03 May 2026
Maran HGR' Moshe Sternbuch shlit"a's powerful brocha: "He won't lack anything he needs!"
An awe-inspiring event took place this week in the home of Maran Ish haElokim Rabbeinu Posek HaDor HGR' Moshe Sternbuch shlit"a* The Rabbanim of Bnei Brak, Maran HGR' Massoud Ben Shimon and Maran HGR' Shmuel Eliezer Stern joined Maran in his home to hear about what was required of Klal Yisroel at this time. *"This is an awesome matter- to give 736, equivalent to the gematria of 'kofer nefesh' – and whoever gives this, he will not lack anything that he needs!" declared Maran decisively. He set the time to be until Rosh Hashono תשפ"ח.
An emotional event was held in the home of Maran Ish haElokim Rabbeinu Posek HaDor HGR' Moshe Sternbuch shlit"a, with the situations of the 125 evacuated families from Bnei Brak being the subject of the deliberations.
The Rabbanim of the city, Maran HGR' Massoud Ben Shimon shlit"a, Mara d'Asra of Bnei Brak, and Maran HGR' Shmuel Eliezer Stern shlit"a, Rav of West Bnei Brak, asked Maran what is the cause of this great anger upon us, and what our reaction is meant to be. What is the obligation of Klal Yisroel at this present time?
The Rabbanim with Maran at the head explained why the missiles fell specifically in Bnei Brak more than in any other city in Eretz Yisrael, They said that this is a category of 'וסביבו נשערה מאוד'- that HaKadosh Baruch Hu is exacting with the tzaddikim and those close to Him. They also determined that those whose homes were hit by missiles and shrapnel fell into the category of 'korbanos tzibur,' and the hits were meant for all of Klal Yisrael. This being true, the Rabbanim determined that we all bear the responsibility to help with repairing the damages, and no one is exempt from accepting his proportional part of the responsibility for the hits.
Afterwards the Beis Din discussed what was considered a suitable sum for each member of Klal Yisroel to donate and K"K Maran Posek HaDor shlit"a answered there is a great inyan to give 736, which is the gematria of כופר נפש .Maran then added that the responsibility of helping those affected is incumbent of all of Klal Yisroel not only on Bnei Brak residents.
At the end of the Beis Din's meeting, Maran Posek Hador shlit"a in his extremely clear and decisive manner for which he was already renowned in the days of Maranan the Chazon Ish and the Brisker Rav, read out his psak, which he subdivided into four parts: the facts; the obligation; the request; and the brocha, all of which he asked to be publicized worldwide so that the public knows what is the correct path to take and how to act.
In the first part, Maran analyzed the situation and he declared: " עם ד' חזקו והתחזקו, there is no need to talk or to hear, there has never been a situation like this". Maran, who has seen many generations in his lifetime, testifies that there has never been a time like this, where hundreds of families have been evacuated from their destroyed homes and are literally wandering from place to place!
In the second part, Maran determined what is incumbent on each one of us: "It is the zechus of each and every person to be a partner in this extremely great mitzvah to rebuild and re-establish the destroyed homes; this is an opportunity that must not be missed out on," and that it is a zechus, a mitzvah and an obligation upon all of us. Giving tzeddaka as a כפר נפש is in fact an atonement for all of us, and we are all in need of this כפרה.
The third part: Maran shlit"a beseeches all of Klal Yisroel: "I am requesting and entreating each and every person –it's an exceedingly great inyan to give the sum of 736 the gematria of כופר נפש [each country in its own currency] – an opportunity"- adding that it is a very lofty matter.
One of the other Rabbanim added that these people are communal korbonos- and all of Klal Yisrael, each and every person, is obligated to help them.
The fourth part: Maran showered his blessings on those who help, and in contrast to his usual practice he gave an unusually lengthy brocho while specifying a date: "הקב"ה will repay, He is reliable and will do so, הקב"ה will fulfill all your hearts' desires for the good, and you will lack nothing. This blessing is valid bs"d until Rosh Hashono 5788".
Maran shlit'a adds his signature to his psak and the other Rabbanim add theirs too. Maran then donates the first sum of 736 as a כופר נפש for himself and for all of Klal Yisroel!
In view of what was said, now is the time to act, to use this opportunity to assist those families who are suffering tremendous financial hardship and to merit this unique brocho of "he will not lack anything he needs."
Following the instructions of Maran, Kupat Ha'ir is initiating a worldwide campaign to collect support for the evacuated Bnei Brak families, with two options:
The first option is to give 736 as kofer nefesh [each country in its own currency] in accordance with the psak of Maran shlit"a and to merit his unique brocho that the donor will not lack anything until Rosh Hashono 5788!
To donate 736 the gematria of kofer nefesh please click here >>>
Another option is to donate 4 times the gematria of כופר נפש - 82 x 36 months - and to receive a shtar signed by Maran shlita and his Beis Din wherein it is written that the donor will not lack anything – dated Rosh Hashono 5788!
To donate 82 x 36 months and receive the shtar Kofer Nefesh please click here >>>
Donations can also be made to Kupat Ha'ir Fund #3322, by phone 1-888-587-2842, or by mailing a check to American Friends of Kupat Ha'ir, 4415 14th Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11219.
02 May 2026
What Is Crohn’s Disease?
The Patient Who Was Never Sick
A man turns fifty. His insurer pays for a screening colonoscopy. He has no abdominal pain, no diarrhoea, no weight loss, no fatigue. He goes in because the schedule says it is time. The pathologist examines the biopsies and reports granulomas and chronic inflammatory changes. The gastroenterologist calls him in and tells him he has Crohn’s disease, a chronic incurable condition that will require lifelong management. He is started on adalimumab, an injected biologic costing roughly forty thousand dollars per year, with documented adverse events including serious infections, lymphoma, hepatosplenic T-cell lymphoma, and heart failure.¹ He will inject himself with this drug every two weeks for the rest of his life.
He had no complaint when he walked through the door.
This is not a hypothetical. It has a name in the gastroenterology literature: silent Crohn’s, or asymptomatic incidentally diagnosed Crohn’s. Roughly a quarter of patients with the histological findings have no symptoms at the time of diagnosis.² The treat-to-target framework now dominant in inflammatory bowel disease practice³ instructs gastroenterologists to suppress the tissue findings whether or not the patient feels ill, on the theoretical grounds that future damage might otherwise occur. The retrospective evidence in the establishment’s own journals tells a different story. Grinman and colleagues at Sheba Medical Center in Israel reviewed the records of 2,700 Crohn’s patients in their inflammatory bowel disease registry. They identified 60 patients whose Crohn’s had been discovered incidentally — found during colonoscopy or imaging done for unrelated reasons, in patients with no Crohn’s symptoms. Eighty-eight percent of these patients received no treatment after diagnosis. Of those left untreated, eighty-nine and a half percent had no flare over a median follow-up of four and a half years.⁴ The authors’ conclusion, in their own words: many asymptomatic patients with an incidental diagnosis of Crohn’s disease can probably be followed up without immediate treatment.
The practice continues regardless. A healthy person with no complaint is informed they have an incurable disease, started on a drug that costs more than most cars, and instructed to take it indefinitely. The body that was successfully managing its own affairs is now prevented from doing so.
The case this essay makes is that Crohn’s disease is a modern poisoning with a specific toxin, by a specific route, in a specific population — and that the asymptomatic-treated patient is the clearest window into what the diagnosis actually is. The body in that man’s gut was doing what bodies do when they accumulate something they cannot easily clear. Medicine saw the work and called it disease.
On 13 May 1932, three physicians at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York — Burrill Crohn, Leon Ginzburg, and Gordon Oppenheimer — presented a paper to the American Medical Association in New Orleans titled Terminal Ileitis. The published version appeared five months later in the Journal of the American Medical Association under the title Regional ileitis: a pathologic and clinical entity.⁵ The paper described fourteen patients between the ages of seventeen and fifty-two, all operated on by the Mount Sinai surgeon A. A. Berg. The lesion was characteristic: transmural inflammation of the terminal ileum, granulomas, skip lesions, fistulae. The cohort was overwhelmingly Jewish.
Earlier descriptions of similar pathology existed but were rare enough to be surgical curiosities. Morgagni had noted the picture in 1761. Antoni Leśniowski described it in Poland in 1903. Thomas Kennedy Dalziel, a Scottish surgeon, published a paper in the British Medical Journal in 1913 titled Chronic Interstitial Enteritis, describing the same condition in human patients and noting its histological resemblance to Johne’s disease — a chronic granulomatous ileitis in cattle first described by Heinrich Johne in 1895.⁶ Dalziel’s paper is not cited in Crohn’s 1932 report. The omission would shape the next ninety years of research.
From those fourteen surgical cases in 1932, the disease has expanded into a global epidemic. The 2017 Lancet systematic review by Ng and colleagues documented incidence rates above twenty per hundred thousand per year in parts of Canada and northern Europe, with prevalence exceeding 0.3% of the population in early-industrialised countries.⁷ The Global Burden of Disease 2017 IBD Collaborators estimated approximately 6.8 million people living with inflammatory bowel disease worldwide.⁸ Kaplan and Ng’s four-stage epidemiological framework places Western countries in a prevalence plateau while China, India, Brazil, and sub-Saharan Africa move rapidly through accelerating incidence — a transition the authors link explicitly to the Westernisation of diet, hygiene practices, and pharmaceutical exposure.⁹
The migration evidence makes the environmental signal unmistakable. Benchimol and colleagues documented that second-generation South Asian immigrants to the United Kingdom and East Asian immigrants to Canada acquire host-country incidence within a single generation.¹⁰ Their genes do not change in that interval. What changes is the schedule of pharmaceutical exposures, the food supply, and the injection regimen administered in childhood. The disease is acquired, not inherited.
Genetics deserves its own paragraph because the establishment has invested four decades in pursuing it. The NOD2/CARD15 gene was identified simultaneously by two groups in 2001.¹¹ Twenty-five years and over two hundred and forty susceptibility loci later, the genetic programme has produced no cure and no actionable clinical intervention.¹² The Swedish twin study of Halfvarson and colleagues found 29 monozygotic twin pairs with Crohn’s disease — only nine of them concordant for the disease, twenty discordant for life despite identical genomes. CARD15/NOD2 variants did not explain the difference; the authors concluded that the genetic variants “contribute but do not alone explain concordance of Crohn’s disease in monozygotic twins.”¹³ NOD2 variants are rare or absent in East Asian populations, where Crohn’s incidence is currently exploding. A disease that triples in a generation in Korea cannot be primarily genetic. Gene pools do not change at that rate.
What does change at that rate is what is being injected, ingested, and prescribed.
***********************
What Is Crohn’s Disease? Modern Poisoning and the Manufacture of Lifelong Patients
Unbekoming brings the evidence. Crohn’s symptoms are the body trying to rid itself of poisonous heavy metals, and conventional treatments which don’t address the root are doomed to eventual failure. https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/what-is-crohns-disease
Shalom Pollack: The New Jews
Towards the end of a film I recently saw, a conclusion was advanced: The talmudic training of the Diaspora prepared the technological successes of the "Startup Nation."
The impression was that, to an extent, one replaced the other, and that was a positive thing.
One further gets the impression that the Jewish state represents the nation's physical survival needs with a somewhat unfortunate inward-looking priority, while the diaspora retains "core Jewish values", like a diverse, liberal, global perspective.
This suggested dichotomy is not unintended and problematic.
The Torah that kept the Jewish nation vibrant in the diaspora is the same that kept the dream of the return to Zion alive.
Significant voices at the time of the creation of the state said it was time to abandon the Torah completely. The dream has been fulfilled.
They were sure that as Torah faded from Jewish national life, the nation would be strengthened both materially and even spiritually.
I came home to Israel half a century ago as one of many diaspora dreamers.
Once home, I was impressed to meet my Israeli kibbutz cousins who farmed and defended the (holy) land of our dreams.
True, they did not observe or respect the Torah that guided me home, but still, I was impressed with what I, in my Brooklyn ghetto, could not accomplish.
The fact that they did not give their children a bar mitzvah, or viewed the "Kotel " as just old stones, not worth fighting for, gave me pause, but who am I to criticize? They built our Jewish state, I thought.
A half century ago, my cousins could not be prouder to be Israelis and would be ashamed to admit that a family member would even contemplate the dirty word, "yerida."(Today it is called "relocation")
These same cousins today have children who have intermarried, and others are doing "very well" in America. No shame; in fact, they are proud.
The "Start-up Nation" is too small to keep down its really ambitious members, the" new Jews". They leave for Big Brother, the one they like to emulate in Silicon Valley.
Why not?
There is a new service industry in Israel today: how to acquire a foreign passport. How to get out.
Jews whose grandparents came here to create a new, improved Jew without the shackles of Torah see no reason to be in the land of their grandparents' dreams.
I came here because of those "shackles."
They leave because that which freed them from those shackles gives them no incentive to stay.
Their new "Jewish moral compass" has brought them even to the point of confusing brothers for the enemy. ("The hilltop youth" are a greater enemy than "Hizbollah")
Growing communities of these Israelis from Thailand to Spain to Los Angeles are the fruits of their grandparents' blunder.
They are indeed the "new Jew", wandering the globe seeking greener pastures.
I am the old Jew, the kind that Torah brought me here and keeps me here.
tour guide and author
"Jews, Israelis and Arabs"
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