News

A Memorial Day Poem 

The wet, salty tear

Falls down from the dry, soft cheek

In a cavernous conference hall at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Downtown DC last week, over 18,000 delegates from across the US and Israel and around the world thundered with cheers over highly partisan addresses by an all-star roster of Trump administration-affiliated speakers, including Vice President Mike Pence, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. During their speeches and others, the crowd gave standing ovations for mentions of President Donald Trump, while references to leading Democrats like Senator and Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, Representative Ilhan Omar, and former President Barack Obama drew resounding boos.

Every year around this time, we all ask the same basic question: “What do I want to give for shalach manos this year?” But no one really asks, “What do the people around me want to get?”  Isn’t it about the receiver? 

A controversial October vote by the New York City Council to shutter the Rikers Island jail complex has stirred up serious concerns for residents of Kew Gardens Hills and the surrounding areas.

A few years ago, I shared with Queens Jewish Link readers the start of my genealogical journey [Treasures from the Attic, 2013], which recently reached an emotional highlight. To briefly recap, while sitting shiv’ah for my mother a”h in 2002, I was intrigued by the visits of cousins whom I had hardly known. That, coupled with the discovery of a suitcase filled with documents, from my grandfather (my mother’s father passed away in 1966), set me on a course where I have created a family tree with over 2,500 names.

On those occasions when I could break away from Pesach preparation over the last few hours, it seemed that all the news centered on the burning of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. It was amazing to me to see how many people were outraged or saddened or pained by the burning of this building. On my visit to Paris a few years ago, my tour bus passed the cathedral several times, and despite the many impressive buildings in Paris, it stood out. Hailed by some as the “most important building in Western Civilization, the iconic, massive, and grandiose structure, hundreds of years old, was certainly quite a sight, and perhaps that is why it has saddened so many. Perhaps it was because this has only been the most recent and famous of houses of worship being attacked in a spate of tragedies throughout France.