By Mendel Super on Chabad.org…
After last Yom Kippur, as the community members of Chabad of Auckland, New Zealand, gathered together to break the fast, one congregant rose, telling those gathered: “If it weren’t for Chabad, I wouldn’t have been at synagogue today. I would have been at work.” Another remarked that while he’d been going to synagogue for 83 years, this year’s service was better than all the others combined.
Fast-forward seven months and one coronavirus pandemic later to Lag BaOmer. With the approach of the holiday, which is traditionally celebrated outdoors—a gorgeous time of year in New Zealand, with the warmer weather stubbornly clinging on, and the trees beginning to shed their red and orange leaves—Rabbi Mendel Hecht, director of Chabad of Auckland, was determined to celebrate with the community, social-distancing-style.
While encouraging everyone to stay in their own backyards for kosher Kiwi barbecues and roasted marshmallows, the young rabbi—who arrived with his wife, Esther, to far-flung New Zealand just a year-and-a-half ago, their young daughter in tow—and the Auckland Jewish community took part in a first-ever trans-Tasman Lag BaOmer celebration at the start of the holiday on Monday evening, May 11, with their Australian counterparts across the ditch…
Read the full story on Chabad.org here.
