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Local day schools gear up for fall
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Indoors, outdoors and online LOCAL DAY SCHOOLS GEAR UP FOR THE FALL
By Eric Schucht
Sta Writer All students and teachers will be required to wear face masks during the day and remain six feet apart. It’s a rite of growing up to be impatient for school accommodate the 135 students. to let out in the spring and be sad about the passing “We’re a small enough school with a large enough space to be able to fi t everybody into the school with of summer as school opens in the fall. more with six feet in between all the students and the sta ,” Walls said. “We took the advice of local health Not this year. o cials and doctors and that’s why we decided that we can do it safely.”
And that’s the problem. As Jewish day schools across the Washington region fi nalize plans for fall classes, the uncertainty caused by the coronavirus pandemic have led to some drafting multiple scenarios.
While most administrators interviewed for this story want, like Malkus, to be able to convene classes in person, they have opted to go entirely virtual this fall. There’s no question that, with experience they
gathered in the spring after they shut their doors suddenly, area days schools are now applying creativity to the pandemic problem.
Gesher Jewish Day School Gesher Jewish Day School in Fairfax has pushed back its fall start by two weeks to Sept. 8 to allow for additional facility training and building renovations. Head of School Aviva Walls said the school is knocking down walls to enlarge classrooms. That will leave fewer rooms, but more space for social distancing.
Gesher is also upgrading its ventilation system, and buying PPE, hand sanitizer dispensers and soap. Walls said the school building is large enough to Milton Gottesman Jewish Day School of the Nation’s Capital Milton Gottesman Jewish Day School of the Nation’s Capital plans to hold classes inside as well as virtually, according to Head of School Deborah Skolnick-Einhorn. The school has 475 students enrolled and will start classes on Sept. 1.
Skolnick-Einhorn said the school wants to have pre-K and kindergarten classes meet inside its building, but as of Aug. 7 it hadn’t determined if it can do so safely.
Older students will be outside, and will be organized into groups containing no more than 11 students.
Outside lessons will include hikes, nature-inspired
scientifi c exploration and team-building challenges. To increase outdoor space, the school plans to rent camps and parks that would otherwise not be in use, Skolnick-Einhorn said.
What if it rains? Or snows?
The school will require health screenings for students and sta before any outdoor program. Temperatures will be checked upon arrival and frequent handwashing and hand sanitizer use will be part of the day. It goes without saying that mask wearing is required.
“We really like the model of having them learn outdoors. It’s just a really good risk mitigation for them and for the teachers,” Skolnick-Einhorn said. “We have gotten really beautiful support from our community. What I keep hearing is we understand how complex this decision is. We understand there’s no good answer. There’s no answer that will make everyone happy. But people seem to really appreciate that we’re going an unusual route.” Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School CESJDS in Rockville is going entirely virtual for its 916 students. Classes will begin Sept. 1 and Malkus said students will be taught via livesteam and from recorded video lessons. The videos will give students and parents more fl exibility in when to study.
He added that the school is going this route because some families and faculty raised health concerns. “I have a lot of families who want the school to be cautious,” Malkus said. “And we want to make sure that they’re comfortable returning.”
Melvin J. Berman Hebrew Academy Melvin J. Berman Hebrew Academy in Rockville also will be all virtual when classes begin on Aug. 31.
The school will implement an expanded version of the program it launched in the spring for its 650 students, said Sarah Sicherman, director of marketing and communications.
“Basically we try to create an experience that was as
similar to a school day as possible,” Sicherman said
Students taught under the “Berman at Home 2.0” model will be instructed through a four-day schedule via Zoom. Berman’s preschool and kindergarten will open for in-person instruction. Sicherman said the school is also exploring small group outdoor activities.
Virtual learning does have its upside, Sicherman said. Nobody has to worry about how far they are from anyone else, or wear a mask. But it is harder for teachers to connect with their students.
“It’s not the same as seeing your child’s face in person and being in the classroom with them and forming that connection,” she said. “It’s hard to accept that this
is where we are, but I think people are trying to make the most of it.”
Winter is coming At the same time, the schools are working on plans for how they’re going to transition classes back into their buildings. Earlier this summer, Berman was planning on having in-person classes in the fall. Those plans fell through on Aug. 5, when Montgomery County Health O cer Travis Gayles prohibited private and religious schools from opening until Oct. 1. Even though the order was rescinded, Berman decided to stick with distance learning, at least for the fall.
Berman plans indoor instruction in the winter if allowed by state and county guidelines. Students and teachers will wear masks while inside the building, according to a document Berman released in July. Classrooms will be set up to accommodate six feet between each student. Dismissal times will be staggered to keep everyone from crowding hallways at the same time. Milton has plans to bring students back indoors incrementally, according to Skolnick-Einhorn. CESJDS plans to review conditions in November and, if possible, begin the transition back into its building starting with the youngest students, according to Malkus. The school is looking into a model similar to Berman’s, where students would have indoor instruction depending on their grade level by the day or week while the rest are taught virtually. Like schools everywhere, Jewish day schools in the Washington area have spent the last half year improvising, adapting. In preparing for a new school year, they’ve made plans they may never use as they balance their mandate to teach with their need to keep the school community safe.
All of it will be put to the test at the end of this month. WJW
Other area day schools did not respond to requests for interviews for this article. They include: Leo Bernstein Jewish Academy of Fine Arts, Yeshiva of Greater Washington and Torah School of Greater Washington.
eschucht@midatlanticmedia.com @EricSchucht
arts & culture LAURA ZAM TAKES ON SEXUAL HEALING IN
By Lisa Traiger Arts Correspondent
Laura Zam hated sex. With a passion. The District-based solo performer, writer, public speaker and, most recently, sexuality educator su ered for decades from painful intercourse, but su ered even more from not talking about it.
“We [women] don’t talk much about sex,” she acknowledged. “One reason is that we think there’s something wrong with us … and feel it’s a shameful thing to bring up, especially if we’re in a partnered relationship” and privacy is a consideration.
These days, she’s found her voice, and her pleasure. Zam, 57, learned much on her years-long journey to sexual healing, which she originally recounted in “Married Sex,” a 2012 one-woman play that premiered at Theater J, before moving to New York and other locales.
This spring, she returned to her exploration of the sex industrial complex — a years-long investigation that took her into EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, a therapy used in trauma victims) and EFT (emotional freedom techniques, using acupuncture-like touch points), a hypnotist, a tantric sex coach, trauma therapy, group couples’ workshops, a pelvic floor physical therapist and a range of gynecologists for her troubling diagnosis of vaginismus.
The result is “The Pleasure Plan: One Woman’s Search for Sexual Healing,” a bright pink-covered book by Zam that is both an autobiographical confessional and self-help manual about her quest for sexual healing. She wrote it to empower women to speak up, seek help and take charge of their sexual health, and their sexual pleasure.
In Zam’s breezy, frank — and sometimes explicit — prose she shares her deepest pains, traumas and intimate moments, in the bedroom, the examining room and the therapy o ce. “I decided I was going to write about this issue because “I decided I was going to write about this issue because I just saw it as an opportunity to heal myself, to force myself to heal,” Laura Zam says. Photo by Matthew Worden I just saw it as an opportunity to heal while her father su ered from untreated myself, to force myself to heal,” she said. depression that kept him isolated from “As a performer, I knew how to make art. his family for much of her youth; these I didn’t know how to heal myself of this experiences haunted her for decades. past trauma or whatever it was that was In fact, while she had a few boyfriends a ecting me.” over the years, she didn’t marry until 46,
In the book, Zam recounts her child- partly, she admitted, because of e ects hood history of sexual abuse — two from residual trauma. “As Jews, we have pedophiles who lived on her Brooklyn a complicated relationship with trauma. street, and a teenage handyman Individually we have our own traumas all molested her at a young age. that we’re dealing with … and then The vague memories and flashbacks how are those traumas and processes continued to weave in and out of her informed by this collective Jewish subconscious over ensuing decades, trauma?” she wondered. marring her intimate relationships. “There are some old ways of thinking
Zam also experienced generational about trauma,” Zam said, “because … the trauma: Her mother survived the Lodz Jewish people are trauma survivors. Of ghetto, two concentration camps, course, the biggest trauma survivors are including Auschwitz, and a death march, Holocaust survivors.” She alludes to her mother, noting that treatment of trauma and PTSD in the post-war 1950s and ‘60s was often inadequate or nonexistent. “My mother never went to therapy,” she noted, “but when I was in my 20s, I did. But even I thought it would be bizarre for my mother to go to therapy and talk about Nazis,” when Zam said she used therapy to talk about boyfriends, work problems and other problems a woman in her 20s faced.
But while traumatic memories thread through her book, it’s a purposefully light and uplifting read. “I took this risk. It was an experiment to create this first as a play, to see where it would take me.”
She called the result miraculous. “It gave me courage to step outside of the morass and the confusion and pain of [the diagnosis]. It gave me an ability to look at things from a playful angle, an improvisational angle, a creative angle, a highly imaginative angle, a humor angle.”
Zam hopes that women, young, middleaged and older can find ways to connect with her story and with their own bodies: “First understand what … pleasure is for you … and own your pleasure.” WJW
“The Pleasure Plan: One Woman’s Search for Sexual Healing” by Laura Zam, published by Health Communications Inc. and distributed by Simon & Schuster. For information on Zam’s work or to order, visit: laurazam.com.
ICELANDIC JEWISH COOKIES: A dessert with a fascinating story to tell
By Rachel Ringler
You’ve heard of the wandering Jew, but have you heard of the wandering Jewish cookie?
As Jews move from country to country, they pick up recipes, spices and dishes along the way. Sometimes, even after a Jewish community is no more, their food remains, an echo of a world that once was. Such is the case of the “Jewish cookie” from Iceland.
Recently I learned of a cookbook, “The Culinary Saga of New Iceland, Recipes From the Shores of Lake Winnipeg,” compiled by Kristin Olafson Jenkyns, a writer with forbearers from Iceland. Her book documents the history and culinary traditions of immigrants from Iceland who settled in North America at the end of the 19th century. Many of them moved to Manitoba, Canada, on Lake Winnipeg, where they formed a community that came to be known as “New Iceland.” In the section of the book titled “Cakes and Cookies,” following classic Icelandic foods like skyr, smoked fish and brown bread, are recipes for cookies traditionally eaten on Christmas. Their name in Icelandic is gyðingakökur, which translates to “Jewish cookie.”
How did “Jewish” cookies end up in a cookbook filled with the food of Icelandic immigrants to the New World? You can be sure that there weren’t many, if any, Jews among those settlers 150 years ago. Yet there are three recipes for Jewish cookies nestled between other traditional sweets like Vinarterta and ginger cookies.
Olafson Jenkyns is not sure how they came to be part of the culinary canon of the New Icelanders. Her guess is that the Jewish cookies came to Iceland by way of Denmark. For hundreds of years, Iceland was closely tied to Denmark; traders and merchants, some of them Jewish, moved back and forth between the two countries. Perhaps the cookies came via that trade route.
And how did those “Jewish” cookies land in Denmark in the first place? According to Gil Marks, author of Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, Jewish butter cookies originated in Holland. Many of the Jews who were expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 15th and 16th centuries found a safe haven in Holland. There they merged, “…their Moorish-influenced Iberian fare with the local Scandinavian cuisine. Instead of olive oil, they used the butter found in great quantity in Dutch cookery to create small rich morsels, still called Joodse boterkoeke (Jewish butter cookie) in Holland.” Until today, Dutch Jews serve those cookies on Hanukkah and Shavuot and at other dairy meals.
From Holland, the cookies spread to Denmark where they became a traditional pre-Christmas treat.
As is the case with all immigrants, when the Icelanders left their homeland in 1875 for the New World and created the community of New Iceland in Canada, they brought their culinary traditions with them. Gyðingakökur were part of that tradition. “The cookies must have been popular for them to have made it from Denmark to Iceland to New Iceland,” said Olafson Jenkyns.
In scouring through old cookbooks from the New Iceland community, Olafson Jenkyns found these three recipes for Jewish cookies – slightly di erent one from the next but all most definitely known as “Jewish.” One recipe was from a cookbook, circa 1915, from Reykjavik, Iceland. The other two came from community cookbooks from New Iceland from the middle of the 20th century. In Gil Marks’ book, the Jodekager, or Jewish cookie recipe, was attributed to Denmark. His recipe is very similar to the Icelandic ones — all have lots of butter, all are rolled out into a thin dough, and then cut into rounds. And all are topped with a wash and a sweetener that combines sugar and nuts.
Are the cookies Icelandic? Canadian? Dutch? Or Danish? No matter where you find them, the name is the same, hearkening back to a Jewish presence and the Jewish bakers who created them.
This recipe for gyðingakökur comes from “The Culinary Sage of New Iceland, Recipes From the Shores of Lake Winnipeg.”
Ingredients For the dough 2 ½ cups flour ½ teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon ground cardamom ¾ cup butter, cut into ½ inch cubes 1 egg For the topping: 1 cup cold, strong co ee 1 cup blanched slivered almonds, coarsely chopped 1 cup crushed sugar lumps (coarse bits, not fine)
Directions
Stir flour, salt, and cardamom together.
Work the butter into the flour mixture by rubbing it between your fingers, as if you were making a pie crust.
Beat egg with a fork and add to dough. Combine well.
Wrap in wax paper. Chill thoroughly (at least 1 hour) until firm.
Roll out dough on wax paper until 1/8 inch thick. Cut in 1 ½ inch rounds with a cutter. Brush tops with co ee; mix the almonds and sugar and sprinkle generously on top. Press down gently with your hand to help the almond-sugar mixture stick. Place on greased baking sheets and bake at 350 degrees for about 12 minutes or until lightly golden brown. WJW
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OF CENTRAL MA RY LAN D More than a meal ™
The new foodie normal Instead of travel and tours, one-on-one chef video lessons
By Karen Chernick
TEL AVIV — The reservations were rolling in, and Inbal Baum was preparing for her busiest summer yet of food tours through Israel’s famed open-air food markets. Her decade-old tour company and its team of more than 20 guides were ready to lead thousands of international guests to markets in places like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where they would try curated samples of foods ranging from hummus and bourekas to lachoch bread and ma’amoul cookies.
That was before the coronavirus pandemic.
First, the arrivals of tourists slowed. Then restaurants closed. Then, fi nally, so did the markets.
Baum’s company, called Delicious Israel, was out of work. And yet, she noticed that people seemed more interested in food than usual — they just weren’t fl ying anywhere to try new dishes. Instead, they were cooking, baking and pickling in their home kitchens nonstop.
So Baum thought of another avenue to reach her foodie clientele while simultaneously supporting other food industry professionals who, like herself, found themselves fl oundering overnight: In late May she launched Delicious Experiences, a website that connects home cooks with leading chefs and culinary experts (mostly U.S.-based, some international) for one-on-one private workshops via video chat.
The platform o ers tailored classes in cooking, baking, mixology, cake decorating and food photography. Many of the instructors are Jewish, and many of the courses are Jewish-themed.
When Baum compiled a wish list of culinary celebrities and started reaching out to potential instructors, she was surprised by how many of them said yes.
Instructors include Michelin Star restaurateur and sommelier Etheliya Hananova, James Beard Award-
Shoppers are back at Israeli outdoor markets, such as this one in Tzfat, pictured July 15, 2020, but Delicious Experiences lives on.
Photo by David Cohen/Flash90 winner Nate Appleman, and a range of Israeli chefs, including Nir Mesika, Roy Ner and spice maven Lior Lev Sercarz.
Kevin Fink, a Texas-based chef on the platform, says that classes are “always something that I get asked to do, and traditionally, we just don’t have time.” In the age of COVID-19, reaching clients online is more feasible for some chefs.
Beyond the time factor, these types of live private experiences were never a high priority in the food industry.
“It’s actually something that’s super uncommon in the food world. Well, was uncommon,” adds New Yorkbased Jake Cohen, another chef on the platform and author of the upcoming cookbook “Jew-ish: A Cookbook: Reinvented Recipes from a Modern Mensch.” “It’s something that’s changed drastically. Almost overnight we saw this complete shift in how people reacted to food and what they were craving.”
Shiry Yosef, an entrepreneur in Tel Aviv who loves drinking cocktails at bars and restaurants but had never made one at home, tried a craft mixology class on Delicious Experiences with Singapore-based bartender Joseph Haywood. They decided to focus on gin and whisky.
When Baum tried the cocktail class herself, she also felt it was an advantage being in her own kitchen — despite the fact that she doesn’t have any cocktail-making tools.
Baum argues that doing these workshops at home, in the same kitchen clients use daily, makes them much more likely to recreate the dishes later. She claims, as someone who regularly takes cooking classes overseas when she travels, that the dishes are always tricky to reproduce at home since you never have the same tools or ingredients.
“But all of a sudden, when you do it in your kitchen, you learn that you don’t need a rolling pin — you can actually just use a wine bottle or a paper towel thing,” she said. “Or, in Israel we don’t have half-and-half — it doesn’t matter. It’s something that a recipe’s not going to tell you. When there’s a chef on the other side they’ll tell you what to mix, part cream, part whatever.”
Israel’s markets have opened back up again, despite a rise in COVID-19 cases across the country — but what people want has changed, Baum says. Going out to restaurants doesn’t seem to hold quite the same appeal.
Cohen sees being a foodie as meaning something di erent now.
“This new world has created an environment in which, if anyone prioritized good food in their life [before], that means that now they have to prioritize learning how to cook at home,” he said. WJW
