A year later, we speak every day, staying close during this pandemic. Helena, soon to turn 96, is quarantined alone inside her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It’s a home filled with memories. Photographs, books and artwork, much of it from her travels, cover walls and shelves. But her kitchen calendar, once abrim with engagements—lunches, dinners, concerts, plays—is now blank.
The ten organizations listed here invite you to learn something new, join a conversation, watch a performance and, when possible, give what you can.
In the days leading up to the lockdown, the Milanese Jewish community behaved “like good soldiers,” Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, director of the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDEC), tells Moment, respecting public health ordinances and avoiding scenes reminiscent of those coming out of Brooklyn and Bnei Brak of minyanim gone rogue.
Today, before the sirens went off, hundreds of volunteers throughout Jerusalem placed a flag and a potted plant outside the doors of survivors, and as the sirens blared, they stood with them, but at the required six-foot distance, so that they would not be alone. And on-duty police officers called to survivors to come to their porches during the siren, and saluted them.
Ira N. Forman, Moment Institute’s Senior Fellow and former U.S. State Department’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism and Nadine Epstein, Moment Editor-in-Chief, discuss the impact of the coronavirus and anti-Semitism being seen around the world.
Unlike the rest of the country, the residents of the hotel aren’t in lock-down. Or at least, not within the hotel. “We can do whatever we want. We’ve arranged schedules for ourselves. We play games, we listen to music, we dance, we do yoga, I do standup, we hang out, some people pray. We eat a lot. “
Ann Lewis, a former chair of the Moment Advisory Board and founding member of the National Women’s Political Caucus, discusses the critical role Jewish leaders played in the fight for the vote for women.
“Any sacrifice to save human life is, by definition, vital.”
Though the number of Jewish births in the UK has outpaced the number of deaths since 2006, the community continues to skew older. Those over 60 are at a far higher risk of becoming sick or dying from the coronavirus. In addition, the majority of British Jews live in and around London, where the outbreak in Britain has been most pronounced. The city remains weeks away, reports suggest, from the coronavirus’s peak.
The police are out in full force. They always are during these holidays to maintain order among the crowds of hundreds of thousands that come to pray. But this year, they are out to ensure that there are no crowds, as Jerusalem remains under virtual lockdown.
My sister was cooking up a batch of our late mother’s recipe for tzimmes Wednesday morning when the pot exploded.
Meetings and classrooms have been disrupted by blasts from pornographic films and, in one case, a shouter interrupted a Massachusetts school class meeting with profanities, and then disclosed the teacher’s home address.
