In the gripping historical novel, The Song of the Jade Lily, Kirsty Manning weaves together little-known threads of WWII history, family secrets, the past and the present. In 1939, two young girls meet in Shanghai and form a friendship. But the realities of war prove to be too much , and they are torn apart. In 1916, the granddaughter of Romy, one of the young girls, learns about family secrets kept hidden for half [...]
Dear members and friends, I am not a rabbi. At times like this, I wish I had at hand the depth of a Rabbi’s holy insight and the eloquence of a Rabbi’s spiritual vocabulary. With those special gifts, the better to express the joy and gratitude I feel at this moment, thoughts bestowed upon me by a simple act — a keystroke on my computer. Those of you who attend Saturday morning services may [...]
The shul will observe Yizkor on Wednesday, April 8, at 6 p.m., on Zoom. Please join our service to honor those who have gone before us.
Dinah Slepovitch. Photo by Zisl Slepovitch By Jennifer A. Stern In summer 2020, when the world was in lockdown, I couldn’t stop watching a video that featured two young children — Dinah Slepovitch and Pinya Minkin — singing a Yiddish folk song about eating potatoes every day. The song felt a lot like life during COVID-19, even as it evoked what poor Eastern European Jews often ate in the past. I was enchanted. The Yiddish language was still relatively new [...]
The corridors of Limerick’s Istabraq Hall rang out with the sounds of Hebrew prayer on a recent Shabbat to celebrate the gift of four Torah scrolls, which will serve the Irish Jewish communities outside of Dublin. The scrolls, gifted by Congregation Temple Emanu-El in Haverhill, MA, have their own extensive history: three were scribed in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust, and the fourth in Israel in the 1950s. The Temple is merging with another congregation, [...]
On March 11, permanent street markers were installed in the Scheunenviertel (Barn Quarter) to mark the approximately 50 years when Yiddish was the main language there. At the end of the 19th century, many Eastern European Jews, planning to emigrate to North America, got stuck in Berlin, trying to collect enough money or get papers for their ship journey. As a result, the area, and especially the Grenadierstrafe, became a bustling Jewish street, with many [...]
On March 12, a shooting and vehicle-ramming attack occurred at Temple Israel, a Reform synagogue in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan. A male suspect rammed his pickup truck into the front entrance of the synagogue, drove through the doors and down the hall, and reportedly opened fire. Police said that the suspect was killed in an exchange of fire with armed security personnel. The vehicle caught fire, possibly from something flammable inside. One security guard was [...]
Barbra Streisand will receive an honorary Palme d’Or for lifetime achievement at the Cannes Film Festival in May. (Announced by the Hollywood Reporter)
Iris Cantor, an arts patron and philanthropist who with her investment banker husband, B. Gerald Cantor, the founder of Cantor Fitzgerald, amassed — and then bestowed to various museums — one of the largest private collections of Rodin sculptures in the world, died on Feb. 22 at her home in Palm Beach FL. She was 95. The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation’s major beneficiaries include the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the [...]
Isaiah Zagar, an outsider artist who bedazzled thousands of square feet of Philadelphia with mosaic murals, pieced together from shards of mirrors and crockery and encrusted with bottles and bicycle wheels, died on Feb. 19 at his home in Philadelphia. He was 86. From the late 1960s, Mr. Zagar produced more than 50,000 square feet of mosaic murals in Philadelphia and dozens of murals in other states and in Latin America. Some of his work [...]
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