Community Corner

Hidden Sparks, a nonprofit focused on providing teachers and parents with the tools to support struggling students in mainstream Jewish day schools, is expanding the service area for its Parent Education Center (PEC) to include all five New York City boroughs. This growth in services, which were previously focused on Queens, is in response to the rising out-of-borough requests since the PEC’s opening at the beginning of the current school year.

Do you have a post-high-school daughter who is looking to somehow get the authentic seminary experience and yet also complete their college education at the same time?  Well, you have no need to fear – because the opportunity has now arrived! The Queens Jewish community is proud to now have in their midst Tiferes Bnos Yisroel (TBY) – a Bais Yaakov seminary which features a full Jewish curriculum as well as a fully-developed approach to making college a real and practical possibility.

As the New York State Legislature continues to make its way through the budget process, Agudath Israel’s New York office convened the second installment of this year’s Albany Day series, focusing on the Queens and Long Island areas. Agudah staff and leadership, joined by leading community advocates and school officials, spoke to an array of legislators, advocating on behalf of New York’s Orthodox Jewish community.

What would have been the 50th Jubilee year of Dr. Paul Brody of Great Neck chanting Megillat Esther, and 20 years of Dr. Brody instructing students of the North Shore Hebrew Academy (NSHA) Middle School in Great Neck, in a program he instituted in 2002 - when he observed that almost no young people knew how to read the Megillah - took a strange “twist” when he unfortunately took a slip on an icy patch, landing him in extended rehabilitation after complex surgery. Dr. Brody has instructed approximately 400 seventh and eighth-graders, both Ashkenazic and Sephardic, who have chanted Megillat Esther in a unique student-led service for their schoolmates, faculty and families, on Purim Day.

Chaverim of Queens, founded in memory of world-renowned philanthropist Mr. Jack Friedman a”h, began with just ten volunteers. That was 14 years ago, when calls were dispatched to volunteers via beepers. Today, Chaverim of Queens has over 100 volunteers who respond to calls rapidly via an app. The acts of chesed that the volunteers of Chaverim do daily does not go unnoticed by those who have benefited from the assistance provided. The resilience of our community post-COVID has been remarkable and the sense on comrade is noteworthy.

It was an evening of remembrance, and also an evening to remember, surely not to be forgotten by the nearly 2,000 attendees. It was an evening to see and hear moments that may have receded into our subconscious, to be awakened with the same degree of happiness, or, perhaps, to an even greater degree of joy than the first experience. So many of us in the audience, were delighting in — and for an all-too-brief time — returning to childhood memories, replete with adolescent obsessions with songs and, possibly also with the then young, enthusiastic, performers, whose glowing joy and spirituality echoed our own searching, tumultuous youthful fervor!