One of the things I find most rewarding as an educator is when a student finally “gets it” – that moment when the eyes light up with understanding, the face animates, and the person becomes truly engaged in the lesson. This holds true whether I am teaching language...

On a trip to visit my father and stepmother in 1976, I brought a cassette recorder and half a dozen blank cassettes with the intention of interviewing Dad. The first evening after dinner I brought it down to where Dad was sitting, reading the Yiddish edition of...

I remember reading The Diary of Anne Frank as a tween and being drawn to her positivity and hopefulness despite the constant fear of discovery. Later, in college, I read Dr. Victor Frankl’s memoir Man’s Search for Meaning for a psychology class. That book, with its...

At the beginning of 2025, we saw a drastic switch in policy and national attitude. As expected with the inauguration of a new president, we were attempting to adjust. As the changes became more intense, I found myself participating where I could. I attended a protest...

My father was born in Essen, Germany in 1926. He moved to Czechoslovakia in 1933 with his parents and sister to escape Nazi rule.  Unfortunately, the "escape" only lasted until 1939 when Germans invaded Czechoslovakia. Luckily, my grandfather was on a business trip to...

Hospitals are not usually known for being ideal performance venues. Yet, there I was, waiting to be taken to surgery, telling one of my Holocaust stories. The oddest part, though, was the reaction I received; it was perhaps the best one I have ever gotten. As I lay...

“There are two things they can never take from you — your intelligence, and your memories.”  Aside from this admonition, I received precious little of my father’s story during his short lifetime. He never spoke outright of his experience as a child in Europe during...

Why do I tell Holocaust stories? For a long time, I could not say. I could talk about how these stories resonated with me, but I could not explain why. I could talk about the need to preserve this history and to learn from it, but not why I felt the need to tell these...

My aging mother began to need more help just as I was retiring from 32 years of pediatric practice. There are some transferable skills between pediatrics and geriatrics, and I applied them to the care of my mother. Taking care of her, I began to realize that not only...

The date was April 27, 2014. The place, Beth Israel Synagogue in Salisbury, MD, the synagogue that our family had belonged to since moving to Salisbury in 1950, the year before I was born. The event was the annual Yom HaShoah program, which my father, who survived the...