina Torah, what is new is forbidden by the Torah, an outlook that makes the Hasam Sofer a forefather of Ultra Orthodoxy in its harshest and most zealous instantiation, where nothing matters save for old books and old ways. This worried Yaakov Lupoliansky. But when the year at the Torah, or yeshiva, ended, Ori Lupoliansky enlisted in the paratroopers as a combat medic. After that, he met and married Michal, and the two moved into a small apartment in Jerusalem. In Sanhedria. Uri Lu Poliansky got a job as a teacher in a neighborhood school, and Michal was soon pregnant with the first of their 12 kids, eight of whom would go on to become rabbis of reputation. Rav Yitzhak Lupoliansky and Rav Moshe Lupoliansky and Rav Yaakov and Rav Shaul Yechezkel and Rav Dovid and Rav Bezalel and Rav Eliyahu and Rav Aron Lupoliansky. It was soon after that that Uri and Michal Lupoliansky started, without ever planning to what would become their life's work. Uri Lou Poliansky said, quote, I noticed that very often the neighbors would come to see if I by any chance had a nebulizer. Nebulizers are a thing you need in the middle of the night. Usually it's because there's a baby who all of a sudden comes down with some airway thing. And if you don't have a nebulizer, you need to take him to the hospital. I did not have a nebulizer to lend, and no one else in the neighborhood did either. So I thought, that's not right. Because if you need a tomato or a cup of flour, you can always go to your neighbors and get it. But when you need a simple thing like a nebulizer, you have to go to the hospital. So I decided to buy a few nebulizers so that if someone asks me for one, I would have one to give whomever needed it. I bought a few machines and I brought them home. And little by little, people heard that I had these machines. And whoever needed at first just from the neighborhood, and soon from other neighborhoods too, they would come and take them on loan for free. This was very useful to people, even though in the end, my own son never needed the machine, not even once. Slowly, people came by to ask if I had some other medical device, this one or that one. And I understood that there is a need for other devices. And I bought some inhalers and some tanks of oxygen, and I stowed them all in a room in our apartment. And people would come to take the stuff. End quote. What the Loupolianskis had made, without really meaning to, was a gamach, which is a Hebrew acronym standing for a benevolent society. An institution that thrives in Haredin neighborhoods, in ultra Orthodox neighborhoods. An institution that lends for free often, that lends money for free to people who need it. Free loans, and sometimes very often as well. Stuff. There are hundreds of these gamachs of different sorts with different specialties these days. There are gamachs for baby things, bottles, blankets, cribs, diapers, pacifiers, strollers. And there are gamachs for expensive medicines. There are gamachs for tables and chairs for big events. There is a gemach for cots and mattresses for temporary guests. There is a jewelry gamach for special occasions that call for being fancy. There is a gamach for sound equipment, another for computers, a gamach that will send your faxes for you, a gamach for prescription glasses, an ext cord gamach, a mouse and rat trap gamach, a suitcase gamach, a furniture gamach, a breast pump gamach an oven and stove gamach, a broom gamach, a gamach for prayer books, many Many, many wedding dress gamachs, a samuvar gamach, an exterminator gamach, a gamach for power tools, a gamach for kids toys, a tefillin and tallis gamach, and a great number of gamachs for the ritual pillow and ritual little robe for a baby on the occasion of his circumcision. Most everything you might want you can borrow for free from some gamach or another somewhere in the Ultra Orthodox world. What the Lupolianskis had in their living room was a gamach, but it was a very special sort of gamach. A typical gamach is aimed at helping people in the community. Usually a gamach is a thing run by Ultra Orthodox Jews. Haridim for Ultra Orthodox Jews. The Lupoliansky's gamach, from its very start, was meant for everyone, anyone, everyone. And after the Loupoliansky saw how helpful a thing like what they had going could be to people, all they wanted was to bring it to more and more people. And Orylu Poliansky oversaw all of this, all while he was still teaching full time. Oryloupoliansky said, half a year after all this started, my father decided to sell off his business in Haifa, selling leather goods and shoes. He came to me and said that he decided to invest some of the money in something to memorialize his mother, Sarah, who died in the Holocaust. So I said to him, there is so much need for the medical devices that I have at home, so maybe give the money for that and we will name it after my Savta Sarah, of blessed memory. My father did not know much about nebulizers. In Haifa, you hardly need them. But I was his youngest son, beloved. So he did what I asked, and then I brought two wheelchairs, and I already had quite a lot of other equipment. And I asked the building committee in my building if they'd let me have the shelter in the basement to stow the equipment. They said, okay, but if there's a problem with the Civil Defense, it's on you. And in fact, maybe half a year later, a team from the Civil Defense came and they complained. And I said to them, what are you talking about? This is medical equipment in case of emergency. And in the end, all of Sanhedria got accommodation because of our shelter, end quote. Hoping to grow his operations, Ori Lupoliansky made a cold call to the head of Hadassah Hospital, one Professor Kalman Mann, who said, a man comes in unexpectedly with Tzitzit and a beard and a kippah. And I was very suspicious. This was a time when there were harsh conflicts with Haridim about autopsies and organ donations. And I thought he was coming to me to go on about these things. But then he explained to me why he was there and showed me the amount of equipment he had gotten on his own. And I understood straight away the potential of the thing. From the start, I could see that this could be a solution to the missing link in public health in the country. So I gave him all sorts of medical equipment that here in Adasa they said there was no point in fixing. But he had volunteers who could fix them. And I gave him three rooms in one of our clinics. And we started to think about what we needed. And we decided to treat everyone from pregnant women to babies to old people. End quote. It was together with Professor Kahman Mann that Ori Lupoliansky incorporated Yad Sahara. By 10 years in, the organization had more than 3,000 volunteers working in then 54 branches all over the country. Today there are more than 130 branches already. Back then there were 120,000 wheelchairs lent out at any given moment, and tens of thousands of oxygen tanks and thousands of glucose monitors and apnea monitors and hospital beds for home use and bedpans. Some of these things were cheap, but who wanted to buy them and then have to either keep them or throw them out? And some of these things cost months and months and months of salary, maybe years for some people. And at Yad Torah they were all free. You came, you left the deposit and you took the thing for as long as you needed it. On the 10th anniversary of the operation, Neri Lievne, who these days writes in Haaretz, wrote then in Koter at Rashid a long article about all this. And what she wrote starts quote, Ori Lupoliansky, who, out of the goodness of his heart and the goodness of his heart alone, is responsible for starting and running today the Yad Sera association is a young man, 35 years old, a very pleasant faced Haridi man. He is the closest thing to a righteous man, a tzadik that I have ever met. But he is the sort of righteous man who does what they do with their own hands, driven by the power of infinite goodwill. One conversation with him is enough to cause irreparable harm to your cynicism. His services he offers with the same joyful enthusiasm to religious folks and secular, to Jews and Muslims and Christians, end quote. And the article goes on like that. It was not Long after that, and owing to articles just like that, in 1988, the Degel Hatorah Litvak Mitnaged political party drafted Orilu Polianski to head their faction list in the Jerusalem City Council elections. When they asked Orilo Polianski to do the thing, he flat out refused, saying that his life's work was yadzara and he did not want to let politics get in the way of that. And he was a teacher besides full time, a business man, and by now the father of nine. Oriliu Poliansky's worry was that the rough and tumble of politics might hurt Yad Tahara, and this worry had a foundation already. Five years before, one of the young guard leaders of the Degel Hat Torah party, Avraham Rawitz, had pressed Orelow Poliansky to run for City Council at the head of the party's list. But this had been opposed by Menachem Porush, an old guard politico and party leader who had 23 years in the Knesset behind him and was known as a do whatever it takes brand of politician. Some years earlier, Malachim Porush fronted a group of American Jewish investors building the Center Hotel in downtown Jerusalem. The group was led by Joe the Butcher Statcher, a mob associate of Meyer Lansky who escaped prosecution in the United States by making a hasty aliyah to Israel under the Law of return in 1965, under Rav Menachem Porush's guidance, the deal went bad, leading Joe the Butcher stature to say, head in hand, I cannot believe it. A rabbi stole my money. A rabbi stole my money. Menachem Porush was that rabbi. And ahead of the 1984 municipal elections, after Avram Ravitz had pressed Orilo Polyansky to run, Menachemporis said to Orylo Polyansky that if he ran, whenever and wherever Menachem Porush had the power, he would see to it that Yad Zara got no money, no support, no government funding, no philanthropy, nothing. The threat was a good one, and Ori Lupoliansky stuck to his resolve back then in 1984, not to run, as we learn from an article at the time in the fine Jerusalem local paper Kola IR that was headlined, When Porosh roars, who will not be afraid in the next municipal election. Five years later, in 1989, a rabbi named Yosef Shalom Eliashiv summoned Ori Lopoliansky and told him to run. Rav Eliashiv was the second most revered scholar and leader in the Litvak community after Rav Eleazar Menachem Man Shah and Rav Eliashiv had by this time for 15 years been a staunch supporter of Yad Torah, giving a rabbinic ruling, for instance, that it was permitted for Yad Serat to operate on Shabbat even in cases where the lives of people borrowing this stuff did not hang in the balance on the principle that keeping people from suffering, that too is a sort of pikuach nefesh, a sort of saving of life that allows one to abrogate the rules of the Shabbat. And Rav Eliashiv ruled that Yadz Har was right to serve everyone equally, Muslims and Christians alongside Jews, as a way to sanctify God and preserve peace and good relations between people and peoples. When it got hard for Rav Shah to climb the stairs to Rav Eliashav's Mesharim walk up for a talk and study of the sort that the two great rabbis made a point of meeting for as a matter of course, Rav El Yashiv moved these rabbinic summits to the local branch of Yad Sarah, giving Yad Zara an air of grandeur and sanctity that was not lost on Orylo Polanski's neighbors and the people he davened with with Uri Lupoliansky saw in Rav Eliashiv his rabbi, and he loved Rav Eliashiv, and he knew that it was thanks to him, in part anyway, that Orylo Poliansky was celebrated in the pews of his shul and nowhere regarded with suspicion, despite running a 247 operation for lots of people whose lives did not revolve around Torah. What's more, this was the first local Jerusalem election in which a new party called Shas, the Sephardi Haridi Party, was running. It was an earthquake in ultra Orthodox politics, and it was also the first time that the Ashkenazi Haredi politicians split into two factions, the Hasidic Aguda Menachem Porush's group and the Litvakh Mitnaged Degalatera Party, Rav Eliashif's people and also Urylo Polyansky's Menachem Porush then was in a different party now, and he was no longer the boss of Orilo Polyansky. All of which is how Orylo Poliansky came to run for office, though he he still did so with some worry that he was putting in jeopardy his life's work and the remarkable thing that he and his wife Michal had created. Yad Zara. And this was a feeling shared by others, some of whom organized themselves into a group they called Fans of Yad Zara, who took out half page ads in Kol Hair in the weeks before the election that read, among other things, quote, we are shocked to see and hear that politicians are mixing and linking our wondrous undertaking Yad Zara with the municipal elections in Jerusalem. And it is forbidden that Yad Zara have any ties with any political party. Ori. Ori Recant. Do not cause such damage to Yad Zara. End quote. In the same issues of the paper, there were ads by a group called the Volunteer Headquarters for Uri under the slogan Uri Lo Polianski, a good man and a good manager for city Council. And for good measure, there were ads by the Progressive Secular Rats Party that read, give us your vote or you are giving everything to the Haredim and come out on election day or you will have no place to go out to the day after. And other such slogans, implicitly comparing Lupoliansky to an Ayatollah or to a leader of the Taliban. When the votes were counted, Ori Lupolianki's list, it was called ET or Tree, won three city council seats. Now Mayor Teddy Khalek met with Aurelius Polyansky first, before all his other more obvious coalition partners, and he pressed them to take the job of deputy mayor with the responsibility of overseeing all of the city's social services, saying, who better than you knows how to help people in need? I want you to do for Jerusalem what you did for Yad Sara. One of the first things Uri Lo Poliansky did after he took the job Tedikalak offered him was a man named Ovadja Avraham. After he was laid off as a nurse at Bikur Cholim Hospital, took up residence in one of Herod's old burial caves under the King David Hotel, living off scraps of food left by tourists who visited the site. Ovadja Avraham had a tough background, and before he became a nurse, he'd been in prison for stealing a car. Ori Lupoliansky went to speak to Ovadya Avram in his cave, and it was agreed that the city would pay for a stay in the hotel until the nurse got back on his feet. Later, when the winter weather turned bad, Ori Lou Poliansky found hotel rooms for every person in the city living on the street. This was Ori Lou Poliansky being Ori Lupoliansky. It was also Orylou Polyansky doing for Jerusalem what he had done for Yad Zarah, just like Teddy Khalek had asked. For the next 14 years, Uri Lupoliansky was deputy mayor of Jerusalem, giving over the day to day of Yad Tarah to a professional manager named Moshe Cohen, though he remained the face of the thing Orilo Poliansky did, representing it especially to philanthropists and donors with whom he had a way. It was his enthusiasm that did it, people said in the 1993 Jerusalem elections. Teddy Kollek, who looked all of his 82 years and who had run Jerusalem for 28 tumultuous years by that time, was beaten by a well spoken and well youthful in comparison Likud politician, son of a Kirut politician, Ehud Olmert. The its list of Orylo Poliansky won four seats this time, and Ehud Olmert, now mayor, offered Aurelio Polianski a deputy mayorship as well as the chairmanship of the Local Planning and Building Committee, arguably the single most important job in the city, or in any city after the mayor. Important because the Local Planning and Building Committee approves all building permits, authorizes all additions to buildings, advances long range statutory, detailed plans and zoning schemes, no matter where you are. But in Jerusalem, more than in most places, planning is politics affecting which communities and neighborhoods and ways of life will thrive and which will not, determining where there will be shuls and mosques and churches and where there will not be or community centers or schools or parks or parking, and a million other things. Cities are made and unmade around the table of the Local Planning and Building Committee. And fortunes are made and unmade there as well. And Ori Lupoliansky was there for every decision. On October 28, 2002, Prime Minister Eric Charon's National Unity government collapsed and new elections were set for three months later, January 28, 2003 and Ehmud Olmert, after almost a decade of being mayor, announced his candidacy for the Knesset with the Likud after Ari Charon agreed to give him the number two spot on the party list when the Likud won 38 seats, twice as many as Labour's 19. Ehud Omer resigned as mayor of Jerusalem, fell to the City Council to appoint a replacement, and Ori Lupoliansky, he ticked the most boxes. He was the longest serving deputy mayor in the city. He was the powerful head of the Planning and Building Committee. The Haridi parties could live with him, so could the secular parties. He was a nice guy. He was decent. He didn't go grabbing headlines away from his colleagues. A vote was taken and by acclamation, Orilo Polyansky became the first ever ultra Orthodox Haridi mayor of Jerusalem. Eight months after that, when the city went to polls to elect a mayor and a city council, Ori Lupoliansky was elected mayor with 51.5% of the vote, against 42.5%. That went to a handsome 40 something ish, secular, paratrooper, officer, high tech, venture capitalist, multimillionaire named Nir Barkat. Today he is the country's Minister of Economy and Industry. But then he was a rich man who could not believe that he could lose to an ultra Orthodox man. And yet that is just what he did. The next day, after the election in which Orilo Polanski was elected mayor, banner headlines in Mariv, then still the biggest paper in the country, read Hakharidim Chogegim Yerushalayim Bey Adenu the Haridim are celebrating. Jerusalem is in our hands. The faux quotation echoing the famous pronouncement of General Motogor after his paratroopers had conquered the old City in June 1967. The Temple Mount is in our hands. This association was not just an idiosyncratic brainstorm of Maariev's headline editor. It was for a time, everywhere. I remember how Lou Polansky's election produced for many here, maybe especially here in Tel Aviv, a great sense of despair and loss. It seemed somehow too uncomfortable. Undo that astonishing moving moment in June 1967 when Jerusalem was quote, unquote, reunited. A friend of mine at the university told me that just like June 1967 is remembered as the day when Jerusalem was liberated from our enemies, October 2003 would be remembered as the day when Jerusalem fell back into the hands of our enemies, albeit our new enemies, the ultra Orthodox. There was a lot of that. An article in the paper headlined A Haridi for Mayor or a Mayor for Haredim wondered if Orilo Polyansky could be anything but a lackey for Rabbi Elia Shiv. Another headlined Puppet on a tzitzit string attacked readers for going to the polls in numbers too small to make near Barkat mayor. In voting Lou Polyansky for mayor, we received the leader we deserve. A goof article that came out on Purim Day in 2003 started with this. New Jerusalem mayor Ori Lupoliansky yesterday announced his intention to redivide the capital through the use of a giant mechitza that will separate the Jewish male and Female populations, according to Allah, all unmarried men and women will live on opposite sides of the barrier until their wedding night, Lupoliansky said, end quote. Maybe in response to all this, Orilo Polanski tried to create what the papers called a black Red coalition, inviting the liberal left Merits party into his coalition, offering them a deputy mayorship and promising them that most of the things that mattered most to them, keeping theaters and restaurants open on Chabot, for instance, would stay in their hands. The head of the Merits list, the charismatic Lima born Turkish ex Black Panther named Pepe Alalo, favored joining Uri Lupoliansky's coalition. But after a fierce fight in the party and a good deal of pressure from Meret's Knesset members like Yossi Sarid and Zava Galon, the party voted down the offer. And Orilu Polyansky formed a coalition that at first had only religious parties, making many people that much more suspicious of him. Orylu Poliansky turned out to be a very different kind of mayor than what the leaders of Merets and many others worried about when they worried about Orylo Poliansky, that he'd be a puppet on a tzitzit string or a mayor for Haridi Malone. He said in the campaign that, quote, there are many different cultures and religions in this city. I strongly believe that people dance to their own tune, but not on the toes of others, end quote. And as the weeks and months passed, it became harder to doubt that when he said that, he meant it. Places that had been open on Shabbat stayed open on Shabbat. New places popped up and they too were open on Shabbat. When the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra was about to shut down, the result of years of underfunding by Ehud Olmert, Ori Lu Poliansky found the money to keep the operation going, and he convinced Leon Botstein, the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra in New York, to take it over. When Hebrew Union College, the Reformed seminary, started its new academic year, Ori Lupoliansky went to the opening as mayor, addressing the president of huc, Rabbi David Ellison as well. Rabbi David Ellison, A small and maybe obvious sign of respect and recognition for the Reform rabbin at that of the among many ultra Orthodox to this day is not at all small or obvious. A big test for Orylo Poliansky as mayor came a year and a half in over the Pride Parade. Jerusalem had had its first Pride parade in 2002, seven years after Tel Aviv started staging its annual parade, and it was a small affair sponsored by the Jerusalem Open House for Pride and Tolerance, which ran an HIV clinic and a club and all sorts of groups. And it was a sports and a spot to talk. And the first parades were mostly made of the same people who showed up throughout the year at the open house. But in 2005, the thing was set to be bigger. It was then to be a world Pride event, an international do, like the one they had in Rome a few years before that. And just like lots of people feared, Rav Eliashiv was dead set against it. And Israel's Chief Rabbi, Yona Metzger, was against it. And the head of the Orthodox Rabbinical alliance of America, a man named Yuda Lech Heaven, was against it. And Jerusalem imams came out against it, and patriarchs of Orthodox Christian churches came out against it. And 30 members of the Knesset were against it. And a petition went around, and some of the greatest, most learned Orthodox religious leaders of the day added their name to the petition. But Aureli Poliansky, he refused to sign it, though, as he said, he did not relish having the parade on the streets of Jerusalem. Right away, the walls of Meir Sha' Arim were covered with paschivilla, with news of the day posters attacking the mayor. One read, the lechery parade tramples on the feelings of every person in Jerusalem and of most every Jew who turns to pray in the direction of the Holy City. Another went, a terrible insufferable scandal has befallen us. In response to, well, everything. Oriliu Poliansky tried to find some middle ground, but it was hard to reach Eud Olmert, who was mayor when the first pride parade took place. He had refused to give city money for the thing on the grounds that especially controversial things should not be funded with tax money that everyone pays. And Ori Lup Poliansky, at first he took the same stand, but a petition was filed with the Supreme Court, which ruled that it was discriminatory for the city to not pay for this parade, while it helped to pay for so many other parades. And Oreloup Poliansky then authorized the money. At the same time, he wrote in the paper an op ed headline signed Genuine Tolerance. Colon Cancel the march in Jerusalem. No man is persecuted for his faith, ethnicity or tendencies. And if there are bad seeds who are inciting, well, all secular and religious residents of the city unite to ostracize them. In a democratic society, the sensitivities of the majority must also be taken into account. End quote. For all he tried to find some middle ground, paying for the march and closing off city streets. So it could happen on the one hand. Hand, but saying he wished it wouldn't happen on the other. Ori Lu Poliansky was criticized by basically everyone. And the criticism only got worse after a Haredi man named Yishai Slissel stabbed with a kitchen knife three people marching in the parade. They survived, a crime for which he was sentenced to 12 years in prison. What Ori Lupoliansky was trying to do was a hard thing. When the city asked a girls dance troupe to perform at the inauguration of the new Mehtarim bridge built at the entrance of the city, haredi rabbis and politicians protested immodesty of the thing. And Orilu Poliansky, looking for some compromise, suggested that the teenage dancers perform in ski caps and cloaks. This in July. At the same time, it was Orilu Polyansky who saw to it that every person in Jerusalem could be buried without a rabbi or a priest running the show, establishing the city's first secular cemetery, something that we do not have to this day in Tel Aviv. Ori Lupoliansky's political career ended suddenly when, ahead of the 2008 elections, Mayor Porush announced that he was running for mayor. Mayor Porush is the son of Menachem Porush, the Menachem Porush who, in mafioso fashion, had threatened to destroy Yad Taraf. Orylo Poliansky ran for City Council 25 years earlier, and everyone agreed, from patron rabbis to political advisors, that it would not do to have Orilo Polyansky and Mayor Porosh split their constituencies, essentially making Near Barkat mayor in the event. Mayor Porush turned out to be a lousy candidate with little of the charm and broad appeal that got Uri Lo Polianski elected, and Near Barkat beat him by pretty much the same margin by which Orylo Polyansky had beaten Near Barkat five years before. After the election, Uri Lupoliansky said he was glad to go back to working where he had always loved working most of all, Yad Sarah. He said this in a way that you could believe. I know because I believed it. But then there was another chapter for uri Lupoliansky. In April 2010, the papers reported that evidence had been uncovered and witnesses had given testimony that politicians had taken bribes to approve plans for building on the site of the old Holy Land Hotel, seven huge residential towers, which meant rezoning, granting variances, sidestepping permitting requirements, and accepting sketchy land valuations. On April 6, Hillel Charney was arrested and charged with bribery. A month later, Ehud Olmert was questioned as a suspect. When the investigation was finally over, the state attorney indicted 17 people, including Ehud Olmert and his chief of staff, Shula Zakin, who had passed on to Olmert paper bags filled with bills delivered by messengers of the Czarney family. Ori Lou Polyansky was one of the 17. He was the head of the local planning and building committee when the money changed hands, and he oversaw a lot of the sidestepping of procedure that got the deal done. He was guilty of something that mattered. But unlike Ehud Olmert and alone among the 17 defendants, he had not gotten cash and paper sacks. Ori Lupoliansky had taken Hillel Charny's people on a tour of Yad Sarah's headquarters in Jerusalem, and when they offered to make a donation, he eagerly accepted, as he always did. And then they made another donation, and another. And then they donated to the Talmud Academy that Orylo Polansky's boy, Rav Itzel Polyansky, had just started up. Each time they offered to give money to a cause that Ori Lupoliansky believed was as good a use as there was for money, he, Polyansky was delighted. It did not seem wrong to him taking money from this man whose grandmother had died in a concentration camp, for the sake of the charity that he himself had built in the memory of his grandmother, who had died in a concentration camp camp, which money would do nothing other than keeping sick people at home with their families, keeping working people's bank accounts afloat, making people's lives better. It seemed to Oreloup Poliansky, as he said at the time, and ever since, that Hillel Charney gave the money he gave because he wanted to give the money he gave because he saw what good the money would do, because he understood that it was the greatest tribute he could ever give to his grandmother, helping to memorialize along the way Orilu Poliansky's grandmother. And it was the greatest tribute he could give to all the people who came before him, bankers who never forgot workers. In the end, Hillel Czarny gave more than two and a half million chekos to things Orilo Polianski cared about and believed in most. And this was a crime. It was corruption. The court ruling in 2014 made clear how serious a thing it was. Quite. The bribery affair in all its components was thus proven, and its ugliness is profound. Millions of shekels flowed from Vested interests to Yad Sara. Tens of thousands went to the yeshiva of Lupoliansky's son, a man of great virtues and merits entangled the noble enterprise of his life in a web of governmental corruption over many long years, while occupying the highest offices attainable in local government. Government one, upon whose head many crowns had been placed, did not refrain from accepting bribes. Lou Poliansky's conviction at law of a man whose deeds for years truly bespoke righteousness on a series of bribery offenses is devastating not only for the man himself, it is devastating for society as a whole. Let all public officials therefore know, know and beware. It was maybe because there was something especially dispiriting in seeing a man who was, for so many of us, like for Neri Livna, the closest thing to a righteous man we had ever known. In seeing him do what Uri Lopoliansky had done. It was so dispiriting that the presiding judge in the case, David Rosen was his name, sentenced Orilu Polyansky to six years in jail. This despite the fact that it had lately been known and read into the record by his lawyers that Ori Lopuliansky was now suffering from cancer that his doctors did not expect him to recover from. An appeal of the sentence to the Supreme Court brought the sentence down to six months of community service, which Orilo Poliansky performed, of course, at Yad Zara. Six months added to 40 odd years, during which Aurelo Polianski had never stopped doing community service at Yad Zarah. Last week, when Oriliu Poliansky died, his body was brought down on a Yad Sara gurney to the flagstone walkway in front of the apartment that he and Michal had gotten so many years ago at number 12 Maagalei Harav Yuda Lib Levine street in Sanhedria, an address that is still, as it has been for the last almost 50 years, the address of the Sanhedriya branch of Yad Zara. Thousands of people lined the streets as rabbi after rabbi for more than an hour praised the man under the tallis on the gurney for his righteousness. Among these thousands were many people who had stories, as personal as a story can be, of that righteousness. Say how because of Yad Sarah and the bed that they trundled in and the oxygen tanks that they brought and the monitors they set. Get up. Their mother had died at home, surrounded by the people she loved the most, instead of in a cold room in a hospital somewhere. Fact is, talk to anyone, everyone has a story. About Yad Zarah and how the place helped them at a time when they most needed help. I have my own stories, too, about the wheelchair from which my bubby saw Susan and me get married, and about crutches that time, and about the stuff we needed back when Susan got sick. Sick. Ori Lou Poliansky had a genius for kindness. For seeing a man in a cave and renting him a room in a hotel, for letting mothers and fathers sleep the night at home with their baby instead of in the pediatrics ward of Hadassah. He had a genius for kindness. And it moved me this week to see how pretty much everyone saw it, like they couldn't not see it. I heard on the radio this week the journalist Shachar Ilan, who was still a student when he first wrote about Orylo Polyansky and Kola IR and who got the Haridi beat for Haaretz. Wherefore for years he had no good words to say about the ultra Orthodox, never. And who left writing for a time to run an organization called Chiddush, a Hebrew acronym for Religious Freedom and Equality, with the mission of keeping religion out of politics and out of the public square, and mostly keeping Haridim out of politics and out of the public square. And Shahar Ilan, tall, with hair spilling down his back. He was the face of the fight against the Ultra Orthodox for decades, and he said on the radio that he loved Orylo Poliansky because Orylo Poliansky had come up with a way to help people that no one before him had ever thought of in all the history of people helping people. Shakhar Ilan said that he was jealous of Orilo Poliansky because how could one man have so very many mitzvot to his name? How could one man have made so many lives better? The only shame of the thing was, Shakar Ilan said that the rabbis forced him into politics, which was no place for a good man like the Orlu Poliansky. And it had been moving to see the outpouring of love for this man, of charity and grace for this convicted felon. But for all the good that this week people have seen in what Orilu Poliansky created in Yad Zarad, there is more to the man. Uri Lupoliansky died at a moment when the anger that lots of Israelis feel toward the ultra Orthodox and the anger that the ultra Orthodox feel towards many Israelis is greater than it is most maybe ever been, for reasons that are easy to see. More than two years of fighting in Gaza that killed 922 soldiers, of whom just four were haredim, during which time ultra Orthodox politicians have staged big, sometimes violent demonstrations under the banner we would rather die than serve. It's a lot to take if you or your kid or your cousin or your friend has had thousands of days of fighting in Gaza or been hurt or worse. And all of us have kids, cousins, friends who've had hundreds of days in Gaza and been hurt or worse. And for haredim who worry that they won't be able to keep their way of life if every one of them is forced to spend three years in the army, and who feel the heat of the hostility that people regard them with, who hear on the evening news that people think they're lazy, cowards and parasites, it too is a lot to take. Whatever side you are on, it can feel like the distance between us and them is so great as to be impassable. But Orylo Poliansky knew that the distance is not as big as we think and not as hard to travel. Ori Lupoliansky knew that Yad Zara is not a way to help people that no one before him had ever thought of. Ori Lou Poliansky knew that Yad Zarah is a way to help people that was already a part of day to day life for everyone and anyone in Mea Arim or B' Nai Brak or Beit Sheme. And he knew that this part of Haridi life would mean something deep in Tel Aviv and Haifa and Majd Al Shams, because he knew people are people. Sick mothers are sick mothers and kids with Krupp are kids with Krupp. And this is what Ori Loup Polyansky brought to politics. His belief that people are people. And because people are people, a mayor can be anyone as long as he or she is a mensch, which Ori Lu Poliansky was. Oriliu Poliansky was a visionary and he was one of a kind. And he was as extraordinary a man as everyone has this week been saying. He was special. And he was also, as we know, a man who could miss things, important things, who could make mistakes, important mistakes. What gives me hope when I think of Orylo Poliansky, who was himself a factory of hope, is that he believed what he said in front of his high school assembly, that he was not special. He believed that he was like most of us and that most of us like him, saw that under all the things that divide us, there is something deeper we, all of us have that we all of us want to live with some dignity and that we all of us want to help the people around us live with some dignity. And we all saw that he was right after October 7, when there suddenly seemed to be only one question that everyone was asking. What can I do to help? And there were thousands of thousands of answers to this one question. Make a guitar gamach Make a vegan food gamach make an empty apartment gamach make a grave digging gamach Make a Shiva going gamach Make a eulogy riding gamach make an iPhone charger that works in tanks gamach make a babysitting gamach make wedding staging gamach Make a free supermarket gamach make a wheelchair ramp gamach make a psychotherapy gamach. Make an apartment cleaning gamach Make a clown gamach a kid's birthday party gamach. And so many more on October 8th, all at once. Every one of us here was Orilu Poliansky, and it was beautiful. Thousands of people came to Orilu Poliansky's funeral, like I said, and thousands of heartbroken tributes came from all over the country from rabbis like one from Meir Porush, who is now a member of Knesset and Minister of Jerusalem affairs and Jewish tradition. And they also came from people like Shakar Ilan, who has spent his life fighting to diminish the influence of rabbis like Rav Meir Porush. It is a thing here and probably everywhere to long for people who reflect back to us, ourselves, at our imperfect best. Once we look to army heroes like Moshe Dayan and Ari Charon and Yitzhak Rabin to do this. The great swell of love and appreciation that we have seen this week for Orilo Poliansky, it is a sign that now he reflects back to us, ourselves, at our very imperfect and still very good best. Yehi Zikro Baruch.