(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…
(JTA) — When Saadya Ehrenpreis was an infant, a doctor told his mother that he would “never walk, talk or amount to anything.” He wound up doing all three. Ehrenpreis was born with Down syndrom, but he was intensely determined. With the help of his family, he not only learned to walk and talk, but…
Raquel Bakalar, a Cuban immigrant who grew up in Los Angeles, remembers her mom proudly pointing out her name as a solver of the newspaper’s Yiddish word puzzles. Linda Galler, a law professor at Hofstra University, said her mom used the Forward to teach her Yiddish as a teenager. And Betty Baumel recalls the Sunday…
Even before his election, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro inspired theories and debates about the best way to categorize his extreme-right ideology. There were no shortage of experts who openly calledhim a fascist. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, there are those who think he has gone even further. “Bolsonaro’s attitude towards the Covid-19 pandemic is Nazi,” said…
After the Union of Reform Judaism, which operates North America’s largest network of Jewish summer camps, sent an email last week to thousands of families announcing that all its camps were cancelled, an independent camp in Pennsylvania issued an email announcement of its own. “Camp Zeke is not a URJ camp” it declared, in bold…
Parker Jewish Institute for Health Care and Rehabilitation in Queens is the nursing home with the highest number of COVID deaths in the state, according to data released from the Department of Health Monday. The institute, which receives funding from the Jewish Communal Fund and UJA-Federation of New York, has had 71 COVID deaths since…
Stacie Funk is afraid to tell her son that there might not be summer camp this year. Jonah, 21, has severe autism. Funk playfully calls him “one and done”: He’ll talk incessantly about a movie he wants to see, for example, and as soon as he sees it, he never mentions it again. But for…
Emerging from the hospital for the first time in hours, the nurse needed to talk to someone. A young woman, she’d trained hard for her career, with full knowledge that it would be a difficult one. What she hadn’t prepared for was saying the shema with dying coronavirus patients, comforting them through final moments that…
(JTA) — Rachel Spector Peak had no idea how beloved her older brother Dan was until she posted about his death on Facebook. Tributes started pouring in immediately. “He made Memphis a better place,” read one. “His dedication to Memphis and to artists is rare and precious,” read another. Spector, who died of COVID-19 on March…
(JTA) — Every year on Purim, neighborhood children would line up outside the home of Elliot Samet in Passaic, New Jersey, waiting to show him their holiday costumes. “There would be a line up outside his house,” his friend George Matyjewicz told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “People just knocking on the door wanting to them…
LONDON (JTA) — Martin Lovett, a British cellist and the last surviving member of the world renowned Amadeus String Quartet, died in London on April 29 after contracting COVID-19. He was 93. The British-born Lovett was the last member to join Amadeus, whose other three players — Siegmund Nissel, Peter Schidlof, and Norbert Brainin —…
