By Rabbi Gedalia Zweig
Targum Press
New York, 2023
106 pages
Reviewed by Steve Lipman
Shortly after the Hamas attack on October 7, Rabbi Gedalia Zweig of Toronto was contacted by a representative of Kibbutz Be’eri, the Israeli kibbutz that suffered the most casualties at the hands of the terrorists; at last count, some one hundred residents of Be’eri died in the Hamas atrocity, triggering the IDF’s ongoing war in Gaza.
The Be’eri representative, who had seen Rabbi Zweig’s name mentioned in a Jewish publication, asked if he would say Kaddish for four of the kibbutzniks who had lost their lives in the October 7 attack. For various reasons, says the rabbi, Be’eri residents would be unlikely to say the Jewish mourner’s prayer for the four victims for the full eleven months.
Rabbi Zweig, who splits his time between serving as the chazan at Toronto’s Toras Emes Congregation (Viewmount Shul) and working in the family paint business, immediately said yes.
He was following his own advice.
Rabbi Zweig is a ba’al teshuvah who learned at Aish HaTorah. He also studied at Yeshivat Itri in Jerusalem and received semichah from the Mirrer Yeshiva in New York. He has made it his life’s mission to tell people about the spiritual benefits of reciting Kaddish when the need arises.
His first book, Living Kaddish: incredible and inspiring stories (New York: Targum Press, 2007; also translated into Russian and Spanish), offered some background on the prayer, as well as some memorable stories about people who managed to say Kaddish under difficult circumstances. Readers’ enthusiastic reaction to Living Kaddish led him to start collecting similar Kaddish stories, featuring serendipitous incidents and obstacles overcome in venues on every continent.
The result of his continuing interest is Kaddish Around the World, which includes such stories as:
• Members of opposing legal teams joining each other in court, along with the trial’s presiding judge, when one of the attorneys needed to say Kaddish late one day. “Most of the men pulled out their iPhones or Blackberries and had the prayers on their screens in seconds.”
• A minyan at Ataturk International Istanbul Airport in Turkey. Eric scurried to find ten men for Minchah. He ran around the terminal before his flight to the US boarded. Finally, he rounded up enough men.
• Kaddish recited by members of a safari expedition in Kenya. One of the safari’s dates coincided with Ivan’s yahrtzeit date for his late father. Ivan’s safari would be “somewhere in the heart of the Masai Mara game reserve,” a large grassland. The peak tourist season was over; “the nearest minyan was hundreds of miles away.” Into the lobby of Ivan’s hotel walked “a noisy crowd” of tourists . . . all Israelis. “Ivan hadn’t found a minyan; the minyan had found him.”
The book contains thirty-three stories, most not longer than a few pages, all in the words of the people—rabbis and lay members of the Jewish community—to whom the stories happened.
“I wanted it to come from them—everyone has a story; everyone [at some time] has to say Kaddish,” Rabbi Zweig says. “I want to inspire more people to say Kaddish. I want to be known as ‘the Kaddish Man.’”
The rabbi did not know any of the men and women of Be’eri for whom he undertook to recite Kaddish until September of 2024. Strangers, all. . . . [Except that] now they are connected by the words in Aramaic he recites three times a day.
Rabbi Zweig’s interest in the topic grew during the quarantines of the Covid pandemic, when synagogues were closed or restricted the number of people who were allowed to gather there for worship services, after which many people “lost interest in minyanim.”
In recent years, Kaddish has become more personal for the rabbi. His father, a Holocaust survivor, died in 2021; his mother, from Toronto, died in 2002.
Unlike a spate of other books about Kaddish in recent years that have focused on the prayer’s history, background, halachot, or journals of individual people who recited the prayer, Kaddish Around the World brings together stories from various people, some non-Orthodox, showing the strength of Kaddish.
“Kaddish does not mention the deceased, nor does it speak about death,” Rabbi Zweig points out in the book’s preface. Citing the remark by the late Israeli poet Shai Agnon that “we are all G-d’s children” and that “when a human dies, G-d loses a child,” the rabbi writes that Kaddish offers “words of consolation to G-d because of His loss.”
The rabbi did not know any of the men and women of Be’eri for whom he undertook to recite Kaddish until September of 2024. Strangers, all. Really not strangers, he corrects himself. Now they are connected by the words in Aramaic he recites three times a day.
After the Hamas attack, when non-Jews with whom he spoke around Toronto asked him if he had family in Israel, he would say no, he says. Then he had a second thought. “Everybody is family there,” he now tells the questioners.
Among the victims of the Hamas attack on Be’eri, whose population before October 7 was about 1200, were women, children and infants; many hostages were also taken from Be’eri, and dozens of homes were burned down. Established in 1946, the kibbutz is the largest village of the Eshkol Regional Council.
“Unfortunately,” says Rabbi Zweig, “we have many reasons to say Kaddish” following October 7 in Israel. “It’s a very difficult time for everybody.”
In saying Kaddish for a small group of victims, Rabbi Zweig is doing as an individual what the Chesed Chaim V’Emet organization (https://holy.hhe.org.il/en/kaddish-lkol-kadosh/) is doing on a wider scale in Israel.
A globe-trotter, Rabbi Zweig leads tours in Israel during his frequent trips there, and has led High Holiday services in Sweden and Barbados. Amid a busy schedule giving speeches in Canada and abroad about his latest book, Rabbi Zweig has begun conceptualizing his next one. It will also be a collection of stories, he says. Maybe about Kaddish again. Maybe about another aspect of the spiritual side of Yiddishkeit. “It might just be inspiring stories,” the rabbi says. “There is no lack of stories.”
One story in Kaddish Around the World: The author describes his search for a minyan at the Chabad House in Weston, Florida. It was in late December 2021, and Covid wariness and many people’s vacation schedules resulted in “only seven people in shul.” With the help of the Chabad rabbi’s son-in-law, Rabbi Tzvi Alperowitz, three more daveners showed up.
Rabbi Zweig had his Kaddish minyan.
“Don’t forget,” Rabbi Alperowitz told Rabbi Zweig, “to put us in your book of Kaddish stories.”
Steve Lipman is a frequent contributor to Jewish Action.