RJ Blog

by Arlene Sarah Chernow On May 13, I will watch my youngest daughter become Rabbi Ilana Mills, joining her sisters, Rabbi Mari Chernow and Rabbi Jordana Chernow-Reader in the rabbinate. Like most mothers (and fathers, too!), I have always hoped that my daughters would find fulfilling, meaningful work that matches their skills and talents, and provides opportunities for them to grow intellectually and emotionally. This coming Sunday, on Mother’s Day, I will see these hopes fulfilled. It may seem hard to believe, but when I went to college, women chose majors in just a few areas—teaching, nursing, and social work.  [...]

by Susan Alexander One of my favorite weekends of the year is when I facilitate OSRUI’s Mother & Daughter Kallah. This is a program designed for mothers, grandmothers, aunts and the girls they love ages 5-12. The Mother & Daughter Kallah is open to mothers, grandmothers, and aunts, and the girls they love ages 5-12. The connection between mothers and daughters is probably the most profound of human connections. With today’s busy lifestyles, sometimes this relationship needs to be charged with something new to keep it alive and growing. This weekend is designed to deepen that bond between these women [...]

My full name is Sara Kathryn, but it has never meant much to me. I have always known that I am named for my great-grandmothers, those black and white faces whose photos I have seen but whose stories I had never heard. In fact, beyond their names, I knew almost nothing at all about Great-Grandma Sarah and Great-Grandma Katie, not even where they came from. When, as a child, I was assigned class projects that required me to trace my family tree, I always hit a stumbling block. My paternal grandparents were both long dead, and my father had no [...]

by Melissa Stoller I started planting the seeds of an intergenerational visit to Israel several years before my oldest daughter, Zoe, became a bat mitzvah. By the time I finished, my husband and I and our three girls, Zoe (13), Jessie (10), and Madeleine (4), together with my mother and in-laws, all were on board for our first trip to Israel, a special post-bat mitzvah journey to make connections in our family and to connect us, both spiritually and physically, to the land that we had read about and studied for years.

Haggai. I danced at his wedding in the fall of 1971. He was a proud member of the IDF Tank Corps. The wedding was at Kibbutz Na’an not far from Rehovot. My first Israeli wedding. We laughed and danced. He embraced me into the “kibbutz family” into which my sister would marry in February. On the first day of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Haggai was killed on the Golan. He is buried not far from where he fell. Haggai was born on the 29th of November 1973, an auspicious day in our Zionist/Israeli history. He was the first child on Kibbutz [...]

by Leah Wolff-Pellingra This is the story of one life. Her name was Mina Speier-Holstein. She was one of 15 children born in Cologne. She taught Home Economics and Physical Education. She had one son. On Kristallnacht, they found each other – Mina, her husband, Baruch, and her son, Jonas. They roamed the parks all night, afraid to go home. Jonas and Baruch are enlisted as slave laborers, working to build the AutoBahn. The family tries to hold out for visas to leave together. There is a work visa to England for Jonas, 18 years old. He must go if [...]

by Rabbi Jeff Goldwasser A few weeks ago, I had this conversation with my 13-year-old daughter who was reading Elie Wiesel’s Night for a school assignment. I was driving her home with her in the back seat. I said, “You know, it’s not a subject I like to talk about.” And she said, “I know.” “It’s hard for me not to take it personally, especially when I think about my grandfather and how his sisters were murdered.”

by Aron Hirt-Manheimer Jews throughout the world have been commemorating the Holocaust annually on the 27th of Nisan since 1953, when the Israeli government inaugurated this day of remembrance and linked to the heroic Warsaw Ghetto Uprising  of a decade earlier. The message was clear: even suicidal armed resistance is preferable to going like lambs to the slaughter. For many Holocaust survivors, like my parents, and for those of us in the “Second Generation,” the lessons of that terrible time are more varied and nuanced  than  simply extolling armed rebellion in the face of a powerful genocidal enemy.   And these [...]

by Louise Van Schaack “Who is Elijah?” five-year-old Hannah asked me when she arrived at pre-school a few weeks ago. She’d recently received a copy of The Little Red Hen and the Passover Matzah by Leslie Kimmelman from the PJ Library, and the book had piqued her interest.  She wanted to know more.

by  Jocelyn Sontag For the past few years, I served on the Membership Initiative Task Force at Westchester Reform Temple (WRT) in Scarsdale, New York.  Many of our meetings were spent discussing, among other things, how best to engage families with young children.  Specifically, we talked about engaging the families in our Early Childhood Center (ECC), as these are families that chose to send their children to a synagogue preschool (as opposed to a secular one down the street), so their desire for an early Jewish education was apparent.  We heard a constant message from the ECC liaisons that these [...]