Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 51 - 75 of 104
The "Seeking Kin" column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA) - The regular phone calls stopped, the letters went unanswered. For Lily Kraut, living in Judea and Samaria, communication with her mother, Regina Ament, all but ceased in late 2008 after the latter suffered a stroke. Then last late November, Kraut heard the terrible news – her mother had died in Florida several months earlier. This week, she will observe the first yahrzeit, the Hebrew anniversary o...
BALTIMORE (JTA) – As director of professional scouting and baseball development for the Oakland Athletics, Dan Feinstein scouts amateur players, evaluates the organization's talent, is involved in contract negotiations and arbitration cases, ponders trades and analyzes potential free agent signees. His varied portfolio is news to at least one of the team's players. "I don't doubt that he does a lot, and has done a lot, for the organization, but I don't know to what extent," catcher Derek N...
(JTA) – When Argentina plays its opening-round matches in the World Cup, Mariano Schlez of Buenos Aires will be screaming his support from the stands. But taking in his home country's matches in Brazil isn't all that will be occupying Schlez for the first fortnight of the monthlong soccer spectacle. Also filling his calendar are 14 "Jewish" events that he and his wife have organized in seven of the host cities. They include Shabbat evening prayers, beach soccer games leading into Saturday n...
The "Seeking Kin" column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA) – Judith Mertz still recalls plenty of the Indian words she learned from her friend Miriam El-Chai when they were high school friends in Israel and embarking on teaching careers together. And when Mertz next makes one of her frequent trips to Israel, she expects to see El-Chai for the first time in a half-century. "I always tell my family about my Indian friend," she said. "I remember lots of words s...
BALTIMORE (JTA) – While visiting Israel in 2009 to watch his son Bruce coach the U.S. basketball team to the gold medal at the Maccabiah Games, Bernie Pearl perused local phone books. He spent an hour calling people with the last name Showstack but came up empty. Unable to locate his relative during his stay, he gave up. In March, Pearl mentioned the search to "Seeking Kin." A retiree living with his wife, Barbara, in Boynton Beach, Fla., Pearl, 80, still hoped to find his third cousin, Gerry S...
The "Seeking Kin" column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA)-On a recent visit to Manhattan, Michael Herman brought his wife and two daughters to a stone building at the corner of Canal and Orchard streets. A chiseled ribbon running across the 12-story structure's facade reads S. Jarmulowsky's Bank Est. 1873. Alexander "Sender" Jarmulowsky was Herman's great-great-grandfather and the bank's founder. The building the Hermans visited was constructed in 1912,...
WASHINGTON (JTA)-Most fans of the usually dismal Washington Wizards would be thrilled to be taking in the team's rare playoff run from a luxury suite. But Steve Buckhantz is used to watching the games courtside, with a microphone. Buckhantz, 58, a member of the local Jewish community center's Sports Hall of Fame, has served as the Wizards' television broadcaster for 17 years and endured plenty of putrid basketball. This year's squad, however, is making some noise, with the team reaching the...
The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA)—The contemporary multi-building complex that is the ALYN Woldenberg Family Hospital in Jerusalem’s Kiryat Hayovel neighborhood had its roots nearly a century ago with a modest goal: treating children with orthopedic problems. It was the brainchild of Dr. Henry Keller, an orthopedic surgeon from New York who visited prestate Israel in 1918 to learn of the country’s health care situation. A decade later he returned to conduct research on children...
The "Seeking Kin" column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA)-Nancy Glickman was a teenager when she heard the story about her father at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin: Marty Glickman and another Jewish sprinter, Sam Stoller, were replaced as members of the 400-meter relay team for the U.S. squad on the morning of the event. Asking her father about the slight one night, he pulled out his uniform from the bottom drawer of a large dresser to display it. Right...
BALTIMORE (JTA)-Maccabi Tel Aviv reportedly is heading back to the United States this fall for its first exhibition games against NBA teams in five years – but greater developments appear to be in the works for the iconic franchise and Israeli basketball. For one, how about NBA squads making the trans-Atlantic flight to play regular-season games in Israel, and an Israeli club flying the other way to play in North America? First, the exhibitions, which have yet to be confirmed: Tel Aviv will m...
BALTIMORE (JTA)-Sara Tivoli Cohen has thought occasionally over the years about the junior high and high school in Greece that she attended, not realizing she had yet to receive her diploma from the Umberto No. 1 Italian School in Salonika. Now the 84-year-old Toronto resident is checking the mail awaiting its arrival. Suri Greenberg, the daughter of the late Toronto couple who had adopted Cohen's orphaned sister Esther, found Sara Tivoli on a list of 157 Jewish students who had never been award...
BALTIMORE (JTA)-Shortly after assembling the players trying out for the American squad he'd be coaching at the 2009 Maccabiah Games, Bruce Pearl brought them to Sabbath evening services at the Heska Amuna Synagogue in Knoxville, Tenn. The passionate and gregarious Pearl, a veteran of reading the haftarah at Yom Kippur, led the services. Now he's bringing that spirit, enthusiasm and knack for leadership back into coaching. The plan is for Pearl to guide the Auburn University basketball team for...
The "Seeking Kin" column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA)-All Zipora Saar had were some letters, names and pictures of American relatives she never knew, people last heard from a half-century ago. Saar fancied turning up descendants of her mother's first cousin, Filippus Mosesco, and his second wife, Lillian, who sent the letters from their farm in Macungie, Pa. Filippus was known as Feivush before emigrating as a young boy in about 1902 from the extended...
PHILADELPHIA (JTA)-Celeste Morello isn't Jewish or a sports fan, and has never attended a professional basketball game. But a passion for history-particularly Philadelphia history-prompted her to seek recognition for the hoops pioneer Eddie Gottlieb. Morello succeeded last week when the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission approved her application for Gottlieb, a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, to be featured on an official state historical marker. The...
The "Seeking Kin" column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA)-The tattered book with the beige cover was just the sort of thing Tara Lotstein was looking to purchase when she found it online in late 2012. Its title was "A Jewish Woman's Cookbook" and after the book arrived by mail, it joined a special, short stack of Lotstein's acquisitions that includes a Siddur, a High Holy Days machzor and a Passover Haggadah. All four books are in Hungarian, a language...
The "Seeking Kin" column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA)-For Rich Lindemon III, the brunch for six that Benita Schwartzman hosted in her Baltimore townhouse was a reintroduction to long-lost family and a chance to fill in some gaps. Lindemon, a mechanical engineer from nearby York, Pa., had long known of the Schwartzmans and remembered them fondly. His late mother, Susan, was Benita's niece, but except for a brief period in 1981, the families had little...
BALTIMORE (JTA)-Even at 96, Frank Towers still recalls the stench of the prisoner train when its doors were opened nearly seven decades ago. "Not to be believed," he said. It was April 13, 1945, when the U.S. Army's 30th Infantry Division, to which Towers belonged, freed prisoners from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany who had been packed onto a train 40 to 50 cars long bound for Theresienstadt. They had been on the train for six days before it was stopped at a railway siding near...
BALTIMORE (JTA)-The rain dripping from his uniform provided an unceremonious end to London Fletcher's career as the Washington Redskins linebacker headed to the locker room following a recent road loss to the New York Giants. His team's last-place finish was hardly the idealized final walk off the gridiron for Fletcher as a professional player. But his 16-year National Football League career might never have launched were it not for Charlotte Kramer and Leonard Schwartz. The Cleveland...
BALTIMORE (JTA)-Scanning the list of students, Benny Natan wondered if he would recognize any names from his youth in Salonika, Greece. One of the 157 names jumped out: Nissim Tazartes. Natan, a space and aeronautics professor at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, beamed. Tazartes was his first cousin, someone he had heard much about growing up but never met. The list of children who attended the Umberto No. 1 Italian School in Salonika between the world wars was compiled by Antonio...
PHILADELPHIA (JTA)-Fittingly, Harvey Pollack was the one who scribbled the number 100 on the most famous photograph in basketball history: Wilt Chamberlain holding the piece of paper signifying his astounding point total in a 1962 game for the then Philadelphia Warriors. After all, Pollack is basketball's ultimate numbers and public relations man. But the scrawling is hardly Pollack's sole legacy in a nearly seven-decade career in basketball. He was the first to track a player's blocked shots,...
BALTIMORE (JTA)-Wearing a black jacket and hat with a white shirt buttoned up to the neck, the bearded man sings of poverty and hunger, homelessness and being alone, a family lost. Yet through the pain, the performer of the Yiddish tune "Papirosen" somehow projects contentment as he sits smiling a toothless smile on a bench facing a table of schnapps and snacks at the Belz shteibel in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, N.Y. His singing packs exponential poignancy given that the man in this...
CATSKILL, N.Y. (JTA) – The past escorts John Thorn home from the moment he greets a visitor at a 139-year-old railroad station, crosses the Rip Van Winkle Bridge and arrives at his residence, a county historical landmark. Clad in a facsimile jacket of the defunct Negro Leagues' Kansas City Monarchs, he enters the billiards room of his home in this Hudson River town 35 miles south of Albany, N.Y., its walls crammed with old framed prints and theater posters. The environment befits the official h...
BALTIMORE (JTA)-The basketball goal that Ellen Schneeweis bought for her four sons as a Chanukah present in 2008 drew Andrew, the second oldest, to practice shot after shot. Some attempts came from a pretty fair distance-like the sidewalk in front of his neighbors' house in Englewood, Colo., on the other side of East Berry Drive. His diligence paid off: On Aug. 24, Andrew Schneeweis, now 18, swished a half-court shot at Colorado State University's Moby Arena to earn a free year of tuition. The...
BALTIMORE (JTA)-Almost from the moment they met him, several officials and players with Israel's national baseball team said they saw manager Brad Ausmus headed for the major leagues. They cited his communication skills, command of the game and preparation-not to mention his 18-year playing career as a catcher that included winning three Gold Gloves and reaching the 2005 World Series with the Houston Astros. "We knew that even though he'd never had any managerial experience, he'd go and be a...
BALTIMORE (JTA)-For Carla Greenspan, the news was upsetting: A relative by marriage of the man who saved her mother's life during the Holocaust was spurning an award from Yad Vashem. "It's a sad legacy for him if this is truly how they feel," Greenspan said from her home on Manhattan's East Side. "Their great-uncle went out of his way and risked his life to save my mother." Mohamad Helmy, an Egypt native who worked as a physician in Berlin when World War II broke out, helped hide the family of...
