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It’s really almost like winning the lottery: atuition-free four years at Yeshiva University. 19local students have won that privilege, accordingto YU. Five young men from DRS will attendYeshiva College at no charge, if they so choose, aswill three young women who currently attendSKA.
Four students from Rambam Mesivta havealso scored a four-year-long free ride to Washing-ton Heights. They are pictured above with theirteachers and administrators, from left: RabbiYotav Eliach, Rabbi Zev Meir Friedman, JacobBernstein, Gavi Novick, Jonathan Drory, Shmuel
Herzberg and Mr. Ira J. Schildkraut.HAFTR, HANC, Mesivta Yesodei Yeshurun,
Mesivta Ateres Yaakov, North Shore HebrewAcademy and Yeshiva of Far Rockaway all haveone big winner apiece. A student from WestHempstead who attends MTA is also an all-expenses paid scholarship winner.
—Jewish Star Staff
Questions or comments?Email [email protected]
Sussman also mentionedthat high school truancy isdown and that he’s excitedabout the universal pre-k pro-gram.
“Students in the future uni-versal pre-k program will go tothe elementary and there willbe tremendous progress. It’s avineyard where the vines willgrow,” he asserted.
Touretz said his proudestmoment was the day beforeThanksgiving when 149 formerstudents, most of them from lastyear’s graduating class, came tovisit the school.
“We didn’t provide lunch, wedidn’t provide coffee and dough-nuts,” Touretz said. “We justallowed them to come back. Itwas really heartwarming thatthey wanted to come back and
tell us how they are and to seetheir favorite teacher, and occa-sionally, their favorite administra-tor... What we say here is, we’renot Lawrence High School theway it used to be, we’re better.”
Questions or comments? Contact Michael Orbach at [email protected]
creates the blue dye of tekheletand the purple of argamon.Many archeological sites alongthe Mediterranean have evi-dence of the dyeing processincluding large fields deep withsnail shells and dye remnants.
Much of the dye inSolomon’s time came fromTyre, and coins from the cityhave an image of the snail onthem. After the destruction ofthe Second Temple, when manyJews left Israel, Rome made itillegal to wear tekhelet, reserv-ing the color for Caesar andother political dignitaries. Thedye became difficult to obtainand by the fourth century CEwas almost completely unavail-able.
In the 1800’s the RadzynerRebbe, Rabbi Gershon HenochLeiner, set out to determine thesource of tekhelet on his own;he focused on the cuttlefish, asquid that secretes an ink-likesubstance. Leiner had difficultyproducing the dye and enlistedthe aid of a chemist. Ten thou-sand of his followers beganwearing the blue threads ontheir tzitzit.
In 1913, Rabbi Isaac Her-zog, Chief Rabbi of Ireland andlater Chief Rabbi of Israel,wrote a doctoral thesis onHebrew Porphyrology (thestudy of purple). When he test-ed the Radzyner dye he discov-ered that it was a synthetic dye,known as Prussian Blue. Herealized that the murex truncu-lus was probably the tekhelet.Much of the Radzyner chas-sidus was wiped out in theShoah, but Rabbi Herzogpassed his records of the dyeprocess on to the surviving cha-sidim in Israel.
About 18 years ago, notlong after he made aliyah,Greenspan went scuba divingwith other colleagues to searchfor the snail.
“It was an adventure,” hesaid. “We didn’t know we’d bere-instituting the ability to weartekhelet.”
Greenspan found the snailbut was unable to harvest it inmeaningful quantities, since it isprotected under Israeli law.Greenspan’s adventures contin-ued with a call to a French fishmarket, a visit to Spain and final-ly to Croatia where he found asource of snails. Greenspan alsovisited the Vatican to see if gar-ments worn by popes in the Mid-dle Ages had tekhelet on them,as suggested by the Rambam —though any remnant of the dyehad decayed centuries before hearrived. The Vatican did have aposter describing the dye fromthe mollusk.
The process of creating thedye involves catching the murextrunculus, breaking its shell andremoving a white gland. Thefluid from the gland is clear andcolorless but when exposed tolight transforms to yellow, thengreen, then blue then deep pur-ple. The fluid is air-dried into apowder then added to water; aprocess that Greenspan demon-strated during his lecture.
In ancient times lye wasused to make the dye basic;Greenspan uses another chemi-cal. Old urine was used as areducing agent and in ancienttimes collecting urine was amajor part of the dyeing indus-try. After adding some acid tomake the dye less basic,Greenspan submerged a wad ofwool in the liquid and let it sit awhile. When he removed thewool, the color changed quicklyto purplish-blue argamon.Greenspan said that they’d acci-dentally discovered the bluetekhelet color when the dyebath was left in the sun; thedye turned wool blue ratherthan purple.
The current Ashkenazimethod for tying tzitzit,Greenspan explained, is inmemory of the way it was donewhen we had tekhelet. TheRambam says that only one halfof one string should be blue, theRyvid holds one of four, andRabeinu Tam two of fourstrings.
“Rabbi Dr. Moshe Tendler
and Rabbi Hershel Schachterwear tekhelet. Rabbi Lichten-stein does not since Rav[Joseph B.] Soloveitchik did notsupport doing so at the time,”Greenspan said.
Greenspan noted that afake tekhelet from the indigoplant, used in the time of theMishna, is the same color and ischemically identical to thesnail-based dye, though thesnail-based dye has two extrabromides from which argamonis derived. Only the animal-based color is halachically per-missible for tzitzit.
Greenspan concluded thelecture by explaining that peo-ple’s perception of color andwavelengths is measured innanometers. Color absorbs cer-tain wavelengths of light andreflects back certain wave-lengths — we perceive thereflected wavelengths as thecolor of the object, measured innanometers.
The tekhelet moleculeabsorbs light at 613 nanome-ters, the number of the mitzvotin the Torah.
More information is avail-able at www.tekhelet.com.
Questions or comments? EmailMalka Eisenberg at [email protected]
GRAD RATES SOAR AT LAWRENCE H.S.Continued from Page One
THE MYSTERIOUS BLUE SNAILContinued from Page One
Attend YU, no charge
Photo by Malka EisenbergDr. Ari Greenspan, founder of P’tilTekhelet, at YI of Woodmere.
9The Jewish Star December 25, 2009
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