It was Friday, March 14. Purim fun was in the air, and all the elements in place: A good story, heroes and villains, noisemakers, all the hamantaschen you could eat, all the wine you could drink, all the fun you could have. SMBloom photo
The Book Circle will meet on Wednesday, April 30, at 3 p.m., in the community room at the shul, where the group will talk about The Safekeep, by Yael Van Der Wouden, in whose debut novel it is learned that a house and its people are not what they seem. It is a dark tale of desire, suspicion, and obsession between two women staying in the same house in the Dutch countryside during the [...]
When Luigi Maria Calio, a classical archaeology professor, first brought students from the University of Catania to excavate an area of Ostia Antica, the ancient commercial port of call outside Rome, he wasn’t sure what he might find, the New York Times said. The dig site had not been explored in modern times, in spite of its central location next to a square that was once the city’s headquarters for shippers and traders and is [...]
At the Academy Awards telecast, the Israeli-Palestinian documentary, “No Other Land,” won an Oscar for Best Documentary, but has no U.S. distribution. Mikey Madison, who is Jewish, won best actress for “Anora,” which is set in Brighton Beach. Linda McMahon, the billionaire wrestling executive was confirmed as Education Secretary. She supports Trump’s effort to dismantle parts of the agency she now runs, even as it serves as the main federal body investigating allegations [...]
A light-filled atrium is featured in the new Tree of Life museum, education center and synagogue building, to be erected in Pittsburgh at the site of the Oct. 27, 2018 shooting that killed 11 worshippers, one of the “deadliest antisemitic attacks in American history,” said Michael Bernstein, the synagogue’s chairman of the board of directors. An exhibit at the University of Pittsburgh introduces information about the shooting, items gifted to Pittsburgh’s Jewish community in its [...]
Jared Isaacman is Donald Trump’s nominee to be administrator of NASA. Isaacman, 44, is the billionaire CEO of Shift4, a payment processing company he started at age 16 in his parents’ basement in New Jersey. He is also a pilot and a commercial astronaut with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. In 2021, Isaacman self-funded a three-day SpaceX mission to space called Inspiration4, marking the first space flight manned by civilians rather than government astronauts, and the first [...]
The Shofar joins the membership in extending condolences to Rochelle Garmise and her family on the death of Stuart Garmise, brother of our beloved shul member, the late Alan Garmise. Stuart died on Feb. 28, and was buried in New Jersey on March 4.
Rose Girone, believed to be the oldest survivor of the Holocaust, died in North Bellmore, NY, on Long Island, on Feb. 24. She was 113. Her secret to longevity, she said: dark chocolate and good children. Rose Girone was eight months pregnant and living in Breslau, Germany, in 1938, when her husband was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. She secured passage to Shanghai, only to be forced to live in a bathroom in a [...]
M. Paul Friedberg, a landscape architect whose playgrounds, pocket parks and plazas transformed areas of New York City, died on Feb. 15 in Manhattan. He was 93. Mr. Friedberg grew up in rural Pennsylvania, but he believed in the promise of cities to create happier, healthier societies with inviting public parks and plazas. In New York and other cities across the country, he became the go-to designer for reinvigorating public space. He tucked vest-pocket parks [...]
Refugee, prisoner, wine merchant, spy: Peter Sichel was many things in his long, colorful life, but he was probably most often identified as the man who made Blue Nun one of the most popular wines in the world in the 1970s and ‘80s. At its peak in 1985, 30 million bottles of this slightly sweet German white wine were sold. By the time Mr. Sichel took charge of his family’s wine business in 1960, he [...]
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