- The last few times I've been to an event at an area synagogue, I have seen a police cruiser with an officer parked outside the front door. I take this to mean that our neighbors who worship there, and celebrate the transition into adulthood of their young people there, do not feel safe in our community, and they see no choice but to arrange for highly visible and immediately present protection for themselves and the ones they love, even as they quietly and peacefully practice the healing and affirming rituals of their faith.#
- I was raised Roman Catholic, and I remember as a young adult the first time I had the happy experience of hearing a peer talk about the significance to him of his Jewish identity. I know exactly where I was standing, in the rose potting shed of Westover Greenhouses in University City, Missouri. Out the shed door we would see members of the community walking to their worship services sometimes, I also recall.#
- The reason those moments listening to Carl there stayed with me since early 1974, I think, are three:#
- 1. He spoke eloquently about something that mattered to him, and that's always memorable.#
- 2. There was enough ease among the handful of crew members back there, centering a bare root rose in the center of a paper pot, scooping soil and a few crumbs of fertilizer in around it, and tamping the soil hard with something like a wooden baton until the pot could be safely moved without falling apart. Long hours of work in the dim space, radio filling some of the time, but slowly conversations opening up about things we cared about. #
- 3. And most of all, at nineteen I saw from Carl's monologue that my own upbringing in the next suburb over had been far more notably isolating, culturally isolating, than I had guessed until that moment. It was a country, I now saw, where people did not know each other.#
- And in not knowing each other, we miss beautiful things. About a year ago a friend of mine passed away, deep in her eighties. In Jewish tradition, there was a graveside service mainly for family that same day, which I heard about later. I have visited the cemetery a number of times since then.#
- Passing the gate and walking among the stones, I see some family names I never knew before, and names of people of accomplishment in our community. Here and there, on the back of a stone, a medallion indicates that someone survived the Holocaust. On many of the stones, along the curve of the top, pebbles have been placed by visitors. This tradition was new to me not so long ago, but I'm very fond of it. As you look across the rows of stones, you see evidence of dozens of times that people have come to visit their lost friends and family members. One or two or three pebbles on this stone, perhaps a dozen on that one, many but not all of the stones bearing evidence of those who have come to visit and remember.#
- It's a quiet, beautiful ritual, isn't it? I believe that my friend's stone will be placed by her grave sometime in the next month or so. Not far away, Mr. Simon, who fled Germany when he was in high school and who I knew when he was nearly ninety, after a business career and decades of generous philanthropy. My own friend's husband, and her son who died young. Her mother, who when Nazi sympathizers beat her sibling Hans to death took a train across Czechoslovakia to another town to inform their mother of his death in person. And when she arrived there, there was no sign of her mother nor any of the other elders who lived in that home, and none of the terrified neighbors on the street would answer the door. Around that time the pretty lies about the nearby camp or ghetto called Theresienstadt began to be published as a ruse to outside countries. And this poor woman took the train back home, having failed to find or even find word of her own mother, so few days after the murder of her brother Hans. No one knows where the lost elder died; my friend's mother is buried here in South Bend. #
- It's a meditative space, under old trees, rows and rows of stones, a small building for ceremonies in the center. I will check back soon. Passing through the gate on foot, I'll pick up a few pebbles from the mass of them arrayed in a bed around the base of one of the trees, and walk over and leave one on the stones of those people I know, or whose story I know. And soon, there will be a stone for the person I worked with as she shaped her book about the family's peril in Czechoslovakia in those years, and how it shaped her, and what she held onto for wisdom along the way. She felt that she wasn't done meditating on those years even in the final decade of her life, and so she researched and wrote her first book, her memoir. We worked for a long time to bring the book into print. I asked her one day if it was okay to think that in the process we had become friends, and she said yes. Most of all, I will leave a pebble on her marker.#
- After the book was completed, she read from the book's introduction in this very short video containing pictures of some of those people, from those years. #
- It's dangerous to write about someone else's traditions. I hope I haven't bungled something here.#
- The last few times I've been to an event at an area synagogue, I have seen a police cruiser with an officer parked outside the front door. I take this to mean that our neighbors who worship there, and celebrate the transition into adulthood of their young people there, do not feel safe in our community, and they see no choice but to arrange for highly visible and immediately present protection for themselves and the ones they love, even as they quietly and peacefully practice the healing and affirming rituals of their faith.#
- I was raised Roman Catholic, and I remember as a young adult the first time I had the happy experience of hearing a peer talk about the significance to him of his Jewish identity. I know exactly where I was standing, in the rose potting shed of Westover Greenhouses in University City, Missouri. Out the shed door we would see members of the community walking to their worship services sometimes, I also recall.#
- The reason those moments listening to Carl there stayed with me since early 1974, I think, are three:#
- 1. He spoke eloquently about something that mattered to him, and that's always memorable.#
- 2. There was enough ease among the handful of crew members back there, centering a bare root rose in the center of a paper pot, scooping soil and a few crumbs of fertilizer in around it, and tamping the soil hard with something like a wooden baton until the pot could be safely moved without falling apart. Long hours of work in the dim space, radio filling some of the time, but slowly conversations opening up about things we cared about. #
- 3. And most of all, at nineteen I saw from Carl's monologue that my own upbringing in the next suburb over had been far more notably isolating, culturally isolating, than I had guessed until that moment. It was a country, I now saw, where people did not know each other.#
- And in not knowing each other, we miss beautiful things. About a year ago a friend of mine passed away, deep in her eighties. In Jewish tradition, there was a graveside service mainly for family that same day, which I heard about later. I have visited the cemetery a number of times since then.#
- Passing the gate and walking among the stones, I see some family names I never knew before, and names of people of accomplishment in our community. Here and there, on the back of a stone, a medallion indicates that someone survived the Holocaust. On many of the stones, along the curve of the top, pebbles have been placed by visitors. This tradition was new to me not so long ago, but I'm very fond of it. As you look across the rows of stones, you see evidence of dozens of times that people have come to visit their lost friends and family members. One or two or three pebbles on this stone, perhaps a dozen on that one, many but not all of the stones bearing evidence of those who have come to visit and remember.#
- It's a quiet, beautiful ritual, isn't it? I believe that my friend's stone will be placed by her grave sometime in the next month or so. Not far away, Mr. Simon, who fled Germany when he was in high school and who I knew when he was nearly ninety, after a business career and decades of generous philanthropy. My own friend's husband, and her son who died young. Her mother, who when Nazi sympathizers beat her sibling Hans to death took a train across Czechoslovakia to another town to inform their mother of his death in person. And when she arrived there, there was no sign of her mother nor any of the other elders who lived in that home, and none of the terrified neighbors on the street would answer the door. Around that time the pretty lies about the nearby camp or ghetto called Theresienstadt began to be published as a ruse to outside countries. And this poor woman took the train back home, having failed to find or even find word of her own mother, so few days after the murder of her brother Hans. No one knows where the lost elder died; my friend's mother is buried here in South Bend. #
- It's a meditative space, under old trees, rows and rows of stones, a small building for ceremonies in the center. I will check back soon. Passing through the gate on foot, I'll pick up a few pebbles from the mass of them arrayed in a bed around the base of one of the trees, and walk over and leave one on the stones of those people I know, or whose story I know. And soon, there will be a stone for the person I worked with as she shaped her book about the family's peril in Czechoslovakia in those years, and how it shaped her, and what she held onto for wisdom along the way. She felt that she wasn't done meditating on those years even in the final decade of her life, and so she researched and wrote her first book, her memoir. We worked for a long time to bring the book into print. I asked her one day if it was okay to think that in the process we had become friends, and she said yes. Most of all, I will leave a pebble on her marker.#
- After the book was completed, she read from the book's introduction in this very short video containing pictures of some of those people, from those years. #
- It's dangerous to write about someone else's traditions. I hope I haven't bungled something here.#