May 18, 2009 · 8:27 am

From Ghetto Girl To Rabbi’s Wife

by Aliza Hausman (Riverdale, NY)

I have always been a stranger in a strange land.

My childhood years in Washington Heights, an inner-city New York offshoot of the Dominican Republic, were Rapunzelesque. I watched the goings-on in the ’hood from our sixth-floor apartment, which towered over the hilly area. My sisters and I weren’t allowed to play outside because of the drug dealers, the culture, and the language, all of which my mother was sure were veneno—poison. According to Mom, Spanish was okay, English even better, but “talking Ghetto,” the Spanglish slang of the streets, was no good.

I learned about religion watching The Ten Commandments over Easter. On Sundays I attended catechism classes at the local Catholic school. At home my mother practiced a blend of Catholicism and Santeria (Afro-Caribbean “voodoo”), taking me to brujas (witches) to cure my allergies. I had no idea that only blocks away, in the midst of my Dominican ghetto, there was a Jewish neighborhood.

So how in the world did I find my way to Judaism?

It started with a car ride. My best friend, Igor, a Russian Jew, had gone to Israel an atheist and come back Orthodox. Driving around the neighborhood with me and my sisters, he thrilled us with tales of going kosher, living life as an observant Jew, and scaring all his old friends. He wore a black kippah, soon to be coordinated with the white shirt and black pants that would become his signature wardrobe. I was wearing a halter top and short shorts. All I knew was that Judaism meant I wasn’t allowed to hug him anymore.

“Wow! That’s so interesting. Tell us more!” my sisters chorused from the backseat. And then to me: “You should be Jewish! You always wanted to be Jewish. Remember?”

When I was 13, a visit from a Holocaust survivor to my junior high school had piqued my interest in Judaism enough that I stole the Star of David my mother kept with her cross and wore it every day. I went to the library’s religion section, where I discovered that the Jewish notion of G-d matched the one I’d always had in my head and heart. G-d was always watching over me and always listening. There were no intermediaries standing between us.

“Mom, I want to be Jewish,” I declared one day, running to her in a frenzy of excitement, books in hand.

My mother’s lips curled in horror before she reeled her arm back like a baseball pitcher and cracked a slap across my face. Later, various family encounters would teach me that anti-Semitism was alive and well in the world. I put Judaism on the back burner.

At 25, I tried going back to the church. I hoped Protestant Christianity might be less fire-and-brimstone than Catholicism. But the calculation that no Jesus equals eternal damnation didn’t sit well with me. So when my best friend started talking, I was intrigued.

Two months later, I was knee-deep in Jewish books and had an appointment with an Orthodox rabbi. No Jesus. No Trinity. No more scary confessions to priests. No nuns looking perturbed when they asked all the students to draw G-d and I held up a drawing of a giant yellow squiggle and said,“G-d is light.” In my head, G-d was as bright and warm as a sunburst, always lighting the way ahead. Even at 8, I wasn’t drawing Jesus idols.

Over the year I became a constant presence in the synagogue office. I took weekly classes. I assaulted the rabbi daily with questions via e-mail. I read late into the night and listened to educational MP3s on the way to work. I was a human iPod, downloading a lifetime of Jewish learning into my brain.

I saw Judaism as an extension of the personal relationship with G-d I had already honed over years of angry rants and silent wishes aimed at the heavens. I got high on how Judaism could teach me to make every action in my life holy and how to focus on bettering myself for my time on Earth, not as a ticket to Heaven.

Judaism began to color all the areas of my life. I bought my last pair of pants from the Gap and a week later sold them to a fellow teacher at the high school where I worked. I charged knee-length H&M skirts by the dozen. I prayed all the time and for everything. And when I discovered Shabbat, I sighed with relief. Shabbat was the first vacation this workaholic had taken in a long time.

I finally confessed my decision to convert to my father in an international call to the Dominican Republic. “Dad, I’m going to be Jewish. You’re going to have Jewish grandchildren.”

After a long pause, I heard a faint chuckle escalate into booming sputters of laughter. “You’re crazy!” No, I assured him, I wasn’t.

But still I was a stranger. My olive skin was much darker than the Ashkenazi faces I saw at shul. People stared at my curly Afro. When I told my non-Jewish friends that people at shul complimented my “tan,” they reacted in disbelief: “But you’re so white!”

Six months into my conversion, I met my future husband, then a graduate student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, at a housewarming party for some rabbinical students in Washington Heights. Here, at least, I felt like the consummate insider—Dominican and (almost) Jewish in a neighborhood that had long been home to both groups.

After nearly a year of studying, the rabbi thought I was ready to convert. But first I had to survive Israel.

My husband’s supportive mother sent me to a Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) school. Orthodox Jewish boys dated for marriage, and we couldn’t wed until I was “kosher.” In Israel I realized that I was becoming part of a family. Like any family, there is bickering and infighting. Sometimes we can be dysfunctional in the way we tear each other down. But we can also be amazing in the support systems we create: cooking meals for new mothers, sitting shiva with friends, and partying at glorious weddings not to be missed.

Two months later I returned to New York to dip in the mikvah. A beit din (rabbinical court) of three rabbis asked me questions before shepherding me into the little pool. Fresh from the mikvah and clasped in a bear hug by my friend Devora, I was sure that, though I had been born to a non-Jewish mother, I had always had a Jewish soul.

Am I still a stranger in a strange land? As I pack my husband’s lunch before he heads for rabbinical school, I wonder how many other Dominican Jewish rebbetzins are out there. But I’ve never felt less alone in my life. The story goes that converts, too, were present at Mount Sinai for the giving of the Torah, but we were lost along the way and have had to find our way home.

And where is home?

Ruth, the most famous convert of all, put it best: “Your people will be my people, and your G-d, my G-d.”

You said it, sister!

Aliza Hausman, a Latina Orthodox Jewish convert, freelance writer, blogger and educator, blogs daily at Memoirs of a Jewminicana: http://www.alizahausman.net. She is currently working on a memoir.

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May 11, 2009 · 8:21 am

Shards of Faith, Reassembled

by Van “Zev” Wallach (Stamford, CT)

I wear a chai — the Jewish letter symbolizing life — around my neck. I’ve studied Hebrew and Yiddish, have visited Israel, subscribe to Jewish newspapers, and have been told I look rabbinical. In fact, my great-great-grandfather, Heinrich Schwarz, was the first ordained rabbi in Texas.

Hearing this religious background, you would never imagine my spiritual journey began as a New Testament-reading, hell-fearing member of the First Baptist Church of Mission, Texas. How the heck, so to speak, did that happen? And how did I return to Judaism?

The story began when my mother’s German ancestors moved to Texas in the 1870s, settling in small towns amidst Christians who enjoyed nothing as much as hectoring Jews until they saw the light. My mother married my St. Louis-born father, son of Russian immigrants, in Temple Emanuel in McAllen, Texas. They moved to France, where their union produced two sons.

As in other spheres, the Russians and the Germans couldn’t get along, so my parents divorced and my mother returned to her hometown of Mission, on the Mexican border. My father remarried and moved to New York, and I saw him one weekend in 10 years, a gap lasting from 1962 to 1972.

Shards of Jewishness lodge in my earliest memories. While my mother had no outward interest in any faith, she had bucked the family trend toward intermarriage and then provided, for reasons I cannot fathom, some aspects of a Jewish home. I like to think that a spark of the neshama, or soul, of Rabbi Schwarz remained in her and she unconsciously passed that along.

Once we went to Temple Emanuel, although my brother Cooper and I didn’t like it. Mom taught us the essential Jewish prayer, the Sh’ma. We had a menorah in the house, the Union Prayer Book, and The Wit and Wisdom of the Talmud, printed in the 1920s. Mom kept a bottle of Manischewitz concord grape wine in the refrigerator, forever skewing my taste toward nauseatingly sweet kosher wines.

I remember Mom sobbing when she watched Judgment at Nuremberg on TV. She saved her ketubah, or Jewish wedding contract. But we never had a Shabbat dinner, nor a seder, nor Hanukkah celebrations. An unexplained rift with the Jewish community in nearby McAllen ended almost all contact with other Jews in the area.

Isolated and indifferent to Jewish practice, my mother left religious instruction to our Southern Baptist neighbor, Mrs. D. Her basalt-hard faith reflected the Baptists’ smothering love of and barely concealed disdain for “the Jewish people” to make our family a natural target for intense spiritual cultivation.

Every Sunday, Cooper and I got carted off to the First Baptist, and in the summer we attended Vacation Bible School. My search for identity in an overwhelming non-Jewish world flowed toward Christian belief. From a young age, the hellfire messages of Baptist preachers terrified me into unease, guilt, and finally acquiescence.

I accepted Jesus to relieve the gnawing fear of damnation and was duly baptized on Super Bowl Sunday 1972. That’s also the day the beloved Dallas Cowboys, coached by Mission’s own Christian gentleman, Tom Landry, beat the Miami Dolphins 24-3. Thank you, Lord!

And yet, we remained the town Jews. My mother’s family moved to Mission in 1925; everybody knew who and what we were. Mrs. D called Cooper and me her “Jew-els.” When golf-obsessed Cooper wanted to join the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in high school, the adult sponsor exclaimed, “Why, Cooper, you can’t join the FCA. You’re a Jew!”

Meanwhile, a kernel of curiosity about our heritage sprouted in me. I listened to a San Antonio radio show, The Christian-Jew Hour, and read literature from the so-called Messianic Jews to try to square the circle of irreconcilable belief systems.

The circle would be broken when Cooper and I finally visited our long-absent father in Manhattan for a week in 1972. A self-employed engineer with WASP pretensions, he attacked my religious beliefs and most aspects of our small-town Texas upbringing, which he loathed. In his ham-handed way, he showed me I didn’t have to be a Baptist. He pried a few fingers from my death grip on the King James Bible.

Doubts, like weeds, cracked the concrete of my faith. Bit by bit, I became disenchanted with Christianity. It felt less organic, more imposed on me. As a high school sophomore I was nervy enough to talk to the rabbi in McAllen, although I could not admit my Baptist background. I even attended Rosh Hashanah services in 1974, my great act of teenage rebellion.

When I told my mother what I was going, she started crying. “Van, I didn’t know you were interested,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t think you would understand,” I said. I was 16 years old.

I stopped church but lacked the strength to start going to temple. By 1975 my identity and belief as a Southern Baptist had vanished. My Jewish self-education started as I read books like This is My God by Herman Wouk and Basic Judaism by Milton Steinberg.

I liked what I read about Judaism, the faith’s simplicity and self-acceptance versus the devouring anxiety I felt as a Christian, where I always wondered if I measured up to perfection, whether I really believed. Trust me on this – Jewish guilt is nothing compared to the fears of a doubting evangelical. The last time I ever attended the First Baptist was to get a graduation Bible as a high school senior in 1976.

I first met Jews outside my family as a freshman at Princeton University. I checked out Hillel activities during Freshman Week and signed up for Hillel classes. But while I had left the Baptists, they hadn’t left me. My heritage dogged me, along with my utter lack of familiarity with Jewish practice and culture (getting the jokes in Annie Hall doesn’t count).

I had never attended Hebrew school, never lit Hanukkah candles, never had a Shabbat dinner, never attended a Passover seder. The Jews at Princeton seemed so East Coast smart and at ease, even jaded, in their faith. I felt shame at my ignorance. Book learning could not replace the experiential void. I yearned to know and be accepted, but I had no way to do that. Like the simple son at the seder, I did not know to ask.

I thought about unburdening myself to the Hillel rabbi, but he intimidated me. Indeed, I feared all Jewish authority figures as echoes of my father who would mock rather than understand me. Christianity remained my cross to bear. While my former beliefs held no appeal, I could not find a niche in Princeton’s Jewish life.

Jewish holidays passed in silence. Nobody invited me home for seders. Had I been more involved in Hillel, able to say those three hardest little words — “I need help” — then maybe I would have been welcome somewhere. I never asked, and nobody ever answered.

That changed in my senior year when classmates Marc and Steve invited me to join their families in Brooklyn and the Bronx for Passover. These friends helped me take my first steps in living a Jewish life. They both did great mitzvot — good deeds — and I will always be grateful to Marc and Steve and their parents for welcoming the stranger in their midst.

The pace of Jewish exploration quickened after I moved to Brooklyn a week after I graduated from Princeton. Synagogue-hopping became my weekend obsession, as I sought to expand my Jewish experiences. I sampled everything from Reform to the Flatbush Minyan and for a while attended the beginners’ services at the orthodox Lincoln Square Synagogue. But I could never talk about the past. I arrived at services eager and anxious, and seemingly from nowhere.

How deeply that past remained embedded in me soon became obvious. I had met a woman, Beth, who was Jewish, jolly, and from Long Island. She invited me to join carolers bringing holiday cheer to Brooklyn. I reluctantly agreed and we gathered one Saturday.

Was the first song “Jingle Bells”? I don’t remember. What I do recall is a sudden choking feeling. A wave of anxiety washed over me as I realized, I can’t do this. The songs all had meanings and childhood associations far beyond secular celebration.

“I’m sorry, I have to leave,” I told Beth as I hurried away.

I called her later to explain. While Beth saw the songs from a distance, to me they reflected a faith I had been raised in, an affirmation of the birth of the Savior. To this day I do not sing or listen to holiday music — whether the topic is Jesus, a white Christmas, or Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer.

I finally settled on the conservative Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn as my shul. I still recall my first Saturday morning service. I knew so little about Jewish customs that I recoiled and shook my head when a man offered me the honor of an aliyah during the Torah reading.

During an aliyah, you read prayers in Hebrew before and after parts of the weekly recitation from the Jewish Bible. I had no idea what to do, and I declined. Who was I to deserve this? What if I screwed up?

I had reached an impasse. Spiritually, I was at ease in Jewish beliefs and had no desire to go backward, but I saw no way forward without ‘fessing up to my ignorance and what I viewed as my twisted background. I finally decided to speak with Kane Street’s rabbi, a man I immensely liked. In this Jewish version of a confessional, I came clean – about my parents, the Baptist beliefs, the unguided drift from Christianity to Judaism, my sense of shame at what I had been.

To my surprise and delight, the rabbi was not the least bit shocked. It turned out I wasn’t the first Jew to lack a bar mitzvah or an enriching Jewish upbringing. Imagine that. Our conversation marked my fresh start as a Jew. As the Baptists would say, I got right with God. I felt relief that I had faced the facts of the past and didn’t get laughed at.

Over the last 25 years, I have built my version of a Jewish life. I have studied Hebrew and feel, if not fluent, then more aware of what’s happening during services. I was married at the Kane Street Synagogue in 1989 by a new rabbi, a woman I like to call “Rebbe Debbie.”

Since my divorce in 2003, I have dated only Jewish women, who I find intelligent, passionate, and adorable. The rhythms of Judaism seeped into me, so that I transferred the emotional response I had to Christian prayers and music to Jewish liturgy that I have heard hundreds of times – Aleiynu, Adon Olam, Yedid Nefesh, Ain Keloheynu, Kaddish and Israel’s national anthem, Hatikva.

My adult experiences are catching up to the intellectual leap I made as a teenager. I gave myself the Hebrew name “Zev” (wolf) to use when I have an aliyah, an act that rattles me only slightly now.

While I’ve made peace with my past and current beliefs, I am still aware of the split in my life. My Jewish friends remember childhood seders; I colored Easter eggs. They played with dreydls; I decorated Christmas trees. They hated Hebrew school; I liked Vacation Bible School. My childhood and adult sides are mostly separate.

The chasm yawned whenever I returned to Mission and visited with Mrs. D. My break with the past saddened her. “Could you ever believe the way you used to?” she once asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m happy with what I am now.”

But some shards of faith bridge the distance of decades. I have the family menorah and the Union Prayer Book from Mission, and books that mention that hardy Prussian on the prairie, Rabbi Schwarz.

The chai around my neck? Mom gave that treasure to me for Hanukkah 1979, four years before she died of cancer. While a Baptist preacher presided over my mother’s funeral in 1984 and she was cremated, her older sister Charlotte, a fervent Baptist, placed Mom’s tombstone in the Jewish cemetery in Gonzales, Texas, next to their parents’ graves.

Whenever I’m in McAllen, I attend services at Temple Emanuel – where I feel most welcome. And I still say the Sh’ma every night, the way my mother taught me.

Van “Zev” Wallach is a writer based in Stamford, Connecticut. A native of Mission, Texas, he holds an economics degree from Princeton University. Van writes frequently on religion, politics and other matters. His interests include travel, digital photography, world music and blogging, which he does at Kesher Talk http://keshertalk.com/, where this piece originally appeared.

“Shards of Faith, Reassembled” is reprinted with permission of the author.

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May 4, 2009 · 8:31 am

A Ger in Gan Eden

by Pat Alder (New Paltz, NY)

What a long, strange trip this has been for me.

I suppose you don’t know many Jews born in a Catholic hospital, do you?  Allow me to explain. I converted to Judaism in 2003 at age 47, but I had been a “practicing” Jew for thirty-three years prior to that day.  Do the math.

I can trace the beginning–the first time that I felt the pintele Yid–to when I was a kid exploring my neighborhood of East Flatbush, Brooklyn, on an old bicycle with hard rubber wheels. (At least I never worried about a flat tire.)

One Saturday morning I heard an intriguing sound coming from a small house with a kelly green fence surrounding the small parcel of land.

Transfixed, I stood alongside the fence, listening, delighted, and, like a tuning fork, my being resonated with the singing that floated out of the windows toward me.

After a while men in black hats and suits poured out of the little house talking and wishing each other something that sounded close to ” Goott Shabbis.”

When I told my parents, who were good Catholics, they thought it was time that I learned about my own religion and sent me to Catholic school where I proceeded to be the gadfly in Sister Mary Linus’ class.

“Okay, if Jesus could convert wine to water, why could He not have prevented His death? He didn’t know what was coming?”

I was six years old.

Once I was whacked with a ruler for forgetting some aspect of dogma, and I grabbed the ruler–my fiery Irish Latin temper ablaze–and smacked the sister back.

My parents were called in to speak to the Mother Superior, and, shortly afterward, my full-time religious school training was over, except for Wednesday afternoon classes for Catholics attending public school.

My friends in public school were few, but mainly Jewish. I asked questions, many questions, of them, and–wow!–they answered me.

The more I read, inquired and observed, the more I felt the pintele Yid inside me and saw myself as Jewish.

I’ve heard it said that people who feel Jewish–but who are not born Jewish–possess a Jewish soul.

I wasn’t Catholic. But was I Jewish?

All I knew then was that the most basic tenets of Judaism made more sense to me than the whole of Catholicism.

Fast forward twenty-three years to my first marriage to a Reform Jew.

I began the conversion process and took the classes. But the day we were married, we moved from New York to Vermont where my new husband had a new job at a radio station.

Although he was supportive of my goal, our marriage fell apart after four years. Despite this setback, I continued on my quest to become Jewish.

Twenty years later I found myself back in the Hudson Valley area of New York. I knew no one and was too busy at work to make friends. In desperation one night I prayed:  “If you know of one person…one good person here. . . let me know.”

Unbeknownst to me, a good person was nearby. His name was Chuck, and he was my managing supervisor at work. We were on chatting terms. He knew I was Jewish, but only I knew that I was Jewish in spirit. It was the High Holy Days. He told me of a temple he attended and invited me to come along to Yom Kippur services.

Yom Kippur morning. It had been sixteen years since I was last inside a synagogue, and I was nervous. Chuck spotted me and waved me over to join him. At first the prayers were unfamiliar, and Chuck was giving me a play by play of the service itself. I hummed where I needed to, bowed where I needed to, and generally followed my friend.

Soon after the holidays, I began to attend shul regularly. I got to know the rabbi and many of the families. After one service I went over to the rabbi and asked if there were conversion classes and  told him of the incomplete one I had started and now wanted to finish.

He was delighted to hear I wanted to do this and told me the classes were on Tuesday nights, which was fine at first, but then I began a new job and continued studying as a “distance learner,” calling, e-mailing, and meeting with the rabbi so he could monitor my progress and answer my many questions.

Some of my questions were answered, and some were “chok,” which means “There is no conclusive answer, but one accepts it on faith.”

Now that was an answer I could live with, even if it didn’t answer the question directly.

I studied for a year, observing all the holidays, learning Hebrew.

Hebrew. That was the most difficult part. But I had a very patient teacher in Naomi. Eventually, I could read the letters and slowly make out the words. My proudest moment was driving back from Monroe and being able to read a sign written in Hebrew. “Hey! I know those letters!!”

But what did it say? I didn’t know. I think that’s how Hebrew is taught.  Learn the words first, we’ll get to what they mean later on. G-d knows what you are saying. (This approach reminds me of the story about a man who prays by repeating all the letters again and again without forming any words: “I give G-d the letters,” he says, “and G-d will know what I am saying.”)

A year. The holidays flew by, month by month.  I said Kaddish for my father, lit the Shabbat candles, observed Havdalah, fasted and feasted. I loved every minute.

It was time. If I was going to complete the process, it was now. I asked the rabbi if it was really time. We talked in his office, and he thought I was ready to go in front of the Bet Din.  But was I truly ready?

Yes.

Nervous? I was panic stricken, despite all the ribbing I got from the rabbi and others.

On the scheduled day, I walked into the rabbi’s office at the stroke of noon and saw, in addition to the rabbi, the cantor and Howard, another person who I knew fairly well. I thought the Bet Din was made up of three rabbis. These were folks I knew!

“You mean…y’all are it?” was my first question.

“Yes.. we… all… are”  was Howard’s reply.

I answered many questions, primarily regarding my Shabbat observances and my belief in Jesus. (I didn’t really have a belief. I said that he was a nice person, but no son of G-d.) I left thinking: “I don’t know… I hope that was okay.” I felt drained, tired, although I had spent less than an hour answering their questions.

The Purim services later that night went well. Most of the congregation liked the Purimshpiel where I told jokes a la Bob Hope. After the service, the rabbi grabbed my arm, and, in my surprise, I shot him an annoyed look. He knew in that instant, I needed to know their decision.

“Did I make it?”  I asked.

“Yes, yes you did” the rabbi replied.

I’m Jewish!

Wellllll, not exactly…yet.

“We now need to schedule you for the mikvah,” the rabbi told me, smiling.

A week later, towel in hand, I went into the Orthodox shul where the mikvah was located. A lovely bubbeleh, Claire, took me in hand and showed me around.

My being sans attire in front of her? Well, that was a different story altogether. “Look, it’s not like she hasn’t seen other naked women before you,” I told myself in an effort to calm my jittery nerves.

The mikvah smelled of humidity and pine cleaner and was quite warm. Claire took my towel, and I gradually immersed myself into the warm, slightly fizzy water.

The three men who formed the Bet Din stood on the other side of the door, yelling. ” Okay! Now dip three times into the water.”

Claire was there to make sure I dipped myself completely and, indeed, performed the mitzvah.

But I’m a rather overweight woman, and, for those science buffs reading this, a quick fact: Fat floats. I couldn’t immerse under the water for the life of me. Like a champagne cork, I bobbed to the surface.

Finally, I felt my body go below the water’s surface. Then twice more…and, finally, the blessing, which the rabbi said in Hebrew and I repeated after him.

The words, when translated into English, mean, “Blessed are You, King of the world, Who has made us holy with Your commandments and commanded us concerning the immersion.”

Once the immersion was completed, I was asked to say the “Shema,” and I said the first line loudly, proudly, and with thirty-three years of suddenly freed passion. Then I repeated the rest of the prayer after the rabbi.

As soon as I finished saying the words, I heard the three witnesses singing “Mazel tov and siman tov” and clapping along with the melody. Claire was singing and clapping as well.

Then it was over, and I was official, even though the paperwork had to be filed, and I still needed to choose a name.

I was Jewish…really, really Jewish.

“Welcome to the tribe!” is the greeting I get once I tell other Jews of my conversion.

And I must say I don’t think I could have fallen–or should I say “dipped”–into a better tribe of people.

Pat Alder, a comedienne, writer, and occasional background actress, has appeared at Stand Up New York, the Improv in Los Angeles, the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal, and at many other clubs and Jewish Community Centers nationwide.

The author/performer of the one woman show, Man! What a Life! and a contributor to the online comedy magazine Shtick!, she was the last person seen on NBC’s short lived comedy series Cold Feet  (1999) and refuses to accept blame for its cancellation.

Pat performs comedy in NYC when she can, continues to work as an actress, and writes every day, usually in her time sheet at her day job.

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April 27, 2009 · 8:18 am

Now What?

by Ellie Sugarman (Sarasota, FL)

The many hours, weeks and months that I’ve spent learning Hebrew are almost over.

I will become a bat mitzvah on May 9th, 2009 at Temple Sinai in Sarasota.  My family and friends are planning to attend.

It’s been a challenge to learn not only how to read directly from the Torah, with its minuscule print, but having to learn how any mark under or above each letter alters its sound.

The unique markings above or below the letters, or at the side of a consonant, tell you whether to hold or repeat the sound.  Certain markings will tell you to sound more than one consonant together.  These marks are called the “trope, ” and they help listeners know when a new thought begins and ends.

So, I had to learn not only how to chant the letters which make up each word, but how to stress or elongate the syllables.

All this is not very easy, especially for someone my age!

It’s common for children of thirteen to become a bar or bat mitzvah.  But occasionally an older individual who never had a bar or bat mitzvah dreams of a ceremony of his or her own.

For me, becoming a bat mitzvah became a goal after I found myself as a widow after fifty-nine years of a good marriage. It was very unsettling.  I needed to feel rooted again.

Perhaps I am unique in this need, but I felt learning about my Jewish heritage would offer me solace and well-being. I felt I was on the right path.  I felt sturdier and protected.

It was when some dear friends invited me to welcome the Sabbath over the course of many Friday evenings that I began to have these “feel good” feelings.

Observing the Sabbath each week at their home, and chanting the blessings for the bread and the wine, allowed me to feel the love and warmth of my hosts.

I hadn’t realized what was happening to me.

Returning to the synagogue was helpful, too, and a Sabbath service that I attended about six months ago at Temple Sinai was especially reassuring.

I was asked to recite one of the prayers before the Torah was read, and I was able to do it well.

Walking back to my seat, I had an epiphany. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced.

It had been a cloudy, dreary day, but for a minute the sanctuary suddenly appeared so very bright and sunny.  Everything around me was glowing.

I blinked my eyes, and the natural color of the room returned.

If someone were to tell me that they had experienced this, I would have listened but possibly would have challenged the truthfulness of it happening.

I do not doubt my experience.

My motto has always been, “Yes, I can.”

I don’t know what else I will be able to learn or accomplish in the years ahead.  Right now, I’m looking forward to becoming a bat mitzvah.

After that, who knows?

There’s always a trip to the moon!

Ellie Sugarman, a perennial student, will be called to the Torah as a bat mitzvah on May 9, 2009, to read her Torah portion, Emor. She has volunteered at the Women’s  Resource Center for the past seven years and was a docent at the Ringling Museum of Art for more than 15 years.

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April 20, 2009 · 8:11 am

Remembrance

by Nina Gold (Waterville, ME)

On Holocaust Remembrance Day,
Yom Hashoah in Hebrew,
he told her he was human
he understood what it was
to fear long walks, gas, and G-d—
but he felt, too, the hot terror
in the shoulders of a bare-faced teenager
wearing a uniform starched by his mother,
taught to hate, given orders, and handed a gun.

All the while, she was gathering things:
a few shirts, underwear,
sewing jewelry in the hem of her coat, snatching
sacred photographs and stuffing them
into hidden pockets. Just as he finished talking
about how organized religion was the man-made cause
of nearly every war and nearly
everyone’s hatred,
she slipped away and could never reply
that in this case, yes, religion was
inextricably bound to death, to

Those who gave their lives

but Hitler had nationalism in mind.
When she disappeared, his heart
shattered like glass.
He raised their children Jewish.

Nina Gold was raised in Newton, Massachusetts and is currently a student at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

She says that she wrote about the Holocaust because she’s interested in young people’s relationship to anti-Semitism.

“Some students I know see anti-Semitism as a real, contemporary issue—something that has a place in their lives—while others consider it foreign or anachronistic. When I hear Jews my age say, ‘I’m not really Jewish,’ or ‘my parents are Jewish, but I’m not anything,’ I sometimes fear we may be our own worst enemies.”

You can read more of her work on her blog: http://minibeastspeaks.blogspot.com

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April 13, 2009 · 8:31 am

My Father, The Jewish Athlete

by Helen Epstein (Lexington, Massachusetts)

When I was growing up in the 1950s, none of my friends’ Dads worked out at a gym, let alone swam laps in a pool. My father did. For nearly two decades between the two world wars, he represented Czechoslovakia in international competitions and two Olympic Games. He also coached and served as a role model for younger Jewish swimmers.

One of three sons of an assimilated Jewish family, Kurt Epstein was born in 1904 in the Austro-Hungarian province of Bohemia. The Epstein boys played at being American cowboys; their parents employed a cook and a nurse, a German tutor and violin teacher.

Sports were an important part of life for Czech children by then– girls and boys, Christians and Jews, children of factory workers as well as children of factory owners learned to swim, skate and row. The Epsteins lived on the Elbe river and, early on, Kurt began to use it.

“Any mood can be improved by a good swim,” my father always said.

But there’s no question that he saw swimming as a response to anti-Semitism. That was one of the reasons he joined his school rowing club, which introduced him to athletic discipline, and its rewards.

Rowing made him an asset to his school and small town and soon Kurt began to think about competitive swimming. He and his friends who swam in the Elbe followed newspaper reports of races in Prague, invested in a stop watch, began to clock their times. Then, they signed up to compete.

According to scholars, Czech Jews, like Jews all over Central Europe, were well-represented among athletes of the 1920s and 1930s. This was largely due to the work of Dr. Max Nordau, who called for a “muscular Judaism” at a Zionist Congress in 1898. Dr. Nordau, a physician and one of Herzl’s earliest supporters, argued that a muscular Jewry had existed in ancient times but over the centuries had been destroyed by ghettoization.

Whether or not Kurt was aware of Nordau’s ideas, he would have been in sympathy with them, and eager to put traditional Jewish stereotypes behind him like most Czech Jews.

In 1924, Kurt took pride in joining the Czechoslovak Army in “It never occurred to me to stay up all night and drink potfuls of coffee like some to try to produce an irregular heartbeat and get a rejection,” he recalled.

He was selected for reserve officers school and posted back to Prague where he played water polo in the Vltava River. Then the Czechoslovak National Swim Club requested that he be furloughed to compete in Barcelona, the first of many competitions he attended from Scandinavia to North Africa.

By the early 1920s water polo was one of the roughest and most popular spectator sports in Europe. It is tempting to ponder the psychology that drew men to such a rough sport. Kurt recalled speculating about it himself whenever his team played against the Hungarians who rarely lost a game.

I once asked why a player was playing so furiously since his team was already winning by two digits. He answered that after the war, each one of Hungary’s neighbors had taken a piece of their land. Therefore it was important at least in sports to score as high as possible.

For my father, the ultimate place to score was at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Whether or not to participate in what would become known as the Nazi Olympics was a hotly debated question throughout the world. The Maccabi ordered all its members to boycott.  A Gallup poll indicated 43% of Americans favored boycott and many athletes refused to participate.

Kurt Epstein decided to go. When asked whether he ever regretted his decision to participate, Kurt always said no. He believed sports occupied a higher plane than politics and described the triumph of “the American Negro runner” as he called Jesse Owens, who defied Aryan notions of racial superiority by winning four golds.

Two years later, Hitler annexed what is now the Czech Republic. Kurt was deported to Terezin, then to Auschwitz, then to a small labor camp called Frydlant. There, the prisoners took turns giving lectures to one another on subjects they loved. My father gave one on the Olympic ideal and the importance of amateur sports. He sometimes gave his sports training, along with luck and friendship, as reasons for his surviving Nazism.

When he returned to Prague after the war, he was elected to the Czechoslovak Olympic Committee. When the Communists took over in 1948, he felt that he would not survive a second totalitarian regime and vowed to get out in time “in a swimsuit if necessary.”

He arrived in New York City in the summer of 1948 where, for a decade, he was unable to find steady employment but where he was soon elected Treasurer of The Association of Czechoslovak Sportsmen in Exile in the Western World. Eventually, he was accepted into the ILGWU and became a cutter in a clothing factory in New York’s garment district.

He maintained a correspondence with a network of athletes-in-exile –Jewish and non-Jewish — living in Australia, South America, Israel and Europe, read the sports section of the newspaper every day and never lost his belief in the international brotherhood of sports.

He taught his children how to swim, and I still do.

Helen Epstein is the author of Children of the Holocaust and Where She Came From — the first two volumes of a trilogy about the families of Holocaust survivors — and the biography of Joseph Papp, the American Jewish founder of Free Shakespeare in New York City’s Central Park.
Her website is http://www.helenepstein.com.

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April 6, 2009 · 8:59 am

Growing Up Jewish

An Interview with David B. Black (Yardley, PA)

(interviewed by Rick Black)

Port Chester, NY was a small town, especially the Jewish community.

We went to shul on Lake Street, then on Willett Avenue, and in the Jewish Center. In fact, my father was a founding member of the shul on Willett Avenue – Congregation Knesseth Israel at 249 Willett Avenue. A lot of the Orthodox Jews lived between Travis Avenue and Townsend Street but that was a different group, a religious group, and we had nothing to do with them.

Of course, I went to Hebrew school. The rabbi’s name was Winkler. He was the head and he had a son our age who was part of our gang. At Hebrew school, we were not the greatest kids but I remember the one pleasure that we had was when we left Hebrew school, we would go to the Lifesavers building on Main Street, which was a block away, and there they had three big lifesavers in front of the building – peppermint, wintergreen and I don’t know what the other one was, it might have been orange. We used to play king of the hill and we would run up on the hill and try to hold it, and the other kids would grab our coats and rip our buttons off, and my mother would always wonder how I lost all my buttons – but I never told her.

The other thing at the Lifesavers building was on Saturday morning when the football season was in vogue, they would have a fella from our high school team, Baker – who was the star fullback – giving out samples of lifesavers to all of the automobiles that were passing by. Most of them were on their way to the Yale game and, as they would pass the Lifesavers building, he would drop the lifesavers in their car, and we used to chase after the extra samples that fell in the street.

I was bar mitzvahed in a very small shul – the one on Lake Street. We didn’t make much of it. It was just a small bar mitzvah for our family. I davaned Saturday morning for the service, Shacharis and Musaf, and when they took the Torah out of the ark, I had to sing the “Shema” and my voice broke, and a kid from Hebrew school said, “You alright?”

My father was so proud that I’d be able to davan now. My folks gave me a party for all my friends, all the boys, at my house on Washington Street. We had them over and had a lot of fun. I got a lot of fountain pens. I must have gotten six fountain pens and three didn’t work. I remember the best one that I had was Waterman’s, and that was my favorite.

And, of course, I used to caddie and my mother bought me a set of golf clubs when I was bar mitzvah. I used to make a dollar a round plus a twenty five cent tip, and that allowed you to play on Monday at the course. I played golf at the public courses.

* * *

Before the Jewish Center was built, we would play basketball in barns around town. It was hot but we didn’t care. Even though I was thin, I wouldn’t let that stop me from playing a lot of ball. I went to Hebrew school after my regular classes and then I would spend a lot of time at the Jewish Center, playing basketball and working out.

While at the Center, I played a lot of billiards, I learned how to play pool, I played a lot of ping pong and, later on in life, I was doubles champion for Westchester County in ping pong with Irving Walt as my partner. I was taught boxing and hitting the punching bag. I was pretty good at the punching bag. I had a lot of friends and we played a lot and spent a lot of time at the Jewish Center.

We used to have a good time in the gym. In fact, the fella who had the candy machine in the hall never collected any money because all the guys used to bang the machine against the wall and the candy used to come out. We didn’t feel that was stealing. We felt that he didn’t know his business! We used to have a lot of fun. Many days I would bask in the sun on the roof.

We had a basketball team that was not so hot – but it was pretty good. I was a forward. Our coach used to get the games for us in Stamford and Greenwich and White Plains and New Rochelle and Mamaroneck and Mount Vernon. One day we traveled to Staten Island – we got beat so bad. We used to play in Yonkers – they had a very good team. And some of our boys were on the town team that played for the county championship in White Plains. We lost in the last ten seconds – one of our guards threw the ball to one of the other Yonkers players in error and he made a basket and we lost by one point. We had some good times.

While in junior high school, four friends and myself started a club called the Maccabeans, and we were a very active club. We would run beautiful dances. We would decorate the gym with balloons and confetti and hire a band and the whole town would come and pay tribute to the dance that we would put on. We would take the money that we raised and we would donate it to the Jewish Center for some cause – it might be a new standing radio, it might go for someone to go to camp who couldn’t afford it – but it was a good deed for everyone.

We had about 35 or 40 members after we got started and it was the most popular club in the Jewish Center. We were guided by a young lady who was Ethel Goldman and she saw to it that we ran the club in a constitutional way. I was the president of the club for maybe five sessions. They wouldn’t hear of having another president. They liked the way I conducted the meetings.

The dues were ten cents a week for everybody. If they were behind one month, we looked into the fact to find out whether they had the money or didn’t have the money. And if they didn’t have the money, we used to let them stay in anyway. One of my friends, Joel, though, had a friend who was gentile, and said he would like to put him up for membership in the club. It was a question of letting him in or not, and we took a vote, and voted against it. You had to be of the Jewish faith and connected to the Center to get in – that’s what we figured.

One time our club decided to put on a Broadway musical at the Jewish Center and they hired a director to put on “Loose Change” – that was the name of the musical – and I was one of the chorus. I lost 10 pounds by dancing in this show. It was a very good show; it sold out for three nights. But when we came to the dress rehearsal and the production manager was up front and the curtain went up and he raised his arms to start like a conductor, everybody froze. We didn’t get off the first kick.

So, he said, “I don’t understand you. It’s a good thing that we’re having this rehearsal because if this happened tomorrow night, we would be in dire trouble.”

So they put the curtain back and they started again – and this time it was okay. We were very successful with the play; it was a humdinger.

* * *

My Dad knew we had the club and he used to sell a lot of pants in his store, and when he had to have the pants fixed, he would give the pants to be repaired to a special tailor, and one of the tailors was a Russian. He had his wife and children come over to this country when I was about twelve. And my father said, “You know, this young man has no friends here. Why don’t you introduce him to your friends and get him started?”

So, this fella’s name was Max Bregoff and I met him. He was a tough Russian. I introduced him to a lot of my friends who were members of the club and we made him a member of the club, too. We called him the mad Russian. He used to get very angry. He’d spit at them. He was a tough hombre but he found the American way and he was able to live a good life and enjoy himself. He spent a lot of time at the Jewish Center. Yes, he did find the American way and he became a friend.

After I graduated high school, I still played basketball for the Jewish Center. And then we had a very good ball team that used to play before crowds of two, three, four thousand people. We played other teams within the town – the Don Boscoes, the Holy Name Society, the Catholic organizations, the Y.M.C.A. It used to go on for weeks.

One time we took our team to play against Don Bosco, the Italians, and heard ’em say, “Let’s get the Jews.” But I never really had any trouble with anti-Semitism in Port Chester. We played a lot of teams and used to raise a lot of money for the Jewish Center.

David B. Black, 94, is my father. He was the men’s wear merchandise manager for Alexander’s Department Stores for over thirty years until his retirement in 1978. Over the past two years my brother interviewed Dad weekly to gather material for a family memoir, from which this is an excerpt.

Rick Black, my brother, is a prize-winning poet and former journalist who creates hand-crafted books at Turtle Light Press in Highland Park, NJ. You can see his work at http://www.turtlelightpress.com/abouttlp.shtml

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March 30, 2009 · 8:36 am

A Rally for Harmony

by Mimi Schwartz (Princeton, NJ)

As an American Jew—the child of German refugees—overt anti-Semitism was my parents’ old world, not mine. There’d be an occasional remark here and there, but everyone gets that in multi-ethnic New Jersey. No big deal, I thought, until 500 anti-Semitic flyers were posted on the walls and kiosks of the college where I’ve taught for twenty-two years. That was a shock. Some had swastikas leaning on Jewish stars. Some had a picture of Hitler and of an Israeli soldier, both of equal size. Its caption read: “How many millions must die?” Some had the Christ-like figure of crucifixion paintings, but instead of the expected cross, the arms were draped over a Jewish star, evoking the imagery of Jew as Christ killer. The caption read, “Stop the Murder. Free the Palestinians.”

The flyers were taken down quickly (someone said they’d been posted “without going through school channels”), but a Rally for Harmony was organized in response as way of saying communally: “Hey! You can’t do that around here.” I expected good campus support, especially from those, both Jew and Gentile, who were involved in the school’s Holocaust and Genocide Program, because a central question of those courses has been: “What would you do if…?” Until the flyers appeared around the college, the need to answer had seemed hypothetical.

“Anti-Semitism like that is gone now!” students in my Holocaust through Literature and Film course proclaimed three months earlier while examining a Nazi flyer, circa 1934. It showed a black-haired, fat man with a long hooked nose handing candy to two blond children, and the translated caption read: “Jewish sex fiend passes out sweets with sinister intent.” People don’t believe such rubbish anymore! That’s what the majority of my class (who were white, Christian, early twenty-ish, and first-generation college) had assured me.

They repeated this conviction (although more tentatively) after watching “The Long Walk Home,” a film about the African-American bus boycott in Montgomery, 1955. And again (although with even less conviction) after “School Ties,” a movie set in a rich New England prep school in the 1950’s, where the kids turned against a newly imported football star once they found out (after a winning football season, their first) that he was Jewish.

I show these movies interspersed with Holocaust films to connect past with present. Otherwise it is too easy to be self-righteous about what those Germans did way, way back then. Gradually, student platitudes about tolerance give way to personal stories about bigotry: from not being served as a Black at Denny’s after the prom, to picking on a Jewish roommate who hogged the refrigerator with Kosher food, to shrugging off Polish jokes from fraternity brothers when you are Polish.

The initial tellers are African-American, Hispanic, or Jewish, but then everyone jumps in, sharing injustices they have observed, been victim of, or taken part in. The conversation becomes less guarded. We argue about harmless joking vs. ugly prejudice, moral responsibility vs. risking your life, and what would you do if it happens again. As long as I can keep honesty mixed with civility, everyone keeps listening to one another.

A second shock, regarding the flyers, was that my friends on the political left were boycotting the rally. The 500 flyers were, they said, a non-issue. The real issue was Israel as “The Occupier” with a totally unjustifiable policy. Citing the right of free speech, they were more upset with the college administrators, whom they accused of oppressing the students who posted the flyers.

One colleague—and friend of twenty years—said that taking the flyers down was an outrage, a conspiracy. (I suddenly hear “Jewish conspiracy.”) “All the flyers did was display Palestinian suffering,” she said, practically spitting the words out. “So what if they didn’t get official permission, a mere technicality, an excuse meant to appease the Holocaust powers who were organizing the rally.” ( I suddenly hear “Jewish power.”) She wasn’t going near the rally, which, she said, would be “totally controlled and scripted.”

“But this rally at least admits to a college problem,” I said, swallowing anger. She shrugged. “You didn’t find the flyers offensive?” No response. “The Jew as Christ-killer, the ways the arms are spread out, as if nailed to a cross?”

“Gee, I didn’t get that!” she said, her eyes widening on an earnest face. “I saw it as the figure in the Pieta, you know, a mother suffering for her dead son, like Palestinian mothers.”

This is a professor whose walls are lined with history books. Are you really that naive? I wanted to yell. And what about Israeli mothers who are suffering? And don’t the Israelis have the right for self-defense?

We were saved from the end of friendship by the bell ringing for the next class. “Well, many people here feel the flyers are anti-Semitic,” I said and backed away, feeling betrayed. So this is why my Dad left Germany, I thought, hurrying off, my heels echoing on the red floor tile. People like me, cautiously silent. People like her, self-righteous and unpredictable.

“Okay, okay, I may be over-reacting,” I conceded over lunch to another colleague who dismissed my analogy to Nazi Germany as Jewish paranoia made worse by my parents’ narrow escape. True, I was haunted by whether I’d be as smart as my father who saw the danger signs early enough. The story of how he’d attended a Hitler rally in 1931 and told my mother that night, after seeing thousands of arms raised in adoration, “If that man gets elected, we leave!” had been repeated to me, over and over, as a survival guide. And here were 500 “signs”—posted!! So why weren’t my friends seeing them?

“You can be against Israeli policy and not be an anti-Semite,” said this colleague evenly (he happened to be Jewish), as we ate tuna sandwiches, his bushy beard catching a few crumbs. Weaned on anti-war rallies of the sixties, he has been re-energized by what he sees as another version of the injustice of Vietnam: the same military/industrial complex, the same First World capitalism vs. Third World poverty. Only now Israel is the colonial oppressor. “The Israeli leaders have no credibility, not when they keep building Jewish settlements on Arab land,” he said quietly.

“No argument about that!” I replied. My belief in the security and safety of Israel doesn’t make me pro-settlements, a distinction that keeps getting lost in the ‘for-or-against’ polarization. “So are you coming to the rally?” I offered him my bag of chips as extra enticement, now that we’d found common ground.

“No, it’s a fraud,” he said.

“But not having a rally is worse.”

“The flyers weren’t anti-Semitic in intent, you know. One of the two kids was in Jewish Studies.”

I wanted to shout: Would you say that if those who had hung the Willie Horton posters said, “It’s okay. One of our publicists is Black!” But I thought reason might still make him come to the rally, scheduled in thirty minutes. “Well, if we don’t support a harmony rally, the extremists rule—whatever their stand,” I said.

He shook his head. “No one will say what he really thinks!” and he stood up to go. “Besides,” he said, turning to walk away, “I have a class, a review session.” He waved.

“So bring them!” I called. His was a social history course, after all.

I headed for the rally, thinking about Saul Friedlander’s book, Nazi Germany and the Jews. One of its main premises is that the early silence of the universities as a moral guardian of society helped to make Hitler feel he had “a green light to proceed.” I would send my colleague the quote that struck me most:

“… When Jewish colleagues were dismissed, no German professor publicly protested; when the number of Jewish students was drastically reduced, no university committee or faculty member expressed any opposition; when books were burned throughout the Reich, no intellectual in Germany, or for that matter anyone else within the country, openly expressed any shame.” (P.60)

I always wondered what those German professors told themselves in order not to act. Was it some rationalized sense of justice that let them ignore the images of Jew as sex fiend for a higher cause? And do my colleagues ignore images of Jews as Christ killers for some similar impulse of Right?

The new flyers that appeared on the kiosks were of Palestinian women weeping for their sons, daughters, and the lost land that was their birthright. No swastikas and Jewish stars (someone nixed that), but they made a strong case for justice for the Palestinians without knee-jerk images of hate. That, to me, is what free speech on a college campus is all about: the right to argue your position without the crutch of insult that prevents real listening. Free speech is not hate speech, I tell my classes whenever someone uses fag, Jap, cunt, kike, fatso, to make a case. And everyone seems grateful, as if the venue for open expression is safer with limits.

Only sixty or so (out of 5,000) gathered for harmony in the D-Wing Circle on a blue-sky day before finals week. A Muslim student in T-shirt and jeans came to the open mike to say, “We need to think of ourselves as human beings first, not as Jew, Christian, and Muslim first.”

A Jewish student with a yarmulke stood up to proclaim, “We are all God’s children.”

An African-American woman said, “We must overcome our differences and treat each other with respect.”

A man with a turban said, “We are all Americans who seek peace.”

After each speech everyone applauded vigorously, despite words that sounded like Hallmark cards. We knew the alternative from other campuses—shouting, pushing, even fistfights—and that 7,000 miles away, the lack of commitment to these words of harmony keeps feeding the tragic spiral of Israeli/ Palestinian violence.

There were students from the Jewish Student Union, the Muslim Association, the Hellenic Association, the Asian Student Association, the International Club, the Women’s Coalition—fourteen groups in all. There were two-dozen administrators and faculty members —some acting officially; others, like me, representing one citizen. Five of my students showed up, which was better than none, I suppose, given upcoming exams and that many probably never saw the flyers before they were taken down. The President didn’t show either, a delayed Board meeting, someone said.

Around the concrete wall of the circle were colored signs—Civility, Freedom, Communication, Dignity, Respect—the kind we hang in kindergarten classrooms to teach young children about how to behave. For six-year-olds, they are new words to be taken seriously, executed daily. For adults, their worn, tired repetitions make us impatient. Yes, yes, yes, but….

But within the walled circle for harmony they seemed to frame what might explode. A colleague who loves Plato and Aristotle came up to me and whispered, her face red with anger: “I’m here to support anyone who tells Israel to get the hell out of Palestine!”

“Hey, this is a harmony rally,” I reminded her, managing to swallow Jerk! “We are here to put salve on some wounds.”

“A waste of time,” she said, and left.

I thought how her rage, like mine, if spoken into the open microphone would turn the Rally for Harmony into Cable TV cross-fires of yelling and sound-bite slogans of good and evil that force you either to cheer, boo or change channels in disgust.

At least words like “We must treat each other with respect” keep people connected like bonds of communal prayer or the daily “I love you’s” we tell our mates even when we feel wronged. By themselves these words do little except to hold off permanent damage; but without them, there is little chance to lay the foundation that might turn self-righteousness into something more meaningful, as happened in my class.

I was about to leave when my lunch friend, the activist, showed up. He was “only passing by,” but wanted me to know that he was planning a series of real forums next semester to discuss the Middle East and its repercussions. He and another faculty member were drawing up a list of speakers to lead discussions on the history of the region, American policy options, religious and cultural differences, Zionism vs. Racism, first amendment issues.

“Great!” I said, feeling more optimistic.

‘Forum’ in the Greek spirit of the word suggests ‘insight,’ not to ‘incite’ as a rally does–even a harmony rally. And in a forum-style atmosphere, I could try again to convince my colleagues of their blindness to those anti-Semitic flyers. And maybe Muslim students would be more open about bigotry against them on campus. And we could debate free speech vs. hate speech. And Israelis and Palestinians could be invited to describe their respective homeland’s needs and suffering and fears.

I was on a roll of optimism, imagining people becoming reasonable.

But then the harmony rally ended, and someone began ripping down the bright pink, green, and yellow signs. “Stop! I’ll take them!” I yelled, knowing that wherever we meet, we’ll need to hang those signs again– Civility, Freedom, Respect, Dignity and Reason—and to keep looking at them.

Mimi Schwartz is the author of Good Neighbors, Bad Times – Echoes of My Father’s German Village, which won the 2008 ForeWord Magazine Book Award for memoir (and soon to be released in paperback). Other books include Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed, a marriage memoir, and Writing True, the Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction (with Sondra Perl). Her short work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, The New York Times, Tikkun, Jewish Week, The Writer’s Chronicle, and The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, among others. Six of her essays have been Notables in Best American Essays and she just won a 2008 Pushcart Prize in nonfiction. For more information, go to http://www.mimischwartz.net/

This essay, which appeared in slightly different form in Tikkun Magazine, is reprinted here with permission.

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March 23, 2009 · 7:53 am

Shma Israel

By George  Oscar  Lee (Aventura, FL)

Hear O Israel…
This time O Lord You listen!
Did You, God, see the smoke from Auschwitz
Made of innocent souls?
Or read the sign Arbeit Macht Frei?
Did You hear the moans of murdered children?

Shma Israel, Adonoy Eloheynu
God in heavens!
Where are the millions of your chosen?
Soil covered their mass graves,
Unburned remnants of holy Torahs
The wind swept with wilted leaves.

Shma  Israel, Adonoy Eloheynu, Adonoy Echod
You are our Sovereign, look at Treblinka
At stones with engraved names of the cities,
Those are countless fingers.
Fingers pointing at Your cold skies
In mute accusation of J’accuse… J’accuse… J’accuse!

Shma Israel, Adonoy Eloheynu, Adonoy Echod
Echo of our offering ricochets
From our earthly globe
To the whole universe.
Instead of Shma  Israel
We hear only Kaddish… Kaddish… Kaddish…

_____

George Oscar Lee was born in Drohobycz, Poland. In June, 1941, he ran away to Russia, just ahead of the invading German troops, and was arrested by the NKVD.  Eventually, he was released as a Polish citizen, joined the Polish Army at the end of 1943, and participated in the Liberation of Warsaw. The author of five books, many short stories, and poems published in The Forward, Bialystoker Shtime, Slowo  Zydowskie, and Ziemia  Drohobycka, he lives in Aventura, FL.

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March 16, 2009 · 8:19 am

Shema: Hear! Listen!

By Gloria Scheiner (Sarasota, FL)

We signed the Shema today.

We cupped our ears and raised one finger to show the Lord is One.

It was Tot Shabbat at my daughter Elana’s temple, and everyone was called to listen.

The Lord is One, and we were one Jewish community.

The parents recited the blessing over their sons and daughters, and, of course, Elana, Michael, and three-year-old Chloe sneaked in a special prayer to include their miniature dachshund, Otto.

The Shema urges us to hear, to listen!

I listen.

I listen to my forty-year-old son, Adam, when he calls me each morning at 7:20 am on his way to his office.

I hear all about his day’s plans, his stories about the kids, the challenges of raising a family in today’s world.

I listen.

I listen to his six-year-old.

“Grandma,” he says, “I have to go to a listening class every Sunday. Everyone wants me to listen but nobody wants to listen to me.”

I listen to him.

I listen to my forty-three-year-old son, Jac.

He shares his excitement about his partnership, his books, his music, his recipes, and sometimes even his dates.

“Hey Mom, I completed Sunday.”

Who else but someone who has listened to him could share that excitement?

Because I listen, I know what he’s excited about: the Sunday crossword puzzle.

We listen to each other because we love each other. We love each other more because we listen to each other.

“Listen, Glo. I’m furious. Why do I have to bla,bla,bla…?”

I listen to my sister’s frustration. The more I listen, the more I connect.

It’s so easy to love and be loved. Just listen!

The Shema tells us to hear, to listen, even when it’s a challenge to listen to a loved one when Dr. Alzheimer interrupts his speech and flow of thoughts.

It gets more difficult every day, but I am determined. I am pledged to listen.

Some days are better than others. Yesterday was not one of the better ones.

Tomorrow I will have my hearing aids checked.

I want to listen.

Gloria Scheiner is a member of “The Pearls,” a group of six women who meet every Monday in Sarasota to write. “We choose a word and write for about ten minutes. If we like it, we are free to expand it, edit it, or just hone in on a particular phrase or idea. What I love most is how one word evokes such a different chord in each of us.”

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