Lois Goldrich
Group seeks referendum on blue laws
More signatures needed to get initiative on November ballot
Efforts to repeal the county’s blue laws are gaining steam, said Rosemary Shashoua of Westwood, who launched a petition drive earlier this year to overturn these rules.
So far, she has collected some 1,500 signatures. That’s just 1,000 short of the number needed to place a referendum on the November ballot.
Shashoua, who calls herself a “civic activist,” turned her attention to the blue laws in November, after reading about stores that were allowed to open on Sundays for two weekends after Hurricane Sandy, despite opposition by Paramus’s Mayor Richard LaBarbiera. When store owners tried to win an extension, however, they were rebuffed.
In response, Shashoua — founder of the campaign “Modernize Bergen County” — wrote the Bergen Record a detailed letter outlining her opposition to the blue laws.
Passing the torch
B’nai B’rith endowment will help Hillel ‘get kids into yiddishkeit’
Jack Schneider of Fort Lee, president of B’nai B’rith’s Fort Lee Palisades Lodge, recalls the days when the group was in its heyday, with some 120 members.
“I like to feel that we have been victims of our own success,” Schneider said, noting that the lodge has only five remaining members.
“We’re down to an aging few,” he said, pointing out that when the group started, about 25 years ago, members’ children and grandchildren couldn’t get into Harvard or attain high Wall Street positions.
Now they can — and they no longer have the time, or the inclination, to join their father’s organization.
Nevertheless, that club is still making a difference in the life of the community.
Names, Not Numbers
Moriah students film an oral history with survivors of the Shoah
Eighth-grader Benjamin Barth of Teaneck used to think that all Jews affected by the Holocaust were in either ghettos or concentration camps.
Now, as a result of his participation in the oral history film project “Names, Not Numbers,” he understands much more about the Shoah.
“It’s not just a single story of Jews in ghettos and concentration camps,” said Benjamin, who is a student at the Moriah School in Englewood. “There are other aspects, like people resisting all over Europe.”
That realization, and many others, came after an intensive three-month program of study, research, and hands-on video production.
Guided by a professional filmmaker — and following a curriculum designed by Jewish educator Tova Fish-Rosenberg for middle and high school students — Benjamin and 42 classmates interviewed eight Holocaust survivors, using questions they wrote themselves and employing their newly acquired skills in documentary filmmaking and editing.
