Yeshiva Bochur Makes Royal Guard Laugh in London

The Queen's Guard are known for their ability to stand motionless and expressionless at attention outside royal residences in London. 

Their discipline is challenged daily by tourists visiting the sites, and it appears one may have finally succeeded in breaching their strict protocol and getting the guard to crack a smile.

The culprit, identified only as Yankel, begins his offensive by taking up a position next to the soldier outside the Horse Guards Parade.

“We were together in school, me and him. He went his own way,” Yankel says as his friends record the encounter.

The soldier remains impassive as Yankel continues to elaborate on their friendship: “I remember in school, he used to sit by himself and read books. I was the guy fooling around,” Yankel says.

Although the title on the YouTube clips says this happened at Buckingham Palace, it actually occurred a mile away at the Horse Guards building in Whitehall. The Buckingham Palace guards, wearing bearskin hats, are more skilled at maintaining a stiff upper lip and remaining impervious to tourists determined to make them laugh.

Enjoy!

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The Ninth Man - A Country and Western Passover/Baseball Story/Song

Back in the 1990s Abie Rotenberg, a prolific Orthodox Jewish musician, composer, and entertainer from Toronto wrote a song with a Country and Western flavor about a baseball team from a Brooklyn yeshiva. 

The team had some bad luck and was about to lose an important game when a surprise pinch hitter came in to save the day.

The song was played on Jewish radio stations along with some of his other songs from a series of albums called Journeys. But the song developed a life of its own when YouTube came along and offered opportunities for schools and camps to create their own video versions. 

One version that we're sharing with you today is from a Chabad camp in Montreal called Camp Gan Yisroel in Ville Saint-Laurent and Town Mount Royal. 

Wishing you happy last days of Pesach. We'll be back on Wednesday with more of our mix of fun, nostalgia and Yiddishe nachas.

Enjoy!

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Raise Your Hand - Julie Geller Sings a New Song for Passover

We can always count on singer and songwriter Julie Geller to come up with a new music video whenever a Jewish holiday comes along. We previously featured her songs for Rosh Hashanah and Chanukah.
 
Julie, raised in Colorado where she now lives with her family, also spent time in Boston, San Diego, and Israel. She has taken on a mission to bring love and healing into the world through her music. 

Her new song for Passover, Raise Your Hand, brings to life the requirement that each of us must feel as if we ourselves went out of Egypt by recounting the history of the Jewish people through the generations.

Julie is a graduate of Harvard University and the New England Conservatory of Music. She studied at Bar Ilan University and Midreshet Lindenbaum in Israel. 

Enjoy!

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Passover: What's the Word on the Street?

Man-in-the-street interviews can always be counted on to produce some unexpected and funny answers to questions posed to passers-by. The technique was perfected by Jay Leno in his Jaywalking episodes, but has been used to good effect by other reporters with a microphone.

Over the years we've posted some "Jew Walking" episodes with questions about Passover and Chanukah by comedian Simmy Kay and Rabbi Zvi Drizin.

A reporter for Torah Cafe asked random New Yorkers passing by Columbus Circle in New York City what they know about Passover. The results are unpredictable and entertaining.

Enjoy!

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Jokes to Start the Week of Passover With Rabbi Yitzchak Wyne

Why is this Monday different from all other Mondays? Because it's erev Pesach, and you're all probably overloaded with cleaning and cooking for the seder tonight. But that's no excuse for us to skip our Joke to Start the Week. Today it's also a Joke to Start the Week of Passover.

Today's joke teller is Rabbi Yitz Wyne, founder and spiritual leader of the Young Israel Aish of Las Vegas. He's usually busy as the rabbi of his congregation and as a talk show host with a weekly half-hour show on Jewish values called Life Is Great.

But humor is also part of his repertoire. After hours at the shul, Rabbi Wyne tests a few Passover jokes on an ambivalent audience. His topics include a drunk at the seder and two classic oldies -- the Jew at the queen's knighting ceremony and the great horseradish shortage. OK, so you've probably heard them, but how many times have you also heard the Haggadah?

Enjoy the jokes, the sedarim, and have a happy and kosher Pesach. We're taking two days off to enjoy Passover in Jerusalem with our family and we'll be back with our usual mix on Thursday.

Chag Sameach!

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Jackie Mason's Passover Seder - A Different Kind of Stand-Up

It's almost time for the Passover seder. Tomorrow night Jews all over the world will sit down for the first (and in Israel the only) seder. 

We don't know how many sedarim comedian Jackie Mason will attend, but if this video clip is a sample, it looks like it will be a stand-up affair. But surprisingly, not stand-up comedy.

Jackie shows that he can conduct a seder standing up, even though he moves the afikoman up from its place at the end of the seder to an earlier appearance. There are a few other missteps, but for the most part, he follows the traditional sequence as outlined in the Haggadah.

We were surprised to see that he went through the basics of the seder without cracking a joke or even a smile. To to his credit, he showed a basic knowledge that he acquired in Sheboygan, Wisconsin and on the Lower East Side of Manhattan when as Yacov Moshe Maza he followed his brothers into the rabbinate.

This may well be the only serious video of Jackie Mason. We'll be back in future posts with funny ones. Be sure to watch for tomorrow's Joke to Start the week, even though it's Erev Pesach.

Enjoy!

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Dayenu in the Desert - By the Boys of Boys Town Jerusalem

With the first night of Passover rapidly approaching, we still have a few new videos to share that relate directly to the Pesach seder. 

Here's a rendition of Dayenu that just came in from the boys of Boys Town Jerusalem. Produced in the Judean hills outside Jerusalem, it features the boys dressed in appropriate attire and a cast of camels to complete the picture.

Established in 1948 to provide a home and education for young immigrants to the newly-created State of Israel, Boys Town Jerusalem has become one of the country's largest and most respected educational institutions. 

Boys Town was founded by Alexander S. Linchner, a Brooklyn-born rabbi who, after the Holocaust, devoted his life to building a school for the children of immigrants who poured into Israel from countries around the world. His goal: providing them with a quality education that would prepare them to build the State of Israel with technological skill and traditional Jewish idealism.
 
Today, the beautiful 18-acre Boys Town campus in the Bayit Vegan neighborhood of Jerusalem is one of Israel’s major technological training centers. Approximately 800 students, ranging in age from 12 to 20, live on the campus, with a capacity to house up to 1,000. 
The children and grandchildren of immigrants from 45 countries on six continents, they mirror the ethnic diversity of the Israeli population. More than 75% come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and require substantial scholarship assistance. No student is ever turned away from Boys Town due to inability to pay tuition.

In addition to receiving a fine technological and academic education, Boys Town students are deeply imbued with traditional Jewish values and ideals, and pride in their Jewish heritage. As a result, Boys Town graduates are proud to serve in the Israel Defense Forces and then go on to build fine Jewish homes and families, while making important contributions to their communities and the State of Israel. Among Boys Town’s more than 6,200 graduates are many engineers, technicians, educators, fine craftsmen and professionals.

Enjoy the video,and Shabbat shalom from Yerushalayim.

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The Forward Chefs Make Gluten-Free Chicken Matzo Ball Soup For Your Seder

Gluten-free matzo balls? Rukhl Schaechter and Eve Jochnowitz, the Yiddish speaking chefs from the Jewish Daily Forward, found a way for gluten-restricted seder participants to enjoy chicken matzo ball soup with ground nuts substituting for matzo meal. Of course, if anyone is allergic to nuts, oh well...

According to the chefs, the resulting product is not going to be as fluffy as traditional matzo balls, but it will be very tasty (geshmack, in Yiddish).

We're posting this a few days before seder night to give you time to incorporate this recipe into your cooking plans.

As usual with our Yiddish recipe sessions (we've posted 20 in the last four years -- see "Est Gezunterheit" in the list of keywords in the left column) we're including a few funny-sounding Yiddish words that are used in this episode. If you're a follower of this series, you've heard most of them already.

Chicken soup = Hindel yoich
Oil = Boimel
Drumsticks = Pulkelach
Vegetables = Grintzen
Parsley = Pasternak
Garlic = Knubble
Parsley = Petrusshka

Enjoy!

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South Africa Synagogue Choir in Passover Supermarket Flash Mob

It's not often that we get to post a Jewish flash mob from Johannesburg, South Africa, but so far the Jewish community there is the only one we've seen that takes parts of the Haggadah into the public sphere. 

In this case Rabbi Dovid Hazdan of the Great Park Synagogue South Africa arranged a flash mob at Pick 'n Pay, a major supermarket to draw attention to the display of Kosher for Pesach products that are available.

The flash mob performed a rendition of Vehi She'amdah, a portion of the Pesach Haggaddah, to the surprise and delight of shoppers.It generated Jewish pride and positive happy energy as it added to the community’s awareness and preparation for Pesach.

Enjoy!

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(A tip of the kippah to Sheila Zucker for bringing this video to our attention.)

"All Other Nights" - A Hip Hop Passover Parody

What can you do with All Of the Lights, a pop song by Kanye West that has 96 million views on YouTube? 

Well, if you're 26-year-old Rebecca Adelson, you make it into a Passover parody, of course. Rebecca heard the words as All Other Nights, as in the words from Mah Nishtanah, On all other nights, we eat etc.....

So she turned to her crew from the hip hop sketch comedy show The People of Channel 38 and, along with her brother Matt, turned the flashy, and in our opinion tasteless song into a meaningful review of what happens on the seder night.

The music video was shot on location at two venerable Washington, DC synagogues, Adas Israel and the Historic Sixth and I.

Enjoy!

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