"Sometimes, When I Come Back From a Coronavirus Call, I Feel Like Going Into One of the House Minyanim With a Baseball Bat.”

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Dear Friends:

"Sometimes, When I Come Back From a Coronavirus Call, I Feel Like Going Into One of the House Minyanim With a Baseball Bat.” (The verbatim words of a kind, supreme mentch who has been serving our community in Hatzolah for over 30 years)

Hatzalah is one of the Crown Jewels of Jewish communal life. And the Coronavirus is placing an enormous stress on the heroic volunteers, their family members, and indeed the organization itself.

Since I started writing about the danger and evil of “House Minyanim,” over a dozen Hatzalah members contacted me. Every single one thanked me for speaking out, and most said that I was TOO SOFT in my writings.

The Hatzalah member quoted above, told me that people who are doing house minyanim are “shofchei damim/murderers” and, “It honestly makes me feel like it’s “Pinchas time,” (who killed someone committing a cardinal sin).

I certainly don’t fault this holy person from expressing himself like that. We are to blame that he feels like that.

My dear friends, if we do not step forward, start speaking up in person, start yelling at the shofchei damim who are endangering the tzadikim of Hatzalah and all of us, start telling the institutions who are winking at this behavior or worse that we will never support them financially for the rest of our lives, start reporting gatherings to the police, we just might call Hatzolah when we need it in the days and weeks to come, and find out that they don’t have enough healthy members who are willing and able to go on these calls.

Be well and Gut Shabbos/Shabbat Shalom

Yakov

P.S. After I posted these lines above on my social media this morning, a friend sent me the letter below from Hatzolah of Union City, NJ, notifying that they are temporarily suspending operations. Full Disclosure: I did not get the chance to verify the letter myself, which I usually do, but I got it from a very responsible person who said it was legitimate.