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SPECIAL EVENTS | HAKOL LEHIGH VALLEY | JANUARY 2015 3

By Alice LevelSpecial to HAKOL

Do you remember the story I wrote several months ago for HAKOL about weddings in France? The wedding that inspired me at the time was that of my cousin Julien and his lovely bride Stephanie. Living here, in the United States, I hadn’t had the opportunity to get to know Stephanie very well. All I knew up until a few months before the wedding was that Julien had met Stephanie during dancing lessons … and that she was not Jewish. So imagine my surprise later when my aunt told me on the phone that they would get married in an Orthodox synagogue!

“How is that possible?” I asked. “You told me she is not Jewish.”

“Well,” my aunt replied, exul-tant, “it is a true miracle! It turns out that Stephanie is Jewish after all, although she didn’t know it when she met your cousin, and she was able to prove it with a ketub-bah!”

“What!!!” I said, “Now, you have to tell me the story …”

Stephanie’s great grandmother, Sybille Blum, was a young Jewish girl from Germany who moved to Paris with her mother in the 1890s. She found a job in a fur-rier shop, where she met Samuel Erber, a young Jewish worker from Krakovia (in Austria at the time). It was love at first sight; Samuel and Sybille got married in a synagogue in Paris two months later.

The couple had four children, Albert, Henry, Marthe and Yvonne, born in 1901. Unfortunately, Sam-uel got sick and died two months after the birth of Yvonne. Sybille also passed away, in January 1902, and the four children were sepa-rated. The two boys were adopted by Charles, Samuel’s brother, although he already had eight kids. The baby girl, Yvonne, found almost immediately a new home, and was never heard of again.

Marthe, though, who was six at the time, was taken to a Jew-ish orphanage, where she would be able to have an education and learn a trade. She became a nurse and, as soon as she turned 18, she married a gentile man and moved with him to Argentina. They had two daughters together, who were raised Catholics.

After 18 years, the husband left them and Marthe had no choice but to go back to France. It was the ‘50s

by then, and both girls grew up as “regular” French kids, completely unaware of their Jewish heritage.

In 1968, the oldest girl became a “flower girl” (a hippie) and had a baby with a young man. Although they never married, he always kept in touch with them. The baby, as you may have guessed, was Stephanie. She was raised Catholic, vaguely aware that her grand-mother was Jewish, but that was all. So when she and my cousin, Julien, got serious together, she became interested in her Jewish heritage and asked her family about it.

The family knew almost noth-ing, or was very reluctant to have Stephanie reconnect with this part of the family. Her own mother knew only her mother’s maiden name. Stephanie’s grandmother had passed away several years be-fore and her aunt abruptly refused to help Stephanie in her quest in any way. Stephanie was very inter-ested, though, and dug deeper.

With the name of her grand-mother, she was able to trace their wedding date, their death

certificates and the names of their kids. She called the French Jewish Consistory and found out that the consistory had just released a book with all the ketubbot they had from the late 1800s. She ordered the book, and found the ketubbah from her great-grandparents!

At this point, she had already decided to marry Julien and was in the long and difficult process of converting to Judaism. So when she saw her great grandparents’ ketub-bah, she called the rabbi and asked him if this meant she was already Jewish.

After thoroughly studying the ketubbah and Stephanie’s birth certificates, the rabbi agreed: The ketubbah was the proof that Steph-anie had been Jewish all along.

Julien and Stephanie – whose middle name is Sybille by the way – decided to get married in the same synagogue as Sybille and Samuel. As you can imagine, the ceremony was very moving.

As I asked her how she felt, Stephanie smiled and said: “I feel that my family is finally back where it belonged.”

SAVES THE DAY FOR FRENCH JEWISH WOMAN

The writer, right, with her new cousin, Stephanie, who discovered through a ketubbah that she is Jewish.

4 JANUARY 2015 | HAKOL LEHIGH VALLEY | SPECIAL EVENTS

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By Cantor Ellen SussmanSpecial to HAKOL

It is customary for the parents of the bride to purchase a tallit for the chatan, the groom-to-be. My parents were thrilled to buy their future son-in-law a tallit that he would wear for the first time at our wedding. It is a beautiful, traditional tallit made of wool, white with deep red accents. The tallit bag is made of silk and has a picture of Jerusalem, the view from Mt. Scopus to be exact. At our wedding, David encircled us together with the tallit. I felt wrapped in the love and commitment of my new husband, as well as being wrapped in our tradition. That tallit represented centuries of our families living a Jewish life, as well as our future, creating a Jewish home together.

The next High Holy Days I wore that very tallit to the second day of Rosh Hashanah services at my parent’s synagogue, the very place we were married. I was already in cantorial school and was serving my own congregation in Queens, not too far from where I grew up in Roslyn, Long Island.

At my student pulpit, we celebrated one day of Rosh Hashanah, therefore I had the opportunity to spend the holidays with my family.

The synagogue where I grew up was a large Conservative shul. Walking into that sanctuary I knew so well, wearing a tallit, which I had never done before because women did not wear tallitot at that synagogue at the time, filled me with pride. I was now dedicating my

professional life to the Jewish people.

Wearing that tallit reminded me of my pledge to create a Jewish home as well as my pledge to serve the Jewish people. I look forward to using that very tallit as a chuppah for our children, continuing the chain of b’nai Yisrael.

Ellen Sussman is cantor and spiritual leader of Temple Shirat Shalom in Allentown.

TALLIS ENCIRCLES AT KEY MOMENTS

L’DOR VA’DORIn anticipation of his bar mitzvah, Daniel L. made and embroidered this green satin tallis bag using as a model his father’s, believed to have been made by Daniel’s great-grandmother.

MODERN ART, ANCIENT SYMBOLA hamsa created by Stacy Hortner, who first needle felted with wool on a felt background, then wet felted them with banana silk and lustrous bamboo roving.

SPECIAL EVENTS | HAKOL LEHIGH VALLEY | JANUARY 2015 5

By Sharon AlbertSpecial to HAKOL

When my son, Isaiah Albert-Stein, was about to become a bar mitzvah, his great-aunt, Deborah Avren, wanted to do something to make it more meaningful than her own had been. “When I got my first tallit at my bat mitzvah, it was just a piece of cloth, something that grownups wore. It had no connection to me. It didn’t mean anything,” Debroah said. So she decided to give Isaiah a custom-made tallit as a bar mitzvah gift.

Deborah lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where there are many great fabric artists, but after considerable searching in her area and online she found the perfect artist right here in the Lehigh Valley. Stacy Hortner transforms textiles into works of art, and her Judaica pieces are full of meaning and beauty. Tremendous thought and attention to detail go into all that she does, and she ensures that what she makes is true to its purpose.

Throughout the process of making Isaiah’s tallit, she asked questions and presented multiple possibilities to make sure that the tallit was as he wanted it to be and that it met all the ritual requirements for a tallit. She also ensured that it was a tallit that would be as appropriate for Isaiah in 10 or 20 years as it is for him now as a 13-year-old.

As a student of the Jewish Day School for eight years and an active member of Congregation Am Haskalah, Isaiah was aware of the practical importance of his bar mitzvah, but he also knows that symbols matter. Together with learning to chant Torah and Haftorah and studying to prepare his dvar Torah, thinking about what he wanted his tallit to look like helped Isaiah to distill ideas about who he was becoming, what this moment meant for him and what he hoped for his future.

Isaiah plays piano and trumpet and he knew immediately that he wanted the inscription on the atarah to be Psalms 150:6, “Kol haneshamah tehalel ya, Hallelyah,” – “Let every living thing sing God’s praises.” Musical notes fill the edges of the tallit. (It is a score that Isaiah chose very intentionally, and transcribed himself, but he prefers not to say what it is.)

Picking out colors was perhaps less ritually significant, but a lot of fun, and it helped that he and Stacy had similar color tastes. For Isaiah, though, it is the people who gave it to him that make his tallit most special.

“I am proud to wear my tallit,” he said. “Since I was part of designing it, it really feels like it is part of me. And it means so much that it was given to me with love by my aunt and also made with such care by Stacy.”

Isaiah saw the almost-complete tallit about a week before his bar mitzvah celebration. All it was missing were the tzitzit. When great-aunt Deborah arrived in Allentown a few days before the big morning, Stacy came over and helped Isaiah and Deborah together to tie the tzitzit on to the tallit. As they tied, they discussed the significance of the strings, the number of knots, the color of the thread.

Isaiah’s brother Elijah is 10 and, having watched what it means to his older brother, he’s ready for his turn. He has already decided what colors he wants, the details and even the inscription for his atarah. He’s got a few years to change his mind.

In the meantime, Isaiah wears his tallit with pride.

MAKING MEANING WHILE MAKING A TALLIS … TOGETHER

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6 JANUARY 2015 | HAKOL LEHIGH VALLEY | SPECIAL EVENTS

Jewish Telegraphic Agency

BBYO, the pluralistic interna-tional Jewish youth group, is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year.

Originally the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization, the group in 2001 spun off into an inde-pendent nonprofit, joining many other B’nai B’rith creations such as the Anti-Defamation League, Jewish Women International and Hillel.

From its early days in the 1920s and ’30s, when it was an all-boys entity called Aleph Za-dik Aleph, or AZA, to the 1940s, when B’nai B’rith Girls was added, and beyond, the youth movement has garnered fre-quent mention in JTA. It boasts more than 400,000 alumni.

In 1931, the group closed its convention in Milwaukee by “instituting a movement to strengthen the religious spirit of American Jewish youth. The program includes propaganda for Hebrew literature and culture departments in colleges and universities, the creation of

girls’ auxiliaries to the Order, libraries of Jewish literature, the extension of camps for scouts’ religious leaders, contact with Jewish leaders, expansion of forums and study groups, and the encouragement of synagogue attendance and membership.”

At the same convention, the group officially approved “the observance of Jewish dietary laws at all district and interna-tional Aleph Zadik Aleph con-ventions. Approval was reached after a heated debate over the expense of dietary observance as against the spiritual obligations involved.”

A survey taken at a 1955 B’nai B’rith Girls convention included findings that might surprise current female mem-bers: the girls rejected “by a 2 to 1 margin” the idea of women serving as ordained rabbis.

Three years later, at the height of the civil rights move-ment, BBYO leaders discussed “the desegregation issue in the South,” although the New Or-leans youth JTA quoted seemed at best tepid in his support for

desegregation, reporting that Southern white students are “more realistic” about desegre-gation than their elders:

“High school youngsters in the South prefer an integrated school to no school at all,” Mr. Katz said. He emphasized that white students “are not keen” about mixed classes, but “they are more concerned with education than desegregation.” Furthermore, he said, their an-tagonisms toward desegregation “are tempered strongly by their respectful attitude toward the orderly processes of law.”

At the same convention, BBYO released a survey of 1,100 members in 25 communities in-dicating that three out of four are “affirmative” in describing “the values of their Jewish education” and that “surprisingly” (accord-ing to the study’s author), “more girls than boys think highly of their Jewish training.”

Despite BBYO members’ fondness for their Jewish educa-tion, Ira Eisenstein — a Recon-structionist leader and speaker at BBYO’s 1959 leadership train-ing institute — told them that without better education, the Jewish community is in danger of spawning a generation of “beatniks,” saying:

“The age that produced beatniks should look well to the meaning of those confused and desperate characters. If we are not to have a crop of Jewish beat-niks, the Jewish community had better bestir itself and give an-swers that are straightforward, realistic and constructive. Youth is willing now to be educated, but will our adult leadership meet this challenge?”

In the years that followed, BBYO addressed “Negro anti-Semitism” and “concern over Vietnam”; drug abuse, immi-gration to Israel, and the effort to free Soviet Jewry, with one demonstrating teen even called “dirty Jew” by a Soviet Embassy employee.

In the late 1990s, budget cuts and problems at parent group B’nai B’rith challenged BBYO, until its independence set it on a new — and apparently success-ful — trajectory.

For a 90-year-old, the group still seems to have a lot of energy!

Top, Delegates of AZA, the boys’ arm of BBYO, at a convention in 1973.Bottom, B’nai B’rith Girls delegates at their national convention in 1953.

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SPECIAL EVENTS | HAKOL LEHIGH VALLEY | JANUARY 2015 7

By Ruth Ellen Gruber Jewish Telegraphic Agency

WROCLAW, Poland -- When Katka Reszke and Slawomir Grunberg tied the knot at the historic White Stork synagogue in this southwestern Polish city, they were determined that the occasion would be more than just a wedding.

They wanted it to be a symbol of how thousands of Polish Jews — like themselves — have found their way back to Judaism and Jewish identity.

The couple, who are based in New York but spend part of each year in their native Poland, also wanted the ceremony — the first religious Jewish wedding in Wroclaw in 14 years — to be a learning experience for both local Jews and non-Jews.

To this end, they opened their June 22, 2014, ceremony to everyone in the city and turned their nuptials into an hours-long, open-air public event with klezmer bands, kosher food, two officiating Orthodox rabbis and loudspeaker explanations of each step in the traditional wedding ritual.

“Jewish community members told us that they had never been to a Jewish wedding, so we made it into a sort of festival,” said Reszke, 35, an outgoing woman with spiky reddish hair who was born and grew up in Wroclaw. “By explaining the wedding to everyone, we’re trying to break down the mystery that separates people.”

The couple’s personal histo-ries drove their desire to make a statement and vividly reflect the complex dilemmas of post-Holo-caust and post-communist Jewish experience in Poland.

Reszke is a photographer, writer and Jewish studies scholar who in 2013 published “Return of the Jew,” a book about the country’s post-communist Jewish revival — a revival that shaped her own life.

Since she was a teenager, Reszke said, she had felt strongly connected to Judaism.

“I had a hunch I was Jewish,” she said — but no proof.

Reszke earned a diploma in Jewish studies from the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish studies, lived in Israel, obtained a doctorate in Jewish education from Hebrew University and underwent formal conversion.

But it wasn’t until last year that she learned that her mother’s family had actually been Jewish.

“My mom told me that her grandmother had confided on her deathbed that she was Jewish but made her swear not to say anything while my own grandmother was still alive,” Reszke said. “She finally told me a week before my book was launched.”

Grunberg, 63, is an award-winning documentary film-maker raised by a grandmoth-er who also rejected her Jewish identity.

“She used the term ‘Jew-ish’ as an epithet,” he said. “I learned that being a Jew was something bad, something scary — something not to be mentioned.”

After finding out that he was Jewish as a teenager in the 1960s, Grunberg said, “I did

everything to reject this. I didn’t want to be a Jew. To be different in Poland in those days was no good — to be Jewish was worse.”

It was only after immigrat-ing to the United States in 1981, Grunberg said, that he began learning about Jewish cul-ture, digging into his past and “becoming comfortable” about being Jewish. Many of his films over the past two decades have centered on Jewish or Holocaust themes.

Reszke noted the irony that growing up, Grunberg “was do-ing his best to hide his identity and roots, while at the same time I was doing my best to discover them. Today we are together and are celebrating.”

The two met more than seven years earlier, Reszke said, when she contacted Grunberg after seeing a post on a Polish Jewish Internet site that he was making a documentary on Polish Jewish identity.

“For me it was love at first sight,” she said. “Now we are working on a film together called ‘I am a Jew.’”

At the wedding, hundreds gathered in the spacious court-yard outside the White Stork synagogue.

Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, and Wroclaw’s Rabbi Tyson Herberger officiated under a tent-like chuppah held aloft by friends of the couple on a raised platform set up in front of the elegant facade of the syna-gogue, which was rededi-cated in 2010 after a full-scale restoration.

An announcer using a loudspeaker system de-scribed the details, from the ketubbah to the seven bless-ings to Grunberg’s breaking of the glass.

Before and after the cer-emony, klezmer, Yiddish and folk bands from Poland, the United States, Italy and Cy-prus performed on a second stage. Vodka flowed freely and cooks in the Jewish com-munity kitchen kept replen-ishing a long buffet table of salads, herring and challah.

Before World War II, Wroclaw was the German city of Breslau, with its Jew-ish population of more than 23,000 making it the third-largest Jewish community in Germany. Breslau was a center of the Reform move-ment, and the renowned Breslau Jewish Theological Seminary was located across the street from the White Stork Synagogue.

The synagogue, completed in 1829, was not destroyed on Kristallnacht in 1938 because of its proximity to other build-ings. But it was desecrated and used by the Nazis as an auto repair shop and storage place for stolen Jewish property. The Nazis herded Wroclaw Jews into the synagogue courtyard before deporting them to concentration camps.

Wroclaw became part of Poland after World War II, and today, with some 350 registered members, the organized Jewish community is the second largest in Poland after Warsaw, offering a range of religious, educational and cultural programs.

The synagogue restoration was spearheaded by a founda-tion established by the Wroclaw-based Norwegian Jewish singer

Bente Kahan. The building now anchors an educational and cultural center that also includes a smaller prayer room where regular services are held.

Herberger, Wroclaw’s rabbi, said he was sorry that Grunberg and Reszke would not be living permanently in Wroclaw.

Still, Herberger said, he viewed their public wedding as “a sign of hope and life.”

Friends, family, the public and media crowd in in front of the chuppah at the wedding in Wroclaw, Poland, of Katka Reszke and Slawomir Grunberg outside the city’s White Stork synagogue, June 22, 2014.

IN POLISH CITY, A WEDDING CELEBRATES

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