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Yom HaShoah

Remembering the Holocaust

 — As we again said “Never Again, Never Again,” our community memorialized “those who lost their lives so tragically” in the Holocaust on May 5 at the White Theatre, while at the same time noting the 76th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the 56th anniversary of the dedication of the Memorial to the Six Million. Diane Azorsky, who chaired the program, passionately spoke about her father Ernest D. Mayer, whose parents sent him here from Germany as a teenager, where he had family, to escape the Holocaust. He never saw his parents or most of his extended family again. The exception was his sister, because their parents had the foresight to send her away as well. With her brother’s help, she eventually came to the United States. A successful businessman, Mayer opened his own accounting firm here in 1954, which eventually became Mayer Hoffman McCann, and is now well-known throughout the country.

Among other speakers Jean Zeldin, executive director of the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education, described how the agency has changed since its inception 25 years ago and how it continues to help prevent a future defined by racism and bigotry. Before ending with Kaddish, Rabbi Rockoff concluding comments included, “We’ve seen the dark times, we’ve seen the good times and we pray from here on in we rise from the ashes for only good times.”

Several other events took place across the city, region and country last week. Survivor Gitla Doppelt was the featured speaker at the State of Kansas Holocaust Commemorative Service in Topeka. Sam Devinki, who is now serving a second term of the board of directors for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., traveled to the nation’s capital to attend the USHMM’s annual Days of Remembrance Ceremony. 

The news of the tragic shooting at Chabad of Poway on April 27 was “a real shock” for Torah Learning Center’s (TLC) Rabbi Levi Perl. Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, the rabbi who has been characterized as special and brave, is Rabbi Perl’s uncle, his mother’s brother. Rabbi Perl said some of his fondest memories involve traveling south from his home in Los Angeles to Poway, a suburb of San Diego, to spend Shabbat with the Goldsteins.

“On Shabbat it was time to walk the brisk night air to one of the most inviting synagogues I’ve been to,” Rabbi Perl recalled. 

After services the family, and many others, walked to the Goldsteins’ home for Shabbat dinner.

“I am inspired by the beauty of the scene. The entire Shabbat, my aunt and uncle are inspiring, helping and being friends to everyone they encounter. I see true devotion to the Jewish people,” said the young rabbi, who is married to Brachie Friedman and serves as TLC’s director of development. 

Rabbi Perl said he was shaken by last weekend’s event, and knows the family of Lori Gilbert-Kaye, who was murdered that day.

Rabbi Doug Alpert of Congregation Kol Ami in Kansas City joined more than 20 rabbis, cantors and activists from across the country on a human rights delegation at the U.S.–Mexico border in late March, where they met with asylum seekers, immigration attorneys and advocates directly impacted by the Trump administration’s immigration policies. The delegation, led by HIAS, the global Jewish nonprofit that protects refugees, and T’ruah, the rabbinic human rights organization, spent three days in El Paso, Texas, Ciudad Juárez and neighboring communities.

REMEMBERING MORTON SOSLAND — For the second time in less than a week, the Kansas City Jewish community prepared to say goodbye to a generous supporter of the Jewish and general communities.

A past president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Kansas City (1970-1973), Morton Sosland is characterized in Sol Koenigsberg’s book “Challenges & Growth: The Jewish Federation of Greater Kansas City, 1968-1989” as being greatly sought after to serve in a variety of nonprofit leadership roles throughout his life. The book describes Sosland as conscientious, responsible and took his commitments to the Jewish and general communities seriously.

Sosland was profiled in The Chronicle in 2011, prior to receiving the Jewish Community Relations Bureau’s Henry W. Bloch Human Relations Award for his commitment to justice, his selfless service to the community, his civil leadership and vision, and his devotion to making Kansas City a better place for all. At the time, Sosland said, “I was taught as a child that I had obligations beyond running a business,” referring to Sosland Publishing Co. “We were brought up to know there was more to life than just yourself and your family and you had to reach out and help other people.”

In that article, his niece, Debbie Sosland-Edelman, noted he was generous with his time and resources and was probably best known for his work at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. In the Jewish community, he was instrumental in achieving a large increase in donations to the Jewish Federation in response to the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He also helped his father raise money to build the Beth Shalom building at 95th Street and Wornall Road in Kansas City, Missouri, which was closed in 2011 and sold in 2013. It has since been demolished. He also served as president and/or chairman of Jewish Family and Children’s Services and the Jewish Community Foundation.

JCRB Board Chair Jason Krakow and Executive Director Gavriela Geller called Sosland a man of vital energy and tremendous business acumen.

“One of Morton’s strongest focuses was assuring the quality and quantity of the U.S. food supply and solving the world’s food supply problems,” Krakow and Geller said in a statement. “He felt that hunger was an injustice, and justice needed to be done. Morton Sosland has been a true friend, a wonderful example and a wise advisor to JCRB for many years, and he will be greatly missed. We offer our deep condolences to his family. May his memory be for a blessing.”

See the complete obituary on Page 22.

FAITH CLUBS — Faith Clubs in the Kansas City area are looking for more Jewish men and women to become members. Faith Clubs are based on the book “The Faith Club” published after 9/11 and written by Ranya Idliby, Suzanne Oliver and Priscilla Warner. Groups are small, designed to accommodate three Muslims, three Christians and three Jews. Several groups in Kansas City are trying to find Jewish friends and are currently meeting with just three Muslims and three Christians. Paula Becker says that she and Julie Kaplan will attest that it’s “one of the most interesting and rewarding things we do.” If you’re interested in learning more, call Becker at 816-260-9997 or Kaplan at 816-588-4476.

YIDDISH GROUP SPECIAL GUEST — Every week, a group of Yiddish enthusiasts meets at Congregation Beth Torah. In two weeks, from noon to 1:30 p.m. Friday, May 17, they will welcome a special guest, Alan Edelman. He will speak about “The American Jewish Paradox.” The discussion will cover the difficulties, or tsuris (Yiddish for troubles), facing American Jewish institutions and what can be done to connect members of the Jewish community with Yiddishkeit and Jewish life. RSVPs are not required but preferred to . Participants often bring lunch to the weekly gatherings. People at all levels welcome to join the group. 

Henry W. Bloch, philanthropist and co-founder of H&R Block Inc., passed away Tuesday, April 23, at the age of 96. A full obituary appears in the obituary section.

“Henry loved the city, and he constantly wanted to give back to Kansas City. He wanted this to be a place where kids would want to come back and live because it’s a world class city. He believed in a city that offers great cultural arts, education and healthcare; and a community where people can lead rich Jewish lives. He repeatedly demonstrated this in his work and in his generosity,” said Michael Abrams, board chair of the Jewish Federation of Greater Kansas City. 

Although retired, Bloch worked daily on his many philanthropic endeavors in Kansas City, including the Marion and Henry Bloch Family Foundation, the Henry W. Bloch School of Management at the University of Missouri – Kansas City, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Saint Luke’s Hospital and the H & R Block Foundation. 

In the Jewish community, The New Reform Temple is home to the Marion and Henry Bloch Religious School. In 2015, Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy honored the Marion and Henry Bloch Family Foundation in recognition of its generous support of HBHA and many other important Kansas City institutions.

In addition, The Henry W. Bloch Human Relations Award is given out yearly by the Jewish Community Relations Bureau at its annual Human Relations Dinner. 

“Henry is recognized as having set the standard for community activism and community involvement,” noted a JCRB press release promoting the dinner. “Henry’s quiet and humble generosities of spirit and concern have touched almost every aspect of our civic life. He remains a role model in the pursuit of justice and an inspiration to the citizens of our metropolitan area.”

Every year the JCRB honoree received a personal call from Bloch informing him or her of the honor, noted JCRB Board Chairman Jason Krakow.

“The honorees who received that call from Henry described it as one of their most life-touching moments. The awe they felt by being recognized and connected to Henry and his name was inspiring,” Krakow said.

To learn more about the life of Henry Bloch, visit rememberinghenrybloch.com.

A true tale of taxidermy and Big Foot will premiere at Screenland Armour in North Kansas City May 5. The film, titled “Big Fur” is a wild love story directed and produced by Kansas City native Dan Wayne. Wayne is a Jewish filmmaker who became Bar Mitzvah at Congregation Beth Shalom. He is the son of Rosemary Wayne.

An evening dedicated to celebrating dance and diversity will be hosted by the Kansas City Friends of Alvin Ailey (KCFAA) May 4. The 35th Anniversary Gala will feature special guests Robert Battle, artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, and Judith Jamison, artistic director emerita, plus performances by Ailey II dancers. 

KCFAA, the only presenter of New York’s Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Ailey II in Kansas City, is the New York dance company’s second home. It strives to reach children in the Kansas City area, teaching critical life skills through dance, according to KCFAA.org.

Myra and Lester Siegel, KCFAA Gala co-chairs, said they’re looking forward to watching the spectacular performances at the gala while being alongside those who continue to support KCFAA and its involvement in the community. 

Proceeds from Gala 2019 will go toward KCFAA’s 11 education and youth development programs that have an impact on more than 25,000 children. KCFAA “develops and delivers youth programming that uses the art of dance as a vehicle to improve knowledge, increase self-esteem, enhance critical thinking skills and encourage positive role models and smart life choices,” according to KCFAA.org. 

“It’s very important to raise the funds that will allow this to be continued in our community,” Myra said. 

The Siegels have been involved with KCFAA since the 1960s, after watching the Ailey company perform in Kansas City. Myra said she also had the pleasure of watching the dance company perform in New York.

“We were just absolutely delighted when Alvin Ailey himself chose Kansas City as their second home,” Myra said. “So many other things came out of that, such as the relationships that were formed both by working with Ailey and making new friends, and the diversity and the opportunity to meet people from different parts of the community.”

The Jewish couple has seen KCFAA grow and change over time, from its start in Kansas City in 1984 to the passing of its founder, Alvin Ailey, in 1989. They championed the creation of AileyCamps, free summer day camps for youth learning the discipline of dance, that same year. Kansas City’s AileyCamps program became a role model for 10 other cities across the U.S. that now have AileyCamps of their own. 

“What happened to our young Ailey campers and seeing their lives progress in positive ways and following their careers and their lives, I think that’s mainly what keeps us involved for so long … so many of us had the opportunity to take part and to help in this 35-year-relationship, and many from the Jewish community, and I think it was something that was very positive also.”

Myra said KCFAA brought different races and religions within the community together. 

“It established good working relationships between people who basically didn’t even know each other,” Lester said. “It just grew, the performances, because they were terrific, entertaining and drew a big audience.”

Events like the 2019 Gala are an inspiration to those who attend. 

“When you attend an Ailey event, you look around in that audience and your heart just swells that you’re a part of something that’s really very important in the community and it looks different than a lot of other performances, although they’re all wonderful and all have their place, but this one I think ... has remained very special,” Myra said.

The 2019 Gala Patron’s Party will be hosted by Kathleen and Marshall Miller at their home May 3, featuring Robert Battle, Judith Jamison and the Ailey II dancers. The 35th Anniversary Gala will kick off at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, May 4, at the Kansas City Marriott Downtown, with an intimate performance by Ailey II dancers during dinner. The Janet K. Miller Award Presentation to Mayor Sly James is set to follow the performances. For more information, tickets and sponsorships, visit www.kcfaa.org/gala35/#purchase. 

Passover 2019-5779 begins after nightfall tomorrow evening, April 19. Candle-lighting time is 7:41 p.m.  This pre-seder photo is from the home of Martha Gershun and Don Goldman. To all our Chronicle readers, chag Pesach kasher vesame’ach — we wish you a kosher and joyous Passover!

Low self-esteem. A blurry identity. Isolation. And the need to connect with others, to belong to something, somewhere.

These elements often breed hate. And hate is a learned emotion that leads to learned behavior. 

That’s the message former — emphatically former — white supremacists Christian Picciolini and Shannon Martinez shared with an audience of more than 800 at United Methodist Church of the Resurrection (COR) in Leawood on April 11. The event was titled “Is Your Neighbor a White Supremacist?”

Picciolini and Martinez were interviewed on stage by Mindy Corporon. Corporon’s son, Reat Underwood; her father, Dr. William Corporon; and Teresa LaManno were murdered outside local Jewish facilities in April 2014 by a self-described neo-Nazi who had mistakenly thought they were Jewish and shot them. The perpetrator was convicted of the crimes and in late 2015 was sentenced to death.

Middle-school students at the Saul Mirowitz Community School in St. Louis have spent a lot of time over the last year outside the classroom.

They traveled to Alabama — the cities of Birmingham, Montgomery and Selma — as well as Memphis, Tennessee, to learn about civil rights. They spent a week at a Wisconsin nature preserve to learn about environmental stewardship. They went to Heifer Ranch in Arkansas to learn about hunger and poverty, spending a night without beds and with little food to give them a sense of what real indigence is like.

“I’ve read about these things, but experiencing even a taste of how families in poverty feel makes an impact,” a student, Hayley L., was quoted as saying on a school blog. “It’s shocking that people live like this every day.”

The trips aren’t just about hands-on learning. They are designed to prime the youths to take action.

“They have a fire in the belly when they return from these trips,” Head of School Cheryl Maayan said. “It literally changes their lives.”

After the trips, students conducted an audit of the school’s food, paper and water waste in an awareness campaign to reduce its environmental footprint. They researched local anti-poverty efforts and raised money to support poverty-related charities. They sold water bottles emblazoned with the school’s name to raise funds for a bottle spout at the school water fountain to discourage single-use plastics.

The Mirowitz School’s immersion trips for middle schoolers, now seven years running, are one example of the innovative way that Jewish day schools are trying to impart the values of chesed, or good works, and charity, tzedakah. When schools do it best, they weave social justice, tzedakah and righteous behavior into the culture and fabric of the school both inside and outside the classroom.

“We see many creative examples of chesed education across the network of schools,” said Paul Bernstein, CEO of Prizmah, a network organization for Jewish day schools. “It’s core to the education we seek to provide.”

The trips are part of a larger trend toward more experiential learning in day schools.

“Our schools are moving toward experiential learning for their students, not only for chesed but for all subjects,” said Melanie Eisen, Prizmah’s director of educational innovation. “Students have the world at their fingertips. To make chesed projects real, our schools are taking their students into their communities and beyond to experience the learning with all their senses. These defining moments will have a lasting imprint on their lives as graduates of Jewish day schools.”

In Los Angeles, 10th-graders at the Milken Community Schools, a nondenominational K-12 Jewish day school, take a weeklong trip to New Orleans to rebuild homes with a local nonprofit working to repair damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The school has taken eight trips there with 10th- and 11th-graders, the first in 2006 just months after the hurricane.

The students do construction tasks such as painting, sanding and installing drywall, and get to know the homeowners they are helping, said Wendy Ordower, Milken’s director of service learning. They talk about Jewish themes and texts connected to their experience, such as the adage from the Ethics of the Fathers, or Pirkei Avot: “You are not obligated to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”

“I never thought we’d be doing this trip so many years later, but there’s always something to do in the Ninth Ward,” Ordower said. “We just keep going back. A pillar of the school is ‘gemilut chesed’ — doing righteous works. We really walk the walk. Doing it as a community elevates it.”

At the Epstein Hillel School in Marblehead, Massachusetts, the first grade focuses on fostering intergenerational relationships. Each of the school’s first-graders is paired for the school year with a “grandfriend” — an unrelated older adult connected in some way to the school. The grandfriends, who are in their late 60s and early 70s, come to the classroom every Thursday to participate in discussions and art projects. During the winter, when many grandfriends go to Florida, the students write them letters.

During a class about Veterans Day, a grandfriend showed off the dog tags of his father, who was killed in World War II. Letters to grandfriends about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. elicited memories of his speeches, said first-grade teacher Emily Glore.

“The program is an opportunity to pass on some experience and build a really sweet connection with the older generation,” Glore said. “The kids get to see that there are people out there who are invested in their success.”

At the Gann Academy in Waltham, Massachusetts, an unusual Yizkor Project is being used as a lesson in chesed and history. Last year, high-school juniors worked for months to uncover the names and histories of 310 individuals buried in numbered graves at the local Metfern Cemetery between 1947 and 1979. The cemetery was literally next door, on the 200-acre property of the shuttered Fernald School.

The students began by researching public and online genetic records to identify those interred, who died at Fernald and Metropolitan State Hospital — local institutions for people with physical and mental disabilities. They studied Fernald, which was the oldest publicly funded institution of its kind in America, to learn about historic attitudes toward the disabled.

They created an exhibit about the history of disability in America from 1897 to 1937 that was displayed for eight months at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation in Waltham, a Boston suburb. This year’s juniors are completing a Yizkor book with bios of each person buried at Metfern and making permanent signs commemorating the dead for the cemetery.

“We use history as a lens for thinking about the narratives of who we are,” Gann history teacher Yoni Kadden said.

Student Anna Kamens called the project “meaningful and important.”

“Definitely the coolest thing about it is getting to meet people personally affected by this history, and learning about the history of disability through the eyes of individual people, knowing that we are actually making a difference,” she said.

Many schools require chesed projects. At the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, Maryland, upper-school students must complete 80 hours of community service to graduate, but on average they do much more, spending 244 hours a year in such activities.

Roz Landy, the school’s dean of students, said the projects have changed continually since she started the program in the late 1980s because activities are chosen by students based on their interests.

“This is not adult driven,” she said.

Students work with developmentally disabled children, do EMT work, stock backpacks with clothes and school supplies for foster children, and work at a horse rescue farm, where they help rehabilitate horses and learn how to educate the public about equine abuse and neglect.

Maayan of the Mirowitz School said that chesed projects are key to children’s emotional and intellectual growth, especially in the middle-school years.

“Kids at that age tend to think about things that are not important — whether people like them, how they look,” she said. “We can’t change that, but we can teach them meaningful thinking.”

This article was sponsored by and produced in partnership with the Avi Chai Foundation, which is committed to the perpetuation of the Jewish people, Judaism and the centrality of the state of Israel to the Jewish people. In North America, the foundation works to advance the Jewish day school and overnight summer camp fields. This article was produced by JTA’s native content team.