The Hebrew School Dropouts Want Back In

 By Allison Andrews for Kveller

Last month, at the very last minute, I finally sent off my children’s application to our synagogue’s Hebrew school. For the second time.

Three years ago when it was time to sign up our oldest daughter for Hebrew school, I eagerly filled out the paperwork. My husband and I love our funky, spirited, and opinionated Reconstructionist synagogue, and I thought I found a community that would provide a Jewish connection and community for the entire family. Let the Jewish learning begin! They were starting a new family-

based, Shabbat-based Hebrew school program. We would be in on the ground floor, as they say, and start my daughter off on an amazing journey of Jewish learning.

But it did not quite work out that way.

My daughter is super bright and creative but she is also severely dyslexic and struggles with a complicated set of learning, social, and sensory issues.

It turns out the community building family time at that start of the Hebrew school Shabbat learning program overwhelmed my daughter.

It turns out that it was too loud and there were too many activities going on at once. There were too many transitions and there was too much noise.

It turns out that what works for most kids doesn’t work for my daughter.

By first grade she dreaded going to synagogue. She was begging us not to take her to class on Saturdays. She was struggling at regular school and we were working hard to sort out all of her learning issues.

Continue reading.


 

Tkhines--Little Known Jewish Prayers, Written By and For Women

By Renee Septimus for Kveller

Giving birth was the most spiritual experience I ever had.

It was as if my body, mind and soul–my very being–was on high alert. I felt a new closeness to the man with whom I had fallen in love years before and who was now the father of my child. I felt an intense identification with the Creator God, to whom I prayed each day, and who was our partner in the creation of the new life I had just pushed from my body.

But as a religious Jewish woman, I was disappointed that my tradition provided no special prayer or ritual to mark my rite of passage from “woman” to “mother,” even as I softly said the generic Shehechiyanu blessing (“…who has kept us alive, sustained us and brought us to this time.”)

There were many times that I felt shortchanged as a woman marking life cycle events or more mundane experiences that I felt were, in some way, sacred. There was no way to connect them Jewishly to the God I felt beside me as I lived my life.
Some years after my youngest child was born, I found a newly published book which introduced me to tkhines, prayers written by and for women, dating to the 16th century and originally written in Yiddish, the vernacular of the shtetls of Ashkenazic Jews. Although the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community had never “lost” them, tkhines were rediscovered by the larger Jewish community as a result of feminist Jewish scholarship which began to take off in the 1970s. Since my serendipitous discovery 20 years ago, I have taken a spiritual journey reading, collecting, writing, and teaching about these beautiful prayers which resonate so strongly with me, and with every woman I know who reads them.

Tkhines mark the important events in a woman’s life with prayer, connecting the experience to an immediate God, an approachable God, a God to whom one can pray in gratitude, hope or despair. They consecrate a moment, elevate the “mundane” to the holy.

 Continue reading.

What will you do differently this year?

Kveller asked its readers this very question.  Here's what they had to say.  What about you?

I’ve been thinking about this for weeks. I almost decided I couldn’t write a resolution for this Rosh Hashanah because there are too many things I want to do differently, too much I want to change. I wasn’t sure how to write something short and sweet and meaningful when what I need is a gansa megillah to explain all the ways in which I hope 5774 is so, so different from my 5773.

Then this picture was taken on a family vacation last week, and I decided to let it dictate my resolution and remind me of what matters: more laughing, more love, more wine.


I’ve got big plans for 5774: read a book, go to yoga, see a movie with my husband, give more money to tzedakah, and WEAN my little girl. Also, maybe get pregnant.




This year I’ve decided to like myself. I just turned 33 and it occurred to me that I have spent most of those 33 years trying to become something, change something, aspire to something, and it has left me with a constant feeling of never being happy with who I am. So this year I’ve decided to find the things I *do* like about myself and to honor them. To find a way to be in the moment with myself.

Read more from Kveller

Three Years of Trying & Still No Baby

By Sharon McKellar for Raising Kvell

That I will be a mom someday has always been a given, and like all other things in my life, I have always known that if I plan and try, I will achieve my goals. This is what my own mom taught me. She is the quintessential mother, who gave up a career to raise us not because she was supposed to, but because it was what made her the happiest.

When my husband and I first talked about building a life together, we decided on an order for things. First, we would travel. Then, we would have babies. At 32 we were married, at 33 we traveled the world for a year, and at 34 we returned to have babies. As a librarian, I am an information seeker, so we did it correctly, right from the start. With the fanciest ovulation monitor, and the will of two people who are used to getting their way, we wasted no time. At the six-month no-success meeting with my doctor she told us that this is the meeting where she just makes sure people are doing it right. You two, she told us, are doing it right.

Well, here we are, three years later, and a year into assisted reproductive technology (IUI and IVF) still doing it right, and still child-free. We have watched friends and family get pregnant, have children, have first birthday parties and have second children, while still we wait, feeling like our life is passing us by.

The word “infertility” has a lot of baggage. Getting pregnant and having a child is meant to be a joyful and uncomplicated part of life. I remember in Torah School learning about the life cycle, and while I can now see a multitude of issues that might come with teaching life in such a simplified way, the one I fixate on is this one: starting a family. Starting a family. When it goes wrong, it can feel like you have failed at being a woman, a wife, a daughter, a sister.

Continue reading.

Rosh Hashanah Resolutions: My Cancer New Year

By Kveller

 When we asked our readers to send in their Rosh Hashanah Resolutions, we certainly weren’t expecting anything like the following, sent to us from Rebecca Faulkner Branum of Edmond, Oklahoma.

A New Year sometimes sneaks into a life, changing a family’s calendar forever. Five years ago I was unable to eat apples or honey because I was neutropenic from cancer chemotherapy. The bacteria from uncooked food could have sickened or even killed me, so the Rosh Hashanah that snuck into my life that fall might have been hard to recognize, but it was there all the same.

Cancer appeared as a terrible phone call in September, one week after my only child’s 1st birthday, a day that became Day #1 of a new life. The year that followed was one of loss. Of course the usual cancer losses–my breasts, my hair, and a lot of lost lunches–but I also lost my job as a health care provider (because I couldn’t work with ill patients). Then I lost my savings, my car, my house, and finally my husband, who walked away from the stress.
Continue reading.

Friday Night: A Love Letter to My Old Friends

By Adina Kay-Gross for Kveller.com

When you become a new mother, you spend a lot of time talking about making mom friends. I’ve written about it, as have countless others. We’ve thought it about it honestly, earnestly, and some times desperately. It’s as awkward as dating, it’s a necessary evil, and sometimes, in lucky circumstances, lifelong relationships are formed, relationships that can save us.

But when we become new mothers, we don’t often talk about old friends.

These are the friends who are very well having children in step with you, friends who remember when you, yourself, were a child. Friends who know your parents and know your siblings and slept on the floor in your childhood bedroom and slept on the floor in your college dorm room and saw you with the hair-sprayed bangs and the bad skin and the skinned knees and the broken heart.

Yet, these friends now live in San Francisco and London and Chicago and New Jersey and Texas and Philadelphia and Colorado and Detroit. You are in New York and you are so overwhelmed you can’t pick up the phone to tell them that you’re overwhelmed but you love them. These friends have lives that in some ways resemble yours, but in many ways, don’t. Maybe these friends read different books or blogs. Maybe these friends aren’t readers at all. Maybe these friends don’t think about organic mosquito repellent. Maybe they do. Maybe these friends have spouses who aren’t Jewish. Maybe these friends have spouses who are way more Jewish. Maybe these friends have divorced. Maybe these friends don’t work, or maybe they do work, but you aren’t interested in their work, nor are they in yours. Maybe these friends let their kids watch TV. If you actually get to talking you’ll reveal that you sometimes do, too.

 Continue reading.

An Unexpected Family Reunion, Seven Decades After the Holocaust

My husband’s grandmother’s family was decimated by the Nazis. But at 95, she discovered relatives she never knew.

By Jennifer Mendelsohn for Tablet Magazine

I hardly thought it was a life-changing question.

We were driving home from a family gathering one evening this past May with my husband’s 95-year-old grandmother, Frieda, a Holocaust survivor from a small town outside Warsaw. I told her I’d been spending a lot of time on genealogy websites, immersed in tracing the trajectories of my immigrant relatives, most of whom—lured by the promise of America—had left Eastern Europe long before World War II. I had always thought Frieda’s family’s story was not as flush with immigrant tales; most of her relatives had stayed in Poland, which is precisely why Frieda had so few relatives. She and her late husband Chaim had survived the war by fleeing to Russia in November of 1939. They spent the next six years doing forced labor under increasingly dismal and treacherous conditions. They were the only members of their immediate families to have lived.

And so I asked Frieda what she had heard about America as a child. Did people talk about wanting to go there?

“I didn’t know very much. We didn’t talk about it,” she said. She shrugged dismissively.

And then, almost as an afterthought, she added: “My mother’s two older sisters went there. She was supposed to go, too, but the First World War broke out.”

My pulse quickened. In the 14 years I had known her, I had heard numerous stories about Frieda’s past recounted in vivid detail. But I couldn’t recall her ever once mentioning two aunts in America. And Frieda wasn’t someone who could afford to have two aunts unaccounted for.

“Mumma!” I said excitedly. “They must have had children and grandchildren here. We can find them! We have to!”

Frieda seemed skeptical. Her mother, Chaya Rojza, had somehow lost touch with her sisters before Frieda was even born; Frieda remembers her crying over the one photograph they’d sent back from America, a formal studio shot in which they wore long black skirts. Find them? It seemed preposterous. She didn’t even know their last names. All Frieda knew was that her aunts once lived in Chicago and that one had a husband named Avram. One aunt, she said, had died of cholera. When Frieda arrived in Baltimore in 1958, she’d tried to track them down using the meager methods at her disposal, to no avail.

 Continue reading.