Life cycles

JEMMA ELEANOR SCHWARTZ

Allie Willensky and Brian Schwartz of Los Angeles joyfully announce the July 30, 2021 birth of their daughter, Jemma Eleanor.

Grandparents are Andi and Donald Goldstein of Omaha, Kitty and David Willensky of Palm Springs, CA, and Judy and Ronnie Schwartz of Bradenton, FL.

Great-grandparents are Lenore and the late Irving Ross, Evelyn and the late William Willensky.

BAR MITZVAH

AYDEN MICHAEL HOLLST

Ayden Michael Hollst, son of Kerry and Mike Hollst, will celebrate his Bar Mitzvah on Saturday, Oct. 9, at Temple Israel. Ayden is an eighth-grade student at Elkhorn Valley View Middle School. Ayden enjoys baseball and basketball, playing computer games and he loves his dog. For his mitzvah project, Ayden participated in the Walk for the Cure, and raised money for Alzheimers by setting up a car wash in his neighborhood. He also volunteered at the assisted living facility in Valley, where his grandmother lives. He has a brother, Ryan and a sister, Shaylie. Grandparents are Joan and the late Kevee Kirshenbaum and Rosie and the late Harvey Kennec.

IN MEMORIAM

MARILYN PHYLLIS MANVITZ

Marilyn Phyllis Manvitz passed away on Sept. 20 at age 89. Services were held on Sept. 23 at Beth El Cemetery at 84th & “L” Street.

She was preceded in death by her husband, Justin (Judd) Manvitz, and her parents, William and Betty Lerner.

She is survived by her son and daughter-in-law, Todd and Wendy Manvitz, daughter and son-in-law, Lisa and Kyle Hutchings; grandchildren: Alissa and Matt Arbeiter, Diana and Jason Williams, and David Manvitz, Whittany, Steffany, Bradley, and Victoria Hutchings; great-grandchildren: Addison and Jackson Williams; and sister, Gloria Sax.

Marilyn was originally from Rock Island, Illinois. She attended the University of Iowa where she met her husband, Justin. After her graduation, they were married and moved to Omaha. They were married for over 60 years. She was very active in different organizations including National Council of Jewish Women and Hadassah where she served as President of both organizations. Marilyn enjoyed travel, golf, reading, her Mahjong and Bridge groups, friends, and above all, family. For many years, she contributed and enjoyed helping with bookkeeping at her family’s business, Omaha Compound Company.

Memorials may be made to your favorite organization.

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Sheila Bromberg, Jewish harpist who was first woman to play on a Beatles album, dies at 92

RON KAMPEAS

JTA Sheila Bromberg kept busy as an in-demand harpist in London in the 1960s, but when she got a request for a gig at EMI’s Abbey Road studio from 9 p.m. to midnight she felt she couldn’t turn it down: She was, after all, a single mother to two small children. Yet it wasn’t until the Jewish harpist heard a male with a Liverpudlian accent behind her that she realized she was about to make history. “Well, what you got on the dots?” she recalled Paul McCartney asking her that night early in 1967. McCartney, who could not read music, wanted to hear her play the score he had dictated to Mike Leander, a music arranger. Bromberg, who died at 92 on Aug. 17 at a hospice in Aylesbury, England, was about to become the first woman to perform on a Beatles album. She played the harp accompaniment on She’s Leaving Home, the agonizing snapshot of the void between parents and a daughter, on the Beatles’ music-changing album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In a 2011 profile on the BBC, Bromberg, who had a pitch-perfect ear for accents, mimicked McCartney struggling to explain precisely what he wanted from her and the string orchestra. “No, no, I want something, eh … ” she quoted him as saying. “He couldn’t describe it, he couldn’t express it, and he was waiting for someone to bring it out of the air.” George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, was, atypically, on another gig; McCartney was missing the one man who could explain what he wanted. Bromberg and the orchestra went through three hours of takes. At midnight, Bromberg recalled, Erich Gruenberg, the German-born Jewish lead violinist who had trained in Mandate Palestine and who was also much in demand as a session musician, “tucked his violin under his arm and said, ‘Now it is midnight, ve have to go home because ve are vorking in ze morning.'” “Well, I suppose that’s that then,” McCartney responded, according to Bromberg. When the album came out, she realized McCartney had gone with her first take, but dubbed it so it had a doubling effect. “That’s what he was after,” she recalled herself thinking. “Yes! Clever!” Her delicate arpeggios set the scene for a young woman “silently closing her bedroom door, leaving the note that she hoped would say more.” The parents’ anguish — “Daddy, our baby’s gone,” the mother cries out — cut to the bone of a generation watching their children drifting away. “Something inside that was always denied for so many years,” McCartney sings, as Bromberg’s gentle strokes reemerge at the end of the track. Bromberg was born in London. Her paternal grandfather was a noted Jewish musician in Ukraine before fleeing because of pogroms, and her father and son also were orchestral musicians. Bromberg recorded with other artists such as Frank Sinatra, Dusty Springfield and the Bee Gees. She appeared on Monty Python’s Flying Circus playing the harp in a wheelbarrow and performed on the soundtrack of two James Bond movies. She got nine British pounds for her Beatles gig — about $190 in today’s money. She seemed for a period resentful that the song was the apparent apex of her career. “I’m noted for four bars of music,” she once said. “I found that a little bit bizarre.” Her listing on a music teacher website concludes, after listing her qualifications (“I studied Harp with Gwendolin Mason for whom Ravel wrote the Septet') with a throwaway: “I also worked with the ‘Beatles.'” But as she settled into retirement in Lane End, a village in Buckinghamshire in south-central England, she felt more comfortable with her role. “It was an awfully long time ago now but still it’s a worthwhile project and I enjoyed playing with them,” she told her local paper in 2013 (the article noted that Bromberg, then 84, was still available to teach music, and added an email address). In her retirement, she trained to use music to counsel children with mental disabilities. On the BBC in 2011, she appeared live in the studio with Ringo Starr and surprised him with a rendering on the harp of Yellow Submarine, one of a handful of Beatles songs on which the drummer sang lead. “It does feel a bit good,” she told the BBC about her Sgt. Pepper’s participation. “Thinking about it now, I really feel very proud to have been part of it.” The Jewish Press | October 1, 2021 | 11

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Mallorca’s Jews’ triumph over the Spanish Inquisition

CNAAN LIPSHIZ

JTA Before the Spanish Inquisition, the island of Mallorca had a sizeable Jewish community. Every fall, the island became dotted with the leaf-roofed huts that Jews are commanded to erect during the holiday of Sukkot. But that all changed under the Inquisition’s campaign of persecution that began in 1488 (four years before it started on Spain’s mainland) and was only officially abolished centuries later in 1834. This year, however, the island’s tiny Jewish community in the capital Palma is determined to reintroduce its Sukkot tradition with a public statement. Ahead of the holiday this week, the Jewish community along with the municipality of Palma have erected what organizers are calling the island’s first “public” sukkah since the Inquisition, situated in the city’s former Jewish Quarter. “It’s one of several firsts for the Jews of Mallorca, and it’s especially meaningful because it restores something from this community’s past,” said Dani Rotstein, founder of Limud Mallorca and secretary of the Jewish Community of the Balearic Islands. A tourism and video production professional from New Jersey, he has led efforts to promote Mallorca’s Jewish community since he moved there in 2014. To be fair, Palma has seen its share of sukkahs since the Inquisition. The city and the island, which is a popular vacation destination off of Spain’s eastern shores, for decades has had a small but active Jewish community of about 100 members, plus several Jewish expats. They are celebrating the 50th anniversary since British expats founded the community in 1971. Palma also has a synagogue, a small Jewish museum and a resident rabbi. But this year’s weeklong holiday of Sukkot, which begins Monday night, will mark the first time that a sukkah will be built on public grounds with funding from the local municipality. It was erected at the Ca’n Oms mansion, the seat of the city’s department of culture and other municipal bodies. Jews and non-Jews will be able to enjoy cultural programming from Limmud Mallorca, including lectures in the sukkah and tours of the area, over the course of two weeks. The public sukkah is part of a European-wide initiative European Days of Jewish Culture, a series of events celebrating Jewish heritage in dozens of cities in Europe each year in September and October. This development is the latest in a series of moves by Rotstein and others designed to commemorate the pre-Inquisition presence of Jews in Mallorca, who became known as Chuetas, the local name for Anusim — or those who were forcibly converted to Christianity during the Inquisition. On Rosh Hashanah, local Jews hosted a festive service and musical concert to celebrate the new Jewish year, with the cooperation of a local Catalan cultural center, in its garden located in the old Jewish quarter. It was symbolic to participants because of a painful chapter in the history of Mallorca’s Jewish community. In 1677, local crypto-Jews, who risked their lives by practicing their faith while pretending to be Christian, held a Yom Kippur service in secret in a garden outside the city walls. Local Jews say that when Spanish rulers learned about the service, they salted the garden’s soil to ensure that nothing could ever grow there again, and doubled down on eradicating Jewish celebrations from the island. In recent years, authorities have made an effort to acknowledge and atone for such atrocities. In 2018, local authorities unveiled a memorial plaque at the Palma square where 37 crypto-Jews were publicly burned in what was once known locally as “the bonfire of the Jews.” In 2015, the city helped build a small Jewish museum in what used to be the Jewish quarter. The area, featuring sandstone facades and quiet, cobbled streets, used to be a thriving and heavily Jewish shopping and business area, with many tanneries, shoe shops and butcher shops. Today few if any Jews live there, and most visitors are tourists. Also in 2015, the parliaments of Spain and Portugal passed laws that give descendants of Sephardic Jews the right to citizenship. Millions of dollars in public funds are being invested in preserving and developing Jewish heritage sites in those countries. Many chueta families continued to practice Judaism in secret. Even those who did not keep up their Jewish practice at the time were treated with suspicion and excluded in many ways from the rest of society. Some Jewish traditions remained in chueta families, such as the lighting of candles on Shabbat, covering mirrors during mourning and the spring cleanings associated with Passover. But over time the island’s Jewish population dwindled. But, ironically, society’s exclusion of Chuetas proved to be the key to Judaism’s revival in Mallorca, historians say: because they were not allowed to intermarry freely with the Christian population, Chuetas married among themselves. This helped preserve a distinct chueta identity well into the

1970s, when the dictatorship of Fransisco Franco finally collapsed, opening Spanish society to the rest of Europe. When that happened, Mallorca had thousands of people who defined themselves as Chuetas, a minority that numbers about 20,000 today. In recent years, Chuetas who returned to Judaism and converted have taken the community’s reins. In 2018, two Chuetas were elected to the community’s four-person executive board. And in June, the community received, for the first time since the Inquisition, a rabbi who was born in Palma to a chueta family, Nissan Ben Avraham. This process, as well as the public events for Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot, “are a victory,” Iska Valls, a chueta returnee to Judaism and the wife of Toni Pinya, one of the Jewish community’s chueta board members, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It’s a victory [over] the Inquisition and proof that we are like a phoenix, rising once more from the ashes,” she said.

A leather shop that used to be a synagogue in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. Credit: Cnaan Liphshiz

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