When Titanic departed on its first and last voyage from Southampton, England on Wednesday, April 10, 1912, 18-year-old Jewish immigrant Leah Aks and her 10-month-old son, Philip were on board.
There are a number of topics society has told us we aren’t supposed to discuss in mixed company. Religion, for example, has long been a forbidden subject between people of different faiths. Politics is mostly swept under the rug among people of different parties. Money, something that we all have feelings about, has never been a polite conversation piece.
On my wedding day last fall, I was very nervous. My husband and I planned our celebration, to be held in Chicago, entirely on our own and all the way from Boston. We were also combining a Russian-Jewish family with a Sabra-Israeli family, and members of each took long flights to the U.S. for the wedding.
One of the best anti-aging activities you can do for your body is exercise. For years, it has been widely accepted that we start getting slower, weaker and more fragile with age. But more recently, this has been proven otherwise by studies on the cellular process of aging and the impressive performances of older athletes.
In the pounding rain, lined up five abreast, Greti Herman — then Margit Berger — and her parents were marched from Hungary’s Csillaghegy Ghetto to the nearby train station. As they walked, her mother motioned for her and her father to remove five of the six threads that attached the yellow stars to their canvas raincoats. They arrived early evening, into “a big chaos,” according to Greti, as the Hungarian gendarmes — the police force — shoved people into the waiting cattle cars, tossing their belongings in after them.
On a recent Friday morning, about an hour and a half into his regular weekly shift as the Friday manager of the North Hollywood Interfaith Food Pantry (NHIFP), Jerry Rabinowitz, 86, broke into a smile.
Many people avert their eyes when they walk by the homeless. Hanne Mintz opens her hand, her heart and her home.
Several days before Mollie Pier’s son, Nathaniel, died of complications from AIDS, she joined together with his doctors, Nathaniel and his longtime partner, Michael, as the couple exchanged rings and vows in his hospital room.
There was a moment while preparing for her bat mitzvah when Rebecca Hutman feared the occasion would not live up to its importance. She wasn’t settled at a shul, and the experience was feeling kind of rote.
Suddenly, midday on Sept. 1, 1939, Donna Tuna — then Golda Tajchman — spotted planes flying low over her small town of Ryki, Poland, machine-gunning the inhabitants, who were running, panicked, in all directions. Donna, along with her mother, sister Regina, and younger twin siblings, Feige and Avrum, raced to the riverbank.
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