Jewish News Supplement - Celebrating Women & Moms, 4.24.23

C e lebratingWomen & Moms

Dear Readers,

Celebrating women – moms, mentors, colleagues, and friends – is always important, but especially appropriate as we approach Mother’s Day next month.

I’ve been fortunate to have had some pretty spectacular women in my life. . . starting with the first one I met, my mom. Plenty of others – grandmothers, aunts, cousins, family friends – each found a way to teach, influence, and share their love with me. Then came my own friends (many that are lifers) and the best. . . my daughters.

Of course, I’m not alone in appreciating wonderful women. Beginning on page 15, Simon, Dustin, and Erica Fink, Amy Weinstein, and Jennie Hurtwitz Tabakin, pay tributes to their mothers, Kim Simon Fink, Ellen Wagner, and Sherrill Hurwitz, and I offer one to my mentor, Marilyn Goldman.

As a Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and a martini fan, the article about the Mrs. Maisel-themed martini on page 20 was particularly fun for me to read. Think of the possibilities of creating personality-inspired drinks to toast a celebrant. What would yours be? Mine would probably include Old Bay – I’m a Norfolk native who loves seafood, heat, and spice.

All of us at Jewish News hope your Mother’s Day celebration (as the celebrant or celebrator) is filled with laughter, peace, love, and appreciation.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Terri Denison Editor

I nspirations from moms and mentors

The question might seem easy, but it can be a tricky one: What do you admire about or have learned from your mom or mentor? Jewish News asked a few people and received wide-ranging and creative responses... certainly a tribute to the women featured here. How would you respond?

Since

Kim Simon Fink: Perpetual action. . . and motione

Simon, Dustin, and Erica Fink

Kim is Mother.

Kim is a season unto herself.

Kim is a sister of perpetual action.

She is always working on the next chapter and never plays by the book.

She bore and broke out three children in her own image–a storyteller, a dancer, and a loyalist–mothered them, smothered them, and let them free.

She broadcast to the world stories of sailors and aeronauts.

She charges the community to give and live large. She flies and skis and runs and bikes and swims and fights and whips us all into a frenzy of charactered delight that somehow still leaves space for her to comfort us, hold us, or simply sit with us.

Kim tells you to be yourself and let the sun shine in.

Kim loves us, each, and all together.

Kim is Mother.

•

•Child

•

•

Erica, Dustin, Simon, and Kim Fink.

Terri Denison

With a personality as fiery as her signature red hair, Marilyn Wall Goldman was my first real boss and mentor, and then, my colleague and friend.

In the summer of 1978, Dean Goldman suggested I call his mom, as I was looking for a summer internship and she was the editor of Tidewater Virginian, a business magazine owned by the area chambers of commerce. She hired me for the grand sum of $100 per month, though I also received college credit and learned more than any paycheck mattered. Home from Washington, DC for a visit in January of 1980, I contacted Marilyn to have lunch . . . just to catch up. Marilyn turned that Smith & Welton Tea Room lunch into a five-hour meeting where she talked me into joining the magazine staff as assistant editor.

My mom, Helen Koltun, never shy about anything that concerned me, phoned Marilyn to thank her and tell her it was one of her happiest days as I had been steadfast about living in D.C. and certainly not returning to Norfolk.

Convincing me to leave D.C. is just a small example of her persuasive powers.

Marilyn knew how to conduct an

Women M arilyn Goldman: A mentor for life

interview and write a compelling story and how to coach other writers. She was never satisfied with the status quo and found new sources of revenue to expand the magazine, which was the basis for the now Richmond-based Virginia Business magazine. Establishing relationships with artists, photographers, advertising agencies, and printers were part of her job, and she did them all well. And she taught me how to do it all. In fact, some of Marilyn’s techniques I continue to employ today.

In addition to the magazine, Marilyn took on social justice causes and brought me along to living room meetings and hotel ballroom events. Just in my early 20s, Marilyn sent me to meet and mingle with the movers and shakers of the day. Her confidence of my abilities instilled some in me.

Ironically, prior to joining Tidewater Virginian, Marilyn served as editor of what is now Jewish News. When I became editor of Jewish News, on several occasions she wrote articles at my request and offered up suggestions of topics for special sections on her own.

Our birthdays were always met with lunch celebrations, sometimes with our friend, Susan Horton, who also worked at Tidewater Virginian.

No matter her age (or mine), Marilyn was always free with her advice and her interest in what was happening in my life, as well as in my daughters’. Of course, it’s easy to listen to praise for your children’s accomplishments, but Marilyn had a way of being “official” about it, from an expert point-of-view, making it feel honest.

One never knows how that special person, that mentor, will appear and how long the connection will last and what that person’s impact will be. Marilyn taught me how to be an editor and she brought me back home. I’m grateful she was in life until Friday, April 14 when she passed away at 94.

Susan Horton, Marilyn Goldman, and Terri Denison in 2017.

Ellen Wagner: A generous example

Amy Weinstein

If I had to sum up my mother in one word, it would be generous. My mom, Ellen Wagner, is generous with her love, her time, and her knowledge. She is always willing to open her home to anyone who might be alone for the holidays, she has a hard time saying no to volunteer commitments, and she loves her grandkids as much as she loves me and my brothers (perhaps even more!).

My dad once told me that everything good he has in his life, he has because of my mom – I’m not sure she has heard him say that, but I fully agree.

My mother is my sounding board, my biggest cheerleader, my personal shopper, and my emergency back-up for childcare. She is my role model and her commitment to her community and synagogue set the stage for me – I naturally fell into Jewish communal service and development because my mom taught me to be generous, just as she still is today.

Ellen Wagner, and Dani and Amy Weinstein.

Sherrill Hurwitz: Excuses not permitted

Jennie Hurwitz Tabakin

My mom raised me with help from her mom, my Bubbie, at a time when there were not as many successful single parent households as there are now. She always wanted me to succeed without regard for what I may have been missing in my life and never wanted me to use what I didn’t have as an excuse for failure.

My mom was always a hard worker. I believe she was 12 years old when she started her first job and, in my lifetime, she often worked multiple jobs at once so that she could provide for me. Notably she also worked full time throughout undergraduate and graduate school at Old Dominion, so I guess I would say that she did not accept excuses for herself either.

From her various jobs, she knows people in many different fields and never meets a stranger. My mom can talk to anyone. She used to say that her father said if you dropped Sherrill off in the middle of China, she’d find her way to the emperor. That is one trait that I wish I had more of. She is always very confident and has been unafraid to take on new challenges. Fortunately, this is something that I am already seeing in my children, and I hope they will continue to grow in their confidence.

Hedda Kleinfeld Schachter, Holocaust survivor and bridal empire builder

Before Say Yes to the Dress brought Kleinfeld Bridal to the attention of more than 1.5 million households across America every week, a Holocaust survivor named Hedda Kleinfeld revolutionized the bridal industry, bringing it to life with European designer gowns.

The iconic bridal store, which today boasts about 200 employees, began as an offshoot of Kleinfeld’s father Isidor’s Viennese fur business. Starting in the late 1960s and for the next several decades, Hedda ran Kleinfeld Bridal with her husband Jack Schachter, a talented fur cutter employed by her father.

Nicknamed “Miss Hedda,” Kleinfeld’s foresight to shift the family business away from fur and simple special occasion wear to exclusively carrying wedding gowns transformed the small Bay Ridge, Brooklyn storefront into a multi-million-dollar empire.

“She really built Kleinfeld not only as an iconic name, but she left an incredible mark on the whole industry with her vision,” Mara Urshel, one of the current co-owners of Kleinfeld, told WWD.

Hedda Kleinfeld Schachter died in Manhattan on March 29. She was 99.

Hedda Kleinfeld was born in Vienna in 1924 to an upper-middle class secular Jewish family. She had a younger sister, Liane. After

her father was released from the Dachau concentration camp, where he had been imprisoned for trying to cross the border into Belgium with his brother, the family decided to emigrate, initially with fake visas meant to secure passage to Shanghai. But those papers came in too late, so the family headed to Havana, Cuba, where Hedda and Liane spent their teenage years.

That’s where the teenage boys of her youth flirted with her and taught her how to dance — a skill she brought with her all the way to Central Park in 2018 when, on the way to a Park Conservancy gala as her granddaughter’s guest, she danced to a local band playing under the shade of the iconic Wisteria Walk, her granddaughter Ilana Schachter recalls.

Though those early memories of Vienna and her escape to Havana shaped much of her life, she never spoke about them much, even with her family.

“She really tried to suppress those memories and box them up and say that was a past life,” Schachter says. “She did not share a lot of experiences from that time period, but she did have happy memories of being a teenager in Havana, which I can only imagine was quite a trip.”

It’s fitting, then, that her grandmother chose a career centered on weddings.

“I think she appreciated being a part

of an industry that was about celebration,” Schachter says.

Beginning in the 1990s, the Kleinfeld company changed hands a few times, according to a company history, and in 2004 construction began on a 35,000-square-foot store on West 20th St. That’s the location frequently featured in the popular TLC show Say Yes to the Dress — in which experts help brides find their perfect gown. The show brought the store’s name into millions of homes. But one home that it never made its way into was that of Hedda Kleinfeld.

“She never saw one episode,” Schachter recalls while laughing. “She had no interest. But she wasn’t bothered by it.”

Another “never” that Schachter says her grandmother couldn’t quite get into, despite being quite computer savvy (she was an early adopter of AOL Instant Messenger), was online shopping.

“Online shopping was never going to happen for her,” she says. “You bought things in the store, you felt them in your hands, you assessed the quality and you had to see what it looked like on your body. And then imagine buying somethingand not putting it on your body.”

Clothing was “sacred” to Kleinfeld.

Kleinfeld’s husband Jack died in 2008. She is survived by their sons, Ronald and Robert.

Jennie Hurwitz Tabakin and Sherrill Hurwitz on a UJFT mission to Prague and Budapest in 2013.

Women I tried a ‘Mrs. Maisel’ pastrami martini. Unlike Midge, I’m speechless.

Julia Gergely

(New York Jewish Week)

The martini kit arrives in a bright pink box. Nestled among strings of hot pink confetti are two martini glasses and a shaker, two olives, toothpicks, two single-serving bottles of gin and vermouth, pastrami oil, and pastrami spices.

What’s that? Pastrami? Martini? Together? Yes, you read it right.

The “Maisel Tov” Martini kit is a specialty item dreamed up by the marketing teams of GrubHub and Amazon Prime to celebrate the premiere of the fifth and final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which began airing on April 14. Starring Rachel Brosnahan as the titular Midge Maisel, the series is set in the very-Jewish world of New York City nightclub entertainers in the late 1950s and early ’60s.

The kit is part of a yearlong “Tune In & Takeout” promotion between the two companies pairing foods with popular shows and movies, said GrubHub in a press release.

Crafted by the mixologist Pamela

Wiznitzer, the pastrami-flavored martini combines “a taste of Midge’s two favorite things, Jewish deli fare and a stiff drink.” Why do they need to be combined in one cocktail? Why not just a regular martini and deli fare on the side? I have no idea, but in the name of journalism I knew I had to try it.

First of all, the packaging was adorable. Everything was labeled with the show’s title in its signature cheery font, and the bright pink packaging was a fun homage to Midge’s favorite color.

Per a publicist’s email, “The beverage marries hints of juniper from gin with the briny flavors of black pepper, coriander and caraway classically found in a pastrami sandwich.” Still, they note, the beverage is vegetarian.

After unpacking everything from the box, it was time to make the martini. For some reason, I was nervous. I don’t drink martinis often, nor do I eat pastrami on the reg, but as I poured the pre-made cocktail into the martini shaker and added a few drops of the pastrami oil, I became increasingly conscious of the fact that my life would soon be divided into a “Before” and

After” period.

Perhaps a Shehechiyanu blessing (for new beginnings) was in order. Certainly, at least a L’chaim.

As I sipped the martini, I was left speechless. Like I said, I’m no martini or pastrami expert, so I can’t say if this was the best version of either one. The cocktail was definitely strong and had a savory, meaty taste to it. The oil and spices cut the taste of the alcohol in a surprising way. I felt like I had taken a bite of a sandwich and then drunk a martini to wash it down.

I could imagine sipping it slowly at The Gaslight Café in the West Village while Midge, a budding stand-up comic, shocks and delights me with her set. In fact, I can imagine Midge might have a whole bit dedicated to the drink while her agent Susie Myerson (Alex Borstein) guzzles it backstage. –

Editor’s Note: The sad news for Tidewater residents is that the Maisel Tov Martini is only available in Manhattan. Could this be a challenge for local bartenders?!?