(JTA) — The Jewish actor and director Szymon Szurmiej, the longtime head of Poland’s State Jewish Theatre, has died. Szurmiej, a leading Jewish figure for years during the post-Holocaust communist era, died Wednesday in Warsaw. He was 91. He survived the widespread anti-Semitic purges of 1968 and, in addition to heading the theater since 1970,…
Getty Images As Thomas Erdelyi, he was the Budapest-born son of Holocaust survivors who settled in Forest Hills, Queens. But as Tommy Ramone, he became the leather-jacketed, rhythm-slashing backbone of The Ramones, arguably one of the most influential bands of the late 20th century. Ramone, the last surviving original member of the band, died July…
I first met Zalman Schachter (not yet-Shalomi) in 1971 in Warwick, N.Y., at Kutz, a Reform Jewish camp where my wife, Elana, and I spent our first married summer as teachers and counselors. Our friend, newly ordained rabbi, Larry Kushner, had hired me along with a few other rabbinical students to work with him and…
The Dalai Lama speaks during a visit to Germany. / Getty Images It was, and will always remain, one of the most mysteriously significant experiences of my life. In 1990, eight of us travelled to Dharmsala, India at the invitation of his Holiness the Dalai Lama under the auspices of the Nathan Cummings Foundation. The…
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, one of the important Jewish innovators in postwar America, inspiration to a generation and ecumenical spiritualist, died on July 3 aged 89. A tireless organizer and spiritual architect, Schachter-Shalomi single-handedly created a new form of Jewish practice and spirituality known as Jewish Renewal, founded on the idea of Gaia consciousness: the notion…
I last spent time with Reb Zalman a month ago, during Shavuot at the Isabella Freedman Retreat Center. He looked and felt like all of his 89 years — and he told us as much. As in “The December Project,” his collaboration with Sara Davidson on the late years of life, Reb Zalman was entirely…
I first met Eli Wallach one evening in a restaurant in the Peninsula Hotel. He was almost 90 then, and he needed someone to edit the autobiography he was writing. We sipped chamomile tea and he told me some of his stories — how he had gone out dancing with Marilyn Monroe; how he had…
(Reuters) — Eli Wallach, an early practitioner of method acting who made a lasting impression as the scuzzy bandit Tuco in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”, died on Tuesday at the age of 98, the New York Times reported. Wallach appeared on the big screen well into his 90s in Roman Polanski’s “The…
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