Word: mitzvahs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Dreyfuss, the superb young actor who plays him, Richler is not afraid to make Buddy unlikable or even sometimes gross. Special attention should also be paid to one of Duddy's most elaborate schemes: hiring a perennially drunken and pompous British film maker in exile to make bar mitzvah movies for doting parents. The film maker is played by Denholm Elliott, who is hilariously disheveled and polluted nearly past the point of pretension, a characterization of enormous comic skill. His bar mitzvah production is a triumphant, unconscious (on his part) parody combining the most tiresome features of the anthropological...
...barbered man. "But not religiously." "Yes," mutters another hurrying by, "but I don't have time to stop." A middle-aged woman takes the counteroffensive: "So what's all this about?" She waves in the direction of a van parked near by, emblazoned with a banner reading "Mitzvah Mobile." Inside, more young men in black hats and beards are busy talking-and praying -with people they have stopped...
Named for the Hebrew word for "commandment" or "good deed," the Mitzvah Mobiles are a summer project of a unique group of Orthodox Jews who have made it their mission to awaken fellow Jews to Jewish identity and spiritual obligation. They are the Lubavitcher Hasidim, members of an Eastern European sect that now has its international headquarters in Brooklyn.* The Lubavitch Youth Organization mans the mobiles with vacationing Yeshiva (religious school) students and young rabbis. Half a dozen vans are on the road each week in New York City and its suburbs and in the "Borscht Belt" Catskills resort area...
...Lubavitcher leader, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, the trucks are "Jewish tanks against assimilation" -a counterattack against the secularization of Jews in modern society. The immediate aim of the young men in the Mitzvah Mobiles is to persuade Jews to return to observance of five basic mitzvot that, they say, epitomize the 613 commandments of traditional Jewish...
...stumbles on their hideout, hooks up with the leader, is chased by the terrorists, shows up at the airport, switches identities with a couple of Orthodox rabbis-his chauffeur's relatives-is transported to an enormous welcoming celebration, is asked to preside over a bar mitzvah, all the while being chased by the terrorists because he is still in the company of the political leader, also disguised as a rabbi. De Funès cannot, of course, get out to his daughter's wedding, so his wife is furious, his daughter weeping...