Continuing with some excerpts from the awesome shiur from May 18th, 2025.

Read Part I.

==

Now in Yemen, the Yemenites are firing nukes.

I don’t know why, what did I do to them….

A girl can make a nuke in a second, what’s the problem? What it takes a man 10 years to do, she does it in ten seconds. The mind of a girl is so much better than the mind of a boy.

==

The whole concern [of a boy] is just to learn Gemara.

Learning Gemara, this is boys’ learning, this is what is written in the Baal HaTurim: “Speak to the sons of Aharon”. The sons of Aharon, and not the daughters, because the girls nullified the decree of death.

[The women] didn’t make the Calf, they didn’t agree to give [their jewellery]. 40 years, all the women went with half an ear[1]. For it’s written ‘and take apart’ – now, it’s Ki Tisa, ‘and take apart’, they cut them. They tore out the earrings with the ear.

==

So, [the women] recieved Rosh Chodesh, it’s like chol hamoed.

It’s forbidden for a woman to do washing, it’s forbidden for her to sew, only if she wants to lengthen her sleeves, it’s permitted for her. [But] on Shabbat, even if she wants to lengthen the dress, she can’t.

The greatest enjoyment for a woman is to sew. On Shabbat, they take her greatest pleasure away, it’s oneg shabbat to sew, but they take this pleasure away from her.

==

But on Rosh Chodesh, it’s forbidden for her to sew.

It’s forbidden for her to do the washing. She needs to put on a wash either the day before, or the day after. Today, there are already no cloth diapers, everything is disposable diapers – there is nothing to wash. She doesn’t need to launder anything.

So, she just needs to recite tehillim all day long, and to go to the Kotel, and to Kever Rachel.

==

By Avraham Sternhartz – his mother, [or] his wife, was the granddaughter of R’ Natan [Sternhartz of Breslov], the granddaughter of the Rebbe.

There was a shidduch, that the grandchildren got married, the granddaughter of R’ Natan. She used to say tehillim all day long. She was meant to go and find some twigs, because they didn’t have ovens like they do today.

And she used to bring damp wood. She used to see some wood, and would just take the wood. But, she needed to look for dry wood, and to choose that. All the house was full of smoke, everyone was suffocated. If it was damp wood, so smoke came out of it without end, and everyone was suffocated from the smoke.

==

R’ Natan brought this in one of the sources, that it was impossible to describe the poverty there was.

The poor people only had damp wood, so they used be suffocated by the smoke.

==

[Skipping some]

In every shiur, fire is brought down.

Every shiur, it’s like the Idra[2]. Now, we’ll say a shiur until sunset, until 7.50 pm, and afterwards, we’ll say borchu.

Sefirat HaOmer by itself is half an hour, and the shiur is ten minutes. So, at exactly half an hour, we’ll finish the shiur, and after we’ve finished the shiur, so then we will say ‘Or Tzaruah’[3] until 8pm, and then we’ll say borchu. And then by 9pm, we’ll be finished.

Chatzot is at 12 am, there are another five hours until chatzot. It’s possible to recite the whole [book of] tehillim, and to become familiar with the whole of the Zohar. All the Zohar, it’s just stories….

==

(Skipping some about how Orpah fell the night she left Naomi, and had relations with 100 men and a dog (!) and then gave birth to Goliath.)

==

[The Rav reminisces about when he was a child growing up in ‘Red Haifa’, that was very anti-religious.]

I already said that I was going to yeshiva. Everything was already prepared. Everything was clear to me, already, from the age of 13. I didn’t let go of the gemara for a second.

I used to give over classes in tnua (means ‘movement’, also ‘politics’ – it’s not clear exactly what the Rav is referring to), and everything. And parshat hashavua, Pirkei Avot, to read tehillim, I used to arrange everything, there.

At the age of 17 1/2, I went to yeshiva.

It was precisely the eve of the 17th Tammuz, the 16th of Tammuz I met Shalom Tzadok, today, he’s the Rav of Bnei Ayish.[4]

==

‘AYiSH’, this is the initials of ‘Akiva Yosef Shlesinger’.

He was the only one who was in favor of Eretz Yisrael.

He bought Petach Tikva – Rabbi Kolomiyya. (R’ Kolomiyya was one of the students of the Chatam Sofer, and was the father-in-law of Akiva Schlesinger).

Now, it was his yahrtzeit, on the 10th of Iyar. On the 10th of Iyar, the yahrtzeit of Hillel Kolomiyya.

And he brought for 13 grush – he bought land in Petach Tikva. And everyone immersed in the Yarkon [River], there was Shtampfter, and Solomon – in Petach Tikva, whoever passes by there.

==

I used to go and do hitbodedut, and I would until Rosh HaAyin, doing hitbodedut.

I would go via Petach Tikva, I would get to Be’erot Yitzhak, even until Nechalim, I used to get there on foot, two hours going on foot, do hitbodedut for two hours, come back for two hours by way of the fields. I used to see everything…Solomon didn’t know what this was.

==

[Solomon and Shtampfer] were the founders.

Everyone had payot, with beards, there’s the picture of them, with the Moshavot. Petach Tikva, 1879 – the first settlement was Petach Tikva. This was all chareidi Jews.

And Rabbi Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld was in favor of this, and everyone said to start to live there [i.e. in these new settlements], and to start to found moshavim. [But] everyone died from starvation.

25,000 died from hunger.

==

In the First World War, there were 50,000 people.[5]

25,000 people died from starvation, because the z-nists took all the haluka money.

They used to scream at us, that we were using the haluka money [to subsist in Eretz Yisrael], and then they took everything. Instead of there being kupot (collection boxes) for R’ Meir Baal HNess, they did kupot for Keren Kayemet. In every home, they threw out the boxes for R Meir Baal HaNess, which was for the kollels, and they put a box for the Keren Kayemet.

With this, they built the kibbutzim.

==

And after this, they took all the gold and silver from the Yemenites.

For 2,000 yeras, the Yemenites there were the only goldsmiths. Only Jews knew how to make jewellery, the arabs didn’t know. [An Arab] only knew how to plough and plant a few tomatoes. That’s what he knew. And the Jews were the smiths, and they had sacks filled with gold.

They took everything away from them.

==

They asked Avi Tabib where is the gold?

They told [the Yemenites] that the plane wouldn’t fly if you put gold onboard. This, you need to bring by ship.

So, they stole all the gold from them, all the ancient books, they stole from them. They had Sifrei Torah that were 900 years old – everything, they took from them. They sold it for Judaica, they sold it to collectors, to Oxford.

Now, they are searching for this across the whole glove. In Manchester, they sold this [i.e. the 900 year old Torah scroll]. In Oxford, they sold this, to Russia, they sold this – old Sefer Torahs from 900 years ago.

==

Now, 80 years have already passed since then, this is already 1,000 years.

We are talking about the year 1950, now it’s 80 years. 1948 then, so 80 years passed. Then, it was 900 years, now it’s 980 years, sifrei Torahs that are 1,000 years old. The most ancient that it’s possible to be, and handwritten manuscripts, and perushim (Torah commentaries), and all sorts of perushim.

==

The Saba [of the Rabbanit, Tehilla Berland], he wrote a commentary on the Zohar.

R’ Shalom, Avraham ben Shalom.[6] I discovered his gravestone. I went afterwards, and found his gravestone, at his levaya [the Rav appears to be referring to the funeral of his father-in-law, R Avraham Shaki].

I went to look for his gravestone. We found his tombstone, it was written: R’ Shalom Shaki.

This is on the opposite side of the road.

Excerpted and translated from Shivivei Or, 412.

==

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In many previous shiurim, the Rav explained how the men were so eager to make the golden calf, they literally ripped the earrings out of the womens’ ears.

[2] A reference to Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai, who taught the Zohar in the Idra, surrounded by fire.

[3] Sung before the ma’ariv prayers at the Beit HaRav every evening.

[4] A small town near Gedera.

[5] The Rav is apparently speaking about the number of Jews who lived in Eretz Yisrael when WW1 broke out in 1914.

[6] R Avraham Shaki was the father of the Rabbanit, and a National Religious Party MK.

==

At the bottom of R’ Avraham Shaki’s Wiki page, you’ll find a link to that ‘anti-Shuvu’ and anti-Rav Berland hit piece from 1999, that I’ve linked to before, here on the site.

Here it is again:

“Shuvu Banim: Portrait of Perilous Extremism”. Keshev. November 1999. p. 6.

They’ve been gunning for the Rav for the last 30 years…..

Strange, how people can be so ‘awake’ to fake news and hidden agendas in 2025, but still believe the ‘news’ about the Rav that was manufactured 30, 20, 10, 5, years ago….

==

In the meantime, I found a picture of R Shalom Shaki’s tombstone, here:

שלום שאקי – BillionGraves GPS Headstones

It seems his father’s name was R DAVID SHAKI, according to the tombstone there.

==

Here is an entry for R Shalom Shaki from the Temani Chachamim Encyclopaedia:

(Machine translated from Hebrew):

Shaki, Shalom | The Association for the Cultivation of Society and Culture – The Heritage of Yemenite Jews

Screenshot:

==

I don’t know why the Rav keeps talking about his FIL, but he does.

And everything the Rav says is some sort of ‘clue’ to what is really going on, here.

==

RE: Akiva Schlesinger – we started to uncover some very interesting things about him previously on the blog, check this out:

Hebron: City of Sabbateans – Part 3 – Think for yourself

At some point, I’ll continue that series on what was really going down in Hebron.

I think we’ll all learn a lot.