Talk about whistling in Dixie!

When the fiercest blizzard in North Carolina's history recently unloaded a foot and half of snow on the city of Raleigh, Chabad-Lubavitch emissary Pinchas Herman, who serves as rabbi of the local Sha'arei Israel synagogue, faced quite a challenge. With the airports closed, roads buried under ice, and freezing winds whipping anyone who dared to venture outdoors, Herman knew it might not be so easy to find ten Jews for a minyan. Weighing heavily on his mind was the thought that this was not going to be an ordinary Shabbat -- a young man, Daniel Rosenberg, was to become Bar Mitzvah.

"We kept hearing reports about this school not opening and that government agency closing down," recalls Rabbi Herman. "We felt compelled to call the local radio station before Shabbat and ask them to announce that even if the Internet goes off, the Sha'arei Israel-Lubavitch minyan is still on..."

"As I trudged through the snow to shul, I thought of the stories I heard from older Chassidim who lived in Russia," Rabbi Herman relates. "They described conditions that would make this snow seem like a flurry. And despite the hardships, they would not budge from keeping the Shabbat and holidays."

As some of the regular congregants started to arrive, the rabbi who, along with his wife Helena and three children, started the Chabad center in 1989 in this community of about 5,000 Jews, braved the icy tempest and went literally from house to house gathering up a quorum. Finally, with the assistance of two recently Bar Mitzvah’ed boys who had been playing in the snow, the minyan was complete.

(Before Shabbat, Raleigh Chabad co-director Helena Herman and her daughter Liba endured repeatedly canceled flights to attend the Lubavitch Women’s Emissaries Conference in New York. They finally took an indirect route on the only flight that made it out of North Carolina during the storm. They arrived in time to spend a comparatively mild winter weekend up north, rich in study and emotional moments -- with some precipitation…)