Robert J. Avrech: Emmy Award winning screenwriter. Movie fanatic. Helplessly and hopelessly in love with my wife since age nine.
My beloved father, Rabbi Avraham Avrech, passed away on Saturday, Shabbat. He was 94 years old.
The funeral is tomorrow morning.
I will be sitting shiva for seven days.
Seraphic Secret will be on hiatus until my shiva ends.
[Read more…] about In Memoriam: Rabbi Abraham Avrech June 4, 1919 — March 15, 2014
Freedom of religion. We take it for granted.
This past Friday evening, Karen lit candles, ushering in Shabbat.. Openly wearing my kippah,, I walked to shul and prayed with scores of friends and neighbors. After prayers, Karen and I sat down to a joyous dinner where we sang Shabbat songs and expressed gratitude to G-d for all he has given us.
Karen and I did all this without fear.
My grandfather, Rabbi Shmuel Avrech, lived in fear as a pious Jew in the Pale of Settlement. Would the flickering Shabbat candles invite a rock or a Molotov cocktail thrown through his window? Perhaps the sight of my grandfather and other Torah-observant Jews would enrage neighbors who would shriek “Christ-killer,” and the state-incited/sanctioned pogrom would follow.
[Read more…] about Obama’s Perversion of Religious Liberty and Persecution of Religious People
A long time ago, in a universe far, far away, in a place called Hollywood, the engines of entertainment genius that were the movie studios, and the actors who were under contract to them, celebrated their love of America, and enthusiastically indulged in overt displays of patriotism.
L.B. Mayer (b. Lazar Meir) of MGM, a pioneer of the motion-picture industry, and the man who invented the star system, adopted July 4th as his birthday. Scores of Hollywood historians get all snarky about Mayer’s birthday, claiming that he conveniently changed his birthday in order to cash in on a public identification with America.
What these historians fail to recognize is that Mayer probably did not know the date of his birth.