Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Speaking Out
There was a time in the not too distant past, when those born Jewish would eschew their religious identity, shedding "ethnic" names to hide behind Anglican ones. Thus Romanowitz would become the more Italian "Roman" and Greenburg the standard "Green." My own grandmother, of blessed memory, named her son Burton, though what she really had in mind was Benjamin. In the early 1930's, when anti-semitism would fan the flames of the Holocaust-to-come, Benjamin sounded "too Jewish" and possibly...
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Monday, April 14, 2008
Frank Roser's Funeral
There must have been at least 600 people at Frank's funeral today. Ninety five years old and "Mayor of Temple Beth El" Frank was the one constant in my synagogue; reading each week (without glasses!) his "joke of the day," making sure that enough people came each day to form a Minyan (10 worshippers praying together), especially when a congregant was reciting Kaddish (the mourner's prayer) for a loved one and required the requisite group of ten. Our Rabbi spoke lovingly about this man who,...
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Visit to Eastern Europe
The moment that touched me most on my recent trip through Eastern Europe was not when I visited Auschwitz – thought the room packed with hair shorn by Nazis from thousands of Jewish corpses fresh from gas chambers overwhelmed me with sadness. It was not in the beautiful new Daniel Libeskind-designed Jewish Museum in Berlin, which tells the story of 2,000 years of Jewish life and growing anti-Semitism in Germany. It was not even on the shaded “Platform 17” – from which tens of thousands of...
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Sunday, April 13, 2008
If you look close enough, you'll find it...hopefully
I was shopping today at my local Stop and Shop - with coupons in hand as usual. One was a tempting offer from several Passover food companies that had gotten together to rebate $5 for each $30 purchase of combined food items. Each register would add up the items then, after conditions were met, spit out a $5 Stop and Shop coupon. Bar codes beeped as my Manischewitz gifilte fish, Seasons sardines, and other Seder goodies rang through - but at the end - no $5.00 rebate. "I'll get the manager," the...
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