My Father, Sidney Spiegelman, Z"L, 3 Years

Sidney Spiegelman, Z"L, 1920-2016, United States Navy World War Two

You could say that in my father's death he did me a favor. He passed away just a few days before Passover, just as I was about to really clean and get the house ready for Pesach. It was also a year I had thought would never happen again. We were to host the Passover Seder for two of our (then) unmarried kids. They had requested a "quiet" Seder "without strange strangers."

I'm a terrible housekeeper; the Pesach cleaning is always very stressful for me.  And I had thought that I'd retired from Seder hosting, since our daughter now hosts the big family one every two years, and we've been going to others as guests on the alternate years.

Once I got the news that my father had died, from the complications of "old age," my halachic, Jewish Law status changed. Since I wasn't going to travel to New York for the funeral, which would only be three days later, also leaving no time for more than a bare minimum shiva, Jewish ritual mourning period, of less than an hour, my status as a morner began almost immediately.

As a mourner, I was forbidden to clean, cook etc. My children and husband had to make time to take over all responsibilities for Passover and the Seder. All the food we had already bought for the Seder was sent to my married daughter, who suddenly became the expert in preparing Gefilte Fish. I wasn't supposed to even peek into the kitchen to give orders.

My father with his brother,
my Uncle George, who had
predeceased him.

My father with his brother,
my mother, who had
predeceased him.

My father was blessed with a long life, even though he wasn't all that happy being the very last of his generation. His brother and sister had both died before him, as did my mother. He missed them all.

During World War Two, my father served in the United States Navy, being a pioneer in the use of radar. He discovered that a lot of his training had been riddled with inaccurate presumptions. A gifted "problem solver," his analysis and solutions were crucial to the success of radar in the Pacific against Japan.

After the war, he found my mother, whom he had first met before going overseas, and married her. When they were first married, they lived in Brooklyn, NY, where they had both been born. When I, their firstborn, was an infant we moved to Bell Park Gardens, Bayside, NY, where my brother and sister were born. In late summer, 1962, we moved to Great Neck, NY. My father worked as an accountant, adding CPA to his qualifications. After starting his career in the State Insurance Fund, he began a private practice on the side, eventually only working for himself.

Family, friends and work were my father's life; he had no hobbies.

Later on my father suffered a form of dementia that affected his ability to care for himself, but left him very social and fascinating. At one point, due to my mother's condition, she could no longer care for him, and we brought my father to Israel to live with us. My father enjoyed spending time with his grandchildren, great-grandchildren, niece and other family members. Here in Shiloh, my father made a lot of friends, and we had hoped that my mother would join him in Israel, but it didn't work out. Instead, my sister cleared the house for sale and moved my mother to Arizona, near her. We brought my father to join her. 

That's why they both died in Arizona, but they're buried in New York, in the burial plot of Oakland Jewish Center, of which they were among the founders. Both my parents stayed New Yorkers in their minds and hearts. One of the standard questions asked to check dementia is:

"Where do you live?"

My parents would answer "New York," even after being moved to Arizona. That answer to me was not due to dementia. I have no doubt that they were totally accurate. They were just visiting Arizona until they were to be returned to New York, buried among their old friends. 

לעילוי נשמתו

אלכסנדר זיסקין בן צבי הירש

בן דוד יוסף 

בן אלכסנדר זיסקין

Succot Now and Way Back When, Memories

Here's a collage of this year's succah decorations. We've had our own family succah all but two years we've been married, though neither my husband nor I grew up with a succah.

I remember that our Oakland Jewish Center, Bayside, NY, Hebrew School had us "decorate" or enter a succah before the holiday. There was a major "disconnect" concerning Succot, because it wasn't a holiday we really celebrated. School in our very Jewish neighborhood was cancelled on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but not Succot. I do have some memories of visiting the Rabbi's home and seeing a decorated hut by their house, since my aunt was a close personal friend of Rabbi and Mrs. Issacson. But until I began becoming religious in high school, after we had moved to Great Neck, Succot Holiday and the sukkot huts weren't part of my Jewish Life.

My husband's family was more traditional, but they lived in an apartment, so the succah was just whatever the shul had built.

Our first year married and in Israel, we lived in the Maon Betar in Jerusalem's Old City. We didn't have a succah, but we carried our main meal to the Bnai Akiva succah, which wasn't all that far away. The following year, we were in our very own apartment in Bayit Vegan, which actually had two balconies suitable for a kosher succah.

The first years we used the one off of our bedroom. A  close friend met my husband in Machane Yehuda and helped him buy all the equipment needed. Then she came over to help assemble it. We didn't even have enough chairs for all the guests we had invited. I don't know how we fit everyone into the succah for the meals, but we did.

When we planned our Shiloh home, a 2x5 merpeset seemed nice and big, but now, bli eyin haraa, we can't fit the entire family inside the succah, unless we just stand sans table. Or we can have a small table as buffet and stand around it eating. The kids decided that they're coming over for lunch before Simchat Torah, a time when we can eat indoors.

Now I'm looking forward to the holiday and wonder when the rains will start.

ושמחת בחגך

Have a Wonderful Joyous Succot Holiday

Nothing's New, All in the Bible/Tanach

I didn't get much of a Jewish education growing up. My parents weren't religious, so besides occasionally remembering to light the Chanukah Menorah and having the traditional, though shortened Passover Seder and a rare Friday night when my mother lit Shabbat candles, we did know we were Jewish...

We were always shul (synagogue) members. When we lived in Bayside, NY, we were founding members of the Conservative Oakland Jewish Center, which has since closed for business. Then when we moved to Great Neck, NY, we joined the Orthodox Great Neck Synagogue, though the choice of Orthodox wasn't for theological reasons. Even though I'm a graduate of the OJC Hebrew School, I didn't learn much, certainly not much  Bible/Tanach. And then later as an active member of NCSY I learned living Judaism, not Bible/Tanach.

All the Bible/Tanach I know has been learned as an adult, and not when I was younger. Sometimes when I'm in a class, whether with hundreds of others in Matan, or the small senior citizens class in Ofra, I see so many parallels and similarities between what happened to the Jewish People thousands of years ago and today. It's really mind-boggling to think about it.

As in Kohelet, Ecclesiastes, written by King Solomon, it has all happened before. Human nature, our intelligence and foibles haven't changed at all. In recent years I've been studying Ezra-Nehemiah, the time between the First and Second Temples, when the Jewish People returned in part from exile. The controversies, debates and problems of that time were so similar to today's among the Jewish People. That includes the controversy over "Who's a Jew?"

I have no doubt that we are in an era of Biblical significance, and Gd willing we will do what must be done to truly bring the Moshiach. We need leadership to fully build and develop the Jewish State of Israel. Build for Jews and BUILD THE HOLY TEMPLE!

Aliyah, Moving To Israel

Is Aliyah, Moving To Israel the "elephant in the room" for Jews who live abroad, in Chu"L, out of the Land of Israel?

To be perfectly honest, I'd say "no."

I grew up like most Jews, totally ignorant of the concept of "Aliyah." I also didn't know about Shabbat, kashrut and most of the Jewish Holidays. Jewish History was also pretty much a blank in my mind, as was the Bible, stories and Land. I was made vaguely aware of a bit of it in the Hebrew School I went to six hours a week for five years, in the Conservative Oakland Jewish Center. The teachers there were between a rock and a hard place, as the saying goes. The vast majority were actually strictly practicing and believing Orthodox Jews, but they had to dilute their teaching to suit the Conservative theology and the even less Jewishly committed parents, who would have had them fired or pull their kids out of the school if there were signs of "brainwashing."

But I knew very well that I was Jewish, even if I couldn't define exactly what that meant.

As ignorant and oblivious as I and my Jewish peers were in the 1950's and early 1960's, I know that today's young Jews, with the very minor exception of those who are strongly committed to their Jewishness, know much less than we did.

Many diaspora Jews today either have no real idea that they are Jewish or think they are Jewish and don't realize that there are halachik (Jewish Law) complications which make their Jewish identity very problematic. Assimilation and intermarriage are causing a bloodless Holocaust, which shouldn't be ignored. The big problem there is that there really isn't a solution, simple or otherwise.

The actual percentage of olim chadashim, new immigrants to Israel of diaspora Jews is horrendously minuscule. We all do our best to make olim chadashim feel as welcome as possible, but the actual success of one's aliyah depends more on the oleh/olah (immigrant) than it does on the welcomers, veteran Israelis and the systems here.

We're here in Israel for almost half a century, and I've never been sorry about our move for even a second.

Following are photos I took a number of years ago of a Nefesh B'Nefesh charter flight to Israel.

"No Holocaust Story" is a Story

I grew up without knowing anything about the Holocaust or the term "survivors." This was the 1950s in New York. From the time I was a few months old my parents and I lived in a brand new garden apartment development/community for veterans, Bell Park Gardens, Bayside, NY. Our parents were all pretty much the same, Jewish (well over 90%), white born/raised in a poorer neighborhood of New York and determined to give their children a better childhood than they had.

Our parents had survived the Great Depression with difficulty, and if our fathers had suffered fighting in World War Two, most of us never knew about it. Children of the 1950s were protected from awful realities. Disney reigned, and we were supposed to "live happily ever after."

Most of our mothers considered that their job; they were home raising us. Our parents were 100% American and didn't have foreign accents. Only our elderly grandparents had accents. They had come from somewhere in Europe to America, the Land of Opportunity. I didn't know more than that.

It seemed in my childhood perspective that we were all the same. The only real difference was that my father had aunts, uncles and cousins, while my mother had none. Only much later on, when I was already a grandmother did I fully discover that not only had most of his parents' siblings made it to New York, but so did his grandparents.

I only became aware that there had been Nazis, a Holocaust etc from the news, television and maybe a bit from Oakland Jewish Center Hebrew School. I was in Elementary School when The Diary of Anna Frank came out and Adolf Eichmann was captured and tried.

I never felt connected to any of the Holocaust stories or history. It happened to others, not my family, just like the Spanish Inquisition.  It took many decades for me to realize that my lack of a personal family story is the Holocaust story personified.

My mother's parents had to have come from families before they got on those boats to New York. They certainly didn't sprout from laboratories. Over the years when I had tried to discuss this with my mother, it became very clear that she, too, was in the dark about her parents' histories. Being the eighth out of nine of a very poor his, hers and theirs family, she was raised more by her elder siblings than her elderly and tired parents who were busy trying to scratch out a minimal survival in Brooklyn.

To personalize Holocaust Memorial Day, I'll just write a bit about what I know of my grandmother's family.  I have only the vaguest memories of my maternal grandmother, Ida Vishnefsky Finkelstein Shankman. She died just before my third birthday. Until my mother was close to fifty and already had two grandchildren, she thought that her mother was the only one of the family that escaped Europe. Only by chance did one of her elder half-sisters mention that they had an uncle and cousins in London, but the one sister who knew more and had corresponded when young, had already passed away.

My two older "half aunts" then brainstormed trying to remember what they could of their mother's history and information about the uncle who went to live in London. They put together what they could remember and sent it to HIAS. A cousin read it and via HIAS contacted them.

We are descended from the Vishnefsky's of Rogotshov, Belarus. Apparently the family was relatively successful. They were musical and someone was a barber/doctor. I don't know their first names. One son moved to London, Harry who changed his name to Marks and worked as a carpenter.

My grandmother, Ida (Chaya Raisia) married a Finkelstein and had a daughter while still in Europe. Her husband went to New York, and she followed a bit later, first visiting her brother in London. When they reunited in New York, she had two more daughters before her husband took sick and died. A poor widow with three young children she married my grandfather Abraham Shankman a widower with two sons. Together they had four more children, including my mother. None of my grandmother's relatives ever made it to America as far as her children knew. They must have been killed in the Holocaust or by Stalin just after the war. So, I too have a Holocaust story.

Rosh Hashanah Memories and Prayers

• What is Rosh Hashanah for you?
• What are your favorite and first memories of Rosh Hashanah?

My very first memories of, what must have been, Rosh Hashanah were of being in a great big tent with my father. The tent was set up, according to my memory, in a parking lot in Windsor Park, the garden apartment complex just west of Bell Park Gardens, Bayside, New York, where we lived from the time I was an infant until the summer I was thirteen. I had to have been either two or three years old at the time. I remember that these were Jewish Prayers, and my father stood me on the folding chair. My guess is that I was stood on the chair to hear/see the shofar blowing on Rosh Hashanah. 

In subsequent years, we went to the newly built Oakland Jewish Center, which was our synagogue until we moved to Great Neck. As I've always understood it, that tent was erected before there was a building by those who founded the shul. In the ten years or so we were members, it expanded a couple of times. In its heydays of the late 1950's and early 1960's it was popular and constantly growing. Later on the the membership began to decline, and it finally closed its doors the summer of 2013. The remaining members joined the Little Neck Jewish Center a few miles to the east. Davka, in the final years we were in Bayside, OJC had a tent in its parking lot for the "Junior Congregation" to pray in on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. In those days, our Conservative shul did not permit driving on Shabbat and Jewish Holidays. Also all members lived nearby, within walking distance. Besides the seating, mixed versus separate, there were hardly any differences between the Jewish observances in Conservative and Orthodox synagogues. 

I have strong memories of the shofar being blown. It used to be the dominant sound of Rosh Hashanah for me. But in recent years, I find the prayers, when we all sing/pray together to truly stand out in my mind. 

I've photographed from this very old Rosh Hashanah Machzor- Prayerbook 

Here in my local Shiloh shul, Noam Yonatan, Ramat Shmuel, most of us join in singing/praying loudly. There is no operatic-style chazan demanding his solitary stage. Men and women, sitting separately of course, pray rather vocally, which I love. 

We pray, beg, demand of Gd that we all be inscribed in the BOOK OF LIFE. Yes, there is shouting when we reach that line. We all know how unexpectedly death can Gd for bid come to those young and old. 

And as you can see, we pray in the plural. We pray for all the Jewish people, not just for ourselves and our loved ones. That is also something I truly treasure about Judaism, the plural in our prayers. 

May Gd accept our prayers and forgive our sins.

שנה טובה

גמר חתימה טובה

SHANAH TOVAH

GMAR CHATIMA TOVAH

Rosh Hashanah, Not The New Years I Grew Up With

this year's "fruit head"
"May we be a head, not a tail." 

Yesterday, on Shabbat, I was at my usual shiur nashim, Women's Torah lesson, and the young man teaching us somehow got us to talking about the differences between Rosh Hashannah, the beginning of the Jewish Year, which starts actually in a few hours, and the New Year's celebrations I grew up with.

I can't say for sure that every American family of my generation was the same or that things have remained on the same keel until now, but I don't remember the secular New Year's as a family holiday. My parents sometimes entertained on New Year's Eve, but we kids weren't invited. we had to stay in a different part of the house and go to bed even early. The next day on the news we'd see celebrations from the night before. Well into my teens I did go on New Year's Eve dates a couple of times, but the partying seemed rather mechanical to me. At least for me it was more about imitating the party spirit. I sure didn't feel like it was anything special.

Even though my family as pretty assimilated, I do remember Rosh Hashanah being celebrated with some Jewish customs. We had a traditional meal with challah, honey, chicken soup and whatever else my mother considered as proper for Rosh Hashanah. I don't remember my father ever making kiddush, but I think they did serve some sweet red kiddush wine. We also went to our local shul and heard the shofar. I probably spent more time in shul than anyone else in the family, since I always enjoyed it and felt connected to what was happening. I guess it wasn't all that great a surprise when later on I did become Torah observant.

One of my earliest, if not the earliest Jewish themed memory is going with my father to Rosh Hashana prayers in a big tent in a parking lot of the Windsor Park garden apartments just west of Bell Park Gardens, Bayside, NY, where we lived when I was a child. I can still picture myself standing on the brown folding chair to see better. That was most probably the forerunner of the Oakland Jewish Center, before it had a proper building. Our section of Bayside was full of young Jewish families who, although may not have been all that religiously observant, but they wanted a synagogue that would be sufficiently traditional in which they'd feel comfortably Jewish. OJC was affiliated with United Synagogue Conservative Judaism.

Jewish Holidays, including Rosh Hashanah always have family friendly aspects, special food and child friendly prayers like the Shofar, ram's horn, which is blown in a specific way. Purim, Passover, Succot, Simchat Torah and Shavuot also are celebrated in a family inclusive fashion.

The season of the Jewish New Year begins a month before Rosh Hashanah, when we are supposed to begin repenting and thinking of what we did wrong in our observance of Judaism and behavior towards others, and how to do it better. Jewish News Year's resolutions are in the spiritual realm, not focusing just on things like "lose weight" and "get a better job."

Rosh Hashanah is a holiday for the entire Jewish Nation, and may this next year, 5776 be an absolutely wonderful one for all of us.

Good Health, Blessings, Joyous Events and Geula Shleimah, Complete Redemption!

History- Post World War Two, How Did Entire NY Neighborhoods Become Jewish?

There's an interesting article in the New York Daily News I found in one of my facebook groups, Top of the Court about Growing up in Bell Park Gardens, Bayside, New York.  The person who wrote it is younger than I am, and the family name doesn't seem at all familiar. But we did live there in BPG for some of the same time.

My family was among the original residents.  We moved in on the last day of 1949.  I was a baby then.  I guess that day was chosen, because my parents' rental lease for the little basement flat was probably up, and they couldn't afford to pay for another month.  They spent New Year's for 1950 as owners of a small two bedroom co-op garden apartment on the second floor.

I have no real memories of that apartment, because we moved out pretty quickly to an adorable, though tiny two bedroom duplex, which gave us a backdoor to a garden.  It was almost like having a house, because the apartments next to us were of one floor and didn't have backdoors. A few years later we moved again.  This time was to the largest type of apartment in Bell Park Gardens which had three bedrooms on one floor. Ours had an extra few inches, because there was white siding instead of bricks in the front, the living-room wall.

My memories of Bell Park Gardens, which we left in 1962 when I was thirteen were rather idyllic.  It was a community, very homogeneous, lots of young families of similar backgrounds, lots of Jews.  Almost everyone was Jewish.  At least one of the couple had to be a veteran of the American Armed Forces, army, navy etc. Our parents didn't have accents, but most of our grandparents did.

There were no Holocaust survivor parents I knew of.  It's strange, because I now have friends of my generation who grew up in other New York neighborhoods in which "all the parents were survivors."  They were raised on the tragic family Holocaust stories whether hearing them or the haunted silence of the secrets that were too traumatic to voice.

I only learned of the Holocaust from the media and a bit from Hebrew School (Oakland Jewish Center) when the Diary of Anne Frank was publicized and made into a play then a movie.

First published under the title Het Achterhuis. Dagboekbrieven 14 juni 1942 – 1 augustus 1944 (The Annex: Diary Notes from 14 June 1942 – 1 August 1944) by Contact Publishing in Amsterdam in 1947, it received widespread critical and popular attention on the appearance of its English language translation Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girlby Doubleday & Company (United States) and Valentine Mitchell (United Kingdom) in 1952. Its popularity inspired the 1955 play The Diary of Anne Frank by the screenwritersFrances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, which they subsequently adapted for the screen for the 1959 movie version. The book is in several lists of the top books of the 20th century.^[1]

Soon after that was the legendary capture of Adolf Eichmann by Israel.  All this World War Two history was new and amazing for me as a young Jew in a such a peaceful and Jewish New York neighborhood.

One thing I've always wondered about is how Bell Park Gardens and the other then  new developments surrounding it had so many Jewish families.  The advertisements recruiting veterans to sign up for inexpensive housing opportunities were certainly published for the entire veteran population. My fathers stories of his service in the United  States Navy were about being the only Jew, or the only Jew not afraid to admit his Jewish identity. My uncle had similar stories.  So how when such a small percentage of American soldiers were Jewish did these veteran housing projects end up so overwhelmingly Jewish?

If you have an answer, please reply in the comments, thanks.

Pictures from the funeral and cemetery

 

As usual, I had my trusty old camera with me at my mother's funeral.  I may have taken some of the pictures, for sure those before the actual funeral.  Then I'm pretty sure I handed it to a friend.  My mother is buried in the New Montefiore  Cemetery out on Long Island.  We got off at Exit 49 on the LIE and drove south.

My parents had bought their burial plots there in the Oakland Jewish Center section in about 1959. 

I'm pretty sure they lived next to us when we
were in the five room duplex in Bell Park Gardens.

They were founding members of the shul, Oakland Jewish Center, Bayside NY.  I was hoping to see lots of people I knew, I mean their names on tombstones.  No doubt I'll be back, and then I'll find their old friends.

My father has a lot of relatives in the Neshelsk (a city in Poland that once had a very large active Jewish community) section of a different cemetery.  A cousin was there visiting her parents and grandparents in between my mother's death and funeral.  She told them the news about my mother.

My mother's grave is near one of the outside walls.  It was pretty noisy, but that shouldn't bother her now.

Covering the grave was a group effort.  Due to a shoulder injury I was pretty useless with the shovel.  But I did drop a stone from Shiloh into the grave.  I had brought it with me to make sure my mother had something special from ארץ ישראל Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel.  Most of my mother's grandchildren and all of her great-grandchildren are in Israel.

I was surprised at how much deeper she's buried than we do here in Israel.  There are other differences, the American legally required coffin versus just the shrouds wrapped in a Tallit.  No, I didn't take up the offer to check/see the body.  My brother was pleased at how the shroud covered her.  She was in the simple coffin as all traditional Jews request.  There are many more "traditional Jews" when it comes to burials than living and breathing Jews.

In my community, Shiloh, Israel, actual "kri'ah," ripping of the clothes is the accepted standard.  My high school friend, with whom I had become religious almost fifty years ago,  did the first cut with a knife and Rabbi Dale Polakoff of the Great Neck Synagogue supervised, making sure that the rip was long enough.

Rabbi Polakoff made sure that my mother was well covered.  When the family and friends were gathering to leave, we could still he him heaving the earth onto my mother.  He was overheard telling the cemetery workers that he would take care of it himself.  I'd say that the Great Neck Synagogue is in good hands.

Baruch Dayan Ha'Emet

 

Shirley Spiegelman

שפרה בת אברהם וחיה ריזיה

Shifra bat Avraham and Chaya Raisia

 

לעילוי נשמתה

Li'ilu'i Nishmata

May her Soul be Elevated

Yes, Succot is a Real Holiday

Robert, of Seraphic Secret, has a great piece of dialogue about Succot:

I was asked to attend a script conference tomorrow, Tuesday morning. I told the producer that it was a Jewish holiday and I couldn't attend.
“Wait, the holidays are over, your Yom Kee-pur just ended, right?”
“Uh, yeah, but now we have Succot, Shemini Atzeret and then Simchat Torah.”
“No disrespect, but you are kidding, tell me you're kidding.”
“Sorry.”
“Let me get back to you.”
An hour later the producer, not Jewish, truly bright, creative and decent, calls back.
“I asked all the Jews in the company and they're drawing a blank.”
“Right. Well, I'm not surprised. Look, lemme send you a few links and then get back to me.”
“Hey, I believe you. Just tell me when we can have our sit-down?”
I suggest a day and time.
“Robert?”
“Yeah?”
“I respect your commitment. I really do. But tell me, how come none of the Jews in the company know what I'm talking about?”

It brings me back to the days when I didn't really know about the holiday. In OJC Hebrew School, they took us to see the funny hut decorated with hanging fruit, and I think I visited the rabbi's home with my aunt who was their friend, but it wasn't a holiday we actually celebrated.

We didn't celebrate Simchat Torah either.

In New York City, at least in my school district in Bayside, the schools were closed for Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur, but after that it was business as usual, except in Hebrew School. But since it was the beginning of the school year, it didn't feel like a school vacation.

Shavuot from my childhood is a total blank. We must have learned something about it, but I don't remember anything, not even cheesecake. At least for Purim I have vague memories of hamantashen and a grogger. No, I don't remember hearing the Megillah. And no mishloach manot either.

At least in Israel, even for the non-religious, the Jewish Calendar is the calendar of the country.

Succot are all over. My kids put up ours.

They even hung a picture of their favorite rabbi, "HaRav Tzimmerman."