Category Archives: Jewish identity

October 28, 2019 · 9:21 am

Three Prayers, One Heart

By Harold Witkov ( Downers Grove, IL)

In 2018 I suffered a heart attack and ended up having quintuple bypass open-heart surgery. When I left the hospital five days later, I had the expectancy of recovery, but rather than getting better, things got worse. 

Not long after I got home from the hospital, my health began to decline and I was diagnosed to have “heart failure,” and told that I was a “candidate for sudden death.” The problem was my heart function, or “ejection fraction.” It was dangerously low. I could drop dead.

What I needed most then was a surgically implanted defibrillator to zap and kick-start my heart should it stop beating, but that could not happen until three months after my surgery. In the meantime, all I could do was continue on with cardiac rehab, take my medications, and count the days.

During those months, I prayed a lot, shed tears, and suffered a series of complications. I became very sensitive to the word heart, and the heart symbol ❤️ (wherever they might appear during the course of a day). 

Once, for instance, when I lost Internet service for a few days, my laptop mercilessly put a heart symbol with a crack in it on my computer screen with the message: “You’re not connected.” How true it seemed.

In response to my overwhelming sense of vulnerability, I created my own special little prayer:

Shaddai, Shaddai, 

Please don’t let me die.

Heart, Heart,

Have a new start.

I clearly recall my somber Yom Kippur that year. During the service, I softly read aloud, along with the other congregants, the Ashamnu — the “We Have Sinned” prayer. In correspondence with my many transgressions, I gently tapped my heart with my right fist. For someone recovering from heart surgery and living with heart failure, it was a sobering experience.

The day of my defibrillator implant finally arrived. Not yet sedated, I was on the operating table when I became aware that things were not what they should be. They brought my wife in and explained to us that they had just discovered my body had an anomaly: I had a “persistent left superior vena cava.” It was a benign condition, but a condition that nonetheless canceled the implantation procedure. There was another defibrillator company that made an alternative defibrillator for people like me, I was told, but that would be another day.

My body anomaly and last-minute canceled surgery experience gave me a lot to think about. Despite the grave risk, I decided to at least temporarily forgo a defibrillator and just try to work at raising my heart function on my own. This I would do through exercise, medication, healthy eating, and prayer.

Then, in July of 2019, I had my 4th echocardiogram. This time my heart function was significantly higher. It was still below normal, but I was no longer a candidate for a defibrillator. There was also no scar tissue to be found. My heart had physically gotten slightly smaller too and, according to my cardiologist, that was a positive. The results were “all good.”

I am inclined to say that while my heart has been getting physically smaller, it has also been growing a lot on a spiritual level. This whole experience has made me a better person, although I’m still a work-in-progress.

Recently, I celebrated another Jewish New Year. Once again, in synagogue, I recited aloud the Ashamnu. This time my right fist gently tapped upon a much healthier and happier heart. And on Yom Kippur a new prayer touched my soul.

The Rabbi announced, “Please turn to page 261 in our prayerbooks. This year we are adding a new prayer, the Birkat HaGomeil — Sharing Thankfulness.” The Rabbi continued, “For those among us who have experienced a near-death experience over the past 12 months, and are comfortable in doing so, please rise as the congregation recites the Birkat HaGomeil.” In a sea of seated congregants, a dispersed handful, myself included, stood:

Baruch atah Adonai,

Eloheinu melech haolam

HaGomeil l’chayavim tovot, 

Sheg’malani kol tov.

Blessed are You, our God Eternal; Your majesty fills the universe – through Your generosity I have experienced Your goodness.

Harold Witkov is a freelance writer in the Chicago area who previously worked in textbook publishing and sales for more than 30 years.

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October 14, 2019 · 6:30 am

Columbus in Granada

by Annette Friend (Del Mar, CA)

Spain, last October,
the days always starting with rain.
We toured the slippery cobblestone
streets of Old Granada with careful steps, umbrellas crashing into
sides of alleyways lined with purple bougainvillea,
walls topped with shards of jagged blue and green glass
keeping robbers away from white washed houses.
Our guide tells us these alleys were once
the Jewish Quarter hundreds of years ago.
No Jews here now, only our name remaining.
Via de Judios.
I am lonely for them.

We take the bus into the teeming city center.
Protests continue against cutbacks in mental health,
signs fly from windows admonishing Catalons not
to secede from Spain. I am reminded of the U.S.,
our issues, our national fractures.

It is almost Columbus Day.
Here he is still venerated, unlike
America which has more mixed emotions.
Celebrations and bullfights are scheduled,
We are told the traffic will be brutal.

Columbus’s bones are buried in Granada,
(at long last with DNA evidence)
in a magnificent church where we visit,
close to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand’s graves,
who sent him on his journey
paid for with Jewish money.

There are still those rumors that Columbus
might have been a Converso, a Jew in hiding,
born in Italy, speaking only Spanish,
his children establishing a home in Jamaica where Jews
could practice freely, a land Columbus
discovered in his travels.

How strange his bones ended up in a church
mired near Isabella who expelled all Jews from Spain
in 1492, the same year Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
Are his bones crying
forced to listen to church bells ring forever
while his soul is singing the Shema?
Or are they laughing at the joke history has played
as a once reviled hidden heretic is brought back home to Spanish ground,
surrounded by the crosses that once condemned his people
and worshipped as a hero?

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 Tidepools, Summation, and The San Diego Poetry Annual.

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October 7, 2019 · 7:00 am

The Light in the Window

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

Rosh Hashanah, 5780 –
I’m sitting in the synagogue
listening to the rabbi preaching
the importance of listening
with eyes, ears, heart and soul,
to be part of the congregation
that says hineni, “Here I am.”
But I am a bad listener,
drifting in and out of the rabbi’s words.
My eyes wander up to the stained glass windows
where I see and sense the sunlight pouring in.
This light fills me with awe and comfort,
giving me the feeling there is hope
in these times of conflict and uncertainty.
The rabbi finishes his speech,
but it’s not his words I take away;
it is the language of light
that offers me His presence instead,
and I become  a most complete and faithful listener.

The author of twelve books for young adults, Mel Glenn has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years. Lately, he’s been writing poetry, and you can find his most recent poems in the YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy, edited by M. Jerry Weiss.

If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit: http://www.melglenn.com/

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September 23, 2019 · 9:30 am

Holy Ground

by Kayla Schneider-Smith (Rishon LeZion, Israel)

Bubby holds up a fist and makes a
zero with her fingers

This is how “Jewish”
Reform Jews are to me,

she shuffles me through crowded markets where
boiling men wear summer coats and study
their feet as we pass them

step to the side, step to the side,
Bubby goads, but all I hear is

make yourself smaller,
make yourself zero

Bubby buys me a white shirt
and a white skirt for Yom Kippur
the way she thumbs through the racks and lights up when
she finds something right
makes me feel like she loves me

so that each time the hot familiar anger rises
I remember how she bought me a Yom Kippur outfit and
walked me through the city with her rolling shopping bag and
poured me iced coffee slushies and
paid for taxi rides home and told me

I’m waiting for you to wake up

Wake up to what, Bubby?
to your God who
invalidates my God?
to my God who challenges yours?

Kayla Schneider-Smith is a poet, musician, and social activist from Monmouth County, New Jersey. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College, she recently completed the Yahel Social Change Fellowship in Rishon LeZion, Israel, where she taught English, piano and guitar to children, adults and senior citizens in a small neighborhood called Ramat Eliyahu. Kayla is currently pursuing her Masters of Fine Arts in Writing at The University of San Francisco and working as the Mindful Arts Program Coordinator at the San Francisco Education Fund. She aspires to be an English professor, Rabbi, or Interfaith Minister one day.

If you’d like to read some of her work in prose, visit: https://www.yahelisrael.com/single-post/2018/11/27/To-Be-Or-Not-to-Be-Progressive-Judaism-in-Israel

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September 16, 2019 · 7:00 am

Honey

by Saraya Ziv (Jerusalem, Israel)

Joëlle’s humongous plasma TV takes up a whole high wall of her hairdressing salon. You can’t miss it. And I, not having a TV of my own, don’t want to: an appointment with Joëlle is an appointment with culture.

Besides French soaps, she favors Israeli cook-offs or the spitfire chat-chat of talk shows. Her natal French and acquired Hebrew lead me through the weird life of chanteur Johnny Hallyday to an ancient and skilled woman teaching her great-grandson to make honey cake. The cake is for Rosh Hashana, which is imminent.

Commercials wish me Shana Tova, and, at last, six glamourosos of both sexes sit in a wide U, mikes clipped to their hip clothes. One woman sports long sleeves but naked shoulders, one curly haired man wears sunglasses nipped into the cleavage of his shirt. All of these people are Jews, and they are all talking at once.

I hear them say Rosh Hashana, but I don’t know if they’re condemning or celebrating. They talk straight into the commercials. They’re talking when the camera returns. They don’t seem to care that I’m out here. They’re busy.

Another commercial with more Shana Tovas, and when we return a young woman, sweet faced, dressed plainly, warm with smiles, is talking about her career.

Joëlle tells me the woman is a chef, a new Israeli from New Zealand. The panel pelts her with questions ensemble, and gently, smiling at the onslaught, she replies. Black-and-white stills show her at her pots and ovens. Joëlle says, “They’re asking her what she makes special for Rosh Hashana.”

She describes a honey upside down cake in English and Mr. Curly Hair translates to Hebrew. “Ha-fuach.” I pause. It’s the word in the Megilla of Purim, where good and rotten, optimism and dread, normal and insane, are tangled: upside down.

They throw her more questions. It’s a mosh pit of noise. She describes a complex dish, then slips back to English to say, “Honey coated ham.” No one needs to translate.

This panel of hip Jews, to a one, becomes absolutely still. Ms. Shoulders looks down at her shoes. Mr. Curly stares ahead.

The director must be nervous with this hush. His timing wildly off, he cuts to commercials, which wish me, again, Shana Tova.

Saraya Ziv attended SUNY Buffalo, worked as a Business Analyst on Wall Street, and left the United States one April morning in 2015 on a one way ticket to Tel Aviv. She was born and lived in New York City all her life, but now lives a short drive to Jerusalem. You can find more of her work at her website, Jerusalem Never Lies https://www.jerusalemneverlies.com, where this piece first appeared

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September 2, 2019 · 7:00 am

A Taste of Home

by Tania Hassan (Gilbraltar)

It will be kibbud av va’em,
I tell myself before leaving the little ones behind.

I fly the 9 hours to gain some eternity.
My oldest friend picks me up at the airport. It’s been ten years.

Shehecheyanu – for keeping me alive.

I walk out into the pouring rain,
I bless it.

Inhaling the sweet smell of wet cedar and grass into every pore of my being,
We duck into a tiny coffee shop in a Montreal alleyway.

Rich, thick and nutty, that latte goes down like
Abuela’s autumn bean soup.

Vekiyemanu – for sustaining me.

We pass the steel moose cut-outs at every major intersection,
I stop for the requisite selfies.

Later I reflect on the expression on my face;
The way my smile reaches the whites of my eyes.

I embrace my parents,
My father’s Ralph Lauren aftershave,
The nephews I never met.

I never noticed their scattered freckles on FaceTime.

Vehigiyanu Laz’man Hazeh – for bringing me to this season in my life.

I laugh with brothers. Hearty guffaws we have to stifle with anyone else.

The boundaries fade away and I am 13 again.

Honouring my parents is easy when my husband is neatly tucked away at home,
meals prepared in the freezer, and I’m sleeping in my childhood bed.

The baby weight I just about lost,
Was greedily piled back on as my palate stopped pretending it was a cultured European.

Though the height of kavod/honour would have me preparing Shabbat for my parents,
I took a back seat and allowed my mother to serve her traditional Morroccan feasts

Honey and cumin, turmeric, cinnamon, and all the love you could cram into five days and nights..

Filling my heart with home.

Five days and not a day longer.

Baruch – A blessing.

Tania Hassan is an ABA therapist who lives in Gibraltar, a 2.2 km squared British peninsula that shares a border with Spain.  Her Spanglish is superb, her British accent less so.  When she has spare time, she writes and pines for Canadian winters. 

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August 5, 2019 · 9:29 am

Anne Watches Me

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

Anne Frank and the Marranos of the
Portuguese Synagogue of Amsterdam
would not be proud of me as I walk, with cane,
a second day in this canal-laced capital.
Even surrounded by rich Jewish tradition,
located in the center of town,
I feel tangential to the teachings of
Spinoza and Maimonides.
What will make me feel more Jewish?
I have broken too many rules,
avoided too many rites, to lay claim to
being an active participant in my own religion.
And yet,
I am my father’s son,
he who escaped the Holocaust,
who suffered survivor’s guilt,
who nevertheless passed his heritage on to me.
I think of him, and all Jews, those who perished,
those who survived, as I slowly climb the stairs
in the Anne Frank House in the heart of a city that
has remembered and respected its Jewish history.
Ascending those stairs to the “Secret Annex,”
I can hear Anne’s footsteps behind me,
asking questions for which there are no answers:
Why me? Why us? Why now? –-
questions that echo both past and present
as tyrants then and now seek to control the world.
Anne, I feel your strength and bravery
wandering the rooms of your abbreviated adolescence
as a renewed Jew here in the old city of Amsterdam.

The author of twelve books for young adults, Mel Glenn has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years. Lately, he’s been writing poetry, and you can find his most recent poems in the YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy, edited by M. Jerry Weiss.

If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit: http://www.melglenn.com/

 

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July 8, 2019 · 9:11 am

Lion of Hope

by Brad Jacobson (Columbia, MO)

Black stocking feet and no shoes.

Blue and white prayer shawl
wrapped around his head and arms.

He stands in front of the ancient Wall,
his face hidden.

Large as a lion, he raises his hands
like a street performer before the worshippers.

He sweeps his arms above
the old man in white,

above a boy
in a blue baseball jersey,
#32,

above the rabbi
in back of the Torah.

The Lion of Hope roars, and
his prayers speed like Lefty’s fastball,
soar to the top of Mt. Moriah,
pure as tears protecting a child’s prayer.

He steps slowly to a chair by mine.
I touch the Wall and hear
the Big Man whisper,
I am exhausted.

After prayers we walk together
to the Kiddush table by the stairs.

The Rabbi raises a cup of wine.
Big Man turns to sing sweet
Shabbat songs to Chinese tourists.

He shakes my hand.
Shabbat Shalom.
Be healthy. Have peace.

Brad Jacobson is a volunteer every summer in Israel in the SAREL program. He teaches TESOL at the Asian Affair Center at the University of Missouri, where he has an MEd in Literacy. In the summers he enjoys exploring places with his camera like the Old City of Jerusalem, Tzfat, and the Red Sea where he scuba dives. He has been published in Tikkun, Voices Israel, Poetica, Cyclamens and Swords, and the University of Missouri International News.

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June 24, 2019 · 6:02 am

Lisa and Stanley

by Janice L. Booker (Malibu, CA)

Shortly after the end of World War Two, I received an excited call from my husband’s Aunt Frima. Her voice was shaking with urgency as she told me, “I have a niece in Russia who wants to contact me. I never even knew her.”

The contact was an example of serendipity.  A young Jewish soldier from Brooklyn was determined to reunite as many Jewish families as he could, as passionate to do this as was his mother in Brooklyn. Lisa told him she had an aunt in Philadelphia. She knew her last name but that was all. He sent his mother Lisa’s scant contact information, and his mother placed a notice in a Philadelphia newspaper that served the Jewish community. One of Aunt Frima’s daughters saw the notice and asked her mother, “Do you have a niece in Russia named Lisa? She’s looking for you.” That started the ball rolling

My husband’s Aunt Frima and his Uncle Ben had been in America as immigrants for many years. They had five American born daughters and lived  a normal middle class life. When I was married to their nephew, we became part of each others families. She was particularly fond of me because I could speak Yiddish with her. She and Uncle Ben came often to our home for holiday meals. Aunt Frima was kosher so she brought her own food.  Uncle Ben ate what she brought and also what I made.

Lisa, 32, was widowed and the mother of two small children. She was evacuated from Moscow when the German army invaded Russia. A day after the invasion in 1941, the Soviets established a makeshift evacuation program to move Soviet citizens from major cities and the probabilities of German bombings. Tashkent in Uzbekistan, 1734 miles from Moscow, was targeted as the site. Lisa and her two small children were among the evacuees. Tashkent had become a makeshift refugee center, and Lisa and her family settled in with primitive housekeeping facilities, hoping the city would escape German occupation, and she prayed for peace.

Stanley, a single, unattached male, was also evacuated from Moscow to Tashkent. Stanley was a loner, a quiet intellectual with an absorbing profession. He restrung fine violins with horse tail hair for violinists all over the world. The war halted his business and he, too, wondered what his life would be like after Tashkent. Lisa and Stanley met and a romance developed in the detritus of the camp. They both wanted to emigrate to the States.

As was necessary, Lisa needed a sponsor in America to facilitate immigration. Aunt Frima and Uncle Ben accepted that role, and, with the help of their daughters, the flurry of paper work and bureaucracy began. After about a year, Lisa, Stanley and her children  arrived in West Philadelphia on Aunt Frima’s doorstep. She called me to say, “They’re very tired now but come here tomorrow to meet them.” I did and found Lisa and Stanley sitting stiffly and stone faced on a blue velvet sofa. I could understand their apprehension of this new life. How long could they stay in this house? How would they support themselves? Had they left familiarity for the unknown? Lisa had assured her aunt that she and Stanley had been legitimately married in Tashkent, but Aunt Frima was skeptical. She insisted on taking them to a rabbi to witness an official Jewish wedding.

They were quickly integrated into the entire family and turned out to be warm, intelligent and helpful. Although extremely grateful for Aunt Frima’s willingness to sponsor and facilitate their repaired lives, Stanley and Lisa knew they must find ways to take charge of themselves. Stanley got a job selling hot dogs at the Philadelphia baseball park and Lisa worked in a hat factory.  Eventually, Stanley was able to return to his unique profession, and Lisa became a designer in the hat factory.  They prospered and eventually retired to Florida.

I was very fond of them, and we became friends as well as family.  They were so grateful to be given a new chance in America. And I was grateful to have them part of my life.

Janice L. Booker is a journalist, author of four books, including The Jewish American Princess and Other Myths, an instructor in creative non-fiction writing at the University of Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia radio talk show host, and a free-lance writer for national publications.

 

 

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June 10, 2019 · 10:42 am

My First School Bus Ride

by Maureen Rubin (Los Angeles, CA)

When I finished second grade, my parents moved to the Detroit suburbs.  Mom was expecting another baby so we needed a bigger house. This was 1956. Nobody lived in the suburbs yet.  The roads weren’t paved and there were plagues of earthworms after it rained. 

In September, I took my first school bus ride.  As soon as I was seated, I felt a wet spitball sting on my neck.  

“You kike,” yelled one girl.  “Get off our bus.  Get out of our school.  We don’t want you dirty Jews here!”

This made no sense.  What did I do?  I took a bath last night.  I was clean.  I was only eight. I wasn’t even sure what a Jew was.  

When I got to my classroom, the girl who threw the hardest, wettest spitball was sitting at one of the desks.  Her name was Marsha. She told all my classmates not to speak to me because I was a Jew.  They complied.  

I was often tormented throughout elementary school.  If I raised my hand in class, I heard whispers of “Smarty-pants Jew.”  At recess, I stood alone. The other kids jumped rope or played jacks.  If I tried to join them, they twirled the rope at warp speed and made me fall and skin my knees. They stole my jacks,

I finally learned why.  Our new house was built in the middle of farmland. My subdivision had expensive new houses that many Jews had purchased.  Jealousy probably fueled the hatred.

In high school, Dave asked me to a school dance.  He was very cute and very not Jewish.  The day before the dance, I saw him speaking with Marsha.  That night he called me and said he couldn’t go to the dance with me.  I cried.

For most Americans, anti-Semitism is abhorrent, but most likely abstract.  Perhaps someone in a college dorm asked to see a Jewish student’s horns. Maybe a fellow vacationer advised bargaining with the natives because, “You can always Jew them down.”  But to me, anti-Semitism has always caused mental and physical agony.

Over the years, though, I got stronger.  I earned a law degree and worked in social justice organizations.

At my 25th high school reunion, I saw Marsha.  She came up to me and said, “It’s great to see you.  I have lots of Jewish friends now.”

That sentence finally gave me the power to confront her.

“You tortured and bullied me when I was a kid,” I said.  “You might think it’s admirable to tell me you have lots Jewish friends now, but that statement proves you’re still an anti-Semite.  A racist. A bigot. You don’t understand how dangerous it is to see people as Jew first, and anything else second. Even a friend.”  

Maybe I shouldn’t have confronted Marsha that night.  Maybe instead I should have thanked her for motivating me to fight ignorance, bigotry and racism in all the Marsha’s of the world.  

Maureen Rubin is an Emeritus Professor of Journalism at California State University, Northridge. In her 30 years on campus, she taught writing and media law , served in a variety of administrative positions, published widely and received numerous teaching and public service awards.  Prior to joining the university, Rubin was Director of Public Information for President Carter’s Special Assistant for Consumer Affairs in the White House, and held similar positions for a U.S. Congresswoman and several non-profits. She has a JD from Catholic University School of Law In Washington, D.C., an MA in Public Relations from University of Southern California and a BS in Journalism from Boston University.

 

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