Category Archives: Family history

December 23, 2024 · 7:30 am

The Thing About My Conversion

by Miles Whitney (Sacramento, CA)

The thing about my conversion was that it was in response to Karen telling me that if we got married, I would have to convert. I had never considered conversion before that and had only a vague awareness that it was even possible. Later Karen clarified that we could do some kind of civil ceremony even if I didn’t convert, but I chose to explore conversion anyway. Obviously I did end up choosing conversion for myself, with quite a bit of joy. But it wasn’t something I originally sought out — it was something that came out of left field but ended up being one of the best decisions I have made. And that was even before my daughter, Bel, died. 

Karen brought up conversion before I proposed. We barely knew each other. I tried to get my head around the idea of conversion. I had an acquaintance that had started the conversion process a few years earlier, but we had lost touch and I had forgotten about it. Of course, I knew about Ivanka Trump, and Karen, who had converted maybe eight years earlier, but the idea that this was something I could do, or anyone could do, was new. I worried about cultural appropriation. At the same time, I felt something like recognition, like I had failed to see something totally obvious that was right in front of me.

I immediately agreed to explore conversion. However, there wasn’t a readily available rabbi or conversion class. This all happened during early COVID. Karen was not affiliated with any congregation at the time, and I lived in a different city. Everything was shut down.

Karen found a rabbi for me. Karen’s father had died a few months into the pandemic (from unrelated causes), and Karen had struggled to find support. Karen had posted something online about their dilemma of how to say the Kaddish. A Bay Area rabbi had offered to help. I remember Karen telling me that the rabbi would be a great person to study with if he was available and willing. Karen insisted that if nothing else I should talk to him, because we would totally hit it off.

I called the rabbi and indeed we hit it off. I told him about my fears of cultural appropriation. He assured me that it was totally fine to convert. He told me a story about how converts are supposed to be treated. He asked me why I thought he opened with that, and I guessed it was because some people might not live up to that ideal. He said I was right. He also told me about a tradition whereby an applicant would ask a rabbi three times when seeking to convert, but he would not hold me to that. He was quite sure I would meet enough obstacles without him throwing up more.

I asked about my Buddhist practice, which I didn’t want to abandon. He assured me that there was no serious conflict, that he himself practiced Zen. We talked about my conversion being in response to Karen’s wishes. I told him I wasn’t sure I would convert. I just didn’t know enough yet. He told me that this was a good position, that no matter how the journey had been initiated, in the end I would have to decide for myself. We would figure out the answer as we went along. I agreed to proceed.    

In the beginning, the rabbi told me to find three things I would have a hard time discarding, and three things I looked forward to gaining. One thing I knew for certain was that I would happily embrace monotheism again, after spending many years following the Christian faith. I had quit that path after too many followers supported Proposition 8. I missed it.

I had not, however, expected to fall in love with Judaism’s magical world of stories, words, and ideas. That is all I had then. I had yet to attend a service or participate in any of the home-based rituals. It was more than enough. My experience was similar to how, in my early twenties, I stumbled into a job at a law firm and found out that the law was exactly how my mind worked. The stories, words, and ideas stole my mind.

I was asked to do writing assignments. I wrote about my relationship with the Divine. The rabbi told me I should polish it up and get it published, that it would be of benefit to the world and to the Jewish people. That sentence made no sense to me. Why would anything I do matter to the Jewish people? I didn’t understand anything yet.

I decided to convert. I sat for the (Zoom) Beit Din. I had sent in my writings earlier, including one about how I chose my Hebrew name, so the rabbis knew something about me. I expressed my fear of not knowing enough, not being Jewish enough. One of the rabbis told me not to belittle my fears, that the sentiment was “so Jewish.” I laughed, delighted. I passed.

I ended up doing the mikveh in the American River, witnessed by Karen and a mutual friend. Even though it was August, the water was so cold that stepping in it made my feet ache. Karen and our friend perched on a large boulder that was surrounded by the freezing water. There was a depression in front of the boulder, where I decided to submerge myself. I waded in, wondering whether the cold could stop my heart. Because I was so slow at learning Hebrew, Karen had to tell me the prayer a few words at a time, which I repeated. I bent my knees and was underwater. I popped back up, and the process was repeated. By the second dip I was numb to the cold. Once again and it was done.

Karen and I had our perfect Jewish wedding two months later. Seven months after that, my daughter Isabel (from a previous relationship) died in her sleep. She was 22. No cause was ever found. Now it was the rituals that saved me. Karen covered mirrors and I did nothing until the rules said I could. Saying Mourner’s Kaddish tethered me to the world when nothing made sense, when my very self was shattered.

I began to write. I wondered if everything was created in six days. If God said everything created was good, was death included? If so, why was death treated as less than, or not as good as, life? I looked for the origin of death in Genesis. I was astounded by what was and was not in the text. Unsure of what I was finding and writing, I shared the piece with a rabbinical student, who saw nothing wrong. I sent the essay out and it was immediately accepted for publication in a Jewish literary journal. I didn’t see that coming. It was the first thing I ever submitted.

I also sought answers to mundane problems in Torah and found them. Karen and I joined a conservative shul. I wrote more essays. I became a Shabbat enthusiast, declaring it a day of “aggressive rest.” I observed new holidays: donuts, fasting, rickety shacks, trees.  But on Bel’s second Yahrzeit, I fell into an awful depression. I felt useless, like everything I had been was dead and all that was left was to wait for my body to follow. Or, in fancy words, I am only here to remember the dead.

I was driving to an AA meeting in the midst of this funk when I was forced to stop because a young woman stepped in front of my car and refused to move. I asked her what she wanted, and she said she needed to call an ambulance. I offered her a ride to the ER instead. She got in the car and asked if we could just talk. She clutched a beer and cried as she told me she was suicidal. She had relapsed a few months prior. She told me about her breakup, and about her happiness during her sobriety. We talked a little more, then I mentioned that I was on my way to a meeting. She looked straight ahead out the windshield and said, “Let’s go!”

I took her to the meeting and although she didn’t stay, the effect on me was profound. It felt like God, through her, was blocking my (downward) path. Like God grabbed my face, looked me in the eye, and shook me. My depression stopped, in part because it felt forbidden. I was convinced there was a command in there, that it was time to do something else. The next week I dreamt that my local rabbi showed me a binder containing three questions about Torah, which I was supposed to answer. I couldn’t read the questions, perhaps because it was a dream, or I didn’t have my readers, or maybe it was in Hebrew.

I don’t know what this means, other than to be open to the new and be willing to say yes. Maybe it means my old life is indeed dead, but a new life lies ahead, which will be significantly Jewish. Maybe I will even do something of benefit to the world and the Jewish people. 

Miles Whitney is a queer, trans, Jewish attorney living in Sacramento, California. Miles started writing creatively after the unexpected death of his daughter, Isabel, in 2022.

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December 16, 2024 · 7:30 am

On That Day

by Herbert Munshine (Great Neck, NY)

It rained that day. The gray sky 

matched everybody’s mood

and as my face was pelted 

with large, heavy drops that hurt,

I reassured myself that I would never cry. 

I was almost 10.

I stood lost in the crowd. I didn’t 

have a need to be up front

but someone nudged me, 

pushed me closer to the grave

and I looked down and saw

the plain pale brown coffin 

decorated with a matching 

Jewish star, the place in which

my mother slept (that was the current 

euphemism), and I was numb. 

An old man speaking through 

his beard, dressed in a long black coat, 

a rabbi whom I’d seen in my rare visits 

to Temple Emanuel in Parkchester when 

certain holidays occurred, said words 

I didn’t understand, made noises 

that offered a young child no comfort, 

and sporadically others, most of which 

I didn’t recognize because my family had chosen 

isolation as a way of life. He mumbled what I guessed

were prayers, and all I felt was the heavy rain that

seemed determined to replace the tears that wouldn’t come.

I paid attention to my heavy breathing 

because, I guess, it took my mind away 

from that pine coffin that held what was left 

of the woman who used to comfort and care for me 

when I was sick, who used to cook for me in her 

Jewish-Latvian way, from scratch to tasty,

with the constantly secret sacred ingredient 

being love.

I had been her companion as she prepared the food,

the one who licked the bowl … but what exactly 

was my role now that she was gone? Who would be

my mother? A little child needed a mother, but she was gone.

These thoughts bombarded my defenselessness

while wise men said their Hebrew words and still 

the tears refused to visit me, and the rain kept falling 

and the shovels lifted senseless dirt and dropped it 

on my mother and I felt like screaming and running 

to her but she was no longer there for me. Instead, 

the sounds replaced her voice, those holy sounds 

that meant nothing to a ten-year-old, 

a boy who simply wanted to hear

his mother’s voice again.


Herbert Munshine grew up in the Bronx and graduated from C.C.N.Y. with both a B.S. in Education and a Master’s Degree in English. You can find his baseball poetry on Baseball Bard where he has had more than 100 poems published, and where he was recently inducted into that site’s Hall of Fame. He lives with his wife in Great Neck, NY.

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November 25, 2024 · 7:30 am

Lighting the Sabbath Candles

by Miriam Bassuk (Seattle, WA)

I can still see my mother lighting

short white candles in a silver

candelabra every Friday night

to usher in the Sabbath, to welcome

the Sabbath bride. Later that night,

our kitchen would grow dark, 

save for those flickering lights.

Over the years, that tradition fell away 

with a whisper I hardly noticed. 

Still, there’s something cellular,

deep in my bones that connects me

to generations of women, 

hands waving three times, covering

their eyes as they say the prayer. 

I feel their hum and sway, and realize

the link to this tradition grows 

ever diluted with each new decade.

Though I no longer feel drawn

to light candles on Friday night,

this memory stays with me as sacred. 

Miriam Bassuk’s poems have appeared in Snapdragon, Between the Lines, PoetsWest Literary Journal, and 3 Elements Review. She was one of the featured poets in WA 129, a project sponsored by Tod Marshall, the Washington State poet laureate. As an avid poet, she has been charting the journey of living in these uncertain times beyond Covid.

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November 18, 2024 · 7:30 am

I Said the Words

by Herbert Munshine (Great Neck, NY)

I said the prayer for a very long year
to remember my mother
(as if I could forget)
to honor her
(as if I needed to)
to show my love for her
(as if that was the so official way
as if that could replace the feeling
fading just too quickly from my mind).

I journeyed to the synagogue
one vacant block from where my father worked
and sat with bearded ancient men
who shared a musty smell
with the hall which they inhabited,
who sought responsibility to guide the child
that I was and would forever be.

I listened to the words of the Kaddish
spoken quite precisely in a foreign tongue
a phrase at a time
and then I found myself repeating sounds
that had no meaning and no substance to me,
but it was my job, as I was told
(as if I had a choice).

And so I went, day by day, and I obeyed
and parroted the words
but never had the chance to say
the words that needed to be said,
about the ties we’d had, my mom and I,
about the caring that we knew
and love and strong security
now shattered — and the joy
of helping her whenever she put on
that apron and began to cook
from European scratch.

I said the words that were my duty,
words so alien to me
with men so distant from my needs
but with each word I mispronounced and mumbled
was the childhood-crafted
realization of what I no longer had
but needed very much.

I said the prayer
but wondered in my elemental way
why any God could be so cruel
to cleave a mother from a child
and substitute the words that had no meaning
to my soul.

Herbert Munshine grew up in the Bronx and graduated from C.C.N.Y. with both a B.S. in Education and a Master’s Degree in English. You can find his baseball poetry on Baseball Bard where he has had more than 100 poems published, and where he was recently inducted into that site’s Hall of Fame. He lives with his wife in Great Neck, NY.

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November 11, 2024 · 7:30 am

Devotional

by Miriam Flock (Palo Alto, CA)

His thigh thrown over mine,

my head nestled against his clavicle—

for thirty years, my husband never guessed

as he embraced me before sleep 

that I was praying: a hymn to that good Lord 

who forms our souls, pairs us in the ether, 

then hurls us into life, solitary 

until we recognize each other 

in the college cafeteria. Thank God, 

I say into my husband’s chest, 

his heart singing me to sleep.

Miriam’s work has previously been published in Poetry, Berru, Salmagundi, CCAR, and other journals.  She was the winner of the 2019 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for poems on the Jewish experience.  Her chapbook, “The Scientist’s Wife,” was published by Finishing Line Press in 2021.

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November 4, 2024 · 7:30 am

Baby-Boomer Blues

by Howard Wach (New York, NY)

I’m a baby-boomer, Bronx-born, a grandchild of immigrants from Poland and Lithuania, raised in a 1960s Long Island suburb, which was half Jewish and half other white ethnics, everyone newly migrated from city neighborhoods. I matured in the ‘70s, when Jew-barring (or Jew-counting) barriers collapsed across all kinds of American institutions. 

But sudden indifference to Jewish catastrophe and open Jew-hating—the post October 7 legacy—has pushed me and my boomer peers to revisit what we thought were rock-solid certainties. The last eight months changed everything.  

I’m a knowledgeable guy, a teacher, a scholar in my own modest way. But now I wonder what I’ve ever really known. History lulled me to sleep, then woke me with a klop. My everyday worries—money, family, health—have new company, a dangerous twist on the tribalism splintering our civil society. Suddenly, the hyphen connecting “Jewish-American” feels frayed, eroded, anything but certain. 

All my life that hyphen signaled a balance I had no reason to doubt. A birthright, if you will. It never felt conditional or one-sided.  

**********   

In 1906 Shai Wach, an 18-year-old immigrant from Warsaw, arrived in New York and renamed himself Charles. Eleven years later he returned to Europe, a doughboy drafted into the 77th infantry division, the “Melting Pot” division, a polyglot mix of immigrants from lower Manhattan. Charlie fought with the Lost Battalion in the Argonne Forest and returned to New York with a fistful of medals, his patriotism signed and sealed. He marched up Fifth Avenue with his old unit every Armistice Day for decades. Growing up in the Depression-era Bronx, my father Daniel, Charlie’s older son, absorbed the lessons of those parades. 

I never heard my grandfather talk about Israel. New York was his home. The United States was his homeland, and he had the medals to prove it. But his brother perished in Auschwitz (also never discussed); his sister disappeared forever into a wartime Polish convent. I suspect that like his Workmen’s Circle comrades, he had no personal Zionist convictions but believed that the Shoah made Israel necessary. Just not for him, or for his son, or for me. 

********** 

My father spoke more often about his World War II service as he aged. Before he became too frail to travel, he eagerly embarked on a veterans’ “Honor Flight” to visit war monuments in Washington. The day he died a biography of Churchill lay open on the magnifying reading device the VA had given him.  

I turned eighteen just as the Vietnam-era draft ended. A graduate of my high school was killed at Kent State. Some classmates sewed peace symbols on their jeans and joined antiwar protests. Others sneered at the “footprint of the American chicken” and enlisted the moment they could. My peacenik mother hated the war; my proud veteran father defended it. I didn’t know what I believed, but I acted the teenage antiwar hippie, singing along with Country Joe and the Fish and listening to Hendrix tear through the national anthem.  

It never occurred to me—or to anyone I knew—that Jewishness could have any relevance to that all-American strife. National identity was properly a civic affair. We all belonged to this country. I had no Zionist feelings, no desire to make aliyah. But I knew—even through the fog of adolescence—that Israel was a fulfillment, a source of ethnic pride heightened by the miraculous Six-Day War.  I grasped its importance and celebrated the victory, but we were Jewish Americans, secure in that solid identity, feeling no unsettling contradiction or tension. All the old barriers were falling. Wartime dissension aside, what could disturb our happy condition? 

**********

I have a different question now. What made me think I’d escape the history I studied and taught? I’m a lucky Jewish baby-boomer born into the post-Holocaust truce that sidetracked Jew-hating and enabled some of us to vault into corporate suites and institutional power. The truce has faltered for a while, but the October 7 aftermath blew it apart.  

We disappeared into benign, assimilated invisibility. Or so I thought. That dreamy moment in the American empire is over. The sudden disregard for Jewish lives unearthed my half-buried boomer memories: Charlie’s brutal, unspoken knowledge of genocide, my parents looking sideways at goyim, their memory of “Gentiles Only” warnings in employment and real estate ads. Blue numbers tattooed on the forearm of my friend Paul’s father. It all flooded back when I saw torn, defaced posters of Israeli hostages and heard noxious chants rising from massive rallies. I was rudely yanked back into history. 

The shock unleashed a stew of unwelcome emotions in me: anger at “progressives” who abandoned moral sense, who preach simple-minded theories of power, seduce the ignorant, and make Israel the centerpiece of global evil; anger at Israeli zealots who reinforce that corrosive lie—lunatic settlers running wild and the politicians who coddle them; fear for my children, who witness Jewishness embroiled in today’s American strife and may never recover the assurance that “Jewish-American” once meant, the hard-won allegiance my grandfather and father gifted to me. 

**********

In the 1980s I wrote a Ph.D dissertation at Brandeis University about civil society in nineteenth-century Britain. One day I was sitting with friends in a common room when a professor in the History Department, a brash and funny character, dropped by to share his latest insight. “Brandeis has a new theme song,” he announced, “a medley of Hatikvah and Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Then he laughed and walked away. 

Until recently the joke made playful, ironic Jewish sense. It fit perfectly at Brandeis, that model of postwar Jewish-American identity and ambition. In the last eight months I think of it more than any time in the last forty years. But its playfulness is gone, its irony soured. 

Here’s a sign of the times. Brandeis is recruiting Jewish students feeling displaced or frightened at campuses where keffiyehs are fashionable and Zionism is a seven-letter version of a four-letter word.  

That old joke isn’t funny at all anymore. 

Howard Wach is a semi-retired City University of New York academic. He’s written and published articles on educational technology and academic history in various journals, and now writes creative nonfiction and short stories. Palisades Review published his short humorous piece about not buying a time share. 

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October 28, 2024 · 7:30 am

Apple Strudel from Cramer’s Bakery 

by Julie Standig (Doylestown, PA)                      

Because it was Rosh Hashanah I was on the hunt

for good strudel and a mislaid memory.

Because of a trip to Poland, coffee and strudel

was a must-have at Café Mozart in Prague’s Old Town.

Because strudel and Eastern Europe are intertwined,

Rudy’s words, spoken long ago, come to mind.

Because he slowly stood up on our visit to Terezin’s

hidden synagogue to speak about his mother.

Because his eyes filled with tears as he recalled

the flaky pastry she rolled to cover the dining room table.

Because she crafted not only strudel but a tender memory

that Rudy clearly told at the age of eighty.

Because I left the bakery with apple strudel in tow, hands

tightly placed on the steering wheel, my wrists aglow in gold.

Because my left was adorned with the watch my father made

for my mother, and on the right, was a wide link bracelet once worn

by my Auschwitz surviving, parachute-making aunt.

Because these holidays always hold a mixture of salt and sugar.

Julie Standig’s poetry has appeared in Schuylkill Journal Review, US1 Poets/Del Val, Gyroscope Review and Crone editions, as well as online journals. She has a full collection of poems, The Forsaken Little Black Book and her chapbook, Memsahib Memoir. A lifelong New Yorker she now resides in Bucks County, Pa. with her husband and their Springer Spaniel. If you’d like to learn more about Julie and her work, visit: https://juliestandig.com

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September 23, 2024 · 7:18 am

My Father’s Name is Israel

by Talya Jankovits (Chicago, IL)

I have only been to Israel once. 

Ten days when I was eighteen,

a program that assured me 

it was my birthright to visit

this land that so many feel

holy connections to. 

The other attendees sped through

customs with generic Jewish names

or secular ones like Dusk or Dawn,

but my father’s name is Israel

and I carry a name that could

sound Israeli; Talya Shulamit.

They thought I was Israeli. 

They asked question after question. 

My father’s name is Israel. 

His name made them wonder

at my American passport. 

Whom did I belong to with a name 

like Talya Shulamit Bat Israel.

To whom did I belong?

To whom do I belong?

Where do I, bat Israel 

belong if not to Israel? 

They tell me I don’t belong there. 

They tell me I don’t belong here. 

Tell me, where do you want me?

Oh, hear Israel. Let us listen.

Let us hear where they want us. 

Talya Jankovits, a multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, has been featured in numerous magazines, some of which she has received the Editor’s Choice Award and first place ranking.  Her poetry collection, girl woman wife mother, is forthcoming from Keslay Books in 2024. She holds her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University and resides in Chicago with her husband and four daughters. To read more of her work you can visit her at www.talyajankovits.com, or follow her on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram @talyajankovits.

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September 16, 2024 · 6:31 am

The Back of Our Hands                 

by Annette Friend (Del Mar, CA)

My nephew’s afternoon wedding in upgraded

Jersey City— a rose covered Chuppah overlooks

the sun-speckled Hudson River, the jagged NYC skyline.

My granddaughter, six, sits on my lap,

in a flowered pink dress, beige patent leather

shoes with tiny bows, softly touches the back

of my hand, traces brown liver spots, blue veins,

red splotches of skin damaged by too much sun,

baby oil slathered teenage skin at the Jersey Shore.

Her pure, pink skin, unblemished, smooth

as rose petals, in stark contrast to my time splattered

covering.  She maps the spots up and down my arm

as if trying to decipher clues about my life.

“What happened here?” she whispers,

points to a thin white scar on my thumb.

“Cut myself with a knife making latkes.

I’ll be more careful when I come to visit,

and we make latkes for Hanukkah.”

Her pearly fingertips march up my saggy arm,

“Your skin is squishy like Jello, Granny A.”

I laugh, she giggles snuggling against me.

Does it matter if my skin tells tales of time

passing when she’s here with me in the sunshine

smiling on this happy, sparkling day?

We watch the bride and groom parade

back down the aisle to applause, the groom

has finally smashed the glass after five tries.

All Jewish celebrations are tinged with ancient

adversity, the broken glass, some say, a reminder

of the Temple we lost thousands of years ago

When I was young these customs

made me shrug my shoulders, annoyed, we Jews

can never just kick up our heels, relax and enjoy.

Now my skin proclaims me an old relic as I watch

fresh young lives around me begin to bloom, I realize

stories of the past show us our strength, the beauty

and pain all of our history contains, the past

entwined in all the moments that we are alive,

part of a tradition that teaches us how to survive.

In this moment, the past, the present, the young

and the old, the sun sets, yet rises, on a new marriage,

and our two hands, my granddaughter’s and mine,

side by side, woven in gold.

Annette Friend, a retired occupational therapist and elementary school teacher, taught both Hebrew and Judaica to a wide range of students. In 2008, she was honored as the Grinspoon-Steinhardt Jewish Educator of the Year from San Diego. Her work has been published in The California Quarterly, Tidepools, Summation, and The San Diego Poetry Annual.

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September 9, 2024 · 6:30 am

Shabbas

by Cheryl Savageau (Boston, MA)

all those years I thought

I was doing it for you

your mother, your family

for our child, so he would know

and have a choice

so why this anger

this year without you

when Rosh Hashanah comes

without ceremony

my feeling that without you

I have no right

we reconciled at Passover

bought new dishes

just two place settings

and ate amid packing boxes

now I claim it greedily

your people shall be my people

your G-d, my G-d

our son married 

beneath the chuppah

our grandson’s bris

now I light the candles

circle my hands, cover

my eyes, feel the world

shift, raise my eyes

to yours

Good Shabbas, we say

Good Shabbas

my love

****

Cheryl Savageau is a convert, and also Native (Abenaki), and her poems are about her first experiences as part of a Jewish family and how she became part of the Jewish people. She has three collections of poetry: Mother/Land, (SALT 2006), Dirt Road Home (Curbstone Press 1995), and Home Country (Alice James, 1992).  Her memoir, Out of the Crazywoods, was published in 2020, and her children’s book, Muskrat Will Be Swimming, was first published by Northland in 1996, then in paperback in 2006. This poem is part of a new collection, New Love/Old Love, looking for a publisher. Visit her website to learn more about her life and work: https://cherylsavageaublog.wordpress.com/

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