Volume XXI, Issue III | www.thejewishvoice.org Serving Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts
10 Shevat 5775 | January 30, 2015
Finance & Philanthropy
WHEN ONE FAMILY GAINS THE EDGE A ‘Living on the Edge’ update BY KARA MARZIALI kmarziali@jewishallianceri.org Editor’s note: Some names have been changed for confidentiality. Miriam, a 45-year-old woman from Warwick with a preteen son was suddenly widowed and lost her sole source of income. When her neighbor Shirley came to pay a Shiva call, she could see that Miriam needed more than her sympathies and a homemade kugel. Shirley EDGE | 16
PHOTO| FRAN OSTENDORF
Seniors at the Kosher Café enjoyed a festive meal and Hanukkah celebration in December. Jboost.org is currently raising funds to offer meal vouchers to seniors.
A pilgrimage of modest dimensions Editor’s note: As we go to press, we are deeply saddened to learn of the death of our distinguished columnist, teacher and friend. His final column appears here. May his memory be a blessing. BY STANLEY ARONSON M.D.
In the fi nal days of 2014, I had sent a brief letter to Fran Ostendorf, editor of The Jewish Voice, telling her of my intent to cease submitting columns to the paper for reasons of personal health. In return, I received a gracious letter of thanks with a suggestion that I may wish to offer, for some future issue, a brief closing commentary.
A closing commentary, I suppose, would require that I comment on something, perhaps what the world appeared to be doing – or avoiding – at the time of my fi rst column in The Jewish Voice, some 18 years ago. It might consider what subjects these columns shared with the readership. And fi nally, what was Providence, and the surrounding world, oriented to in November of 1997, the month when this inauspicious column appeared? The inaugural column explored what factors made a recurring disease to be categorized as “Jewish.” Certainly there were
Survivors return to Auschwitz determined to share their stories BY TOBY AXELROD
Stanley Aronson M.D. hereditary disorders that are customarily said to be Jewish and are transmitted from one PILGRIMAGE | 24
KRAKOW, Poland (JTA) – What kept you alive? Did your non-Jewish friends reject you? Could you ever forgive? Those were some of the questions posed by Jewish young adults to Holocaust survivor Marcel Tuchman on Jan. 26 at the Galicia Jewish Museum here. “What kept me alive was having my father with me,” said Tuchman, 93, a physician from New York who was born in Poland and survived several concentration camps, includ-
ing Auschwitz. “And another thing was the hope I had that one day I will be able to tell the story to the likes of you, so you can tell it to the next generation.” His meeting with young Jews was one of many such encounters taking place in and around Krakow on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Soviet army’s liberation of Auschwitz, where an estimated 1.1 million people were murdered – many of them gassed. On Jan. 27, in a tent set up around the gaping entrance to AUSCHWITZ | 27