Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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HOUSTON (JTA)—Midway through the first quarter, Omri Casspi entered the preseason game between his Houston Rockets and the Dallas Mavericks. A minute later, the buzzer sounded summoning Mavs rookie guard Gal Mekel into the Oct. 21 contest. Casspi took his first shot, a three-pointer that missed. On the ensuing possession, Mekel scored on a driving layup. Order was following form: Four years ago, Casspi became the first Israeli to play in the National Basketball Association. And with the new season tipping off this week, Mekel will become the s...
(JTA)-When Craig Breslow entered the playoff game against the Detroit Tigers, FOX broadcaster Tim McCarver hailed the Boston Red Sox reliever-a Yale University graduate with a double major in molecular biophysics and biochemistry-as the smartest player in Major League Baseball. But with Breslow's stellar performance this postseason, Red Sox general manager Ben Cherington is looking like the genius for acquiring the lefty in a trade last year. In Boston's first two playoff series this season,...
(JTA)-You'd think Adam Grossman has a pretty easy job. After all, with the Boston Red Sox owning one of the most iconic brands in professional sports and gunning for their third World Series title in the past decade, how hard could it be to put fans in the seats at Fenway Park? But Grossman, the team's 33-year-old vice president for marketing and brand development, takes nothing for granted. While players and fans are fixated on the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals, he's already prep...
The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA)—The official Israeli identification card in Herve Cohen’s hand is about the only evidence he has of his father’s existence. Cohen, who lives near Paris in Issy les Moulineaux, decided a few years ago to try to find his father, Yehuda. At 33, Cohen is a little young to remember meeting him, since his parents were divorced in 1982 and his father’s trail disappeared by 1990. A few years ago, Cohen began...
The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA)—Teenagers Mark Matsuki and Leon Feldman came to study in the Boston area this summer as strangers and left as friends, unintentionally regrafting family-like branches of a tree that first took root four generations ago. In Leningrad in 1932, Dora Belinsky, Julia Kritchevski and Natasha Gershovich met as first-graders and established what would become lifelong bonds. The parents of the girls becam...
BALTIMORE (JTA)—Dean Meminger sat in owner Irv Bader’s office at Camp Seneca Lake and talked of his girlfriend, her battle with lupus and their plans to marry. Meminger, known as “The Dream” as a star guard at Marquette University and a key reserve for the New York Knicks’ 1973 championship team, had just finished a four-day stint at a basketball camp at the Pocono Mountains’ Jewish facility. He had taught the players with enthusiasm and his demeanor bespoke an apparent contentment with life. Be...
The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA)—The photograph shows a lighthearted moment at the end of a war that four decades later still prompts analysis and evokes somber reflections. Snapped just after Israel and Egypt had signed an agreement ending the Yom Kippur War in February 1974, the photo shows two Israeli soldiers swimming in the Suez Canal. It was among several war-era photos from the Israel Defense Forces’ archives published recently by Yedioth Ahronoth as the 40th anniver...
BALTIMORE (JTA) – Needing a gift for retiring New York Yankees reliever Mariano Rivera, the Baltimore Orioles pitched their idea for a sculpture to the Israel-born artist Omri Amrany. No surprise there, even though Amrany knows nothing about baseball. The 59-year-old Amrany, now living in the Chicago area, has become the go-to guy for sculptures of athletic giants. A week after the Orioles put in their request, they had their gift for Rivera, who retired Sunday after a record-breaking career w...
BALTIMORE (JTA)— Last September, first baseman Nate Freiman was doing his best to help Israel secure a spot in the World Baseball Classic. Despite some super hitting from the towering slugger, the team fell short. Fast forward a year. Freiman, 25, now finds himself in another playoff chase. Only this time it’s as a rookie in the big leagues, splitting time at first base for the Oakland Athletics. Playing for the A’s has been “an amazing experience,” Freiman said in a locker room interview...
BALTIMORE (JTA)— When Henry Leventon, his wife and three daughters attended their first Sabbath service at Temple Beth Israel of Highland Park and Eagle Rock in 1976, the gabbai at the Los Angeles synagogue immediately approached. “Just what we need: a young man and his family!” the sexton greeted them enthusiastically. Leventon, considering himself hardly youthful at age 49, saw the aging worshipers and understood the intent. The synagogue in northeast L.A. was fading. The migration from the s...
BALTIMORE (JTA)—As a girl in Seattle, Anne Bush evinced little interest in the Holocaust, even though her father, Harry, was a survivor whose mother, sister and brother-in-law had been murdered. But as a mother in Baltimore, by then known as Chana Staiman, she gradually was drawn to the period, spurred in part by her elder son, Ari, who as a boy read incessantly on the Holocaust—to the extent, Staiman said, that she considered “taking him to see someone” for counseling. By then, Harry Bush ha...
BALTIMORE (JTA)—For Howie Perlman, a kibbutznik in Israel, hearing about the New York reunion of his Yeshiva of Central Queens Class of 1973 spurred him to post a few period photographs on Facebook. Then he had an idea: Let’s hold a reunion in Israel of the 15 or so YCQ graduates living there. Perlman was looking for a way to honor his parents, Martin and Zelda, who had died one month apart last fall. What better way to remember them, he figured, than recalling his time at a school for whi...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—The two Israeli television cameramen awaiting the Canadian basketball team’s arrival at the opening ceremony of the Maccabiah Games didn’t hint at the chaos about to envelop Amar’e Stoudemire. The 6-foot-11 forward for the New York Knicks stepped from the chartered bus and the cameramen departed, duly satisfied they had captured their shots. But the party was just beginning. Seemingly every one of the 9,000 athletes waiting to parade through Teddy Stadium here for the opening cer...
NEVE ILAN, Israel (JTA)—Luke Rosener removed his orange T-shirt, changed into a white dress shirt and alighted from a chartered bus. The garb was a far cry from the uniform Rosener will wear while playing for the U.S. volleyball team at the Maccabiah Games, the 78-nation sports competition that began this week in Israel. The attire was more befitting a religious ceremony—in this case, his bar mitzvah. Rosener, 22, of Cupertino, Calif., had never had a bar mitzvah, owing to his family’s finan...
BALTIMORE (JTA)—In May, Tel Aviv resident Baruch Axelrod sent a letter to his first cousin, who lives in New Jersey. The letter returned unopened to Axelrod’s home because the cousin, Gary Hyman, had moved, his new address unknown. The branches of their families had not been in contact for more than 20 years, when Axelrod’s sister Chana Pavlowitz visited the United States. Axelrod had never even met Hyman, but he well remembered Hyman’s parents, Aaron and Bela. Aaron was the sister of Axelrod...
BALTIMORE (JTA)—The first arrows Roxana and Rafael Gonzalez launch at the upcoming 19th Maccabiah Games will take flight from their fingertips, but also from Jeffrey Sudikoff’s imagination. Roxana, 25, and Rafael, 24, are part of the first Cuban delegation to participate in the Maccabiah, a quadrennial sports competition that dates back to 1932. The siblings arrived July 3 in Israel from their native Cienfuegos to continue their archery training in advance of the games, which opened July 18....
JERUSALEM (JTA)—Of all the compelling stories of athletic achievement and challenges overcome that could be told by the 9,000 participants gathering in Israel for the 19th Maccabiah Games, it might be hard to find one to top Jacques Demers. He’s a coaching legend, having led the iconic Montreal Canadiens to the National Hockey League championship in 1993. He’s also a member of the Canadian Parliament. And until about a decade ago, he would have been unable to read the words in this artic...
BALTIMORE (JTA)—In their Tel Aviv boarding school a half-century ago, Moshe Zarchi and Zvi Halevy spent time together doing homework, playing hide-and-seek and enjoying Chamisha Avanim, a jacks-like game involving five gold cubes. Halevy, 62 and a resident of Netanya, Israel, fondly recalls their friendship. It may have meant even more to Zarchi, whose parents gave him up for adoption. Halevy learned only recently that Zarchi died in the United States more than 30 years ago—and perhaps was mur...
BALTIMORE (JTA)—Ora Bogomolny sounded subdued, as if the phone call to her Israel apartment had disturbed her sleep. Indeed, she had experienced a nightmare just hours before receiving the call from “Seeking Kin” on June 13. Bogomolny had learned that Avraham Siton suffered a fatal heart attack in a Manhattan hotel room mere hours before his scheduled flight for Israel to attend a reunion of their Tel Aviv elementary school class—an event spearheaded by Bogomolny. The previous night’s get-toget...
BALTIMORE (JTA)—Sabina Faynberg decided recently to visit the grave of her cousin Shalom Schwartzbard on a moshav near the Israeli city of Netanya. Going online to find directions, the Jerusalem woman stumbled upon a “Seeking Kin” column that discussed Schwartzbard, who had murdered Semyon Petliura on a Paris street in 1926. Many Jews of the time had held Petliura responsible for instigating pogroms in Ukraine that killed thousands of their relatives and thus believed the killing was justi...
BALTIMORE (JTA)—Four generations of Lieberman boys stare out from a collage that hangs from a corridor wall in Johannesburg, South Africa. Each boy is 7—a significant number in the life of the first boy, from whom the others descend photographically and genealogically. An ordeal that befell Israel Lieberman at that age would spur him to safeguard his sons against disaster, and they have done the same for their sons. The collage attests to Lieberman’s scars, but also to his mother’s unquenc...
BALTIMORE (JTA)—A “Seeking Kin” column in April 2012 excited Gal Adam Spinrad—and now the Cincinnati woman has cause to be happy anew. Adam Spinrad has long been fascinated by the legend of her relative, Jacques Faitlovitch, who more than a century ago left his native Lodz, Poland, bound for Ethiopia. He devoted much of his life to the Jews living there, becoming one of the first European Jews to vouch for them as co-religionists and bring them into the fold. As a UCLA student in 1992, Adam Sp...
BALTIMORE (JTA)—Josh Perelman is seeking kin—but not his own. Rather, Perelman is on a quest for families and individuals who will share memories, artifacts and pictures that help tell the story of the American Jewish relationship with baseball. As chief curator for the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, Perelman is mounting an exhibition that will open next March. Instead of focusing solely on American Jewish baseball icons such as Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax, the e...
BALTIMORE (JTA)—Visiting his late father’s ancestral village of Pavoloch in 2011 confirmed some of the images Lew Priven had long held of the place as a real-life Anatevka, the fictional shtetl of “Fiddler on the Roof,” such as the people he saw riding by on horse and wagon. Then he and his wife, Judy, learned of the horror: The 1,500-member Jewish community, massacred on Sept. 5, 1941, was buried in a mass grave. The suburban Washington couple were visiting the Ukraine village’s museum, housed...
The Seeking Kin column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA) – Some people search the world for those they knew before time and circumstance intruded. David Scherr was sitting at his desk at a Baltimore auto repair shop when the lost walked through the door. The amiable Scherr was working in the front office of K&S Associates when a tan Volvo station wagon was towed in this winter with electrical problems. Over the course of several days, Scherr regularly u...
