Chol HaMo’ed Succos in the Sukkah at Westcliff Hebrew Congregation 5783

Chol HaMo’ed Succos in the Sukkah at Westcliff Hebrew Congregation 5783 Gut Yontef everyone Thank you Rabbi Hyams for introducing us and to Mr Pepper who invited us. As he’s not feeling well, please pass on my best wishes for a speedy recovery and Refuah Shelema to him in my name. You all remember the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks OB”M, so perhaps you would agree that he used to open his speech with “My friends!”. So, My Friends, Gut Yontef and thank you for having us here, my dear friend Daniel Admon on the keyboard, my wife Kreindy – our musical director and my young Kalisch family and kids – our dear grandchildren. At one of the Kashrut events, Rabbi Sacks was guest speaker and he told us about a visit that he made to Johannesburg in South Africa. He was in the courtyard of a synagogue and saw a huge muscular giant of a man building a large wooden frame. When he asked the builder what he was building the local smiled, revealing two rows of perfect snow-white teeth shining in the blistering sun. He said: “this is no shed – this is going to be the Succah”. When Rabbi Sacks asked him what this is needed for he replied: “this Succah will be used for eight days – unlike this large building – pointing towards the huge Shul building – is only used three days a year”… We are all aware what happened across in Europe some 75 years ago, within living memory. Yesterday I had the privilege to meet the minister of transport Eric Pickles, who was our guest in Stamford Hill. Whilst waiting for him to arrive – you see, being that he was minister of transport, he was delayed by nearly an hour due to traffic – I heard the following story from Reb Leibel Stemoel, a holocaust survivor. They were all copped up in the Ghetto of Bochniyah, a town in Galicia, Poland. The invading forces ruled with an iron fist and didn’t allow any religious activity whatsoever. So in Purim of 1941, they prepared an enclosed space of 7X7 to serve as a Sukkah, in some corner of a side street. You see, these Jewish survivors of daily Ausziedlungen, Razzias, Shooting and other life-threatening calamities that were thrown at them were still full of hope for a brighter future – even during such constant depth of depravity, killings and persecution. So they planned eight months ahead, so that the wicked rules won’t notice that they built it. Come Sukkos, they hastily threw a few branches over the couple of thin beams that were laid over the space and one by one passed under the Schach, munching a Kezayis, to fulfil the Mitzvah of eating in the Sukkah. This brings me to the age-old song: A Sukkaleh a Klyne . . . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaJGrfJFgXY