Ben Harris
By Ben Harris
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News Jerome Spector, 79, Candlemaker Who Planted Gardens
(JTA) — Jerome Spector started making candles when he was living on a commune outside Bennington, Vermont, in the 1960s. Spector was a potter back then, but he didn’t have a kiln. So when someone suggested he could earn money by making candles, Spector used his clay pots as molds, filling them with wax and…
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Fast Forward She survived the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic and COVID-19. What is her secret?
(JTA) — After Marilee Shapiro Asher was admitted to the hospital in mid-April sick with COVID-19, her daughter got a call from the doctor telling her she ought to get down there right away. Her mother likely had only 12 hours to live. “Well, he doesn’t know my mother, does he?” Joan Shapiro said. What…
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News Benjamin Schaeffer, 58, Hero Subway Conductor Who Battled Transit Authority Over Jewish Holiday
(JTA) — For their third date, Benjamin Schaeffer took Lisa Smid to the New York Transit Museum for a personal tour. Schaffer knew his way around the Lower Manhattan shrine to the city’s transportation systems. A veteran subway conductor, Schaeffer loved all things transportation. For more than two decades, he had worked for New York’s…
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Fast Forward Adviser says Biden would keep embassy in Jerusalem
(JTA) — An adviser to Joe Biden said the former vice president would keep the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem if elected president. Tony Blinken, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee’s senior foreign policy adviser, said that reversing President Donald Trump’s decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv “would not make sense practically and…
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News Paul Shelden, 79, Music Educator Who Founded Instrument Company
(JTA) — As a young clarinetist, Paul Shelden performed under the direction of famed conductors Leonard Bernstein and James Levine. Later he would lend his talents to the work of Bob Hope, Tony Bennett, and the jazz-rock band Blood, Sweat and Tears. And as an academic, he spent more than three decades on the faculty…
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News Ernest Einzig, 97, Purple Heart Winner Who Left Behind Over 100 Descendants
(JTA) — There was something unmistakably old-world about Ernest Einzig — or Zeide Ernie as everyone called him. With his mustache, trademark suspenders and thick Hungarian accent, he seemed to come from another time. Einzig was born in 1923 in Budapest, where he apprenticed as a tailor before fleeing rising anti-Semitism for America. He was…
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News Noach Dear, 66, Former New York City Councilman And State Supreme Court Judge
(JTA) — Noach Dear, a longtime New York City Council member representing largely Orthodox areas of Brooklyn, died April 19 in New York of complications related to COVID-19. He was 66. Dear was elected to the council in 1983 representing sections of Midwood, Bensonhurst and Borough Park that were heavily populated with Orthodox Jews. Dear…
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News Salomon Podgursky, 84, Lived A Life Of Resilience After The Holocaust
(JTA) — When Robert Podgursky was a boy, his father piled him and his brother into the car and headed north from their home in Louisville, Kentucky. Their destination was Toronto, where a relative from the old country had settled. Armed with little more than an address and an unshakeable sense of mission, Salomon Podgursky…
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Fast Forward Why some Satmar Hasidic leaders endorsed Zohran Mamdani as mayor, stunning many Jewish voters
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