A teacher and a mother, Rebbetzin Machlis cooked for several hundred guests every Shabbos for decades
Rebbetzin Henny (Lustig) Machlis had a goal to “bring Shabbos to the whole world,” and she started doing that together with her husband, Rabbi Mordechai Machlis, when they were in their early 20s, immediately after moving from Brooklyn to Israel in 1979. A teacher and a mother, Rebbetzin Machlis cooked for several hundred guests every Shabbos for decades.
In an incredibly inspiring biography, Emunah with Love and Chicken Soup: The Brooklyn-Born Girl Who Became a Jerusalem Legend (ArtScroll/Mesorah Publications, 2016), author Sara Yoheved Rigler offers close to 600 pages of fascinating stories about Henny Machlis and the wisdom she shared. Rebbetzin Machlis’s daughter, Tamar Ornstein, shared that she reads “Henny’s Torah Teachings” from the book “as a mussar sefer to give me chizuk, and to know what my mother would want me to do.”
You can try to replicate Henny’s Shabbos meals — her dips, her kugels, and her sweet chicken — but unless you know the secret ingredient, it’s futile. Food is love, she believed. And she was constantly feeding people — not just on Shabbos. The Machlis door was a revolving one, with hundreds of guests dining there over the course of Shabbos, and throughout the week at all hours of the day and night.
Tamar, the seventh of the fourteen Machlis children, shares what it was like growing up in the Machlis home, and the lessons she carries with her today when preparing for Shabbos.
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