Rabbi Abrams Blog

The Jewish Children’s Pride Parade was an invention of the Rebbe and a brilliant idea that changed the course of post-Holocaust Jewish America. It features the most inspiring Jewish and Torah themed floats, Jewish children marching bands, and a Jewish wonderland. About ten years ago, I begged my father to attend with me and our 3 toddlers. He reluctantly came but was busy doing some work on his phone during the procession.  He thought it would be a regular children’s event, ie boring for adults. But once I tapped his shoulder to asked him to watch the floats and the children, he stood up and watched them march by for hours , with tears streaming down his cheeks. In the early 1950’s the Jewish people were not in great shape.  The American Jews were very few and assimilated.  The European Jewish immigrants were refugees and broken from the Holocaust. In those days, the saying, “S’ iz shver tzu zayn a Yid- it’s hard to be a Jew” was common. Jews were not holding their heads high. They fel

It was nice to shut the news off for Pesach, because a lot of negative things have been getting a lot of attention.  Indeed, antisemitism is dominating headlines again. I have been working through my personal feelings as well as  trying to get clarity on the Rebbe’s response. Indeed, the Rebbe’s approach was novel. He didn’t put much into fighting anti-Semitism, and when asked about it, would not take the bait and instead spoke about how all of humanity is really one, saying things like, “All mankind came from Adam so that no one should be able to say I am better than you.” The few times the Rebbe did speak about it, he framed it more as a reality than a virus.   On the one hand he believed that we can’t educate people out of it, that until Moshiach comes and the “wolf lies with the lamb”- metaphorically symbolizing that the nations will dwell with Israel in peace, anti-Semitism will not be rooted out. On the other hand, rooting out the anti-Semites and cancelling them is not really an