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.
“Even after all these years, I find it soul wrenching that so many people, with names known and unknown, perished in the great withering of humanity known as the Shoah.”
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.
In January, the American Jewish Committee (AJC), in partnership with the Muslim World League (MWL), brought 62 Muslims and 20 Jews from 28 countries together for a two-day interfaith mission in Poland.
What does Dr Ruth, a 91-year-old sex therapist who seems to have done it all have to say to a 22-year-old who grew up with little to no sexual taboos?
So just to sum up the state of the Democratic race in the first week of primaries: Jewish donors are attacking a Jewish candidate for being too old to run, and a Jewish candidate is calling out Jewish donors for being part of a “big money” billionaire class. It can only go downhill from her.
Documentary filmmaker Roberta Grossman is obsessed with the Holocaust, always has been. Its ever-present evil—the ultimate “rift in humanity,” she says—just won’t let go. “It’s not that I can’t pull away from it, but rather why others can.” So she asserts on the phone from her home in Los Angeles. Producer Nancy Spielberg (yes, Steven’s sister), with whom Grossman collaborated on the Holocaust documentary Who Will Write Our History, is participating in the conversation from her New York home. Their film, which has already been screened at various festivals worldwide, will make its television debut on the Discovery Channel on January 26 at 3 p.m. The telecast is part of Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations. It’s also the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
A new exhibition marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the former death camp examines how faith helped sustain people during the Holocaust.
