USA

‘One Year Has Passed, Yes, But It’s Still Hurting’: 9 Jews

On Their Pandemic Years.

By JTA Staff

Clockwise from top left: Gen Slosberg and Jenni Rudolph (Courtesy of Lunar); kindergarteners at the Moriah School in Englewood, N.J. (Courtesy of the Moriah School); Ruben Golran at his bar mitzvah (Courtesy of the Golran family); Sofi Hersher and her boyfriend (DeAjah DeLee); Andrea Kopel volunteers at NCJW's New York food pantry (Courtesy of NCJW-NY); Eliana Light poses (Ori Salzberg) Because of bans on large gatherings, Ruben Golran, an Italian Jewish kid celebrating his bar mitzvah, had to limit the February 2020 ceremony to close relatives. (Courtesy of the Golran family)

Stanley Teich, back row, left, seen here at a grandchild’s bat mitzvah, died of COVID-19 in April 2020, an early casualty of the pandemic in the United States. (Courtesy of Carol Ackerman)

(JTA) — One year ago, Carol Ackerman’s father was still alive. Andrea Kopel was trying to figure out how to run a food pantry without volunteers. Sasha Kopp hadn’t yet given up on the city she loved.

They knew that the pandemic had changed the world in major, wrenching ways. But the impact of COVID-19 on their own lives still had yet to become clear.

Earlier this month, when America passed its pandemic anniversary, many reflected on the moments when everything changed. Now, with an end to the crisis coming into view, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency spoke to nine Jews whose lives have been reshaped by the pandemic.

Their stories offer a window into the grief, loss, surprise and, yes, joy that has unfolded over the last year — and an outline of some of the dynamics the Jewish world will have to grapple with on its journey toward a new normal.

An Italian Bar Mitzvah Celebrated One Year Later

Ruben Golran’s 600-person bar mitzvah celebration was scrapped amid Italy’s early surge in February 2020. One year later, he chanted his Torah portion before 200 masked and distanced community members.

His father, Elia Golran: Schools were closed and everything went on Zoom — and the shul and our community. But slowly, slowly, from May until after the [High] Holidays, the situation in Italy was pretty good.

A Devastating Loss Reshapes a Family in New York

Stanley Teich was looking forward to taking his family to Israel for Passover to celebrate his birthday. Instead, he was battling COVID19 in the hospital when he turned 80.

His daughter, Carol Ackerman: We had already booked out all of the travel and the excursions and the highlights we wanted to see. But he decided that it was safer and more prudent to cancel, and we promised we would go in 2021.

A Rabbi Who Shut Down Early is Back in Action

When the Orthodox rabbis of Bergen County, New Jersey, decided on March 11, 2020, to end all in-personal Jewish life under their supervision, their choice was unprecedented — but only for a few days.

Rabbi Kenny Schiowitz: Until we shut down, we were looking to guidance from the CDC, the Department of Health. And then suddenly in one day we became the ones writing the rules.

Missing the Hugs of the Hungry and the Elderly

The pandemic renewed attention to hunger as a national crisis. On the Upper West Side of Manhattan,

Happy Anniversary to all of my friends in the Jewish Community!

Kindergartners at the Moriah School in Englewood, N.J., one of seven Bergen County schools to urge families to abide by school guidelines outside of school in September 2020. (Courtesy of the Moriah School)

Andrea Kopel, center, the director of NCJW-New York, joins a volunteer in preparing a food delivery at NCJW’s food pantry in New York on March 15, 2021 (Courtesy NCJW-NY)

See ONE YEAR on Page 3

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ONE YEAR

Continued from Page 2

Andrea Kopel had to figure out how to keep a weekly food pantry going, stripped of its regular volunteers and routines.

Kopel: We have really prided ourselves on really creating a warm and welcoming and dignified experience for our hunger program. This does not feel like that at all.

Read more about how the National Council of Jewish Women’s food pantry adjusted, who has taken the elderly volunteers’ place and what the mood on the street is as more people are vaccinated.

A College Senior Year ‘Dissipated’ — With a New Jewish

Community Taking Its Place

Gen Slosberg’s in-person classes at the University of California, Berkeley, stopped on short notice in March. She never had another one — or another all-nighter at the library, or boba tea with friends, or any of the other activities that structured her life as an American college student.

Slosberg: Not only did I lose the mundane things that made in person life great, I lost friends and community members. People of my background were lost to hate. We talk about adapting, shifting, changing… I never quite got to process my loss.

A Jewish Musician’s New ‘Hybrid’ Lifestyle Could Last A Lifetime

Like all arts and education gig workers in the Jewish world, Eliana Light saw her carefully planned travel schedule disintegrate in a matter of days in March 2020. But that doesn’t mean she hasn’t been bringing her brand of Jewish children’s music to new audiences this year.

Light: We’ve been able to collaborate and work with each other way more than we would have in a regular world, given that we live across the country from each other.

Read more about Light’s pivot to Zoom, the projects that have sustained her most and her vision for a post-pandemic Jewish arts ecosystem.

A Museum Chief Takes A 99% Pay Cut — And Sees “Visitors” Skyrocket

When the Tenement Museum had to close in March, outgoing president Morris Vogel slashed his own salary to just $25 a month. A year later, he’s no longer in charge, but he says the museum’s mission explains its success in drawing visitors online.

Vogel: People come to us to find a deeper and richer version of the American story, a story of perseverance and aspiration.

Teaching Jewish Educators

Danish Tricks When School Turned Upside Down

In college, Sasha Kopp spent time studying in Copenhagen, where many children attend “forest preschools” that are largely outdoors. That experience came in handy over the last year in her work with the Jewish Education Project.

Kopp: Our teachers hadn’t had experiences of being outside with kids two to five hours a day.

Accelerating Love And Work

With so many nonprofits in distress because of the pandemic, Sofi Hersher’s new communication consultancy had brisk business. The Washington, D.C., executive hired many staff members who were then shaken by seeing the Jan. 6 insurrection play out in their backyard.

Hersher: I had to talk them through that. No one has the emotional resilience that they used to have. 

Gen Slosberg, left, and Jenni Rudolph founded Lunar: The Jewish-Asian Film Project during the pandemic. (Courtesy of Lunar)

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Eliana Light is one of several young Jewish musicians and spiritual leaders moving their work online. (Ori Salzberg)

A view of the front of the Tenement Museum. (Wikimedia Commons)

Sasha Kopp, who trains Jewish early childhood teachers, took up dog walking in Manhattan to fill time during the pandemic. Here she poses at Carl Schurz Park in New York City on July 16, 2020. (Carl Vitullo) Sofi Hersher and Nate Andorsky pose during a visit to introduce Andorsky to Hersher’s grandmother, with COVID precautions in place, in Syracuse, N.Y., Sept. 21, 2020. (DeAjah DeLee)

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Services by Golf Cart and Antique Car Menorah Parades: The Jews Who Call Florida’s Massive Retirement Community The Villages Home

By Caleb A. Guedes-Reed

Rabbi Zev Sonnenstein stands in the sanctuary of Temple Shalom of Central Florida, a Reform congregation just outside The Villages that welcomes around 200 congregants for Shabbat. (Caleb Reed/JTA)

Sumter County, Fla. (JTA) — When Ellen Faulkner told her friends that she was moving to The Villages, the sprawling senior community in Central Florida, they cautioned her: There was no Jewish life there.

Faulkner hadn’t noticed that during her visit, which was made at the urging of a high school classmate who told her rapturously about what it was like to live in the 55-plus community that’s home to 125,000 self-described “Villagers.” She had been captivated by the free concerts, huge crowds in the streets, and endless restaurants and storefronts at Lake Sumter Landing, a waterside mall that caters exclu-

sively to residents.

After returning home to Broward County, in South Florida, she and her husband immediately put their home on the market. It sold in a day. They were all set to begin their new life at The Villages, where as depicted in surreal fashion in the recent documentary “Some Kind of Heaven,” residents can play golf at one of 12 nearby championship courses, attend medical appointments and lunch dates by golf cart, and listen to live music each night in the many public squares.

In making the move north, Faulkner and her husband were indeed leaving an epicenter of Jewish life in the United States — one where massive retirement complexes such as Century Village and Wynmoor have been home to countless Jewish grandparents — to an area without much of a Jewish identity.

But five years later, they are steeped in an emerging Jewish landscape at The Villages, where Faulkner coordinates Amazing Jewish Women of The Villages, one of nearly 3,000 social groups available to residents.

“We have a network now,” Faulkner said. “We all feel connected because we have Jewish friends.”

The explosion of Jewish life at The Villages has gone under the radar in recent years as the community has drawn more attention for its staunch support for former President Donald Trump. Residents voted for Trump, who visited the community twice during his presidency, by a 2-to-1 margin in both 2016 and 2020. Trump even joked about moving there after drawing criticism for retweeting a video filmed at the community in which one of his supporters shouted “White Power.”

But for Jewish residents — and the friends they hope to recruit to become neighbors — the changes are impossible to miss. The community now has two full-time rabbis, one at a Reform synagogue and another with Chabad. The area’s first-ever Jewish federation opened in July.

Rabbi Yoshi Hecht picked up and moved the Chabad center he founded in neighboring Ocala, a city of just under 60,000, after recognizing the population growth taking place at The Villages. Now the rabbi of the Chabad Lubavitch Jewish Center of Ocala and The Villages, Hecht estimates the local Jewish population to be between 3,000 and 6,000 — and said he gets calls daily from Jews considering a move.

Hecht’s Chabad offers a minyan every Shabbat and encourages the community to celebrate the holidays together. Before COVID, the residents held a Hanukkah party with 120 people in attendance.

Now that COVID has restricted the offerings, the rabbi has made adjustments. During the pandemic, volunteers have taken chicken soup and challah to their neighbors on Shabbat, and Hecht holds regular classes on Zoom. During Hanukkah, the community organized an

antique car menorah parade.

“We try to do things that feed into their Villager and Jewish spirit,” Hecht said.

Regan Johnson, a retired state government worker from East Lansing, Michigan, moved to The Villages at the end of 2014.

“I picked The Villages because it had many golf courses for my husband, [and] it had many musical opportunities for me,” Johnson said.

Before moving, Johnson visited to find out what Jewish life was like.

“One of my concerns of coming to Central Florida was that there might not be a Jewish population at all,” she said.

Back in East Lansing, Johnson was highly involved in a close-knit Jewish community bolstered by Michigan State University.

“I sang in the choir, tutored kids for bar and bat mitzvahs, and organized the congregational seders,” she said. “I was active in every way.”

To her surprise, the Jewish population in The Villages was even

Ellen Faulkner started the social group Amazing Jewish Women of The Villages for the growing number of Jewish women in the Central Florida senior living community. They met in a social hall in The Villages prior to COVID-19. (Caleb Reed/JTA)

Best wishes to all of my friends in the Jewish Community. Thank You for your continued support.

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A road leading from The Villages to Temple Shalom of Central Florida in Oxford is known as the Temple Trail and is accessible only by golf cart. (Caleb Reed/JTA)

PARADES

Continued from Page 4

more vibrant than it was in East Lansing.

To find some new Jewish friends, Johnson scoured the list of the thousands of social clubs at The Villages. She went through the club listings and saw interesting names that caught her attention, like the Borscht Belt and The Kibitzers Jewish social clubs, and more learning-focused groups like Chavurah.

The first activity she attended was a sold-out holiday gala organized by the Borscht Belt.

“There must have been over 300 people there,” she said, adding, “And there was dancing, and food and entertainment. It was a big deal.”

In a pre-COVID world, Johnson attended challah and hamantaschenbaking nights, Purim spiels, women’s seders and Hanukkah candlelighting events, though much of this has gone virtual over the past year.

“It’s really comforting,” she said. “These are my people.”

Temple Shalom of Central Florida, The Villages-adjacent Reform synagogue, started 20 years ago as a Villages social club called The Jewish Friends. Members met in a local church before they had their own building.

Temple Shalom now has 565 members, many of whom access the congregation by golf cart via an entrance to the property from the second hole of one of the championship golf courses. It’s called Temple Trail.

The synagogue was lay-led for 18 years until three years ago, when it hired Rabbi Zev Sonnenstein, a native of Monsey, New York. Before he took the job, there were no kids in the congregation. Now, due in part to the area’s rapid growth and need for workers to service the community, Sonnenstein has three bar mitzvahs on the calendar. NonVillagers currently make up nearly 20% of the rising congregation.

“I’ve seen the Jewish population growing,” he said. “The population here is really starting to make an impact.”

On a normal, pre-COVID Shabbat evening, the temple sanctuary draws crowds of 150-200 worshippers. (Sonnenstein had a rocky arrival to The Villages, when he was arrested for a DUI in 2019 and lost his driver’s license, but he’s been a reassuring presence for his congregation in the Zoom era.)

Susan Feinberg, a longtime member and the temple’s marketing director, is originally from Baltimore but moved to The Villages nine years ago.

“Central Florida is famous for a lot of things most Jewish people don’t like to hear about,” she said, alluding to the region’s conservative politics. “But we have a fairly big Jewish population.”

Feinberg mentioned the abundance of Jewish social groups, but also pointed to how The Villages tries to make its Jews feel welcome.

“During Hanukkah, there are menorahs and candlelightings on all the public squares,” she said, adding, “They even put menorahs up in every recreation center and light the candles each of the eight nights. There’s an awareness here about Jewish life.”

The annual Tri-County Interfaith Holocaust Remembrance program, for example, draws crowds of over 1,500 people, both Jewish and nonJewish.

The growing Jewish community in and around The Villages is still tiny compared to the Jewish population in South Florida, where half a million Jews live, many in massive retirement complexes such as Century Village and Wynmoor. And there are signs that the area isn’t overrun by Jewish seniors: The community’s website advertises the presence of eight churches, noting just one synagogue.

Sprinkled among the smiling billboards that line the flat highway leading to The Villages — “America’s Friendliest Hometown,” “Where Friends Are Like Family,” “Where Life Is An Adventure” — are ads for airboat tours, live baby gators and an X-Mart Adult Supercenter that’s open 24/7.

And some aspects of Jewish life can be challenging: For example, there’s no local kosher grocery store.

“We’re just an hour from Orlando, which is helpful because there’s more available there,” said Hecht, who noted that some of the local grocery stores do carry kosher products and his organization makes kosher meat available for purchase.

But for people like Faulkner, it’s the neighbors, not the availability of kosher meat, that makes a robust Jewish community. By 2017, two years into living at The Villages, she had made five Jewish girlfriends. And after they posted a picture of a group dinner on Facebook, they were overwhelmed with messages from other Jewish women in The Villages wondering why they hadn’t been invited.

“After that, I said, ‘That’s it, no one is going to feel left out,’” Faulkner said. “I know what it’s like to feel left out.”

That night, the group Amazing Jewish Women of The Villages was born.

“I realized there was a need,” Faulkner said.

The group set up a Facebook page — it now has more than 500 members — and invited anyone who wanted to be involved. In the beginning they met in local restaurants. But the group kept growing.

“At some point, we couldn’t do that anymore because the restaurants just couldn’t handle 60 to 70 Jewish women,” Faulkner said.

So they decided to become one of the 2,800 official resident lifestyle social clubs — alongside other popular groups like Vintage Sewing, Line Dance for Exercise and Model Railroad Club. This way, they could use the recreation centers for their gatherings.

Before COVID, the group’s monthly events, which feature entertainment, educational speakers and cultural-religious programming, had to be capped at 125 participants. Over the past year, attendance for Zoom events was disappointing, but Faulkner said that with most members having been vaccinated, they are starting to think about reconvening.

“We can’t wait to go back in person when it’s safe to do so,” she said, adding that “Because we have these groups, I feel comfortable living here and being Jewish here.” 

A Year Into the Pandemic, Conservative Jews Consider Whether to Make Zoom Prayer Permanent

By Ben Harris

Rabbi Rachel Ain, center, leads the New

York-based Sutton Place Synagogue congregation in a Zoom service. (Screenshot) (JTA) — On the first weekend of the coronavirus lockdowns in New York City in March 2020, Rabbi Rachel Ain decided that her Conservative synagogue would conduct Shabbat services online over Zoom, the videoconferencing platform then still largely confined to the business world but soon to become a household word.

Doing so technically violated a 2001 decision by the Conservative movement’s Jewish law authority, which had voted by overwhelming majority to bar the convening of an online prayer quorum, or minyan. But Ain didn’t see an alternative.

“I was ahead of them,” said Ain, who leads the Sutton Place Synagogue in New York City. “I made the decision for my community based on how I understood what my community needed at that moment.”

Days later, the heads of the Conservative movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards would officially sanction Ain’s choice, allowing rabbis to temporarily ignore the 2001 ruling for the duration of the pandemic. Separately they issued an opinion, or teshuvah, permitting the limited use of Zoom on Shabbat, when use of electronic devices is severely circumscribed.

Those rulings, like many others issued across the Jewish world during the frightening early days of the pandemic, explicitly invoked sha’at had’chak — literally “a time of pressure,” a principle in Jewish law that permits a certain relaxation of customary rules in times of emergency. Now the law committee is preparing to formally consider whether the allowance for a Zoom minyan should outlive the pandemic.

At the Conservative movement’s rabbinical association conference in February, dozens of rabbis participated in a study group intended to guide the law committee in its consideration of the Zoom question. Looming over the deliberations was the legacy of another decision made by the Conservative movement in response to what once was perceived as an inexorable shift in Jewish communal life that had to be accommodated or risk the movement’s irrelevance: the great Jewish exodus to the suburbs.

Recognizing that large numbers of Jews who had left the city in the postwar period no longer lived within walking distance of a synagogue, the movement in the 1950s made a landmark decision to permit congregants to drive to synagogue on Shabbat — but nowhere else. The change led to the thriving of large suburban Conservative congregations in the middle decades of the 20th century, but it continues to be rued in some circles for having undermined the commitment to strict Shabbat observance.

“We are writing a new driving teshuvah,” said Rabbi Avram Reisner, a longtime law committee member widely seen as the body’s foremost traditionalist, referring to the choice to permit Zoom streaming on Shabbat.

Reisner loathes the driving decision for the same reasons he fears where the committee is moving on the Zoom question. In the view of many traditionalists in the movement, what was supposed to be a limited decision to accommodate families unable to walk to synagogue on Shabbat came to be seen as a broader license to drive, effectively eroding broad respect for Shabbat observance.

Reisner thinks the movement is about to make the same mistake again.

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permit television and computers into your Shabbat, Shabbat is gone. It’s out the window. You’ve changed the tenor of observing Shabbat,” said Reisner, who retired from his Baltimore pulpit in 2015.

Like the driving decision, streaming has opened religious participation to those for whom it would otherwise have been impossible. Some synagogues have added daily prayer services during the pandemic, since the streaming technology has enabled greater participation. Many report that more people are logging in for services online than ever showed up in person.

That has been the case at Beth El Synagogue Center in New Rochelle, New York, where Friday night services via Zoom — streamed prior to the onset of Shabbat — attracts 100 worshippers every week. Before the pandemic, 15 would typically show up in person.

Yet Rabbi David Schuck has refrained from permitting interactive services on Shabbat or counting a prayer quorum for mourners online on other days, though the synagogue has been holding inperson services three times a day since July. In fact, he wrote a dissent in March 2020 to the Conservative movement’s emergency ruling allowing those practices.

Allowing online services on Shabbat “will create a new norm in communal prayer which will, in the long run, weaken communal bonds, lower the commitments that we can expect from people to show up for one another, and diminish the sanctity of Shabbat,” Schuck wrote.

Schuck acutely understood the consequences of that choice. New Rochelle was at the epicenter of one of the earliest coronavirus outbreaks in the United States, and his synagogue was inside the containment zone established by state authorities in March 2020 in an effort to stem the spread of the virus. Many members died in those first weeks.

“I think we had way over 20 funerals,” Schuck said. “And I was doing funerals of couples, like one person and then a week later their spouse. I mean, it was traumatic.”

The rabbi was under significant pressure to enable his congregants to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish, one of Judaism’s most emotionally resonant prayers, over Zoom. He also had a personal stake in the issue: His own father had died the previous November, and he was reciting the prayer for him daily when the pandemic struck.

But wary of the long-term effects of an emergency ruling, Schuck instead crafted an alternate ritual. He began teaching online each day a short passage from the Mishnah, the second-century code of Jewish law that, because its Hebrew letters are the same as the Hebrew for soul, is traditionally also understood as a way to elevate the spirit of the departed. He also began reciting a prayer composed by an Israeli rabbi as an alternative to the Mourner’s Kaddish.

Not everyone in his synagogue was pleased with the choice, he recalled.

“I understood their disappointment in my decision,” Schuck said. “But largely there wasn’t a rebellion here. And I would say we were very effective, if not more effective than ever before, in meeting the religious and emotional needs of people who had to say Kaddish.”

Ain, too, adapted in-person practices for the pandemic era — but reached a different conclusion about whether to permit a prayer quorum.

“What we did on daily minyan and Shabbat for months was not a carbon copy of what would have been experienced live in person altogether because I wanted to make that emotional, pastoral, religious distinction between what was and what wasn’t,” she said. “But we did count a minyan, no matter what.”

As the law committee prepares to consider the Zoom question, the potential consequences of a longterm allowance for Zoom services is weighing heavily even on those who have championed the technology. Rabbi Josh Heller, who wrote the paper permitting Zoom use on Shabbat, and even negotiated with the company to implement changes to the software that would mitigate the potential for violating Jewish law, said both the suburban exodus and the long-term impact of the pandemic represent epochal shifts in Jewish life.

How the Conservative movement responds, he said, will echo for decades to come.

“I lose a lot of sleep over this,” Heller said. “I really feel like in some ways the Conservative movement defines the mainstream of American Jewry and is really the glue that holds together a right and a left that keep on wanting to head off in different directions. And to that extent, where we go does provide a great amount of steering for the American Jewish community as a whole.”

Relieved of the pressure to make a quick choice about how to respond to a rapidly unfolding public health crisis, Ain is moving more deliberately in considering how to structure services in a post-pandemic world and says she will take into account whatever guidance the law committee ultimately provides. But her synagogue expects to continue the use of Zoom in some capacity, including possibly offering participation in the service to those who are physically remote.

“What we’ve learned is that if people are home and watching and trying to engage, they want to have a meaningful experience as well,” Ain said. “And they are not coming because they don’t like shul, they’re not coming because something’s holding them back. And so, we want to give them a meaningful experience at home. And so, we’re exploring what technologies we need for that.”

Ain said three times as many people are attending services now than before the pandemic. Attendance on Friday night has jumped from about 35 to 70 each week, she said, and as many as four times as many people attend weekday services.

“It has not given them an excuse out, it has given them a way to opt into religious life,” Ain said. “And that has been a profound change, that we have reached people that we didn’t even know we could reach.” 

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