This month, we lost an amazing man — Rabbi Elliott Spar. Elliott was a colleague, a friend, and a mentor. One of his children, Ari Spar, is a member of our shul. For almost four decades, he was the rabbi of the Temple Beth Shalom congregation in Smithtown, the same pulpit for his entire rabbinate. He retired here in Mattituck. I first met Elliott as my student, when Dr. Don Russo and I began [...]
As the lights of Hanukkah 2022 flicker and fade, and we close down a raucous game of dreidel with more Hanukkah gelt than any of us have seen, I delight in my family celebration. What a treasure that it follows on the heels of our Congregation Tifereth Israel family festivities: Menorah lighting in Mitchell Park, then back to the shul for latkes, donuts, and hot cider shared with a crowd of synagogue and community members, [...]
The Trifecta Workout returns to Congregation Tifereth Israel in 2023 Mondays and Thursdays at 5:30 p.m. The new session of 15 classes starts Monday January 2nd and ends on Monday February 27th. No class on Monday January 16th and Monday February 20th Session fee is $150 cash or check due the first night of class Equipment needed: two pairs of weights one heavy and one light ie. 5lbs & 3lbs or 6lbs & 4lbs [...]
Toys For Tots A Tikkun Olam Initiative Project The Tikkun Olam Initiative invites CTI members To join us as Holiday Helpers for CAST clients. At the shul’s office door You’ll find a big red barrel. (You can’t miss it.) Please help us fill it with unwrapped toys So that together we can provide CAST families With a happy holiday for their children. It’s a mitzvah.
Dr. Beryl Benacerraf, a radiologist who revolutionized the diagnosis of fetal abnormalities like Down syndrome through the use of ultrasound technology, died on Oct. 1, at her home in Cambridge, MA. She was 73. Dr. Benacerraf, who was a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology and radiology at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, discovered that a thickening patch of skin at the back of a fetus’s neck, known as [...]
Lenny Lipton, who as a college freshman wrote the lyrics to the classic folk tune “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and then used the song’s considerable royalties to fund years of pioneering research in 3-D filmmaking, died on Oct. 5 in Los Angeles. He was 82. Peter Yarrow, Mr. Lipton’s classmate at Cornell, put the lyrics to music and in 1963, he and his folk trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, released it. The song was such [...]
Helen (Halina) Silber, who attributed surviving the Holocaust to her transfer from Auschwitz to an ammunition and enamelware factory owned by the German industrialist, Oskar Schindler, died on Oct. 25 in Baltimore. She was 93. Arriving at Auschwitz at the outset of WWII, she told the members of the Young Israel Shomrai Emunah synagogue in 2019, “I saw endless rows and rows of barbed wire. I could smell the stench of burning flesh…There is no [...]
Gerald Stern, who drew on Nature, history and his own experiences to write prizewinning poetry laced with wistfulness, anger and humor died on Oct. 28 in the Bronx. He was 97. Mr. Stern, whose “This Time: New and Selected Poems” won the National Book Award for poetry in 1998, came to poetic prominence relatively late; his first published poem , “The Pineys,” appeared in The Journal of the Rutgers University Library in 1969, when he [...]
Sy Presten, a press agent who supplied gags and gossip to newspaper columnists for three-quarters of a century, died on Oct. 18 at his home in Manhattan. He was 98. His was an era when national attention was focused on New York theater, sports and nightlife. Readers wanted to know what was happening at the Stork Club and the Copacabana. The proprietors of those establishments used Mr. Presten as their press agent, who would gin [...]
Gael Greene, who reinvented the art of the restaurant review with sass and sensuality in four decades as New York magazine’s restaurant critic, died on Nov. 1 at her home in an assisted living facility in Manhattan. She was 88. Until her death, Ms. Greene was chairwoman of Citymeals on Wheels, a New York charity she helped create in the early 1980s to provide food for the elderly. She embarked on her assignment for New [...]
Get Social