Beshert | My Great-Aunt and I

I’m named after my great-aunt Lillian, my maternal grandmother’s older sister. She was born in Paris, France, in 1938 and moved to Brooklyn, New York with her parents in 1939. From the pictures I’ve seen and stories I’ve heard, Aunt Lillian was a gem—intelligent, vivacious, and stubbornly determined. When she succumbed to breast cancer in 1979, her death left a void in the lives of her family and loved ones. My grandmother idealizes her; my mother mainly has childhood memories of her, a woman unreachable, frozen in time. And though I never met her, my mother and grandmother often point out our similarities. My grandmother mentions it, often with tears welling up in her eyes, at every graduation and brings it up each time we discuss my writing. “You know, you’re smart just like Lillian. She...

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What’s In a Name?

By Gabriel Weinstein For hundreds of years, Ethiopian Jews dreamed of strolling through Jerusalem’s supposed golden streets and celebrating the Sigd festival in its hills. By the late 1970’s, Ethiopians decided that dreaming of Israel no longer sufficed, and embarked on foot to the Promised Land. Scores of Ethiopian Jews fulfilled their dream of reaching Israel through Operation Moses in 1984 after trekking through deserts, skirting Ethiopian border authorities and toiling in unsanitary Sudanese refugee camps. But Ethiopians never dreamed that in Israel, their utopia, they would abandon their Amharic names. Journalist Ruth Mason explores how Ethiopian immigrants traded their Amharic names, and ultimately a sense of identity, for new Israeli-sounding Hebrew names in her documentary These Are My Names.  The film, which premiered last week at the Jewish Eye World Film Festival in Ashkelon, Israel, expresses...

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