Workshops help observant Jews write their way into print

Yael Zoldan always enjoyed writing — as long as she kept it to herself. "It was like singing in the shower; I didn’t want anyone else to hear me," she said.

With the encouragement of her husband, the young mother of four from Passaic enrolled in a writing workshop offered by novelist Ruchama King Feuerman, also a Passaic resident.

"Stay With Me," Zoldan’s memoir about her grandmother’s death, started taking shape at her first session, last November, and is included in Feuerman’s new "Everyone’s Got a Story: 41 Short Stories from a New Generation of Jewish Writers" (Judaica Press).

Films focus on Shoah’s after-effects

Over the next two weeks, two remarkable films will open, each tackling an aspect of the Holocaust, not so much by studying the horrors, but by looking at how lives were affected by the war. Jiri Menzel’s "I Served the King of England" is a brilliant cinematic review of the modern world as seen through the life of one man. This man, a Czech waiter, lives through the turbulent years that preceded and followed World War II. His story is that of the bystander who is caught up in the whirlwind of events that swept Czechoslovakia. Claude Miller’s "A Secret" is a powerful look at how a child of survivors tries to cope with the secret that was kept from him as he grew into adulthood and how that prevented him from having a proper relationship with his father. It also affords a look at French Jewry during and after the war. The films provide contrasting lenses by which to try to understand the modern world.

This state is home to more than 1 million senior citizens, and that number will increase to 2.5 million by 2030, according to the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services. Nursing homes are options for some, but for those who are able and want to remain in their homes, the Jewish federation system has a program called Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities to provide health and social services.

State and federal funding cuts have put NORC funding in danger, however, leaving federations scrambling to make up the difference.

Immigrant society donates burial site to veterans

When a Jew dies, it is the responsibility of the community to guard, prepare, and bury the body according to halacha.

Thus among the foremost concerns of the Rachov Independent Society, founded in 1919 on the Lower East Side of New York City, was to establish a community burial site.

More than 89 years later, the still active landsmanshaften, or Jewish community of immigrants from the same European town, donated two gravesites to be used for an indigent veteran who is a member of a Jewish War Veterans post in New Jersey and for his or her spouse.

Move leaves Teaneck and Leonia synagogues without tenant

In the spring, BPY’s leadership signed a contract to move its kindergarten through fifth-grade classes to the Jewish Center for the coming school year while keeping its preschool program in Leonia’s Cong. Sons of Israel. Ben Porat Yosef had held classes in Sons of Israel since the school was founded in 2001 and needed more space each year as it added grades. The Jewish Center was looking for a tenant after Metropolitan Schechter High School, which had rented space in the center, closed last year.

You might call it an extreme family reunion — an event far beyond a Sunday afternoon of picnics and Frisbee.

Every other summer, Aliza and Avi Picard — among other relatives from France, Switzerland, Israel, the United States, Britain, and Belgium — send their children to a two-week family camp ("familiienlagger") in the Alps.

Avi Picard explained that the camp was an outgrowth of a foundation started in 1901 by his ancestor, Samuel Bollag, a Swiss Jew. Bollag, then 80 years old and the father of 12 children, intended the foundation ("Stiftung") as a vehicle for aiding family members and maintaining contact between them as they started moving to distant places.

Clifton shul opens its doors to area singles

What began as a hobby has become a calling for a local attorney and community leader.

Sig Silber has spent most of his life in Paterson, but his art recalls both his travels and the boyhood he remembers before the Nazis robbed him of both his childhood and parents.

Silber was only 2 1/2 when his parents sent him, his older brother, and younger sister to England on the Kindertransport. (His name then was Siegmar Köppold.) His sister was the youngest child accepted in the program; she was only 7 months old when the group left for England on Aug. 27, 1939. The children never saw their parents again.

The three siblings and three first cousins spent the war years in Great Britain. After the war, his cousins found a home with an uncle in the United States. Homes were found for him and his sister, and they came to the United States in 1948. Silber’s older brother, who was 15 at the time, chose to go to Israel, where he lived on a Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz until his death. (Their story is the basis of "Six from Leipzig," a recently published work by Gertrude Dubrovksy, a New Jersey historical researcher.)

BEIJING – Clutching Israeli flags, the young Chinese students greeted the Israeli Olympic swimmers with shouts of "shalom" as the athletes visited their elementary school here this week.

The Shi Jia Primary School was assigned Israel as part of a citywide program of partnerships between schools and Olympic countries. In preparation, the school spent the past two years teaching the students about Israel and how to say "shalom." It also had the students interact, via computer, with students at a school in Jerusalem.

"Many of our students wanted to ask their counterparts in Jerusalem about peace in their region," said English teacher Fu Rui.

MOSCOW – Vissarion Manasherov left his city as the bombs were falling.

One day later, on Monday, with bombs still falling, he returned to Gori, a city at the edge of war, to persuade the few Jewish families still in the area to leave. The Russians were at their doorstep, he told them.

Manasherov, the community’s leader and a local emissary for the Jewish Agency for Israel, said he fled to the Georgian capital of Tbilisi with a wave of 200 Jews, leaving fewer than a dozen compatriots behind.

"I was the last to leave," he said. "But I went back. And we’ll go back."

For Jason Lezak, Ben Wildman-Tobriner, and Garrett Weber-Gale, the marketing possibilities are endless — perhaps "The Three Chaverim" or "Jews in the Pool."

All three Jewish sprinters are hoping to make a splash as part of the U.S. men’s swimming team heading to Beijing for the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Not only will they be competing as individuals, but they are expected to make up three-fourths of the 4x100-meter freestyle relay team.