If You Tickle Us...

If anyone has a sense of mischief how about this? Hire a horse drawn funeral hearse with flowers spelling out E I R U V and a large banner wishing our dear rabbi Happy Purim and have it ride up and down the Hill and the Common all of Sunday. After all even Mordechai of the Purim story defied him to ride a horse.

Many of you have probably seen this but here it is anyway for those who haven’t. I won’t have time to do anything humorous for Purim but who needs humour when the head of the poultry division chickens out of a public meeting?  

If you live in Golders Green where you are wont to honour the ethos of the Union in its breach you will have ‘another opportunity’ to meet your masters. If however you are unfortunate enough to live in Stamford Hill please stay there and do not even dream of gatecrashing as by the size of your beard and length of your jacket shall ye be known and many have of late been expelled. Unless you are one of the panellists in which case it appears you are not welcome unless you are from Stamford Hill as it is only we who know what's right and wrong for you. Your role in Yiddishkeit is to turn up, pay up and shut up while we ‘are you moitse’ in the more pesky areas. Perhaps shutting up should be qualified since questions may be put a couple of light years ahead of the meeting or 'via the chairman' so as to ensure what not to address. It is not for this blog which generally limits itself to the holy square mile to comment on a meeting to which we weren’t invited even first time r...

Courtesy of Hirshel Tzig To the Hebraically challenged: the above is a greeting in a charity brochure. Since charity receptions and the occasional dinner are the best we have for going out in the evening, for men that is, the charity brochure is the equivalent of the society pages in Tatler. Not unfortunately who’s going out with whom as it happens so quickly round here that you’ve barely kissed the mezuze to go out and it’s time to come back in for the l’chaim announcing the engagement. Besides being the only distraction from drawn-out speeches by speakers internationally renown from their lectern-thumping histrionics, the brochure is also an indicator of who’s going places. ‘He? Last year he had a silver page and this year a diamond! Not bad. What’s he into?’ And ‘Where’s he, didn’t he have a platinum last year? Nebech , men hot im baganvet. I hear his wife’s started a playgroup.’ It is customary in such instances for pages to be donated for the elevation of dead souls. Or ra...

Guys, I feel like a diva at La Scala on the final curtain call. I bow before you all, tilt my head slightly back and thrust it forward propelling my hair, sorry my sheitel , into the air and over my face so that my head looks like a willow in the storm of applause. What should I tell you? I’m overwhelmed. Hits have shot up as if my site overdosed on Viagra, with a hechsher of course, (I now know what they mean by stats porn, you know that feeling a rebbe gets at a sell-out tish ), laudatory emails have been raining in from the chareidi blogosphere kings of yesteryear and the Hill is alive with the sound of comments. In the middle of it all stand I shaking like receiving my first Oscar and feeling, like the real winner, as if my career has peaked. Of my Warholian 15 minutes I can only say may they last for 120. But as my father always told me, 'don't let these things get to your head'. And as we were taught at the age of 9 in the ethical primer The Paths of the Righteous ...

We’re in the news again and this time not for the wrong reasons. The Daily Telegraph has a long article in tomorrow’s magazine on chareidi Stamford Hill which they have put online. A nice and fair write up overall. The usual suspects, the buffoon, the ‘rabbi’, make an appearance and there is the oft recycled canard of Pinter senior establishing YH schools. As if. More like he climbed to the top and once there shoved everyone out of the way bar his children of course. But that’s for another day. There are however other voices too and the writer has taken the time and effort to visit Dunsmure Road and Egerton Road. I mean how many journalists do that, though Oldhill Street may be too much to ask. You can’t fault a journalist who tries to gain entry to a kolel either and I suspect many will be relieved that his request was declined. Yours truly is also allowed a few words edgeways though not quite enough to rain on anyone’s parade. But I’m not complaining because the article is far m...

Stamford Hill has got itself into a lather once again. We're barely out of the last lather whatever that may have been, skirts have been lengthened by an eighth of an inch, Shabbos candles are being kindled 5 minutes earlier to atone for whatever it was that got us into that lather and to appease God to get us out of it, malicious talk is being avoided with ever greater intensity, psalms are being recited fervently everywhere from the doctors' surgery to the benefits advisor's waiting room, horses are being kept even further at bay and women have taken it upon themselves to recite the Song of Songs on the Sabbath eve. Not, heaven forefend, to get them going for the conjugal relations of the evening; that's what they wear their long flowing robes for. And it is precisely for this reason that Rebetzen Padwa has banned wearing them outdoors lest it incite in others what it's intended to arouse in its wearer's basherte . The Song of Songs rotas may however have b...