Rabbi Aryeh Silber is the author of Hachi Garsinan (Israel Bookshop), a guide to Aramaic words in the Talmud
Where did you get the idea?
I was a rebbi for 11- and 12-year-old boys in a chassidish yeshivah, third year of learning Gemara, and then I started tutoring. I realized a lot of boys have problems figuring out the words of Gemara this is usually the third language they’re exposed to, after Yiddish or English and Hebrew and they get confused between “mani” and “nami,” and “hacha” and “heicha” and so on and so forth. I decided to make a list of the basic few hundred words with the teitsh on the side, and I’d give it out to all the yeshivos. That list is now a hardcover book in its fourth printing.
Loud and Clear By Eran Feintuch | January 13, 2021
As the Chabad shaliach to the global deaf community, Rabbi Yehoshua Soudakoff sounds the call of Torah for those who could never before hear it
Photos: Ezra Trabelsi
You know those inspiring stories about someone who overcomes enormous challenges to accomplish the impossible? Well, that’s the kind of story I planned on writing about Rabbi Yehoshua Soudakoff. Rabbi Soudakoff, deaf from birth, left the LA public school system for yeshivah, eventually earned semichah despite being unable to hear the shiurim, and at the young age of 20, had already become a leader of the Jewish deaf in America. But Rabbi Soudakoff essentially waves all that away, because his new frontier is so much larger than his own personal victories. In his new role as the Chabad shaliach to the global deaf community, he’s bridging the chasm that often separates deaf Jews from normative Jewish life and bringing Yiddis