Solomon Schechter, the man whose name graces Conservative day schools in North Jersey and across the country, was something of a scholarly swashbuckler.
The myriad scraps of Hebrew-scrawled documents he hauled out of a dusty crawlspace in an old Cairo synagogue at the end of the 19th century are the subject of “Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza,” by the Paterson-born poet Peter Cole (see sidebar) and the biographer Adina Hoffman (Nextbook/Schocken, 2011, $26.95).
Cole and Hoffman, who maintain residences in Jerusalem and New Haven, just wrapped up a North American publicity tour for their book about the 900 years’ worth of sacred texts, letters, poems, wills, marriage contracts, money orders, trousseau lists, prescriptions, petitions, and magic charms discovered in the Ben Ezra Synagogue Geniza (a depository for worn Jewish texts) by a colorful cadre of adventurer/scholars.
A young Israeli woman was suffering from severe anxiety attacks, rapidly losing weight and hair. Then her husband brought her to the Israel National Therapeutic Riding Association (INTRA) near the coastal city of Netanya.
A month later, after riding therapy horse Pocahantas (Pokey for short) twice a week, she has regained a bit of weight and, most important, a smile.
This was exactly the kind of situation for which Teaneck resident Minna Heilpern donated Pokey to INTRA about 10 years ago. Now head of the fundraising arm Friends of INTRA (Friendsofintra.org), Heilpern is among organizers of a benefit scheduled for Nov. 16, 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. at the Spanish Benevolent Society in Manhattan.
A support system for soldiers who left their families behind
Israel’s Lone Soldier Center in Memory of Michael Levin is a godsend, says Oren Hason, who made aliyah in 2008 from Fair Lawn and served in a field intelligence unit. A “lone soldier” is a young person who made aliyah on his or her own, and then joined the army.
“They helped me through a lot of bureaucratic mess,” Hason says of the Lone Soldier Center. “They are really angels.”
Josh Flaster, a former lone soldier who grew up in Phoenix, founded the center (http://www.lonesoldiercenter.com) in 2009. Several organizations provide services to the estimated 5,700 Israel Defense Forces soldiers who lack local family (including Friends of the IDF, see the sidebar on this page), but this is the only one run by former lone soldiers exclusively for lone soldiers.
On her twice-yearly trips to Israel from New Jersey, Chaya Goldsmith has steamed rice at a Hazon Yeshaya soup kitchen, picked vegetables for Leket national food bank, assisted the elderly at the Yad LeKashish: Lifeline for the Old, made signs for the ALYN Pediatric and Adolescent Rehabilitation Center bike-a-thon, danced with children at Keren Or-Jerusalem Center for Blind Children with Multiple Disabilities, and whatever else she can do to assist a variety of Israeli charitable endeavors.
It is not that Goldsmith ignores needs in her own backyard — she has also volunteered as a matchmaker, Kosher Meals on Wheels driver, and worker in a Bergen County homeless shelter and hospital.
Daniel Shechtman’s rigorous Israeli upbringing gave him the tenacity to keep him on a prize-winning scientific course despite ridicule from colleagues.
During paramilitary training at his Israeli high school, Shechtman was usually the first to jump on the barbed wire blocking the students’ path as they ran through a field.
“Everybody steps on you, and then you try to shake yourself loose and run after them,” the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology professor said at a Jerusalem press conference after the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced he was to become the 10th Israeli to win a Nobel Prize.
Shechtman said that his rigorous early training “definitely” influenced his ability to withstand the professional scorn that first greeted his groundbreaking discovery of quasicrystals, atoms making up non-repeating structural patterns found in aluminum alloys.
Keeping Rockleigh’s quality high despite Medicaid cuts
Some little girls dream of being nurses when they grow up. Sunni Herman dreamed of being a nursing home administrator. And on Oct. 16, at the Jewish Home at Rockleigh’s annual gala, Herman will mark one year as the executive vice president, CEO, and administrator of the 180-resident facility.
“I’m very passionate about what I do here,” says Herman, a 38-year-old mother of three. “I am very driven.”
Herman and her husband, Jonathan, relocated their family from West Hempstead, N.Y., to Teaneck soon after she took over from Charles P. Berkowitz, now president and CEO of the Jewish Home Family, the organizational parent of the Jewish Home’s various facilities.
Helping Haitian burn victims a priority for local lawyer
Sam Davis got news seemingly straight from the Book of Life on Rosh Hashanah: A badly injured boy named Lucken Colas was finally discharged from the Haiti burn clinic that the Teaneck-based attorney helped establish as founding director of the Burn Advocates Network (BAN).
“It’s news like that that makes the mission worthwhile,” says Davis, who visited the impoverished island nation for the fifth time in August to check on existing projects and get new ones off the ground.
Although January will mark two years since the devastating hurricane from which Haiti is still struggling to recover, serious burns resulting from the disaster — and from everyday conditions in the tent cities in which many natives are housed — have not faded from Davis’ priority list.
There is no more earthy holiday than Sukkot, when Jews not only are supposed to eat their meals outside in a hut, but are also commanded to gather four species of vegetation — a closed date palm frond, myrtle boughs, willow branches and citron fruit — in accordance with Leviticus 23:40. “On the first day, you shall take the product of hadar trees, branches of palm trees, boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the Lord seven days.”
Sukkot, after all, not only commemorates the days of desert wanderings, but also is a thanksgiving for the autumn fruit harvest.
The myrtle and willow are inexpensive commodities. The frond (lulav) and citron (etrog) are a different story. Most are imported from Israel — although they grow in other places, including Morocco, Mexico, California, and Texas. Other factors described below also push up the price.
Rishon LeZion, Israel — The primitive music of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah is supposed to stir reflections on repentance. This year, when you hear the plaintive notes, you might also think of Avi Mishan sorting through antelope horns in South Africa.
Mishan, 44, owns one of Israel’s four major shofar production facilities (the others are in the Golan Heights, Haifa and Tel Aviv). He and his 14 employees turn out thousands of shofarot (the plural of “shofar” in Hebrew) to sell here and abroad. “Right now, we have new clients from Paraguay and Mexico,” he says.
