The Shofar joins the membership in mourning the death of Marilyn Schnitzer, mother of shul member Howard Schnitzer. The funeral took place at the Old Montefiore Cemetery on Tuesday, August 18, with Rabbi Robert L. Wolkoff presiding. Shiva was held at the Schnitzer home in Greenport.
David Hirsch, who was among the first to grow wine grapes on the windswept, fogbound Sonoma Coast of California, stimulating interest in the area that would become one of America’s great wine-producing regions, died on July 28 in Santa Rosa, CA. He was 81. Mr. Hirsch’s 77-acre vineyard of pinot noir and chardonnay grapes, stoked the imaginations of young, gifted producers. Initially, Mr. Hirsch sold his grapes to companies that used them in anonymous Sonoma [...]
Ida Schmertz, an influential behind-the-scenes feminist and corporate executive, who was a founding director of the first academic research center devoted to American women and politics, and who helped women advance in workplaces as varied as the dockyard and the corporate suite, died on July 28 in Manhattan. She was 91. Ida Frederika was born to upper-middle-class Jewish parents in Amsterdam. The family fled Europe at the beginning of WWII, moving to the Dutch East [...]
Bill Goichberg, the foremost chess impresario in the United States, whose ideas about organizing tournaments reshaped and expanded competitive chess over his six-decade career, died on Aug. 2. He was 83. According to the Continental Chess Association, which Mr. Goichberg founded in the 1960s the association has held more than 2,300 tournaments and awarded more than $24 million in prize money. In 1966, Mr. Goichberg organized the first scholastic tournament of high school competitors, followed [...]
Victor Niederhoffer, a polymath who pioneered the use of computers to predict short-term movements in stocks and commodities — a volatile, high-stakes trading techniq1ue that made him and his clients a fortune, which he subsequently lost, regained, then lost again, died on Aug. 4 at his home in Weston, CT, a 20,000-square-foot Tudor-style mansion. He was 82. Determined to find patterns in stock movements, he recorded prices in large ledgers and entered them into a [...]
Amy-Jill Levine, a New Testament scholar, has had a lifelong fascination with all things Catholic, and has devoted her life’s work to understanding Jesus as a first-century Jew. Recently, she received a unique honor: She was named president of the Catholic Biblical Association of America, the first Jewish scholar to hold the title. Levine joined the organization soon after she earned her Ph.D. from Duke University 42 years ago, and has been an active participant [...]
The Renoir Girls, Catherine Ostler Three daughters of a prominent French Jewish family, were painted as children by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. One would marry an English aristocrat and escape; one would collaborate with the Nazis; one would die in Auschwitz. This book details the history of the lives behind the portraits. The Jewish South, Shari Rabin In 1669, Carolina colony offered freedom of worship to “Jews, heathens, and other dissenters.” Jews settled in cities throughout [...]
In Weimar, Germany, where the streets once echoed with the notes of Bach, Liszt and Goethe, another European musical tradition has been reverberating for more than a quarter-century: Yiddish. The annual Yiddish Summer Weimar festival brings hundreds of musicians, students and scholars to the former Nazi city for workshops, concerts and performances celebrating the language, music and culture of Ashkenazi Jews that the Nazis sought to destroy. But since 1998, the program has grown [...]
Inmates at San Quentin prison celebrate a b’nai mitzvah. The ceremony, held in July 2026, was the culmination of more than a year of study for the nine participants, who ranged in age from late-30s to mid-60s. The multiracial group included men who were raised Christian or without religion, one who identifies as an Israelite, one who has been studying Kabbalah for more than 20 years, and one who wanted to learn Hebrew but became [...]
Tashlich is the symbolic act of casting away one’s sins by throwing bread crumbs into a body of water, usually during the High Holiday season. Some people have asked what kind of bread crumbs they should throw. Since bread isn’t healthy for the birds that gobble them up, our shul will be using birdseed this year. But that shouldn’t keep us from enjoying the humor of these bread choices: For ordinary sins: White bread [...]
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