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Picture of Naomi Pfefferman

Naomi Pfefferman

Searching for Hannah

Among the Southland\’s some 1,500 Yemenite Jews, \”a conservative estimate is that every third or fourth family has a connection,\” says Eli Attar, 46, the president of Solomon\’s Children, a Yemenite activist group.

Honor Thy Parents

Blythe Danner, David Lascher and Kevin Zegers star in \”A Call to Remember.\”In \”A Call to Remember,\” which airs on Aug. 30 on STARZ! and Aug. 31 on the encore cable channel, we meet David and Paula Tobias (Joe Mantegna and Blythe Danner), survivors who lost their first spouses and children in the Holocaust. They are, nevertheless, attempting the semblance of a normal life in suburbia, raising two boys who want only to assimilate, to become Americans. The younger ditches bar mitzvah practice for Little League; the older brother yearns to move out of his parents\’ home and partake of the 1960s counterculture. Then comes the telephone call that will change their lives forever. Paula learns that one of her lost sons is, in fact, alive and living in Poland. The aftermath nearly tears the family apart.\n

Caught in the Interim

\nIn Rabbi Michael Katz\’s office at Cal State Northridge Hillel hanga \”Star Trek\” poster and a picture of Binyamin Netanyahu. There\’salso a futon — not your basic college-issue office furniture.

Beyond

She has never been the gray-haired bubbe who stays at home and cooks all day. In fact, her hair is red and — surprise — she doesn\’t like to cook.\n\nRoseann Cronrod grew up in the tenements of New York, the child of recent Polish immigrants to the United States. She went on to become a working single mother and an entrepreneur, and, in retirement, has never depended on children or grandchildren to fill her days.

Touch and Go

TV writer and CBS executive Eugene Stein exposes a darkerside in his latest book of fiction

Cops and Chassids

Rachmiel Steinberg is a \”Bostoner\” Chassid, but, he quips, he is also the Los Angeles Police Department\’s \”show-and-tell rabbi.\” That\’s because the Yavneh Hebrew Academy teacher has taken on some unusual students lately: officers of the LAPD\’s Wilshire Division.

Coping

En route home were Alice and Leo Howard and their 14-year-old grandsons, Yoni Howard and Adam Blitz, all of whom had survived the July 30 suicide bombings in Jerusalem\’s crowded Mahane Yehuda.\n\nAfter the El Al jet landed, the relatives greeted each other with hugs and tears and counted themselves lucky. The bombs that killed 13 bystanders (as well as the two Hamas terrorists) and wounded nearly 170 people, had left the Howards relatively unscathed. Leo incurred whiplash, Yoni had glass shards embedded in one leg, and most had painful ringing in their ears. But the close family friends who had been with them at Mahane Yehuda were seriously injured and remained hospitalized.\n

‘A Lot of Life Left’

At first glance, Temple Beth Zion, on a busy stretch of Olympic Boulevard in the mid-city, looks stark and abandoned.\n\nThe front door is locked, the religious school has been closed for almost four decades, and the daily minyan and Friday-night serviceare gone (many of the some 135 members, most of whom are aged 75 to80, can no longer drive at night).\n

Celebrating Sephardim

The Sephardic Arts Festival will take place this Sunday at the Skirball Cultural Center, and it\’s a welcome sign for Los Angeles\’ some 100,000 Sephardic Jews.\n

Her Life as a Montage

Hannah Hoch\’s first major U.S. retrospective has arrived at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; it\’s been a long time coming.\n

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