How To Plan A Kosher Vacation (BREAKTHROUGH METHOD)

hello and welcome to my channel if you're new here my name is shlemmie science and i am a hasidic jewish world traveler youtuber podcaster public speaker etc if you've already visited my channel before thanks for coming back we're glad to have you here today we're going to be talking about traveling as an orthodox jew as some of you may know traveling as an orthodox jew is very different than traveling as just any other person and i'm going to explain why so i want to talk a little bit about what it takes to plan a trip as an orthodox jew and how to go about doing that as a religious jewish person i have certain requirements that other people might not have for example i need to eat kosher food the only kind of food i can consume is food that is kosher that means it's either naturally kosher or is prepared properly in a way that is suitable for a kosher consumer additionally jewish men are supposed to pray with a quorum with a minion that means 10 jewish men are supposed to pray together that's the ideal situation for praying as a jew therefore when a religious jew plans a trip they are generally looking for a a place that they can get kosher food and b a place where they can pray in a synagogue with a minion that's very important now i personally often travel to places where there is no synagogue and where there is no kosher food available because that's what my job requires of me but when i do those things i take kosher food with me and i pray on my own in my hotel room or elsewhere but for most kosher travelers or at least for many of them they're always looking for kosher food and a synagogue to pray additionally there's something called mikvah which essentially means a jewish ritual math the mikvah is something that is required to live a proper jewish life so it's something that's also really good to have either in the community that you're living in or the place that you're going to be vacationing in so how does one plan a trip in a way that they can ensure that they get kosher food and a synagogue of prayer and possibly amicuma so there are a couple ways you can do this the simplest way is if you ask someone you know so let's say you want to go to paris and you know somebody who's french or you know somebody who's been to paris you say okay i want to go to paris do you know where i can find the kosher restaurant where i can find the synagogue where there's a mikvah that's something that people do but what if you don't know somebody who's french or somebody who's been to paris and you want to take a vacation to that place so you have to start googling things where can i find the synagogue where can i find the midfield where can i find a kosher restaurant and then basically what you do is you decide where you want to stay or you decide which synagogue or restaurant you want to be close to and then you open google maps and you calculate the distance between the place you want to stay and the place you want to eat etc another thing to keep in mind is that we have something called shabbos it's god's day of rest and we jews rest every week from sundown on friday to sunday on saturday so basically we have 24 to 25 hours of time where we're not using our phones we're not on the computer we don't drive we don't cook so if you're taking a weekend getaway and it's going to be chavez you're not going to be driving to synagogue you're not going to be driving to a restaurant you want to know what places are in walking distance once again that's where google maps comes in you make all the calculations the problem is that it can get kind of tricky because you have synagogues on one side of town restaurants on another side of town there's all these different things that you want to do and you have to try to like map everything out to make sure that nothing's too far from the other this is something that religious jews have to think about whenever they're planning a trip so if you're not jewish you can just literally decide on your destination travel to that place eat wherever you want do whatever you want as a religious jewish person if we want to have access to all the services and food that we need we have to try to figure out exactly where everything is that can be very very time consuming now something to keep in mind is that i'm constantly getting emails and messages on a daily basis from people all over who know that i travel a lot and they kind of want to rely on me for advice now i try to help as many people as possible and i try to respond to as many messages as i can but lately it's just become so time consuming because so many of these messages are coming in every day it's just become unsustainable and impossible to respond to them all in addition to my work as a video content creator and a writer at ami magazine i often do arrange trips for people specifically in the middle east a lot of people call me about dubai and i sometimes arrange a trip for them from a to z flights hotels cars excursions food everything like they literally do not have to worry about a thing i take care of it all but it's not cheap it's a service i offer but that's not what i do most of the time most of the time i'm trying to create content digital and written content and answering all of these inquiries about travel to random places has just become too much to bear so i have a solution that can help me and it can help you listen closely recently a couple people reached out to me they told me they're starting a company called vakazi vakazi is a full service booking platform where you can do amazing things specifically if you're an orthodox jewish traveler so basically the way it works is you go to vakasi.com you type in the place you want to go you type in your dates you search and then the magic happens with one click it shows you options for hotels all the synagogues and walking distance to those hotels all the kosher restaurants are walking the distance to those hotels and it shows you the mikvahs and walking distance to those hotels so basically if you're an orthodox jewish traveler and you're trying to plan a vacation maybe you don't know if a jewish community exists in the city or state you want to go to maybe you don't know if there's kosher food available if there's a synagogue available all you got to do is go to vacation.com you type in where you want to go and it gives you everything you can book hotels now they're going to be adding flights and car rentals and even kosher food delivery services in the future so i highly recommend checking this out i often get companies reaching out to me and they want to partner with me in some way to promote their products or services usually i have to say no and i turn down over 90 of the inquiries i get just because i either don't believe in their product or i don't think their service is strong enough or it just doesn't align with my kind of content so vakasi is a perfect solution it's going to help you plan your vacation in the best way possible and it's going to help me by saving me time so i don't have to answer all these emails because now you can just do it all yourself with one click technology behind vakanzi.com is simply amazing it's built on one of the world's largest travel booking platforms so they're not going to be any glitches everything is going to go smoothly there's amazing customer service before i go i want to mention one more thing there's something that often happens to orthodox jewish travelers it's not supposed to happen but life isn't perfect so sometimes you're traveling on a friday and your flight gets delayed or cancelled or you perhaps you're driving somewhere and you get stuck in a snowstorm you get a flat tire or your car breaks down or whatever and as an orthodox jew you know that when the sun goes down on friday you need to stop and rest for 24 hours so what do you do if you're on the road and you don't know where to go where to turn you have to start looking for other jewish people who perhaps live in this neighborhood city state country where you are and try to figure out if there's a place that you could stay where you can get kosher food now there's a solution fukazi.com you just visit the website you type in where you are and it will bring you the solutions that you need so that you can have a proper shabbos wherever you are i truly believe that vakasi.com is going to change and revolutionize the way orthodox jews travel it's going to make it more convenient than it ever has been before so go to vacation.com the next time you want to plan a trip or vacation i guarantee that you will be blown away by how easy and simple it has become to plan a kosher vacation safe travels see you next time