Category Archives: poetry

September 1, 2025 · 7:30 am

Displaced Jews 

(Written during the LA wildfires, January 2025)

by Harriet Wolpoff (San Diego, CA)

About 16 million

That’s how many Jews 

Are in the world right now

Of them,

Over 100,000 are displaced

Inside Israel

And here, in LA,

How many 

Of the over 100,000 displaced

Are also Jews?

How many Shabbat candles

Will be lit tonight

On hotel dressers?

How many heads will rest

On pillows not their own?

How many fears will surface

In strange rooms

Or in tunnels?

We need a miracle Shabbat

There and here

One that returns 

Internal refugees

To their homes safely

One that provides 

New, hopeful dwellings 

For our homeless

Protected from

The ravages of terrorists,

The ravages of climate change

Ufros aleynu sukkat shlomecha

Ceilings, walls, floors

That will never be taken for granted. 

Harriet Wolpoff is retired after several years in the New York City public school system and a forty year career in Jewish education in San Diego, winning many awards for ground-breaking programming.  She has been studying Israeli poetry with Rachel Korazim for over four years. Harriet is proudest of being a wife, mother, and Bubbe of three grandchildren who inspire many of her poems.

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August 18, 2025 · 7:30 am

August in Galilee

by David Allard (London, UK)

 We went stone-gathering at dawn,

Thinking ourselves young pioneers

Redeeming the land,

Ungainly in old boots,

Still sticky-eyed and dry-mouthed,

To gather the rocky crop

Risen like dragons’ teeth

From the newly ploughed earth.

My heart awoke first, and

I forgot to breathe for a moment

When I saw you – once more

As if it was for the first time.

Your long black hair curtained your face

As you stooped to gather jagged chunks,

Then slid back when you rose, 

Loose-limbed and lambent, 

To cast your harvest, 

Clanging, echoing,

Into the rusting, dented tractor-drawn trailer.

“ He’s dreaming again,”

 You said to Bernice,

“ Hey you, wake up.”

You might have smiled, 

A muse then and now, 

Unknowingly holding

My fragile heart.

Why wake? Soon enough, 

The red sun risen from the distant ridge

Will turn a fierce yellow-white

And these last floating moments

Bathed in the night’s warmth

Of a faraway summer 

Will be gone, 

But never lost.

David Allard, now retired, lives in London, UK. He lived in Israel through the seventies. He writes poems and short stories, and has been published in the USA, UK and Israel. A detective novel, The Last Resort, set in a sleepy seaside town, has been published under the pseudonym David Strauss and is available on Amazon.

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August 10, 2025 · 7:16 am

In His Hands

by Barbara Krasner (Somerset, NJ)

My grandfather once held my grandmother’s hands in his. I never knew her. He held the keys of his wooden register in his hands. Canned goods. Fresh produce. Milk bottles for the 1915 free milk campaign as announced in the Newark Evening Star. He held my infant father in his hands, an American-born baby of a Litvak and a Galitzianer. He held his aging mother’s hands and when I was born, and my mother asked him for a name, he gave me the name of his mother, Bryna, and his eldest sister. Doba, who died in the 1918 flu pandemic. He once held shoelaces that he dipped in leather in his first job at a Newark tannery. He once held pencils and rulers in his work as a joiner in Russia. He once held the parcels of his Russian life as he steamed across the Atlantic at age 19 on the SS Rotterdam in 1899 to join his brother in Newark. He held the fringes of his tallis and the leather straps of his phylacteries that I now keep in a special treasures drawer. My grandfather once held the remote to his Amana television to watch The Lawrence Welk Show and used it to change the channel to The Wonderful World of Disney for me. He once held the lever to vote for Al Smith for American president after he became a US citizen. He once held the keys to a corner lot house after decades of living behind the general store he and my grandmother owned and operated. As he aged, he held the iron-wrought banister of the outdoor stairs to my father’s car. He held my father’s hands for support. He held onto life itself to the age of 93.

But with all that my grandfather held, I don’t think he ever once held me.

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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August 4, 2025 · 7:30 am

A Cultural Jew

by Herbert Munshine (Great Neck, NY)

I am a cultural Jew, a result of my upbringing.

I am not religious in terms of doctrine, attending

synagogue or following the rules of Sabbath or

the strictly kosher culture. Still, I’ve never thought

of myself as anything but Jewish. 

The religion has a magnetic hold on me. 

I felt this way most potently when I was dating 

the woman who became my girlfriend, my wife, 

and, finally, my much more than significant other. 

She came from a kosher life, a family that celebrated 

holy days and attended synagogue … if you’ll excuse 

the play on words …  religiously. 

I was not a smooth fit, not the final piece of a sacred

jigsaw puzzle. It took much flexibility and patience 

for them to welcome me into the fold, a little like a 

shepherd embracing the prodigal lost sheep … but 

in time it happened, and there was a wedding which was

instructive to this somewhat ill-fitting member of

the congregation.

I recall with fondness seeing so many happy faces,

standing under a chuppah for the first and only time,

breaking the glass. At that time, to me, a rabbi was a

rabbi. But I later learned that the rabbi who said magical

words that united me and my ever-after wife was special. 

He’d helped liberate Buchenwald and had supervised 

the start of new lives for Elie Wiesel and a thousand other 

orphans … and this night he was leading me and my bride 

to our own new life.

I am now in my eighties and remain a cultural Jew,

but I say with pride that I am as Jewish as I can be.

I show all Jews respect, love learning, try to harm no one.

I stand as tall as my fellow Jews. I look upon all Jews

as children of HaShem. I know my place in the scheme

of Judaism and am sincere in my love of all the tribes.

And when the time arrives, I will sit among my ancestors 

and I will be quite comfortable and proud of the life I led.

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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July 21, 2025 · 7:30 am

Meditations on My Yiddish Name:  Mudke Velvel ben Yankel Yisroel, ha-Levi

by Bill Siegel (Boston, MA)

1.  Mudke

They named me Mudke

          Makes me think of mud cakes, mud crawlers

          Muddy Waters

But they must mean Mordche

          which translates to Mordecai

The Latin mort, Death

          coupled with the Hebrew chai, Life

In America, they changed it to Morton

          dropping the chai, taking the life out of the name

How could you saddle a baby with a name like that?

          My aunt chided her sister

As if forgetting it was her own father’s name given to me

As if forgetting it would keep their father’s name alive

2. Velvel

A stutter, or better, a strut

One syllable with each shoulder’s swagger

          Vel~right shoulder forward and

          Vel~with the left now 

Say his name twice if you say it once:

          Vel~Vel

3. Ben

Son of,

          the rising sun of the father’s new life

The dawn of his hopes

The bend when a river changes course

          Giving birth in its time to a new flow

Ben, bene, bien

The good son

          May he not forget his ancestors

          May he remember where he comes from

          May he remember his names

          That they may carry him

Where he’s going

4. Yankel Yisroel

Who wrestled with God’s Messenger

          Or maybe God Himself

The original knock-down, drag-out, one-fall, winner-take-all

          first fixed bout, a mismatch made in Heaven

Who wrestled with the mighty Thunder King

          forcing It to reveal Its name

Jacob, who became Israel

Yankel, who became Yisroel

Yankel Yisroel

Who patrolled the Shadow of Death

          lined with the dead of Hitler’s demons

          That would boil his people

          To make soap for the armpits of strangers

Peel their skin for lampshades

Who stood, barely 20 years old,

at liberated death camps, surrounded

          by the dead, the dying and the barely surviving

Who stood between captured German officers

          And the interrogating Americans

Using his Yiddish to translate,

          to bridge the combatting languages

To make what happened perfectly clear

5.  ha-Levi

Children of Levi, the one desert clan

          To keep their name for 40 centuries

Through 400 years of slavery

          And 40 years in the desert

Temple servants and warriors

          Guardians of the faith, stationed in every city

And still the tribe with no land of our own

          4000 years and still we wash

The hands of the Cohanim

before the priestly blessing

Look now at the graves of ha-Levi, the Levites

          See the cup carved into the stone

Like all Levis before me, my stone

will honor Miriam ha-Levi

          And her well of Living Water

          that will never run dry

6.  Mudke Velvel ben Yankel Yisroel, ha-Levi

All this in one name.

          All this in my name.

Bill Siegel lives in the Boston MA area, and writes both prose and poetry – about family, fishing, jazz, and more. He has two manuscripts in process: “Printed Scraps”, poems inspired by Japanese woodblock prints; and “Waiting to Go Home”, about family and memories of growing up. His work has been published in “Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust” (Northwestern University Press), and “Indigenous Pop: Native American Music from Jazz to Hip Hop” (University of Arizona Press). His poems also appear in Blue Mesa Review, Rust+Moth, JerryJazzMusician, Brilliant Corners, and InMotion Magazine, among others.

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July 14, 2025 · 7:30 am

Questions I Never Asked

by Herbert Munshine (Great Neck, NY)

It’s too late now, far too late. Both my parents and

both my sisters are gone. My wellspring of family

knowledge has faded into the mysteries of history.

I was smart with books and sports, but I am ignorant

of my own history, full of regrets and a desire to know

but missing the precious resources that would have

filled the holes, the chasms in my consciousness.

When did they arrive in the U. S.? Why did they leave

Poland and Latvia? What was life there like for Jews?

How did they meet? Was the meeting accidental, 

spontaneous, arranged? How long did they date before

he proposed? Where did they get married? How long

were they married before she had my older sister?

What did he help build as a carpenter (besides the

Museum of the City of New York?). What was her

favorite color? Flower? Song? Pre-TV radio show?

Which members of my family were lost during the

Holocaust? During the pogroms? Did any of them

make the Aliyah to Israel? Who were my living relatives?

Where did they live? What did they do? Why were we

and they so distant? 

Why did she have me 10 years after my second sister?

Was she happy when I was born? Did she feel too old

to care for a baby again? Is it true that she almost

aborted me but changed her mind literally at the final

moment?

Then there are the closer queries to my toddler self:

What did her voice sound like? What did her touch

feel like? Her scent? Her presence? Beliefs: Did she

light Shabbas candles? Did he attend synagogue 

regularly when he was much younger and she was

still a vital presence in our lives? Afterthoughts:

What was his favorite opera? Why did he switch from

being a builder to owning a store? The ethereal gems:

What would they feel about the man I have become,

the woman I married, the children and grandchildren

I had – – – and how little my progeny know about them?

One final question: Why did I wait too late to ask?

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 160 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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July 7, 2025 · 7:30 am

Repairing the World with Chicken Soup

by Barbara Krasner (Somerset, NJ)

Boil chicken bones and chicken parts with water, parsnip, dill, carrot, and celery in a pot larger than your firstborn. Ladle the soup into a bowl and add Goodman’s fine egg noodles if it’s Shabbos or handmade lokshen if it’s Pesach. Form dense matzoh balls with your hands. It’s all right if they’re misshapen. So is the world. Should the matzoh balls sink to the bottom of the pot and your stomach, it’s okay. They’ll soak up the golden liquid that soothes all that ails you and the world. Tikkun olam. 

Having kosher chicken soup from your mama’s stove is like no other. Better than the best kosher deli. Because it contains love like your mama’s kiss on your keppele. You’re all right, it’s the Sabbath, time to end one week and start another fresh and clean. The broth will clear your head, clear all mistakes, fill you up so you can curl up under your featherbed all cozy, warm, and loved.

And maybe this is the best of all. Knowing that your mama learned how to make the soup from her mama, Rayzel Entel, who learned it from her mama, Esther Taube Drewno, who learned it from her mama, Chaja Rojza Mularzewicz, who learned it from her mama, Buna Etla Przestreleniec, who learned it from her mama, Ruchla Herszkowna of no last name, born at the turn of the nineteenth century in Brok, Poland. You are a link in the chain doling out the remedy to repair the world a spoonful at a time.


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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June 30, 2025 · 7:30 am

Sh’ma, God, Listen   

by Nancy Smiler Levinson (Los Angeles, CA)

 On the boulevard near the bus stop in “Persian Square”

I glance a woman, small, mottled skin     California sun

one foot on the curb, the other in the street

She looks painfully sad, lost among the stream of shoppers                   

and I find myself at her side, my arm around her bony shoulder 

Are you alright?  Do you need help?

Her accent is heavy    with my hearing aids I lean in  

Money  mon-ey I need 

Is that what she is saying?  for food?  bus fare?  just in need?

I begin opening my pocketbook, but her hand stops mine

and she pulls me close  I am Jewish, lady,

tomorrow night comes Rosh Hashanah    I need honey

Ah  of course  I too am Jewish    come   I guide her to the bus bench,

bid her wait for me while I take off on foot, a mission of sorts

Blocks on, thank God, in a small market I find honey on the shelf

To the woman, trusting, waiting for me I hand a bear-shaped bottle

God bless you lady, she says, God bless and keep you 

Shana Tova and an abundance of blessings to you, I respond

So. . .  I performed a small mitzvah quietly with heart and soul

But if one speaks aloud of one’s good deed

it might appear as if acted for applause

and thus in the eyes of God, not count

Now listen, God    Sh’ma   I need to share this

because there is a story here  

almost every mitzvah is a story   

or perhaps a small poem

Nancy Smiler Levinson is author of Moments of Dawn: A Poetic Memoir and a chapbook, The Diagnosis Changes Everything. Her work has appeared in Poetica, Jewish Literary Journal, Hamilton Stone Review, Silver Birch Press, Ink in Thirds, Burningword Literary Journal, Minnesota Memories, Constellations, and elsewhere.In past chapters of her life she worked as a journalist, educational book editor, Head Start teacher, and she published some thirty books for young readers (including a biography of Emma Lazarus).

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June 9, 2025 · 7:30 am

Folk tale

by Susan Kress (Saratoga Springs, NY)

My aunt died

in the age of letters

and no one told my grandmother

for fear the news would strike her dead.

She couldn’t read

a word of English and

my aunt lived

in another country 

so it was easy to lift sentences

from old airmail letters and pretend

she was still alive.

Years before, when my aunt

had married out of the faith

that no one practiced,

the family mourned.

They chanted prayers, sat on low seats,

folded her away

in a locked drawer—

and for seven years,

until her son was born—pretended

she was dead.

Susan Kress, granddaughter of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland, was born and educated in England and now lives in Saratoga Springs, New York. Her poems appear in Nimrod International, The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, Salmagundi, New Letters, South Florida Poetry Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Third Wednesday, La Presa, and other journals. Her poems have been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

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May 26, 2025 · 7:30 am

Cossacks

by Rich Orloff (New York, NY)

I was raised in a middle-class home

In a middle-class neighborhood

Safe and secure

But raised with the fear

That the Cossacks might be standing outside our door

Ready to rape and kill everyone inside

This was never spoken aloud, of course

It was planted wordlessly

My parents never intended to give me this gift

It was simply how they approached life

My mother, born in Belarus

Trained as a little girl where to hide in their little house

If and when the Cossacks came

Her family left in the middle of the night

Telling nobody

Erasing themselves from the world they lived in

My father, born in Chicago

The son of immigrants

A mother from Poland who never learned to read or write

Or show warmth

A father from Ukraine whose only advice to his son was

Never show fear

As you’ve probably guessed

The Cossacks never stood outside our door

But they had already successfully invaded

The souls of my parents

I learned how to protect myself

And have been prepared for annihilation ever since

I share this with you

Not so you will pity me

But so you know who I am

And if, when we meet

I treat you like you may be a Cossack in disguise

I apologize for not seeing who you are

Rich Orloff writes both poems and plays.  His poems have been published in The Poet, Fragments (published by T’ruah), and Fresh Words magazines, and they’ve been presented at churches and synagogues, performed in theaters and schools, read at meditation and yoga groups, and spoken at events both lofty and intimate.  Rich’s plays include the Purim-themed musical comedy Esther in the Spotlight (performed so far in New York, Miami, Toronto and Tel Aviv), the comedic revue OY! (over 50 productions in the United States – and one in Bulgaria), and many more, of all lengths, styles and subjects.  Rich’s plays have had over two thousand performances on six continents – and a staged reading in Antarctica.  More at www.richorloff.com. 

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