The body lies on a stainless steel table, draped with a sheet. Together with three other women, I cut away the body bag and hospital clothes, remove bandages, pull out IV lines. We wash the body, the water flowing down the table and out of a hole at the foot of the table, into a steel sink. The room is tiled white, brightly lit, antiseptic. We look like doctors, gowned and gloved, and the room looks like an operating room — except that in one corner there is a mikva.

We work quickly and quietly. Conversation is improper, disrespectful, except for the task at hand. If there is a flow of blood anywhere, we stanch the flow and save the bloody cloths, to be buried with the body. Sometimes the work is tedious and dull. Sometimes there are complications that make things more interesting from a medical point of view — I have a medical curiosity about the cause of death — but complications delay us getting out of there, home to our families.

When the body is clean, we take the woman’s body and we place it in the mikva. We have … Read More >>

We fared pretty well. Munich received no awards. Paradise Now didn’t either. The Palestinian cause will have to content itself with the cash of misguided Hollywood Jews, but not their statuettes.

Brokeback did not become Picture of the Year, and received far fewer awards than it was nominated for.

The greatest positive news was an Oscar for the single frum movie.

No, Ushpizin was not a contender.

The frum movie was The March of the Penguins, which won the best documentary award. It was about the running of a marathon in Lakewood, NJ.

Not really, but I couldn’t resist. The March of the Penguins, seriously, is a film that believers in G-d should not miss. It was recommended to me by a major talmid chacham whose rebbetzin conspired to have him view it. He loved it, and urged it upon others. The film is full of beauty, pathos, and most of all awe for G-d’s Wisdom in Creation. The viewer cannot help but be moved by the many wonders it uncovers, like the unsolved mystery of how the penguins find their way back – mutiple times – to a particular patch of ice in that … Read More >>