A Living Lens: Rockland County, N.Y.
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Three anecdotes from my event at the Rockland County JCC:
2. What the F!: Vera Boehm never spoke or read Yiddish. And so, when her grandfather asked her to go to the store and pick up his copy of the Forverts, she had to think fast. How would she know which one it was? Young Vera came up with a great solution while staring at the paper’s masthead: She zoomed in on the shape of the pheh, the first letter of the word Forverts in Yiddish, figuring she’d just hunt for its replica on the newsstand. Unfortunately for Vera, there was another newspaper at the time that started with a pheh — the communist paper known as the Freiheit. She can still hear her grandfather yelling…
3. Calendar Chaos: Natalie Stein’s mother came to America from Russia in 1908, at age 4. By the time she got to middle school, she noticed something amiss, and decided to turn to the Forverts for help: “When,” she asked in a letter to the editor, “is my American birthday? I know I was born on erev Shavuos 1904.” Sure enough, a reply came soon after: May 29, 1904.
Alana Newhouse, the Forward’s Arts & Culture editor, is touring the country, speaking about her new book “A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life From the Pages of the Forward.”
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
