iel Avrech died of complications from severe pulmonary fibrosis on July 1. He was 22.\n\n\”He was incredibly learned,\” said Avrech\’s father, Emmy-winning screenwriter Robert Avrech (\”The Devil\’s Arithmetic\”). \”I always learned from him. Our roles were reversed. He was also very funny and had a very dry, ironic sense of humor.\”
>\”The secret of redemption is remembrance,\” as a sign announces in Israel\’s Yad Vashem, an institution dedicated to remembering the Holocaust.
Judaism\’s moral imagination describes that King Ahashuerus was not able to sleep because of all that was going on around him: Esther was involved with planning and preparing her next feast; Haman was busy building gallows; Mordecai was upset, praying and wearing sackcloth.
Here\’s the scenario: I travel for work almost 20 days a month. It\’s lonely out there on the road, one long Bob Seger song. Dating is almost impossible, but I\’ve met a guy who seems to fit the suit.
\”All Jewish stories have a deeper meaning,\” reflected Judy Aronson, a graduate of Brandeis University and Harvard Divinity School. \”It\’s the community that makes the latkes, the people that create the celebration. If nobody had contributed anything, all they\’d have was an iron nail. Because everybody cooperated, they not only had a feast, they had peace of mind forever more.\”
Responding to widespread debate over Poles\’ participation in a 1941 massacre of Jews, Poland\’s political and religious leaders are calling on Polish citizens to confront their past.
It is hard to write dispassionately about Ofra Haza, the Israeli pop icon who died last week at 41. She sang her fusion of Yemenite folk and \’80s beat with intense, unabashed emotion. And she generated emotion in others.
Los Angeles, as always, attracted a variety of interesting visitors in recent days. The Jewish Journal couldn\’t meet all of them, but we made contact with a group of German journalists and government officials, the former executive editor of The New York Times, and the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations.
Palestinians have an official term for whathappened to them when Israel gained its independence 50 years ago:\”Nakba,\” or, in English, \”Calamity.\” In the failed Arab attack on theJews in 1948, some 600,000 Arabs fled the land or, in tens ofthousands of cases, were expelled.
\nRose Freedman is 104 and, by any account, a remarkable woman.
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