HaKol The Voice of the Pelham Jewish Center
March, 2022 Adar I/Adar II 5782
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Leadership Messages
Rabbi Resnick
Education Director
Ana Turkienicz
President's Message
David Haft
Editor's Message
Barbara Saunders-Adams
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Congregant News
& Donations
Book Notes
Barbara Saunders-Adams
Food For Thought
Share a Simcha
Tributes & Donations
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About two years ago, on a Tuesday in March of 2020, I celebrated Purim with my students at Solomon Schechter in Chicago. Those of you who have been involved over the years with Jewish Day Schools may know that when Purim falls during the week the result is a pretty wild school day. For seven hours Jewish schools the world-over are transformed. Every student gets a brand new schedule. Every member of the faculty gets a brand new job. Math teachers lead costume parades. English teachers supervise bounce houses. The rabbi tells stories and races around from group to group doing whatever wild schtick will make kids laugh. Parents, students, and teachers read Megillah while other parents, students and teachers goof around. There are gifts. There is singing. There is a feast. And there was, at least at Schechter of Chicago, an ill-conceived and somewhat crazed version of the Food Network’s “Chopped!” This involved teams of eighth graders chopping, massaging, mushing, and seasoning tables full of random ingredients in order to create an “appetizer,” an “entree,” and a desert, which were then judged by a brave panel of judges including a beloved English teacher, and a beloved science teacher, and the school rabbi (and former chef). It was an exhausting and wonderful day.
It was also the very last normal thing we did. The following morning we held jittery parent-teacher conferences. The next day we moved those conferences to Zoom. And on Friday we sent out the email saying school would be closed the following week, a swift and startling transformation that played out in every school and synagogue across the country. If you scroll back through the PJCs Google calendar you can watch it unfold in disquieting fashion: Purim on March 10th, a board meeting on the 12th, and everything canceled on the 13th. Like my Schechter, remote learning at our shul wouldn't begin until Wednesday the 18th. Schechter wouldn’t open its doors again until the fall, at which point my life (and billions of other lives) was almost unrecognizable. And too many of them were lost.
As many of you know, we just marked Purim–and the month of Adar–in rather grand fashion at the PJC. We ate together. We drank together. We joked. We came together for an extraordinary First Friday dinner. We hosted a marvelous carnival and a Megillah reading. We celebrated the return of the PJC players. Our building was awash in laughter. As I recovered from an exhausting and marvelous run of celebration on Sunday night, I felt, in many ways, as if I’d finally arrived on the far shores after a long and arduous time at sea.
And though we’ll soon turn our attention fully to Pesach, I want to linger for a little while longer on Purim, an audacious and brave response to an extraordinary (but, sadly, not unfathomable) trauma. In the face of our own potential destruction–set upon by a protean monster called Haman, who seems to rise in every generation–the response of the rabbis was not to inaugurate perpetual mourning but instead to mandate lavish rejoicing. And along with the festivities they deliver an important and unequivocal judgment: For all of its messiness, danger and cruelty, life is indeed worth living and celebrating. There is a beautiful symmetry to the fact that just as Purim was the last normal thing many of us did at the PJC, so too it was one of the first “normal” things to which we returned, almost two years to the date after the pandemic reordered our lives.
I don’t know, of course, what lies in store for us when it comes to COVID. There may yet be challenges ahead. The ending that may approach is not, perhaps, the ending for which we once hoped. What follows will not be easy nor entirely simple and there will be no red ribbon marking the end of the marathon. There will be lingering anxieties. There will be persistent dangers. Some of us will choose to face them in different ways than others. And for some of us, who live with chronic conditions of all kinds, COVID will pose a risk long into the future. As we find our way back into our lives, we must be cognizant of and sensitive to these dynamics in our community and in the world beyond. At the PJC we will meet these challenges as we always have–with mumchiyut (expert guidance), and rachamim (compassion).
But I also believe that we urgently need to be with one another, to celebrate with one another again. For much of the pandemic, the leadership challenge for shuls has been laser focused on how we keep one another safe. Our conversations have been about what we could do and, more importantly, what we couldn’t. And for a tradition like ours that cares so passionately about life, this is precisely as it should have been. Now, however, I believe we are entering a new phase when the leadership challenge is more about how we help one another step into our new reality, carrying our scars and our anxieties, but nonetheless ready to celebrate, just as our ancestors did, generations ago in Shushan. So please join me as we look ahead to Pesach–as we look ahead to freedom, however construed and however embattled and however imperfect. Please join me as we pave the way through the sea and, with God’s help, step out onto the other side.
Rabbi Benjamin Resnick
Ben
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Education Director's Message |
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"וְעָנִיתָ וְאָמַרְתָּ לִפְנֵי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ: אֲרַמִּי אֹבֵד אָבִי, וַיֵּרֶד מִצְרַיְמָה וַיָּגָר שָׁם בִּמְתֵי מְעָט, וַיְהִי שָׁם
לְגוֹי גָּדוֹל עָצוּם וָרָב." דברים כ״ו:ה׳
You*shall then recite as follows before your G-d יהוה: “My father was a fugitive Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation. Deuteronomy 26:5
Every year, once the holiday of Purim is over, Neco and I start pouring into the texts of various Haggadot to begin crafting our family’s Haggadah for this year. We seek illuminating commentaries, new approaches, a different perspective to a text that doesn’t cease to enthrall us and the participants at our Seder table. Each year, we self-publish a new Haggadah, focusing on a current theme and framing it through the wisdom of our sages and the Jewish story of deliverance.
This year, as we watch incredulously, yet again, the hordes of refugees fleeing evil, the words, “My father was a fugitive Aramean”, resonate even stronger in our hearts. Both Neco and I are the children and grandchildren of refugees from towns in Ukraine. Neco’s’ father, Israel Turkienicz, z”l, memorialized in one of the PJC Yizkor boards, was born in 1920 in the town of Sernyky, a small shtetl in Eastern Poland, now part of Ukraine. His maternal grandparents, Leyib and Regina Mermelstein z”l, came from the town of Munkacs, once part of Hungary, now called Mukachevo, southwest of Lviv, in Ukraine. My maternal grandfather, Lippe Nestrovsky, z”l, was born in 1900 in Shpola, another small town in Ukraine, Southeast of Kyiv, and my maternal grandmother, Polly Shapiro Nestrovsky, z”l, was born in 1906 in the small town of Korsun, Ukraine, also Southeast of Kyiv.
When I was growing up, my grandparents didn’t say much about Ukraine or the Ukrainian people. They preferred to tell stories about their lives in their shtetls, and the family odyssey fleeing the antisemitism and persecution under the Soviet regime until they reached the free shores of Brazil. They rebuilt their lives and community in Porto Alegre, where I was born, and made sure I knew the value of freedom and kindness to strangers. It was through my Bubby Polly that I learned to yearn for Israel, to always help the needy and how to celebrate the Jewish holidays. In fact, she was my inspiration for the celebrated “Bubby’s Kitchen” class for the Learning Center. Her personal tales of hasty rupture from her childhood home, being uprooted to a strange place, building a new life within a new language, a new culture, were told to me in Portuguese, with a heavy immigrant accent. My grandparents mainly spoke Yiddish amongst themselves. Yiddish was also the first language of my parents, since my father had also been a child refugee, forced to leave Warsaw, Poland in 1927. Through their stories, songs, jokes and wits, I learned to look at any refugee as if he/she were my own family member.
“Arami oved avi” - My father was a wandering Aramean.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion in Ukraine I find myself constantly thinking about the broken lives of the refugees and how the world they knew until February 24, 2022 is now forever changed. Some might think that Ukraine is a faraway country in Eastern Europe. For me, it is my ancestors’ home, the place where my grandparents’ communities flourished for centuries, until they were brutally forced to flee. I watch the images of the bombarded Ukrainian cities and imagine my own relatives who once lived there. It’s hard not to think that I could have been one of those refugees myself.
HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, helped my father’s family flee Poland after WWI. It has recently published a 2022 Passover Haggadah. In its introduction, we read, “The Passover story is the Jewish people’s original story of becoming strangers in a strange land. It is the story that reminds us that we too, have stood in the shoes of refugees and asylum seekers in search of safety and liberty. As we read these words [from the Haggadah], we are commanded to put ourselves back into the narrative, to consider ourselves as though we, too, went out from Egypt, from a narrow place.”
A few weeks ago, the PJC was part of a countrywide HIAS refugee Shabbat. We had the honor of hosting Farhad Khurami, a recent Afghan refugee, who shared his incredible life story during Friday night services. We are grateful to Michael Dvorkin, Maria Abeshouse, Adam Abeshouse, Sam Temes, Rhonda Singer, Melanie Stern & Zach Ehrenreich for taking the lead in teaming up with HIAS, the Westchester Jewish Coalition for Immigration (WJCI), Pelham’s Hearts And Homes For Refugees and synagogues across Westchester County, raising awareness in our community and reaffirming our commitment to supporting refugees and asylum seekers.
Neco and I will celebrate Passover next month with our family in Israel. As we acknowledge the phenomenal blessing of being able to be in Israel, a safe haven for all Jews in the world, we will also leave a pair of shoes outside the entrance door. Then, we will recite the following words from the HIAS Haggadah: “We place a pair of shoes on the doorstep of our home to acknowledge that none of us is free until all of us are free, We pledge to stand in support of welcoming those who do not yet have a place to call home”. As we raise our first cup of wine and recite Kiddush, “we’ll hold out hope for the day when every person in search of refuge in every corner of the earth can recall a story of freedom, reflect on a journey to security from violence and persecution, and no longer yearn for a safe place to call home. Blessed are you, Adonai our G-d, who frees those who are oppressed” (HIAS Haggadah, March 2022)
This year, we will not need to dig deep in order to make the millenary words from our Haggadah evoke themes from our current lives. Sadly, the connection is seamless. Once again, the Exodus story from our collective past will help us illuminate our bleak present and wish for a brighter future.
May we continue to find hope and strength in the words of our ancestors’ story and together build a world of kindness, where there will be no more war, no more bloodshed. May we continue to teach these stories to our children, to believe in the power of goodness to chase away evil and may they be able to live in a world where no one will need to flee their homes in the face of violence.
May you and your loved ones have a joyous, sweet and safe Passover,
With much gratitude,
Ana
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Fellow Congregants,
Spring is bringing new life to our synagogue. We are off to a good start. I’m sure you realize that our religious community is a bit different from most synagogues you have experienced. There is no tall bimah or sense of watching a performance during services. Other than our Learning Center employees, our administrator and groundskeeper, we don't have a large staff to serve us. Most of the work is up to us to do and I want to urge all who can, to participate by volunteering to help in some aspect of our programs.
You don’t need a Yeshiva education to be on the Religious Practices Committee or be a professional party planner to work on programming. Our whole character as a shul is participatory. Doing for ourselves is its own reward. We meet and get to know fellow members of the community. My first friend in the shul was Bob Goldman who showed me the ropes to set up and take down tables for dinners. This may not seem like a great religious service, but it is.
We perform mitzvot by helping. We receive a meaningful spiritual benefit by the fact of our direct involvement and we set a standard of ethical and spiritual engagement for our children and our fellow congregants. It is a no lose situation. With the spring and the season of our liberation coming up, this is our moment to re-engage and make our own spiritual home.
Shalom,
David
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A Message from the Editor of HaKol
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Dear Friends,
As we transition from Purim fun to our self-defining Pesach rituals, we are increasingly aware of the parallels between the suffering of the present day Jewish community in Ukraine and the story of the Exodus from Egypt.
According to the Haggadah, we are first and foremost, a people who can never forget the experience of being both slaves and refugees from Egypt. We are taught that never forgetting means treating others with the respect due to a being created in God's image, B'tzelem Elohim. The Haggadah reminds us to experience the Exodus as if we, ourselves, were slaves in a constricting space -- Egypt. The maggid tells us "...our father was a refugee, a wandering Aramean." As we witness the horrors occurring in Ukraine, the Pesach story takes on renewed meaning.
Tolerance of others with different views and beliefs is critical in the difficult times we live in. If we keep in mind our responsibility towards one another, it can only strengthen the ties that bind us together at the PJC and to our fellow Jews around the world.
Barbara
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America's Jewish Women
A History From Colonial Times to Today
by Pamela Nadell
With a solid grasp of the arc of both American and Jewish history, Professor Pamela Nadell has produced an accessible, yet scholarly account of the history of Jewish American women from colonial times to today.
Nadell weaves together the complex story of Jewish women in America—from colonial-era matriarch
Grace Nathan and her great-granddaughter, poet Emma Lazarus, to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Recounting how Jewish women have been at the forefront of social, economic, and political causes for centuries, Nadell depicts them fighting for suffrage, labor unions, civil rights, feminism, and religious rights—shaping a distinctly Jewish American identity.
To keep the book manageable and readable, Nadell divides her book into five chapters, each covering a mix of social groups and time periods. The colonial “Jewesses” are followed by nineteenth century domestic mothers, turn of the century immigrants, mid-twentieth century semi-assimilationists and finally by our contemporaries. Nadell sketches history with a broad brush stroke, peppering it with anecdotes of individual women.
Nadell studies how ritual observance (keeping Kosher, praying, having
children, obeying authority, doing good deeds) waxes and wanes with each cohort of Jewish women. She highlights the parallels with Christian culture, pointing out that when Christian women were engaged in the “cult of domesticity,” so were Jewish women.
In the initial chapters, Nadell dwells on the women who are exemplary, such as Jewish female leaders, especially the club women and the reformers. She often overlooks the women on the receiving end of their charitable interventions, and all but the most colorful of our wayward women. Nadell discusses Jewish women who didn’t marry, but implies that they simply preferred to have careers rather than raise families. If she mentions sex, it’s in the context of campaigns for birth control.
In the final chapter, Nadell broadens her focus. We are introduced to feminists, lesbians, intermarrying women, women of color, Zionist activists, women who discover they are Jewish late in life, and men who discover they are women. In the end we become a diverse crowd of Jewish women under a broad tent. This last chapter is so lively that perhaps readers should start here, and then work their way back to our prim ancestors who would rend their garments if a daughter even threatened to marry a gentile.
The rarity of histories like this — short enough for the lay reader to appreciate and comprehensive enough for a more scholarly audience — makes this an important read.
Barbara
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David, King of Israel, Is Alive: Thou Art the Man
Yehuda Amichai
1.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about King David.
Not the one who is alive forever in the song,
And not the one who is dead forever
Under the heavy carpets on his tomb,
But the one who played and played for Saul
And kept dodging the spear until he became king.
David changed his tune and pretended to be mad to save
his life; as for me, I change my tune and pretend to be sane
to save my life. If he were alive today,
he would tell me: No, it’s the other way around.
Every nation had a first king once
like a first love. And the other way around.
2.
King David loves Bathsheba,
Hugs her tight, fondles her with the same hands
that cut off the head of Goliath,
the very same hands. The same man who rent his clothes
and scattered ashes on his head when his son died,
the very same man. When the sun
rose in the east, he rose up over Bathsheba
like the lion on the banner of Jerusalem
and said to her: Thou art the woman.
And she to him: Thou art the man!
3.
King David lies with Bathsheba on the rooftop,
they are heavy as a cloud and light as a cloud.
Her untamed black hair and the wild red hair of his beard
entangled. They have never seen each other’s ears.
and never will. He acts weak, weepy, lost betrayed,
escapes into her body and hides inside it
as in the caves and crevices when he fled
from Saul. She counts his battle scars.
You will be mine, she says,
you will be a tower, a citadel, a city, a street, a hotel,
you will be names, names, and in the end
you will be a wadi for two lovers in the desert in 1965:
Nahal David in Ein Gedi.
4.
King David took Bathsheba in the hours
between midnight and dawn.
those are the best hours for a surprise attack
and the best time for making love.
He declared: “Thou are permitted unto me now –
as of this moment you are a widow, the battle is over
in Rabbah.” In their bodies, David and Bathsheba
mimicked the death throes
of Uriah, the Hittite in battle. Their cries carried
until Yom Kippur and up to our very own day;
the instruments of their love rang out like the bells of Bethlehem
where he was born. He took her from the west
the way his descendants turn east to pray.
5.
King David loves many women. He has an ark of love
full of beautiful women, like a holy ark filled with Torah scrolls,
brilliant in their beauty, crammed with commands and prohibitions
of Shalt and Shalt not, weighed with ornaments,
round and sweet as Sephardi Torah scrolls,
heavy as Ashkenazi scrolls with their massive crowns,
dressed in silk and lace and soft velvet embroidered in many colors,
the breastplate hanging like a pendant, and the slender
hand-shaped pointers of silver inlaid with precious stones.
And on Simchat Torah, the Feast of the Law, which is
the Feast of Love, he takes them all out of the ark,
lines them up, kisses them one by one and hugs them,
makes seven rounds and dances with every one,
even with Michal and Merav who never in their lives
wanted him to dance. Then he puts them back
into the depths of the ark, closes the heavy curtain,
and sits down to write the psalms.
6.
And all the women said, He loved me best of all,
but Abishag, the Shunamite, the girl who came to him in his old age
to keep him warm, she is the only one who said:
I kept him warm, stroked his battle scars,
I anointed him with oil, not for kingship but for cure.
I never heard him play or sing, but I wiped his mouth,
his toothless mouth when I fed him sweet porridge.
I never saw his hands in battle, but I kissed
his old white hands.
7.
I came to him from the pasture
as he came from pasture to kingship.
I am the poor man’s ewe lamb that rose out of the parable
and I am yours until death comes between us.
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"Share a Simcha" allows congregants to share their news with our PJC community. Please submit news about family members -- engagements, births, job updates, kid achievements, community acknowledgements and any other milestones -- to our Communications Director, Barbara Saunders-Adams.
. Welcome to out Afghani neighbor, Farhad (Anwarulhaq) Khurami.
. Our thanks to the Refugee Resettlement Committee - Mike Dvorkin, Maria & Adam Abeshouse, Melanie Stern & Zach Ehrenreich, Jeanne Radvany, Rhonda Singer, Mimi Steinberg & Sam Temes.
. Thank you to Rabbi Resnick, Jenny Lebendz, Lori Weber, Jeremy & Sari Schulman and all who made our Purim celebration a rousing success.
. A shout out to our illustrious PJC Players lead by Sari Schulman. They put on an entertaining performance of Mel Brooks' The Producers.
Simcha is a regular HaKol feature, so keep your news and updates coming!
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Donations to the PJC from...
- Adam & Maria Abeshouse, in memory of Martin Druckerman
- Norman & Alice Bloom, in memory of Martin Druckerman
- Julia & Jonathan Coss, in memory of Martin Druckerman
- Barry & Jill Goldenberg, in memory of Martin Druckerman
- Marilyn Hammer, in memory of Martin Druckerman
- Daniel Kushnick & Janice Goldklang, in memory of Martin Druckerman
- Patricia Levinson, in memory in Martin Druckerman
- Steven & Hildy Martin, in memory of Martin Druckerman
- Steven & Hildy Martin, in memory of Paul Goldiner
- Steven & Hildy Martin, in memory of Samuel Krulak, father of Roger Krulak
- David & Jeanne Radvany, in memory of Martin Druckerman
- David & Jeanne Radvany, in memory of Paul Goldiner
- David & Jeanne Radvany, in support of our Midnight Run Program
- Jefry Rosmarin, in memory of Martin Druckerman
- David & Melanie Samuels, in memory of Martin Druckerman
- David & Melanie Samuels, in memory of Leslie Rosenberg
- Judy Shampanier & Michael Bowen, in memory of Martin Druckerman
- Eleanor Windman, in memory of Martin Druckerman
- Vicki Windman, in memory of Martin Druckerman
Donations to the Rabbi's Discretionary Fund from...
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Adam & Maria Abeshouse, in support of the Refugee Shabbat Dinner
- Stanley & Mindy Patchen, in memory of Martin Druckerman
- Barbara Saunders-Adams, in memory of Martin Druckerman
- Morris Stampfer, in memory of Martin Druckerman
- Morris Stampfer, in memory of his parents -- Rabbi Theodore & Pauline Stampfer
- Gerald & Phyllis Steinberg, in memory of Martin Druckerman
At any time, if you wish to pay by check, please make it payable to "The Pelham Jewish Center" and mail it to our bookkeeping firm at: The Pelham Jewish Center, P.O. Box 418, Montvale, NJ 07645.
All donations to the Rabbi's Discretionary Fund, at any time throughout the year, should be made payable to "The Pelham Jewish Center -- Rabbi's Discretionary Fund" and mailed directly to Julia Coss at the PJC office. Thank you!
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