Prime Minister Naftali Bennett was forced to spend Shabbos in Washington after his meeting with Biden was delayed until Friday in the wake of the suicide bombing in Afghanistan that killed 13 US service members and at least 169 Afghans.
The consul and staff members of the Israeli embassy in Washington organized everything needed for Shabbos in the Willard Intercontinental Hotel near the White House, where Bennett was staying, including hadlakos neiros, davening and Shabbos meals. They borrowed a Sefer Torah for Shabbos from Chabad of Rockville.
A “shul” was set up in one of the hotel rooms and Bennett and his advisers and security guards and the Israeli journalists that accompanied him were invited to the tefillos:
The video below was filmed prior to the start of Shabbos:
לראשונה הקימו בית כנסת מאולתר במלון שבו מתארח ראש ממשלת ישראל. הקונסול וקצין המנהלה של שגרירות ישראל בוושינגטון דאג לספר תורה גדול מבית חב"ד ובמה. ושם יתפללו בשבת בנט ואנשי צוותו. הערב תתקיים קבלת שבת עם דבר תורה, קידוש וארוחת ערב pic.twitter.com/purOaJwQVw
— Itamar Eichner (@itamareichner) August 27, 2021
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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14 Responses
Benmet also dealt with Biden in a respectable non combative manner. This is a welcome change from being mesgara beumos. Hopefully Bennett can repair the damage Netanyahu did by turning support for Israel into a partisan issue.
I assume this was required by security since the R’ Shemtov’s chabad center in D.C. is about a mile north of the White House (close to where the Kushners used to live and daven).
I don’t see Bennet there! I do see some women in his multicultural minyan but he is absent! Maybe he went to an orthodox shul. I’ll buy that story after I close on the deal to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.
PM Bennett’s tiny Kippah reminds me of a Chasidic joke I heard many years ago: small Yarmulka for a small brain.
Mixed seating … not surprising. I wonder if they counted the women in the minyan also.
not my PM___maybe yours but I include Bennett in the basket of impossibilities with Biden the Fool….both are diminished choices and adding to the list of world leaders another dancing monkey___Hashem runs the World and it is so so visible…..turkey it out Bennet___
I guess a mechitza wasn’t so important…
Mechitza?
Please, please, is there nothing happening in the world that is more interesting than this?
Like, who cares?
This was before shabbos, it was filmed. Sounds like it was not the actual minyan.
A minyan that is not kavua (eg Shiva minyan at home) does not need a proper mechitza. So many other possibilities to explain this.
It’s the week before Rosh Hashanah and this is the first Prime Minister to be shomer shabbos and kashrus. Please stop finding reasons to create sinas chinam.
“Not my PM….both are diminished choices and adding to the list of world leaders another dancing monkey_”
SaraRifka: Perhaps you forgot to turn off your random right-wing word generator that produces these incoherent rants apparently cut and pasted from old Trumpkopf tweets. If you are gender-uncertain, we can provide some advice on which side of the polticial mechitza you should be on .
At an ad hoc minyan there is no requirement for a mechitza. But even in a proper shul, Reb Moshe Feinstein paskened that if there are only one or two women, and it only happens once in a while, there’s no need for a mechitza. In the video you can only see two women, and they are not mixing with the men but sitting separately, so according to Reb Moshe this would be OK even in a shul, let alone at an ad hoc minyan. (I hope they knew NOT to say the Brocha Me’ein Sheva.)
Aymdock, there is no mixed seating. The women are sitting separately. And I can only see two of them.