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The purpose of the trip was the wedding of close family friends, the destination Mexico City. Never having ventured farther into Mexico than Ensenada, and because of assumptions based mainly on movies and media, we were somewhat apprehensive. To our great surprise the trip could not have been more wonderful. The city is draped in […]
It was the summer of 1972, I was 16 years old and I was going to Israel for the first time. The trip was organized by Hadassah, six weeks long, we were to spend a week on kibbutz, a week on Gadna (pre-army training camp) at Sde Boker, and the remaining month touring. After we arrived, […]
Spring is here, Purim is over, and Passover is just weeks away. For the third year in a row, we are going back East to celebrate Passover with our children at the home of our older son and daughter-in-law, a home where we have always felt welcomed and included, to a seder that is open […]
Our family was very small. None of my mother’s siblings had survived the war, but my father had two brothers and a sister that lived close by. His oldest brother, Uncle Jack, was the debonair one in the family, always beautiful dressed with his Homburg perched perfectly on his head. Jack had emigrated to France […]
Growing up, all of my parents’ friends were Polish Jews. As immigrants, they wanted to surround themselves with people who had similar experiences and backgrounds, people who shared common customs, language, and food. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I met Jews who looked different, spoke Hebrew or Ladino (as opposed to Yiddish), […]
I am not sure when salads graduated from their humble beginnings to the gourmet status they have today, but I no longer dread eating them. Growing up in the Bronx of the 1950s, salads were tolerated and eaten because iceberg lettuce filled the need for a vegetable. No one worried about carbon footprints because there were […]
My parents, Miriam and Harry Graf, were both originally from small towns near Warsaw, Poland, from families who were religious Zionists. In my father’s hometown of Warka, he and his brothers were active in the Revisionist movement in the 1930s. My mother’s older brother had tickets on a liner to Palestine but the war broke […]
Bamitbach 