The sun was setting, and our two rabbinic interns from Ukraine had just pulled into the Soufrière rest stop to get a drink. January is usually the busiest month around here; it’s when all our locals and second homeowners are on the island, in addition to the thousands of visitors…

“Meet me at two o’clock on Friday at the ferry terminal,” said Yochanan. It was a few days before sukkot, and we were still missing a vital ingredient for the holiday, the aravot. We always import the lulav, etrog, and hadassim from New York, but aravot are hard to come…

It was a Friday morning like any other, the sun was shining, and the kids were already awake for hours. As the clock hit 7 a.m., our nest doorbell camera showed a middle-aged guy in shorts standing by the door, speaking in Hebrew. He introduced himself as David from the…

Late one Friday afternoon, I was waiting in an extraordinarily long customs line at the Castries ferry terminal, constantly looking at the time to see how long was left until Shabbat. It was a long couple of days: I had spent the night on the nearby French island of Martinique…

Several years ago, I’d heard rumors of a Jewish woman who was a school teacher in the tiny village of Micoud, on St Lucia’s southeast coast. But nobody else had heard of her, and I’d almost forgotten about her. This Friday, as I was chopping the last veggies for Shabbos…

It was a beautiful Caribbean day, and my brother Mendel and two of his fellow rabbinical students were driving down the streets of the small coastal town of Soufrière, pop. 8000. He was spending the day on the south of our island, looking for Jews, focusing on Soufrière, the island’s…

This afternoon, I landed in the former Kazakh capital of Almaty as part of a Chabad delegation to the central Asian republic. With borders still shuttered due to the pandemic, Chabad Chassidim and rabbis received special permission for a small group to enter the country (for less than 24 hours)…

Ever fast roped out of a helicopter to join Chabad for Rosh Hashanah? Well, that's exactly what senior navy officer Ken wanted to do! In late September of 2019, the USNS Comfort III reached our beautiful island with a small contingency of Jewish service members. As part of a six-month…

I sat for three hours at the non air-conditioned ferry terminal on our island’s capital of Castries, along with about another one-hundred people, waiting for our packages from the nearby French territory of Martinique. Some people were waiting for packages with clothing or European electrical appliances, amongst other items not…