by Cilla Tomas I recently had the opportunity to return to Bern, Switzerland — to the synagogue where I grew up — to introduce the book, The Ones Who Remember: Second-Generation Voices of the Holocaust, a collection of stories written by my Second Generation group at Temple Beth Emeth. The synagogue in Bern was built…
Idelle Hammond-Sass interviews Rabbi Adina Allen of the Jewish Studio Project In response to the unfathomable events of October 7 I was struggling to digest the daily news, meetings, podcasts, articles, Zooms, emails, and conversation. The exhausting flood of information left me grasping for ways to cope so I could engage with the ongoing conflict….
By Shifra Epstein and Clare Kinberg Last month, my friend Shifra Epstein, an Israeli folklorist and longtime Ann Arbor resident, sent me a series of messages about Kibbutz Nahal Oz, which was among the first communities in the Otef Azza/Gaza Envelope to be invaded and brutalized by Hamas on October 7. Shifra wrote me, “In…
By Micah Sweet and Matan Berg October 7, 2023, was a day that neither of us expected. As we woke up that Saturday morning, we were horrified by dozens of news notifications of an unprecedented terrorist attack on the Jewish people. We were sad, shocked, angry, and confused all at once — more than anything…
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By Bernie Banet, special to the WJN Elon Musk may be the last person in the world we Jews would wish to have as an enemy, and yet he has been accused of being just that by the Anti-Defamation League and many Jewish leaders. A number of commentators draw the historical comparison that Musk is…
By Shifra Epstein In memory of my grandparents, Shifra Epstein (1879–1925) and Israel Epstein (1872–1932), who moved in 1919 with their four children from Bialystock (Russia) to Jaffa. My grandparents are buried in the Trumpeldor Cemetery in Tel Aviv, not far from Zina and Meir Dizengoff. A Jewish city An Odessan was asked one day,…
Two years ago, my company offered my family and me an opportunity to move from Ann Arbor to the French-speaking part of Switzerland for a four-year assignment. It was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when travel still felt like a distant dream. Our family had moved around a lot, but we’d been in Ann Arbor for seven years and had finally settled down. We had recently bought and started fixing up a charming old home, and our two children were very happy at school. We also had never felt more connected Jewishly, having found an extended family with the Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Congregation (AARC) and also being able to connect virtually with a wonderful Jewish Renewal synagogue near our old home in California. The idea of blowing up our lives was completely unnerving, but it felt like an opportunity of a lifetime that we couldn’t pass up.
By Shifra Epstein (originally published August 2022) Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, I have been visiting festivals, shops, and events in Ann Arbor speaking with individuals about the war. This June, my interest in how the war in Ukraine impacts Ann Arborites led me to the Top of the Park, the popular…
By Shifra Epstein Because of the COVID-19 restrictions, it had taken my partner Miriam and me more than sixteen months to venture into downtown Ann Arbor on a Saturday night. During our first venture in on May 10, we enjoyed the closure to traffic of the downtown streets, which made strolling very pleasant. The first…