Netanyahu Gives Visiting Pompeo a Tour of His Sukkah

On Friday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Israel and the home of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In a joint statement they reaffirmed the strong close relationship between the two countries.

At the end of the meeting, Netanyahu and US ambassador David Friedman showed Pompeo the residence’s sukkah, or temporary booth, built for the Sukkot holiday. “Since you’re visiting here on the holiday of Sukkot, we sit in the sukkah during the Feast of Tabernacles. We remember what it was like when we didn’t have a permanent home,” said Netanyahu. 

 “We sit here to have our family meals and visitors sit here in the sukkah.” “When you put the schach on the top, it is supposed to be porous enough so that you can see the stars. One problem is what do you do when it rains? The answer is you go in.” “This is a typical sukkah, and my kids used to draw drawings for it.”

Tonight and Monday we celebrate the holiday of Shemini Atzeret followed by Simchat Torah on Tuesday. We'll be back with more Jewish Humor Central postings on Wednesday.

Chag Sameach! 

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The Modern-Day Wise Men of Chelm Build a Sukkah

Today is Hoshanah Rabbah, the last day of Chol Hamoed Sukkot, and the last day that we'll be posting videos about Sukkot. So here we go one more time...

In East European Jewish folklore, the mythical town of Chelm was a town of fools, who came up with ingenious but ridiculous solutions to their everyday problems. In reality, there is a town named Chelm, but that's another story...

So Chelm had its shlemiels, shlemazels, shmegegges, and shmendriks. But that was a long time ago. In the spirit of Chelm, Joel Alpert and Gidon Sobol decided to pay homage to the old stories by building a sukkah the way they imagined the Wise Men of Chelm Construction Team would build a sukkah today.

We promise this is the last Sukkot post for this year. We'll be observing Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah on Monday and Tuesday, so there won't be any posts until Wednesday, when we'll resume our usual mix of humorous videos.

Chag Sameach!

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Here Come the Sukkot Videos - "Happy - a Sukkah Hop Song"

With Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur behind us, our attention turns to Sukkot, one of the happiest holidays in the Jewish calendar.

We hope you had an easy and meaningful fast, and now it's time to plan our feasts for the eight-day holiday of Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah.

It's traditional to start building a sukkah immediately after Yom Kippur, and many sukkot went up last night and today. It's also become traditional for congregations to schedule a Sukkah Hop, a moveable feast with synagogue members volunteering their sukkot for their friends to drop in for a l'chaim and some sweet snacks under the leafy or bamboo roof of the temporary shelter.

The Sukkot videos have been slow to come in this year, so we're sharing a video that the Melvin J. Berman Hebrew Academy posted last year, a video that we just discovered so it's probably new to most of our readers. The Berman Hebrew Academy is a Modern Orthodox day school located in Rockville, Maryland.

Rabbi Avichai Pepper, Judaics Program Director for the Lower School, took original music from Pharrell Williams' hit song Happy, and wrote and arranged a new version about sukkah hopping with vocals by student Elyon Topolosky.

Enjoy!

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A Joke to Start the Week - "Indian Bar Mitzvah"

We thought we had exhausted the supply of clean jokes from Old Jews Telling Jokes. But we found that a similar project existed in the United Kingdom.

So this Monday our joke to start the week comes from the UK. The joke teller is Andrew, a 62-year-old food importer.

Here's the setup: Sheldon Goldbaum's parents wanted to do something different for his Bar Mitzvah. So they invited 200 of their close family and friends to go to India, to Jaipur in Rajasthan to the pink palace of the Maharaja. And then...

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Rebbetzin Rivka Leah Zelwig Gets Tangled Up While Sukkah Hopping - Part 2

On Sunday we posted the first part of a video of actress and comedian Danielle Jacobs in the role of accident-prone Rebbetzin Rivka Leah Zelwig, as she attempts to sukkah hop around her neighborhood.

We said it was funny, but some readers disagreed. That's understandable, because the funny part is not the introduction to the video that we posted, but the improv dialogue that the "rebbetzin" delivers while trying to explain some of the bizarre drawings and wall hangings in the sukkot that she visits.

So here is Rivka Leah in full satire mode, speaking in what to some readers will be a funny parody of speech patterns that they recognize as a blend of English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Yeshivish (a dialect that is similar to Yiddish but that has unique qualities, some of which we discussed in one of our first blog posts.) 

Enjoy, and have a happy Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah and Shabbat shalom. We'll be in shul and at a huge kiddush this weekend before returning to our regular mix of Jewish humor on Sunday.

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Just in Time for Next Sukkot - A Complete Inflatable Sukkah in Four SIzes

Yarok Inflatable Sukkah

If you struggled last week to put up a sukkah made of wood or plastic panels and metal pipes and canvas and are thinking that maybe there's a better way to erect a temporary structure to last the whole week of Sukkot, there may be good news and a better way for next year.

It's the Yarok inflatable sukkah, created by an Israeli company that specializes in building inflatable tennis courts, swimming pool covers, and jumping bouncers. Now why didn't we think of that?

Pop-Up Sukkah

The Yarok isn't the first portable sukkah.

There have been Pop-Up sukkot and a PediSukkah
but they all had limited capacity (one or two people). 

This one comes in four sizes: 10 x 6.5 ft., 10 x10, 10 x 13, and 10 x 16, big enough for a large family.

PediSukkah

The sukkah is kept stable by an inflatable base that gets filled with water. The whole contraption inflates in 46 seconds and the included electric pump monitors the air pressure and reinflates it when necessary. It can be carried in a rolling cart and has been certified kosher by Orthodox rabbis.

Prices have not been made public, but we suspect that they will be known well before next Sukkot.

Check out the video and see for yourself.

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Rebbetzin Rivka Leah Zelwig Goes Sukkah Hopping (With the Help of Siri) - Part 1 of 2

She's back. Yes, "Rebbetzin Rivka Leah Zelwig" aka actress and comedian Danielle Jacobs is back with a funny Sukkot episode. We've posted her funny Pesach preparation video and others on Purim and Chanukah in previous years.

This is part one of a two-part video. We'll post the second part later in the week.

In part one, she takes direction from her iPhone assistant, Suri, in finding the location of the sukkot on her sukkah hop.

In part two, the "Rebbetzin", speaking in a mock Yeshivish dialect, stumbles verbally and physically as she tries to show her daughter Chanele (never seen but presumably videotaping the shtick) the meaning of the decorations in a few sukkot that her iPhone assistant, Suri, leads her to.

The fact that she doesn't understand some of the decorations doesn't faze her as she finds a way to spin the meaning of a wall of mustached figures and other unconventional sukkah decorations.

 Stay tuned and enjoy!

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How Many Poles Does it Take to Build a Sukkah?

How many poles does it take to build a sukkah? No, this isn't a bad ethnic or politically incorrect joke. It's a legitimate question. The answer is that it all depends on how big the sukkah is. For example, our 8 x 10 foot sukkah takes exactly 17 aluminum poles, plus some metal fittings, bungee cords, wall fabric, and bamboo mats for the roof.

In the last few years, we saw lots of music videos made just for the Sukkot holiday, which begins this evening and lasts for seven days in Israel and eight days everywhere else. This year the rage seems to be time-lapse videos of sukkah building, in which the hours that it usually takes are boiled down to a few minutes with the magic of time-lapse photography.

We selected a couple of these for your amusement as you reflect on the construction of your own sukkah, or if you didn't build one, on the architectural details of the sukkot you will likely sit in this week or observe as you walk through the streets of your community. One uses metal and wood poles, and the other is made from wood panels. Both videos use appropriate music to match the tempo of the speeded-up construction project.

Enjoy, and have a Chag Sukkot sameach! We'll be back on Chol Hamoed (Sunday) with our usual fun mix.

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