Life cycles

IN MEMORIAM

ESTHER S. KAHN

Esther S, Kahn passed away on Dec. 18, 2021, in Omaha. Services were held on Dec. 21, 2021, at Beth El Cemetery Omaha and officiated by Rabbi Steven Abraham.

She was preceded in death by her daughter, Linda Kahn and husband, Allen I. Kahn.

She is survived by daughter and son-in-law, Pam and David Gross; son and daughter-in-law, Marc and Kim Kahn; grandchildren: Julie, Greta, Stephanie Gross, Nathan and Christina and Zachary Kahn.

Esther was born in Louisville, Kentucky to Nathan and Friedel Shersky, youngest of six children. She spent her married life in Omaha. Esther was a talented artist in quilting, needlepoint and fabrics. She was also a great baker and creative cook.

Memorials may be made to the Nebraska Humane Society, 8929 Fort Street, Omaha, NE 68134.

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New York street to be named for Shimon Peres

SHIRA HANAU

JTA

Shimon Peres will soon receive a major honor for a nonNew Yorker: the late Israeli prime minister will have a New York City street corner named in his honor. The intersection of West 95th Street and Riverside Drive will be renamed “Shimon Peres Place.” Peres, who died in 2016, served three times as Israel’s prime minister in addition to serving as president of the country from 2007 to 2014. In 1949, he and his wife Sonia and their young daughter moved to an apartment on the corner of West 95th Street and Riverside while Peres studied at New York University and the New School.

Sections of lost Torah scroll reappear 83 years after Kristallnacht

TOBY AXELROD

BERLIN | JTA A German Protestant minister has handed over segments of a long lost Torah scroll to the city of Görlitz in southeast Germany, 83 years after his father, a town policeman, came into possession of them. While it is not unheard of for German non-Jews to turn over religious objects that have been lost or hidden since the Nazi period, the Torah scroll fragments took an unusually circuitous journey before coming to light last week. The Torah had not been seen since Kristallnacht, the pogrom against synagogues and Jewish property in German-speaking lands on Nov. 9 and 10, 1938. According to Pastor Uwe Mader, 79, the minister who turned the fragments over to the town, the story began with his father, Willi Mader. Born in Görlitz in 1914, Willi was a young police officer in training when he was called to the synagogue on the night of the antiJewish pogrom. Uwe Mader told the Säschsiche Zeitung newspaper that his father never spoke about what happened that night, so it is unclear how the four Torah fragments actually ended up in the policeman’s hands. Uwe Mader believes they must have been cut out by someone who could read the Torah and carefully selected certain passages, including the creation story and the Ten Commandments. The fragments changed hands several times over the years of Nazi and later Soviet rule. In the late 1930s, Willi Mader brought the parchments for safekeeping to a friend in Kunnerwitz named Herta Apelt and her brother. They in turn brought them to their local pastor, Bernhard Schaffranek, who was installed in June 1940. Schaffranek hid the Torah parchments in his library. He died in July 1949. In 1969, his widow, Magdalena, handed them to the new vicar in nearby Reichenbach, Uwe Mader, likely knowing that it was his father who had first received them in 1938. Magdalena Schaffranek told Uwe Mader to tell no one, and he kept his promise, not even telling his wife. He hid the parchments inside rolls of wallpaper in his office. When he moved to Kunnerwitz in 1977, he took the scrolls with him. With the political turmoil of 1989 leading to German unification, Mader moved them to a locked steel cabinet, and kept the key with him at all times. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that Willi Mader finally told his son how he had begun this chain of handovers. After decades of telling no one, last week Uwe Mader finally decided that the time had come to bring the parchments to light.

The city of Görlitz, which recently completed a refurbishment of its synagogue, said it plans to work with regional Jewish leaders to develop a plan for how to display, or potentially restore, the fragments. Görlitz’s “New Synagogue,” which dates to 1911, is the only one in the state of Saxony to survive Kristallnacht. It was rededicated as a house of worship and space for interfaith gatherings last summer. There are reportedly some 30 Jews currently living in Görlitz. Some local Jewish leaders and activists were angered by

Uwe Mader with the Torah scroll fragments he handed over to the city of Görlitz, Thursday,

Dec. 16, 2021. Credit: Pawel Sosnowski the announcement that the fragments had been given to the city rather than directly to the representatives of the Jewish community, which would be the legal successor. But Zsolt Balla, state rabbi of Saxony and Germany’s first post-war Jewish military chaplain, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he was optimistic about plans for the scrolls after speaking with the town’s mayor, Octavian Ursu, on Dec. 17. “We will be discussing strategies next week on how to proceed,” Balla said. According to the Säschsiche Zeitung, observers were awestruck as city archivist Siegfried Hoche placed the four fragments on a table at the city hall on Thursday. Ursu said in a statement that he was “grateful to have received such a valuable historical treasure for our council archive” and that the city would “prepare its exhibition for the public in close consultation with Jewish representatives of Saxony.” The governor of the State of Saxony, Michael Kretschmer, said the fragments were “like a door into the history of Görlitz of the past decades, which is now opening.” Local Jewish community chair and cantor Alex Jacobowitz viewed the parchments on Friday. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that some of them appear to be “in relatively good shape, and could be used in a future Sefer Torah… others are no longer usable, and should either be buried in a genizah or put into a permanent exhibit inside the Görlitzer Synagogue.”

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LOCAL | NATIONAL | WORLD Jewish musician Navah Perlman Frost pivoted to designing cakes

RACHEL RINGLER

New York Jewish Week via JTA For most of her life, professional pianist Navah Perlman Frost spent at least part of each day practicing her music in preparation for upcoming performances. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, the music stopped. Concert halls closed. Recitals were cancelled. At first, Frost, 51, took the drying up of her concert schedule as “a good moment to recharge my batteries,” she told The New York Jewish Week. She never could have imagined that, as the months progressed, her career would pivot as markedly as it did. Frost grew up in a musical family. Her parents are musicians; her father is violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman. Frost began taking piano lessons when she was six years old and performed professionally for the first time when she was 15. By the time the COVID lockdown began, she had been a working musician for 35 years. But Frost is also an accomplished cook and baker, and she did both enthusiastically for her husband, four children, extended family and friends. As the reality of the pandemic set in and the months passed by, Frost found herself obsessing not so much about music but about buttercream frosting. Frost said she couldn’t stop thinking about creative ways to use buttercream to decorate her baked goods. Day after day, she was pulled back into the kitchen and what emerged became more elaborate with each iteration. “The artistry she showed as a musician translated into the beauty of the baked goods she was making,” said her sister-inlaw Stephanie Perlman. “Not just in how they tasted — they were delicious — but in how they looked.” Perlman along with other friends and family members urged Frost to try to sell her creations. But she demurred. With its wide variety of top-notch bakeries, New York City didn’t need yet another cake baker, she said. Except nobody else in this great city was beautifying cakes quite like she was. Frost’s cakes are adorned with botanically themed decorations that are so realistic that one could swear they are looking at fresh flowers. She is best known for her cupcake “bouquets,” bunches of cupcakes presented like floral arrangements. In a nod, perhaps, to her art history degree from Brown Uni-

versity, Frost also delights in recreating works of art in buttercream. She made a Casa Azul cake, inspired by artist Frieda Kahlo’s cobalt blue home in Mexico City. Her cake that replicates Van Gogh’s iris painting looks almost too precious to eat. Her daughter, Frost said, coined the name of her newly minted baking business: Frosted by Navah. At first, she just sold her cakes to a devoted group of friends and family. But word spread beyond that small nucleus, and Instagram further escalated things. Frost then set up a web site, and Frosted by Navah was up and running by December 2020, less than eight months after she began baking and frosting regularly. Client Ulrika Citron told The New York Jewish Week that, to celebrate her son’s and his girlfriend’s graduation from business school, she ordered two cakes: one banana, the other a dairyfree chocolate-raspberry creation. “The cake you get is as beautiful as pictured,” she said. “You get what you see on Instagram.” While her “pivot,” which is how Frost describes her career change may seem anomalous, Frost sees commonalities between playing the piano and cake decorating. Both art forms require intricate handiwork; playing the piano for so many years sharpened her hands’ dexterity and control, allowing her to craft her precise floral applications. And then there is the interpretation that she brings to both fields. “I may play the same Beethoven sonata 10 times, but each time I play it it is slightly different than the time before because I am not a machine,” she said. “Something may occur to me that didn’t occur the other times that I performed that piece. The same goes with my cakes. I don’t make carbon copies. My work is more of an art than a science. Neither product can be cloned.” And just as Frost delights in playing to a receptive audience as a musician, she loves getting positive feedback on a cake she made. “It’s a similar feeling of putting something out in the world that makes somebody happy,” she said. How have her parents reacted to her career change? “My parents think it’s great,” she said. “They are very supportive. What surprised them about my baking career was the highly decorative stuff that was not a regular thing for me until this moment in time.” Recently, for her father’s birthday, she made him a special birthday cake — and no, it wasn’t shaped like a violin. Her dad’s favorite candies are Kit Kats, so she prepared a beautiful floral cake with a surprise inside: Between the cake and the frosting, it was layered with Kit Kat bars. When will her baking end and her musical career begin again? “I am not performing any more,” said Frost. “I am trying to figure it all out, trying to not get ahead of myself. I am having such a good time that it is hard to think of abandoning this. But you never know.”

During the pandemic, Navah Perlman Frost pivoted from being a professional musician to running her own cake busi-

ness. And yes, those are cupcakes -- not flowers. Credit: Design by Grace Yagel