Canada / New York Border – When a plane made an emergency landing back in January after a teenage boy donned tefillin, people across North America treated it as something of a humorous oddity.
But weeks after that incident, a similar case – this time of a super-vigilant passerby sounding an alarm among U.S. border officials – led to the detaining of a rabbi and his Jewish driver as they tried to return to New York from Canada.
It was just before sunset when Rabbi Eli Silberstein, director of the Roitman Chabad-Lubavitch Center serving Cornell University in Ithaca, suggested, as he had done time and time before, that his driver, Ken Kaplan, don tefillin while it was still daytime. The two men, who were heading to Montreal, stopped at a gas station in Watertown just before crossing the border.
“He likes me to put on tefillin, because I drive him all over the place,” said Kaplan, who has driven Silberstein for four years. Besides for the religious requirement, “it’s good luck.”
The pair got out, Kaplan popped the truck, and soon the rabbi was helping the driver wrap one of the box’s leather straps around his arm.
No sooner had they finished, that a person approached the car.
“It was right after I put the tefillin back in the trunk that someone came up to us and said, ‘You can’t leave now, I need to talk to you,’ ” recalled Silberstein. “He was so suspicious of what we had been doing that he took our license plate number.”
They tried to explain and Kaplan drove off. At the border, Canadian officials inspected the car and, finding nothing suspicious, waved them through.
“When we got to Montreal, I got a call from my wife saying that the police in Watertown were searching for us, and that we were under suspicion for trafficking babies across the border,” said Kaplan. “The guy in the gas station saw us standing over the trunk with the straps and assumed that we were doing something criminal.”
On their return, Kaplan and Silberstein were held up for hours as more than a dozen officers combed through the vehicle.
They managed to keep their sense of humor about it.
“I was so annoyed to be detained like that, we were there until 3:00 in the morning,” said Kaplan. “But it was funny. I was laughing during the whole thing. I guess life can’t be boring.”
(Source: http://www.chabad.org/)
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10 Responses
Silly boy! He should have put on his tefillin underneath a burqa. They would not have bothered an Islamic woman praying!
with the time we live in,terrorism,threats,etc…,i think the frum community should put their teffilim on in a less conspicuous manner to avoid such flairups as described. in ,new york city it might be different than how you would do it in watertown. many of our gentile community are not aware of teffilim or other items of religious significance, so why must we be so obvious.
My fear is, that once the goyish world learns the benign nature of tefillin, and is no longer worried about them, THEN terrorists really MIGHT use them to hold explosives!
To YWN editor; Was it “return to NY” as in paragraph 2, or “heading to MOntreal” as in paragraph 3.
To #2; we should never be ashamed to put on our tefilin anywhere. Proper t’filin inspires fear of Hashem in those who see it. Never daven in a phone booth. Our mitzvos are precious enough to be proud of them. Keeping mitzvos is not what triggers anti-semitism. What triggers it is when we try to act like them.
To
to #3,
It is only if we dont respect our tfilin, that it is possible for the goyim not to respect it.
That the way the system works, says I.
Nobody says hide, but there’s no reason to don tefillin as a public spectacle. Go somewhere private and off road and do it there, besides, you can’t have kavannah when you are in a public place with a million things going on around you!
To #4 (Baal Boose): Read it again. They stopped on their way TO MONTREAL to put on the Tefillin. They continued on their way and the Canadian border patrol let them through. They were stopped at the border on their way back TO NY. There is absolutely no contradiction in the article.
well chabad tefillin are particularly large, lol.
#2, Why should we have to “not be so obvious”? Your argument that we live in an age of terrorism is all the more reason why the Frum should be even more proud of their traditions and openly practice them. Should we hide our religious practices? I think not. That is the way to pave the path to another Holocaust. And if the gentile community is unaware of what tefillin are, then that should not dictate to us how we do our religious practices. The gentiles need to become better educated about other people’s culture. If Moslems wore tefillin, you can be sure that they would not change their practices just because some people misunderstand their ways. Why should we have to do so? I for one will not. Being cowardly and hiding who we are does not gain anyone’s respect for the Jewish people.
To haifagirl;
Canadian officials dont stop you when you leave Canada, only coming in. Additionally, it says when they got to montreal, – and on the way to montreal. Unless the story covers both ways?
Aaargh! too much time wasted. Forget it.