Category Archives: Judaism

February 24, 2025 · 7:30 am

Saying Kaddish for an Unworthy Parent

By Karin Joy Sprecher (Newton, MA)

Dear Friend,

Though I could not attend your Shiva in person – my husband stood there for both of us – I’ve thought of you every day since our conversation when you borrowed my mother-in-law’s wheelchair.

Funerals are never easy. Shivas are even more difficult, especially when the relationship was less than ideal or even fraught and sad and painful. 

How does one sit Shiva for someone who often caused us pain? How does one say Kaddish for a parent who was also mean, nasty, down-right abusive?  Two different rabbis and a cantor, in different ways, gave me essentially the same message: try sitting Shiva & saying Kaddish not for who that parent actually was. Instead, try sitting Shiva … try saying Kaddish for the parent you did not have, but that every child deserves.

I had my doubts.

But I was truly surprised that, over time, it felt not only like something I could do.  It felt right! 

What the rabbis and cantor specifically said — that there was a place in Jewish practice which not only acknowledged imperfect, damaging parenting and how that affected one’s ability to follow Jewish rituals for death and mourning — eventually became, for me, very powerful.  It enabled me to find solace in rituals which originally seemed inappropriate, even untenable.

It gave me a place to sit with other mourners in community, even if my feelings were different, even if my raison d’être for being there was the opposite of what others were experiencing.

Over time I remembered there were other warm, loving, nurturing adults in my life who, intentionally or not, filled a parent-like role in my life. Those who became role models for good parenting. Those who enabled me to become the kind of parent I wanted to be … the kind of parent I needed to be … for my children … because  I saw the way they parented their children. 

I saw that their children felt seen, were nurtured, were loved just as they were, whose strengths were appreciated and whose negative behaviors were lovingly redirected. I saw what was possible, and I saw its wonderful effects. I saw what I believe every child needs and deserves.  And, through parenting my own children, I finally realized that I was becoming the parent I deserved to have as a child.

By the end of saying Kaddish, I gratefully realized that there were people in my life who truly loved me, nurtured me, just as I was. They were my “real” parents, just not my biological parents.

Karin Joy Sprecher, an artist specializing in Judaica, was inspired to begin writing again the year before Covid shut everything down thanks to a Hebrew College class  “Writing Through a Jewish Lens: A Jewish Women’s Writing Workshop.”  She lives with her husband in Newton, MA, where she continues to sing, virtually, in Jewish choirs and take online classes in Jewish and secular subjects.

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February 21, 2025 · 7:30 am

The Lord is My Shepherd 

by Rick Black (Arlington, VA)

I shall want to know one day

why God made hurricanes and floods – 

and rested on the seventh day.

I shall want to know one day

why God sent down famine and disease – 

and rested on the seventh day.

I shall want to know one day 

why God rested on the seventh day

but did not grant us any rest.

Rick Black is an award-winning book artist and poet. His artist books are represented in private and public collections, including the Library of Congress, Yale University and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. A journalist for many years, Rick’s poetry collection, Star of David, won Poetica Magazine’s 2012 poetry chapbook contest for contemporary Jewish writing. A reading of Star of David was held in the Middle Eastern & African Division of the Library of Congress. He recently published a new collection, Two Seasons in Israel: A Selection of Peace and War Haiku.

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February 17, 2025 · 7:30 am

Jewish Questions

by Nina Zolotow (Berkeley, CA)

I’m sorry,” the Danish receptionist said in English. “But I’ll need to search your bag before you go in.”

When we had planned our second trip to Copenhagen, I hadn’t thought of going to the Dansk Jødisk Museum, the Danish Jewish Museum—I didn’t even know that it existed. But it turned out that the fifth-floor apartment I’d rented for our week-long stay in the Norrebro neighborhood overlooked a beautiful, old Jewish cemetery from the 17th century. The first time I stood on the apartment’s balcony, I noticed that in the shade of several very tall, slender trees, there was a cemetery, not the park I had expected. It looked wild and untended, with countless worn, old gravestones of varying sizes, some standing straight up, some crooked, and others lying completely flat, all surrounded by lush, flowering summer weeds. And at the opposite end of the cemetery from our apartment, there was an old brick wall that had a small gate in it. The sense of death, of life, and of history all together left me with a quiet feeling of awe.

However, I hadn’t even realized that Jews had lived in Denmark since the 17th century, and now it turned out there had been enough Jews in Denmark to fill up a cemetery. But, of course, Jews went everywhere, didn’t they? Wandering Jews, they called us in the 19th century because we were always looking for ways to escape oppression, persecution, and violence—always searching for places we could call home. That was what became the “Jewish Question.”

But even after exploring the cemetery itself, which was founded in 1694 and was 13,500 square meters with around 5,500 burials, and then reading up on the history of Jews in Denmark, I was left with many questions.

My husband, Brad, was also intrigued. So, when I told him I discovered in my online searches that there was a Jewish museum in central Copenhagen, he immediately said, “Let’s go!”

It took us a while to find the museum because it was, to our surprise, part of the complex of old buildings surrounding the Royal Palace and the entrance was through a very small contemporary addition to a larger old building. When we walked through the front door into the museum’s lobby, there was just one person sitting at the reception desk and we were the only visitors in the room. The receptionist spoke perfect English, but she was very Danish-looking—blond, blue-eyed, and with Scandinavian features—so she was clearly not someone who shared my heritage.

After we bought out tickets, the receptionist asked us whether we wanted to use one of the lockers before we went into the museum. When we said no, she searched my very small handbag.

The receptionist apologized again after I showed her the sunglasses, sunscreen, lipstick, tissues, and charge cards that I had tucked into my little cross-body bag.

“I understand,” I said. “I’m Jewish so I appreciate you being careful.” Still a wave of unease washed over me at the thought that even here in Copenhagen—where everyone seemed so civilized, so very nice—extra security was needed at any place that was “Jewish.”

When we walked through the doorway into the museum proper, we entered a very unusual space. Although the outer shell of the building, which was originally the Royal Boat House from the 17th century, had brick walls, large arched windows, and vaulted ceilings, the interior was very modern and untraditional. The inner, white paneled walls were tilted and asymmetrical, and they seem to be arranged in some kind of labyrinth. And the wooden floors that guided visitors to the exhibits embedded in the walls were sloping instead of flat. Altogether, the design left me feeling tipsy and off balance.

Then, we noticed a very odd little display that had video images of Jewish people projected into a small model of a two-story house and a companion audio track promising a brief history of 400 years of Jewish life in Denmark, starting with the arrival of the very first Jewish merchants back in 1622. So we sat down together and put on the headphones. And as soon as I heard the narrator begin with these questions — Where are you going? Are you going home? Where is home? — I started to cry.

At first, I felt embarrassed about the tears flowing down my cheeks, but then I thought fuck it, it’s a Jewish museum and I’m Jewish, and if I fucking feel like crying I’ll fucking cry even if I have no idea why. My sorrow felt so primal, triggered instantly from somewhere deep inside me.

As I continued listening to the audio presentation and watching the display, I calmed down. Most of what the presentation covered was information I was already familiar with by then—how the first Jews in Denmark were Sephardic merchants invited by Denmark’s King Christian IV to settle in a new town, Glückstadt, on the river Elbe, in the early 17th century. The story is that King Christian thought that having Jewish merchants living in his new town would bring more business to the community. Later Ashkenazi Jews, like the Jews I’m descended from, also joined the Sephardic merchants.

I even laughed to myself when I saw the video images of actors playing early Jewish merchants in their storehouse with bags of coffee beans and chocolate. Ah hah! I thought. They tolerated the Jewish traders because they wanted all that good stuff those Jews knew how to obtain. But then they showed a short scene illustrating how the Jews back then had to practice their religion in secret, hidden behind drawn curtains and closed doors in their own houses. It turned out that the dispensation made for the Jews by King Christian only included protection, the right to hold “private religious services,” and the right to maintain their own cemetery. I quickly realized that being “tolerated” and “protected” was not the same as being an equal member of Danish society. Same old, same old, I thought.

Eventually, though, in the late 18th century, the King expanded the rights of Danish Jews, allowing them to buy real estate, establish schools, study at the university, and join guilds. Then, finally, a royal decree on March 29, 1814 granted the Jewish people the same rights as other citizens. In contrast, the Russian Empire, where all four of my grandparents were born and where they were restricted to living within the Pale of Settlement, never granted citizenship to the Jews who lived within its borders.

However, for various reasons—the Danish government restricting immigration to people who had money, Danish Jews intermarrying with Danish Christians—the population of Jews in Denmark during the 400 years after they first arrived remained fairly small. And now the population was only about 6,000.

After the presentation was over, we walked through the rest of the museum, which was dedicated to the more recent history of the Jews in Denmark, especially during World War II. We learned that the walls inside the museum were carefully arranged in form of the four Hebrew letters that spelled mitzvah, which is the Hebrew word for “commandment” and also for “good deeds” that fulfill a religious commandment.

The mitzvah that the museum was designed to reflect was the aid the Danish people gave to their Jewish neighbors, over 7,000 in total, during the Nazi invasion, when they helped almost of all them to escape on boats to Sweden, which was neutral during the World War II. Later, after the war was over, almost all the Jewish refugees returned to Denmark, though some then emigrated to Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States. That’s why Denmark had the highest survival rate of Jewish people of any country invaded by the Germans: 95 percent. And two of the people who were saved from the Nazis became well-known public figures. Danish physicist Niels Bohr, whose mother was Jewish, was one of the early refugees who fled to Sweden, and, after he himself evacuated, he helped arrange the mass rescue of over 7,000 Danish Jews. And Arne Jacobsen, an architect and mid-century modern Danish designer, escaped on a small boat to Sweden and spent his two years there creating fabric designs based on Swedish nature. After he returned to Copenhagen, he became world renowned for both his famous buildings, such as The Stelling House and Aarhaus City Hall, and for his designs of everyday objects, including his iconic Egg chair. He is now considered the grandfather of modern Danish design.

This, I knew, was in stark contrast to the fate of the Jews in Lithuania, the country my mother’s family was from, where the Lithuanian people aided the Nazis in exterminating their Jewish neighbors, resulting in the lowest survival rate for Jewish people out of all the countries invaded by the Germans, only 5 percent. The Nazis didn’t even need to move the Jews of Lithuania to concentration camps because the work of taking people into the woods, shooting them, and burying them in mass graves was often done by the Lithuanians themselves. And I knew too that some of my maternal grandmother’s family members who had not emigrated from Lithuania before the war, including her two brothers, Leizer and Laibl, were murdered in this exact way.

“Even though it’s still a bit weird to me to think of Jews living in Scandinavia,” I said to my husband, “They were right to come here.”

As we walked out of the museum into the sunny courtyard, I noticed that what had originally looked like an abstract sculpture outside the museum’s entrance was actually the outline of a ship. And I realized then that with its slanted, uneven floors and its angled walls, the museum had intentionally evoked in me the visceral sensations of walking on a small boat out at sea and the disorientation of a world turned upside down. Those feelings were still clinging to me.

As I found my feet again on the steady earth of the low-lying, flat city and we headed back to the apartment overlooking the old Jewish cemetery, I remembered that—come to think of it—today wasn’t the only time I had cried in a Jewish museum. The first time was in 2019 at the end of our visit to the Jewish museum in Sevilla, Spain, which we decided to visit only because it was just a couple of blocks from where we were staying, which, by chance, happened to be in the old Jewish quarter, now called Santa Cruz, adjacent to the Alcazar. The story was that the Jewish quarter was right next to the royal palace so everyone would know that Jews there were under the protection of the king.

Even though Sevilla once had the largest Jewish community in Spain (around 5,000 people, including doctors, scientists, lawyers, merchants, and money lenders) with 33 synagogues, the Centro de Interpretaction Juderia de Sevilla was small and modest—just a few window-less rooms in a very old Sephardic house. Displayed on colored walls, the exhibit was mainly a collection of manuscripts, maps, and other documents, some from the 1391 pogrom and some from the time of Spanish Inquisition, along with legends about a few of the people who had lived in the Jewish quarter before the Jews were expelled from Seville in 1483 and a small number of everyday objects they had left behind. These all just left me feeling vaguely sad. All those written explanations and stories printed on placards, and old “things” behind glass felt like tales from a distant past that had nothing to do with me. In the last room before the exit, the delicate, yellowed dress of a child who had once lived in the Jewish quarter evoked a small wave of sorrow within me but didn’t move me to tears.

However, when we followed the signs to the exit, which led us in a different direction than the entrance, we walked through a room where there were dozens of large black iron keys hanging from the ceilings on strings. Without knowing what those keys signified, I felt an upswelling of a very powerful but unnamable emotion.

“Wow,” I said to Brad, as I stopped walking and just looked up at all those keys.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s intense.”

Then, after we passed out of that final room and returned to the reception area, I asked the receptionist in English, “What is the meaning of those keys?” She explained that when the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, the Jews of Sevilla took their house keys with them because they hoped they’d be able to come back to their homes one day. Living in exile, they had passed those keys down to their descendants, generation after generation after generation, until now, when those very same keys were donated to the museum. And that’s when I started to cry.

When I returned to the US after visiting Copenhagen, I walked to Indian Rock in the Berkeley Hills and climbed up the steep steps that were carved into the rock to reach the top. I wanted to see the panorama that never fails to thrill me—the great San Francisco Bay shining in the sun, with Mount Tamalpais to the northwest, San Francisco to the southwest, and in between the Golden Gate, the entrance to the bay that opens out into the Pacific Ocean. “Is this my home?” I wondered. Of course, I was born in California and lived here most of my adult life, but sometimes I felt like a stranger here on the Pacific Rim, half a world away from Eastern Europe where all four of my grandparents were born. 

All those keys in the museum in Seville were so heartbreaking because of the hopes they represented—for hundreds of years, people held onto those keys on the chance that one day, someday, they might be able to use them once again to open the doors their ancestors had closed behind them when they were expelled from Spain. But I never had that kind of hope. The only relatives of my Lithuanian grandmother who survived the Holocaust were two of her sister’s children, Israel and Leah. After the war, the siblings met up in Lithuania and went back to their old house in Kudirkos Naumiestis. There they found their home was already occupied by Lithuanians who refused to leave. So Israel left for Brazil and Leah made it to Israel. Why would I ever think about going “home” to a place like that?

On the other hand, there I was at that moment on top of a large, volcanic rock on land where for six thousand years the xučyun (Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people) had lived, but which after that was claimed by Spain in 1542, and after that was owned by Mexico when it became independent in 1821, and after that was purchased from Mexico by the US after the Mexican-American war in 1848. I just looked out at the view and took it all in.

Nina Zolotow just loves to write, and she has been doing it for her entire adult life. Currently she is writing creative non-fiction and experimental fiction/poetry, which you can find on her blog Delusiastic!, where there is both brand new and older works, and you can also subscribe to her on Substack, where she is releasing one story a week. Nina has also written or co-written four books on yoga (see yogafortimesofchange.com) as well as being the Editor in Chief and writer for the Yoga for Healthy Aging blog for 12 years. Before that there was 20 years of writing instructional manuals for the software industry, including many books for programmers. And somewhere in there was an MFA from San Francisco State in Creative Writing. All of that taught her how to write simply and clearly when needed but also to go crazy with words when that seems right. 

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February 10, 2025 · 7:30 am

I Cannot Scrub Your Blood from My Bones

by Barbara Krasner (Somerset, NJ)

Deep within my marrow

flows my DNA, your blood,

your ambitions, your regrets,

your aches, your pains, your nightmares.

Deep within my memory

I call up your shtetl, its fields,

thatched roofs, unnamed streets.

Bold numbers nailed to door jambs,

revealing the town plan. Deep within

this hiccup murmurs your Galician dialect

of southeastern Poland, the bleats 

of goats, the shofar during High Holy Days.

Deep within the walls of the stucco homes

childbirth cries. Deep within

the burrows of the streets resounds the beat

of hobnailed boots and rapid gunfire.

You weren’t there during the invasions.

You weren’t there for mobile killing squads.

You weren’t there during deportations.

But you experienced it all the same,

just as I did. 

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in Holocaust & Genocide Studies (HGS) from Gratz College, where she teaches in the HGS graduate programs. The author of two poetry chapbooks and three novels in verse, her work has appeared in Jewish Literary Journal, Tiferet, Minyan, Jewishfiction.net, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She serves as Director, Mercer County (NJ) Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Education Center.

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January 27, 2025 · 7:30 am

An Odyssey to Auschwitz

 by Cara Erdheim Kilgallen (Trumbull, CT)

I entered the gruesome gates of Auschwitz on a recent journey to Poland with my parents and husband.  Half-way through our guided tour, my stoic husband Bill turned to me and said, “I feel like throwing up.”  

The humid June air did not help our collective nausea.  As the sun beat down upon our shoulders, the four of us toured two of the darkest death camps from history and witnessed true Holocaust horror.

As a Jew with family members who perished in the Shoah, I had always felt determined to visit Auschwitz.  My eighty-three-year-old Dad, a Jewish former Marine who proudly wears a Star of David that says, “never again,” came along.  So did my mom, a seventy-seven-year-old dynamo who has worked as a psychoanalyst with Holocaust victims and their children.  Bill, my Catholic husband, wanted to experience history and planned the entire trip.  It had been on our bucket list for sure.

We began with Auschwitz, designed initially as barracks for the Polish Army, and then moved onto the darkest death and extermination site, Birkenau.  The structures at Auschwitz still stood, but they somehow didn’t feel real and the buildings almost resembled college dorms from the outside.  When I walked inside, the death site became more palpable.  Hairbrushes, belts, shirts, toothbrushes, and other discarded items from various victims highlighted the utter inhumanity of it all.  We began the brief bus ride to Birkenau, the neighboring camp, which was worse.

“Brace yourselves,” warned our guide Chris.  This next site will be tougher to take.”

“More difficult than this?” I asked incredulously while thinking about the gas showers we had just seen.

“Sadly, yes,” Chris responded.

Birkenau, the adjoining death camp to Auschwitz, made us all even sicker.  

As Bill and I stood in shock staring at the piles of wood upon which victims slept, Chris explained how those on the top bunks often bled onto those below.  The prisoners slept in old horse barns, each one of them containing hundreds of innocent human beings.  I wondered if they received blankets in winter and learned that groups of twelve or so sleepers were sometimes allowed one small sheet.  We stood inside these cramped quarters, which smelled like death.

My shock and sorrow manifested in an intense back pain that I had never felt before.  There was no place to sit on our three hour walk through dark dungeons and barren barracks.  Feeling too guilty to rest amidst all of the documented human suffering that we witnessed, I tried to stretch out my back as the tour guide led us into a room filled with children’s shoes displayed in a large case secure behind a glass wall.

Until this point, I had not cried at all, perhaps out of sheer shock; however, as the mother of a toddler, I could not contain myself at this point and my eyes filled with tears.  I thought instantly about my daughter, back home in the United States with excellent caregivers, and juxtaposed this privilege against the extreme evils.  The Nazis robbed every ounce of innocence from these young lives, for no reason other than their difference, which most often was their Jewish identity.  

We learned about the pride that those running the camp took in exterminating as many victims as possible.  Chris told us that the Nazis viewed destruction as economic productivity and recorded their killings with precise record keeping.  Furthermore, so many corporations profited from this loss.  Human hair from the deceased was used for clothing, and gold teeth were removed from mouths of the dead.  

Survivor and author Eli Wiesel has written and spoken poetically about the overwhelming silence at Auschwitz.  I felt this quiet all throughout our visit, and my normally inquisitive self held most of my questions until the end.

“As we conclude our journey today, I would like to leave space and time for questions,” Chris kindly offered as though he sensed my overwhelming curiosity and that of my mother the psychologist.  

“Have you encountered any Holocaust denial in any of your visitors?” My Mom jumped in almost immediately.

“Just once,” Chris responded.  “A man on one of my tours questioned why a picture contained no chimney smoke and claimed that this absence meant no gas chambers.  I countered him immediately with the truth that this very photo had documented a factory in Krakow, not the death camp, which contained countless ashes and human remains as evidence.”

I marveled at Chris’s calmness, intelligence, and sensitivity.  He explained that he and his wife had met giving tours at Auschwitz and felt more determined than ever to educate their young children on these historic atrocities.

“Although it would have made our commute to work easier, we stopped short of moving closely to the camps,” Chris emphasized when I remarked about the tennis courts down the road.  “We want them to be Holocaust aware, but having our home on site was too close for comfort.”

“Of course,” we all responded, and then discussed the clear contrast between Chris’ humane response with that of the Nazi Commander who chose to live and raise his family, children playing in the yard and all, on top of the gas chambers.

My family and I left the site of Holocaust horror, and immediately saw a woman run to the bathroom to vomit.  The one silver lining was that others had felt touched and moved by this experience.  They recognized and respected the most profoundly painful parts of human history.

How could I not have journeyed here before?  Why did it take my Catholic husband to plan such a trip for my Jewish parents and me?  My Mother had travelled with a friend twenty-five years ago to Auschwitz, but she has always felt determined to return with family.  

Bill, who had felt profoundly moved by reading Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning at his Catholic high school, made it happen.  A survivor of multiple concentration camps, Frankl founded Logotherapy after his entire family perished in the Holocaust; he spent his life empowering others to discover purpose within their own lives. 

My intergenerational Odyssey to Auschwitz and Birkenau has strengthened an interfaith marriage, solidified firm family bonds, and made each moment of life feel all the more meaningful and precious.

Cara Erdheim Kilgallen is a mother, an author, an academic, an athlete, and a professor who truly treasures family and friendship.  She is dedicated to teaching literature and writing, as well as a lifelong ice skater and someone who is deeply passionate about sport (particularly tennis and golf).  Raised culturally Jewish, Cara deeply values her roots and embraces Judaism as foundational to the Judeo-Christian tradition and beyond.  She hopes for more interfaith and intercultural dialogue.  Cara hopes that through Jewish storytelling, this piece speaks to the horrors of all human suffering, which the world sadly has far too much of at present.

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January 20, 2025 · 7:30 am

Self-Exile

by Herbert Munshine (Great Neck, NY)

To me, a synagogue should be 

an exclamation point, 

standing tall and straight, 

reflecting strength and confidence 

but, instead, it is a question mark, swirling 

and broadcasting insecurity. 

The confusion brought to me by

the Hebrew chanting and the davening 

saddens me, for I feel excluded amidst

the longing to belong, to share the unity

and the compelling desire to recognize 

our attachment and connection 

to our Greater Power. I am conflicted, 

ultimately lost. 

Even so, I feel an urge to walk inside,

to join the others who have worn 

the Magen David draped over their hearts, 

but I recognize that the ancient language 

spoken is a code, a kind of price 

of relevant admission, that excludes 

the likes of me. 

I find no Rosetta Stone handed down 

from Mount Sinai that will lead me 

to a satisfying translation of the wisdom 

which will assure me that I’ve found a home 

among those strangers. So I reluctantly eschew

entrance, step away from the well-constructed but

foreboding question mark, that of Chagall-like 

technicolor windows and impressive wooden doors 

and pews and platform, and stumble hesitatingly away 

on my solitary path, thinking of the lonely road 

through Jewishness that I have followed because 

He took my mother just one week before 

my 10th birthday many years ago. I dwell 

within an exile self-imposed. I try 

to fight it but I am left to wonder

just what might have been . . . .


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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January 13, 2025 · 7:30 am

One of Job’s Daughters

by Nina Zolotow (Berkeley, CA)

I normally would have found him attractive—he was handsome and fit, and middle-aged like me—but I was walking alone down a quiet residential street, and he was following me on his bicycle saying,

“Look at you! Aren’t you sweet? You’re ethnic—look at that hair. Is that natural?”

So, instead, I felt an immediate surge of familiar fear, that same fear most women feel when a man on the street is coming on too strong. I didn’t reply to him and just kept on walking. 

The afternoon seemed absurdly beautiful, with a clear cerulean sky and golden sunlight pouring down on the Sycamore trees and the big old houses with their lush spring gardens. Then I noticed another man—he was sitting on a chair on his front porch watching the two of us—and I heard him call out,

“Hey!”

Hearing his voice partly reassured me because I no longer felt alone, but it also confirmed my fear that maybe there really was something unsafe about my situation. The man on the bicycle kept on following me, and now he said, 

“You’re either Mediterranean or Hebrew—am I right?”

Then my heart stopped cold because this was the first time in my life a stranger had approached me on the street wondering if I was Jewish. I wasn’t even sure what it meant that he was doing it, especially because the man asking me was Black. And then the other man, who was still sitting on his front porch, called out again,

“Hey!”

while I kept on walking and saying nothing. But even with the man on the porch yelling at him, the man on the bicycle pulled up alongside of me and looked into my face. Then, sounding pleased, he said,

“You’re ethnic, all right. You’re one of Job’s daughters, aren’t you?”

One of Job’s daughters? Was that his Biblical way of saying he was sure I was Jewish? Or did he mean something else by that? In the Old Testament, Job’s daughters were the beautiful ones—the most beautiful in all the land. 

Of course, I knew by then that there were some men who particularly favored Jewish women. “They’re sexy,” they would say, “spoiled little Jewish-American Princesses, but sexy and intelligent.” Or, as a Chinese-American man I used to know once said to me, “They’re all the fun of a woman of color but with the skin color of a white woman.” 

But whether calling me one of Job’s daughters was meant to be a compliment or not, it was extra scary having a man add this “you’re a Jew” thing to the typical harassment of a woman walking down the street thing.

Since the man on the porch—a white man, who looked on the younger side—had not bothered to get up from his chair despite his yelling, I quickly thought about how I might extricate myself from this situation. I said,

“I’m sorry, but I’m on way to see the doctor.”

The man on the bicycle then changed his tone, saying, with concern,

“Oh, are you sick?”

Even though I was just headed to an annual checkup, I said,

“Yes. Yes, I’m sick.”

After that he turned his bicycle around and cycled away from me, back in the direction we had both come from, leaving me alone.

When I entered the doctor’s office a few minutes later, I asked the receptionist if I could borrow a pen and paper because while I waited for my appointment I wanted to write down everything that had just happened. 

I never wanted to forget that if something like that—being harassed on the street because I looked “Hebrew”—could happen to me in my hometown, one of the most progressive communities in the United States, Berkeley, California, it could happen anywhere.

Nina Zolotow just loves to write, and she has been doing it for her entire adult life. Currently she is writing creative non-fiction and experimental fiction/poetry, which you can find on her blog Delusiastic!, which has both brand new and older works. She has also written or co-written four books on yoga (seeyogafortimesofchange.com) as well as being the Editor in Chief and writer for the Yoga for Healthy Aging blog for 12 years. Before that there was 20 years of writing instructional manuals for the software industry, including many books for programmers. And somewhere in there was an MFA from San Francisco State in Creative Writing. All of that taught her how to write simply and clearly when needed but also to go crazy with words when that seems right. 

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January 6, 2025 · 7:30 am

I Heard My Grandparents’ Voices

By Esther Munshine (Great Neck, NY)

My grandparents stared from the portrait

Hanging on the wall — dead eyes, expressionless

I used to fantasize that they were somewhere 

Still out in the world, lost, but rescued at the

End of the war, not murdered horrifically, lost in

The mingled ashes at the hell that was Auschwitz

I dreamt that they were survivors who would

Miraculously be found so we could be reunited

Leave it alone! My hope was the naivete of a child

And then the discovery more than half a century later,

My mother’s papers:

Letters from Vienna during the war from

My grandparents to their children and a brother and 

Two sisters caring for my mother’s 

Mother — a tragic figure old and lost

My great-grandmother, an invalid with no words

She couldn’t speak English and I am

Not sure she even knew where she was

From my mother’s closet, several letters from

Her parents, hidden from us in her lifetime

Being read at our behest

In the vocally halting translation by a woman who

Struggled to decode the high German no longer in use

I heard the voices of my grandparents trying to

Encourage the Jewish children they had sent to the safety

Of loving arms in America

They spoke, sending regards to other relatives and friends

I knew well

Having grown up with — making my family suddenly full

Our two central figures included

Finally, part of me in a way that I could keep them forever

They had saved me too by sending their children 

To America…

But they were hiding behind window shades

In their once comfortable Vienna apartment

In terror they were suppressing while making small

Talk about daily life revealing true devotion to 

Each other and their children — hoping to be saved

Knowing they would do what they could to survive

Even as the chessboard of history was countering

Their moves, it was too strong

They used parental injunctions to their boy and girl

To behave and study well and to thrive

And there I sat and met my grandparents who were

Calmly discussing their household management

One time as if at a séance with spiritual intervention

Their tones alive with love; it was in that fractured moment

As if my dream had come true if only for that one–time

Visit — as if they had been merely misplaced in the fog of war —

As if they had survived

Esther Munshine started teaching when she was 20. Her career spanned 50 years, with a generous interruption to raise her family. In 2019, she began writing poems in earnest.  During the pandemic, she met online regularly with other writers sharing their work, safely at a distance. She was an invited featured poet to the second annual National Baseball Poetry Festival in Worcester, Massachusetts in 2024, where she read “Take Me Out” and “First Baseball Game for First Grandson”. “I Heard My Grandparents Voices” is an experience that their grand-daughter is still processing and she appreciates having the chance to share that experience with the community in the Jewish Writing Project. If you’d like to read more of the Esther’s work, visit: https://www.baseballbard.com and Reflections in Poetry and Prose 2023 https://www.uft.org/chapters/retired-teachers-chapter/retiree-programs/reflections-poetry-and-prose

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December 30, 2024 · 7:30 am

R.I.P. Clifton Jewish Center

by Sue Macy (Englewood, NJ)

This is a different sort of obituary, not for a person, but a place. The synagogue I grew up in, the Clifton Jewish Center of Clifton, N.J., held its last Shabbat services on December 21, 2024. The building is being repurposed to become a cheder for Orthodox girls. With the original members gone and their descendants moving away, the Center—the last Conservative shul in town—closed its doors.

It was founded in the late 1940s by nine young men who had gone to Clifton High School together. My parents joined the Center in the early 1950s. I went to Sunday School and Hebrew School there, and had my bat mitzvah. It was not just a place of worship, but of community. My mom joined Hadassah through the Center. My dad was on the temple board.

We had the same rabbi, Dr. Eugene Markovitz, for 52 of the Center’s 75 years. He was an Orthodox rabbi in a Conservative shul, which meant women didn’t have aliyot while he was in charge. It forever irked my feminist soul, but the rabbi had more depth than my younger self gave him credit for. In 1988, Rabbi Markovitz intervened when four local boys painted anti-Semitic graffiti on the temple building. Instead of allowing them to be sent to juvenile detention, he convinced the judge to sentence them to 25 hours of education about Judaism, with him, and 30 hours of helping around the synagogue. CBS made a “Schoolbreak Special” about the incident. Hal Linden played the rabbi.

Although I moved out of Clifton decades ago, I continued to attend High Holiday services with my family. After my dad died, my mom and brother and I went. After my mom died, my brother and I just kept going. But as the congregation shrank, the signs of decline were unmistakable. We no longer had a cantor. Israel Bonds luminaries stopped coming to give High Holiday presentations, hoping for lucrative investments. Eventually, we had no more bond drives at all. There was a time when the temple had to put hundreds of chairs in the adjacent ballroom to fit all those coming for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services. Lately, the ballroom remained empty and unused.

I know that times change. I write books about history and intellectually I can place the geographic movements of the Jewish people in historical context. With affluence, many of the Jewish families in Clifton moved to wealthier suburbs. Still, it’s hard not to feel a personal loss with the closing of the Center. It makes accessing the feelings and experiences from my past that much harder. It also raises questions about my Jewish identity that until now, I haven’t had to answer. What kind of synagogue do I want to join? Where do I go from here? 

Ironically, the last services at the Center attracted the largest Shabbat crowd in years. People like me, whose parents lived their lives in the community, came from near and far to be there one more time. It was a fitting tribute to a place that truly had been the Center of our lives.

Sue Macy is the author of 18 books for children and young adults including The Book Rescuer: How a Mensch From Massachusetts Saved Yiddish Literature for Generations to Come, winner of the Sydney Taylor Picture Book Award. She lives in Englewood, New Jersey, and can be found on Instagram @suemacy1 or through her website, suemacy.com.

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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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