Dear All:
We are now packing for our return to Toronto on Monday evening arriving in Toronto via Vancouver on Tuesday afternoon.
And we have some catching up to do on the diary from Thursday afternoon:
In the afternoon on Thursday we first visited the Whalers Village Mall in Kaanapali and based on a number of reviews that we read in guidebooks, we visited the Whalers Museum in the Mall. It is not a popular Museum but the guidebooks all rated it highly and said that it was worth the one hour that it would take to cover the self guided audio tour of the museum. It is also free! Well, it was a very interesting little museum that described in detail the life of the people who lived sometimes for 5 years at a time on a whaler ship in the 1800s. We recommend it.
We left the Kaanapali area and drove to see the Kihei district in the center of the island just to see what it was like. We walked thru the area and then decided to see a 5 PM showing of Woody Allen's new film Midnight in Paris. We loved the movie; it was classic Woody Allen and a very entertaining film. We got home early enough to complete all our packing and get a good night sleep before the Friday morning flight to Oahu.
ON Friday morning we flew to Oahu on time and took a cab into town to our hotel, the Ala Moana Hotel which is just outside oif Waikiki and attached to the Ala Moana Mall, billed by locals as the largest mall in the USA. It is huge and has everything you would want.
Because Chabad is in the building next to the hotel, (in what used to be a famous nightclub), the front desk staff was well aware of Chabad and Shabbat issues with the elevator and keys and told us that Chabad will assist us in dealing with these Shabbat related issues. After unpacking in our room (very nice room with a fridge and microwave....which was really not easily useable as it also was a grill and toaster oven)....on the 14th floor with a very nice ocean view, we went down to Chabad to get familiar with how everything runs on Shabbat.
We met the kitchen staff (the "chef" is a chabadnik and the help is mostly hawaiian or american non-jews other than one elderly Israeli fellow), and the Chabad chef told us that one of the helpers in the kitchen, Elijah, who is a non Jew but has aspirations of becoming Jewish, is the resident Shabbos Goy, and we can make arrangements with him to either walk us up and down or to escort us on the elevator up and down as many number of times that we desired over the Shabbos. We spoke with him and made the necessary arrangements with him. The trick in this particular hotel is that access to the elevator and to all stairwells is by an electronic keycard. And therefore unless you make arrangements, you cannot access any exits without a goy.
We went to the mall next door and did some grocery shopping for the last few days in Honolulu, went swimming and relaxed before Shabbos.
Shabbos began at 7 PM and Fran lit candles downstairs at Chabad. There was about 15 people there when we arrived and people kept streaming in. By the time the evening was over, there were about 50 people there, consisting of a few tourists like us, some locals, and a large number of Israeli "kioskim" kids.
There are kiosks all over the Islands selling Dead Sea creams and "magic skirts" and other such specialty items and many if not most of them are run by Israeli kids of just post army duty who come over for a few years to make some money by running their franchise and hopefully go back to Israel at the end of their tour of duty. They are literally starved here for any connection to Israel and Judaism and other than Chabad there is no community for them to go to. So after they close their kiosk (which may be much after Shabbat begins) they stream into the Chabad Center where he provides a separate Shabbat table for them with Israeli salads and challot and wine and vodka and they spend a few hours there with some sort of a shabbat or family atmosphere. They do not show up on Shabbat morning as they are all at work running their kiosks.
While walking thru the islands, we met many Israeli kids at their kiosks and after a while, I would just say "ma shlomaich" as I was walking by to see if they were Israeli...9 out of ten would answer in Hebrew and we began a conversation. We even met a young girl in Maui (where there is really no community at all) who told us that she does not run her kiosk on Shabbat (she gives it to someone else to run) because she and a girlfriend will not work on Shabbat and they have really not had much meat or chicken since arriving in Maui because its availability is sporadic and she tries to eat kosher.
Back to Chabad...we met a number of interesting people at Chabad....most had come here years ago for a visit and stayed. Most were singles and therefore there is no group of families, just a collection of singles, whose only jewish connection is Chabad. There was one couple who were in their late thirties, early forties, who had both become very frum thru Chabad after 20 years on the Islands, had married last year and were on their way to Monsey because of the difficulty of living the life of a frum person in Hawaii.
We had a good meal, sang some zemirot, heard divrei torah from the Rav and then had Elijah escort us upstairs.
Morning Shacharit was supposed to begin at 10 AM and the Rav told us on Friday night that in classic Chabad tradition, it usually does not get going till 10:30. So we arranged with Elijah to come and fetch us at 10:15. Well, when he had not yet arrived by 10:35, we began to panic with the thought of being locked upstairs with no Shabbat meal all day....so I kept an eye on the hall and thankfully we saw someone checking out, taking his luggage toward the elevator. We ran and joined him on the elevator down to the lobby.
It seems that Elijah was not available to fetch us as he had been sent on a mission by the Rav to go to his house and bring a fresh bottle of Vodka as they had finished off the first bottle on Friday night and the prospect of a meal without the proper kind of mashkeh would not constitute the seudat shabbat as an authentic Chabad meal!
Shabbat had about 25 attendees and there was a large kiddush/lunch after the davening. We hung out there till about 2:30 when they were supposed to daven mincha but by then their minyan had dissipated and therefore the group would next assemble for maariv and havdalah at about 8. We asked Elijah to escort us upstairs and decided to daven maariv and havdalah in our room as we did not want to chance Elijah leaving us in the lurch again.
Over lunch, we had a long talk with the Rav and he told us about being sent to Hawaii by the Rebbe zt"l 23 years ago as a young married man and working to build some sort of kehillah in the most remote place in the world, Hawaii. The challenges of being frum here are many; the availability of kosher meat, chicken, cholov yisrael products etc. is scarce, the lack of a community etc all make it very difficult. There are many lost souls here who roam in and want to convert and want to latch on to the Jewish community and that presents its own group of challenges. There is much intermarraige and the rav has to deal with the problems that ensue when asked to officiate at a bris or a wedding of someone who is not halachically Jewish. He and his wife actually sent their boys away to Crown Heights at the age of seven to live with their grandparents so that they could grow up in a frum environment! Very interesting.
On Sunday morning we went on a two hour catamaran sailboat cruise of the harbor and saw dolphins, sea turtles and went into the open waters into enormous waves that rocked the boat...very unique experience. After lunch we went down to Waikiki and went for a ride in an outrigger canoe where you row out into the ocean and wait for the biggest wave that you can find and ride the wave into shore. A bit easier than surfing and a very exciting experience. We were surely the most overdressed people in the canoe and in fact on the entire Waikiki beach...great time.
We spent the rest of the afternoon shopping in the market, and came back to our hotel in the evening for our last dinner of the trip.
Today, we are going to spend a relaxing day walking the city before heading to the airport at 5 for our flight overnight to Vancouver and then on to Toronto tomorrow.
It has been a very good trip...Hawaii ranks up there with Norway, Austria, New Zealand, Banff and Singapore in our group of the scenic places that we have visited although we think that both Norway and Austria were prettier. In terms of weather, it cannot be beat. About 85 degrees everyday but the winds and breeze from the ocean never leave you uncomfortably hot.
We would definitely consider coming back to explore the areas that we have not seen.
We look forward to seeing all of you soon
All the best
Fran and David
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