Tamir Appel scampers to his room to pull out a photo album of his latest trip to visit family in Israel. He sets it on the dining room table, where some of his housemates are gathered to talk about their daily life at the Ryzman Family Group Home for Men in Valley Village, one of three run by the Etta Israel Center, the only Jewish group homes on the West Coast.
A little while ago, Hendel Schwartz got a call from a city bus driver. “Your son walks with God,” the driver told her.
Lauren Levine is settling in with a group of friends apartment to watch “American Idol,” when a look of panic comes over her face. She rummages around, finds her keys and darts out.“I left the hair thing on,” she says when she returns, breathless, from her own apartment downstairs. “I was straightening Jasmine’s hair before we came up here, and I forgot to turn it off. Wow. That was close.” Levine has wide blue eyes accentuated with sparkly eye shadow, and her voice is spiced with a sense of interested wonder.
My grandparents really knew how to cook. It seems to me that everyone born in the \”old country\” — in this case Transylvania — was born with built-in cooking intuition. Somehow they could create the most scrumptious meals using no fancy equipment, or even measuring spoons.
Someday, maybe every gay Jewish youth will have as easy a time coming out as Elias Rubin did.
When Myra Clark-Siegel, wife of Israeli Consulate General David Siegel, packed their things for their Los Angeles mission, she sacrificed a few items. But she couldn’t leave behind her children’s favorite books, no matter that they weighed down the suitcases.
The Jewish dating Web site JDate recently announced results from a study that claims the site is responsible for facilitating more Jewish marriages than all other dating Web sites combined. The study, commissioned in-house by JDate’s parent company, Spark Networks, and conducted by the research company ResearchNow, reportedly was based on a survey of 948 Jewish Internet users who have married since 2003. Of those surveyed, 52 percent said they met their match on JDate, compared with Match.com, which facilitated 17 percent, and eHarmony, which can claim 10 percent.
He sleeps while I sit by his side. Every so often, Dad wakes up, and looks with some confusion around his small room, at the hospital bed, the TV and the whiteboard where someone has printed in large letters: “Today is WEDNESDAY, Aug. 3, 2011. Your daughter Ellie is coming this morning.”
Grieving is so smothering an experience that it’s almost impossible to conjure up from a distance. And yet so few people have the inclination or the presence of mind to document its intensity in real time. It’s no wonder that the best contemporary writing about grief — Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” and Meghan O’Rourke’s “The Long Goodbye” come to mind — were begun before scar tissue had time to form.
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