Recycling, Don't People Read?

Here in Shiloh, recycling is on the "honor system." It's not like what my parents had to deal with in Great Neck, where people had a multitude of color-coded trash cans. Each can was for a different type of trash, and each can had a different day to be put in an easily accessible place. They also had to tie down the lids, or animals would enter and spread the garbage all over the place. They could also be fined for filling the cans incorrectly. And if they missed the day, they'd be stuck with the trash.

I like it much better here. People are responsible for putting their recycling trash in the correct containers. Some people just use the giant garbage and don't recycle.  But many of us make an effort to recycle our trash.

There are large garbage containers all over the neighborhood and smaller orange ones for Some, like this one for papers and light cartons, such as cereal boxes, have easy to read labels. Other containers are much older, and the labels have long worn off.

Of course, there are people who don't pay attention and fill all the receptacles with whatever, instead of carefully following instructions. Today I saw a milk carton sticking out of the paper bin. So I carefully read the instructions. After listing all the permitted things, paper, letters, cereal/food/cometic/medicine boxes... very clearly it says:

Don't throw in milk and juice cartons!

Prom Memories

A Facebook friend asked if anyone had attended a prom, and I found myself answering. This is what I said:

I was at a few, nothing very enjoyable. Maybe because I wasn't asked by anyone I cared to be with. It's a very awkward time for those who aren't really dating anyone. Lots of pressure to make parents happy and not look like the kid is a reject. All of my invitations were to make the guy feel accepted. Twice I went with school paper's editor, whose mutual friend fixed us up, because he had to show to mine, jr and his sr. A couple of years before jrs from a nearby school needed dates to show and didn't have gfs, so my friend and I got "drafted." My hs stopped them 3 years after I graduated, because the kids thought it stupid and old-fashioned.

• Were there proms in your day and school? 
• Did you go? 
• What memories, pro or con, pleasant or nightmarish do you have?

Here's my high school yearbook photo:

Great Neck North 1967
GNN67

Great Neck's Cafe Kriza, Even Better than Before

Rather deja vu...

My parents officially left Great Neck in 2010, moved to Arizona and sold their house. From October, 2009 until June, 2010, my father lived with us in Israel. You can read some of the posts I wrote about that by clicking  saga of taking care of my elderly father. Unexpectedly, a few weeks ago, I found myself again visiting a family member in the hospital rehab in Manhasset and then in Great Neck needing a kosher restaurant, though not in the whacked out jet-lagged state I had  been almost seven years ago when I first discovered Cafe Kriza.

Lucky Turn, Found The Perfect Restaurant

Salmon, 2009

Salmon, 2016

This time, I arrived in better shape and not alone, and I had already checked the kosher restaurant scene on Middle Neck Road and was glad to see that Cafe Kriza was still there, open and kosher. One thing was the same. I ordered the same meal, Salmon, not that I was aware of it until now when I checked the old blog post. I remember enjoying my meal in 2009, and I enjoyed it this time, too. Both times I requested extra salad instead of the potatoes or rice, which came with the fish. My eating partners were all happy with their selections.

Besides the food being excellent, it's a lovely looking restaurant. I wonder if I'll ever be there again... If you go, please say that I recommended it, thanks.

I enjoyed the lemon in my icy water.

 CAFE KRIZA     45 Middle Neck Road     Great Neck, NY      516 829-1039     www.cafekriza.com

How Did Great Neck, NY, Become a Jewish Orthodox Center?

When my family moved to Great Neck in 1962, the Jewish community in Great Neck was almost totally secular. There were two Reform "temples," a large affluent Conservative one and a very small, poor Orthodox Synagogue led by Rabbi Efraim Wolf. Within a couple of decades, it had metamorphosed into one of the largest and most vibrant Modern Orthodox centers in the world offering a variety of Orthodox synagogues, kosher supermarkets and an enviable choice of kosher restaurants.

As I've written about many times before, as a newly arrived teenager in Great Neck, my parents pushed me into the Synagogue's Teen Club, as it was called, which was also a charter member/chapter of NCSY. That changed my life and brought me to Torah Judaism, but what changed Great Neck?

I'm still best friend with my best friend of the time who took the spiritual journey/life change along with me. We discussed it a few days ago. We agree that Rabbi Wolf was the key player in this by being so unbelievably welcoming to all. For instance, my friend's parents were not members, but she was as welcomed as I was to the youth activities.

As we're both daughters of CPA's we hit on an economic factor in the synagogue's expansion and influence.

Why did my parents end up in an Orthodox shul, after a very satisfied decade plus membership in the Conservative Oakland Jewish Center, Bayside NY? They were rejected by Great Neck's Conservative Temple Israel, which had all the members its sanctuary could handle. Not only wasn't it welcoming of new Jewish families to Great Neck, it rejected us.  Rabbi Wolf and the Great Neck Synagogue picked up the slack, and people like us felt and were fully accepted, even though my parents did not observe the Sabbath, even though our kitchen was traif (not kosher.)

Thank G-d, thank Rabbi Wolf and thanks to the closed door of Temple Israel!

Memories...

Someone I knew from the time I was just a couple of years old has written a book about memory, or the lack of it. She also blogs. Lisa Hirsch was my neighbor in Bell Park Gardens, Bayside, NY and then in Great Neck, NY. Her parents and mine were very close, and I remember the family well.

Lisa and Ruth

Alzheimer's - My Mom My Hero

Her blog and book are about her mother's Alzheimer's and growing lack of memory, coping with it for both of them.

There are so many different types of dementia. And it progress differently in each sufferer. I knew my mother had it and knew that it was getting very bad when she forgot that my son was engaged. The last truly aware thing I heard her say was "beautiful" when looking at a photo of my eldest granddaughter, her eldest great-granddaughter.

So few people who've survived to the ages of Lisa's mother and my father have both physical and mental sharpness and health. Usually at least one, if not both, of those are faulty. How sad.

Why Do People Think I Swim Laps?

Shiloh Swimming Pool

When people hear that I go to the pool for fitness, they take for granted that I swim laps.They are inevitably shocked to hear that I don't swim laps. Actually, I don't even swim, at least not anything that resembles one of the strokes I had been taught well over half a century ago.

And, no, I'm not afraid of the water, not even deep water. I've never had any problems floating and paddling around a pool or lake or whatever for as long as I can remember.

And I certainly had proper swimming lessons, at a Y one year and at all sorts of camps. I was also taught in school. In Great Neck North the junior high school had a pool, and swimming was on the required curriculum.

My head could do the "Crawl" the basic swimming, racing and lap stroke, but somehow, I was so painfully slow and de-energized I could never swim enough lengths or laps or swim quickly enough to graduate from Advanced Beginner. I never, ever passed a "Deep Water Test," the requirement to be permitted into the deeper end of the pool or lake. It didn't matter that I could do the Side Stroke or Elementary Back Stroke for long periods of time. They are both slow relaxing strokes, which I found suited my "swimming style." Of course I did them more slowly than anyone else.

In Junior High we were required to do twenty-five pool lengths of each stroke to pass that part of the required curriculum. I started with the Elementary Back Stroke, and it took me the entire lesson, a lot longer than anyone else. I was so exhausted afterwards that it was decided to exempt me from the requirement.

Here I am over fifty years later, and I probably spend more time in the pool than many who passed Swimming. Nowadays I don't even do the strokes I once loved, because they are bad for my knees. Instead, I dance in the water. I do all sorts of exercises; some I learned and others I've made up.

As a dancer who trained for almost two decades and former dance and sports teacher, I firmly believe that exercise requirements must be flexible. Any activity you do in the water which is more than standing still or floating on some sort of raft is good. The same goes for most any exercise. Fifteen minutes or a few minutes of stretching here and there is better than nothing. It may not be the same as a good workout, but it's definitely worth keeping up!

Enjoy!

I'm not good at waiting

I'm in a strange halachik-Jewish Law- status.  According to our LOR*, I can't start the official pre-funeral mourning or onan, because I'm not part of the funeral planning crew for my mother.  That status will start for me once I'm off to the funeral, to which I'm going alone from here.

my parents a few years ago here in Israel

I've never been good at waiting, nor letting other people make my plans, but now I'm in a "just waiting for orders" situation.  Almost everything has fallen on my sister, part of the package she got when she agreed to have our parents move to Arizona, and she is being assisted in New York, where the funeral will be, by my NY daughter and a cousin, who will host the first stage/night of shiva after the burial.

Today our family is spread out all over the world, doing all sorts of things, but we were once your typical New York Jewish family.  Both of my parents were the first generation to be born in America.  They (and I) were born in Brooklyn, New York.  Then we lived in Bayside, NY and after that Great Neck, just over the City Line. 

Now my sister is in Arizona, and I'm in Israel.  Our brother is still on Long Island.  We have cousins and their children much further afield.

Many of the cousins from both sides and some old friends  will be making every effort to be together at my mother's funeral.  That will be a comfort.

*local Orthodox rabbi

The New Eli - Shiloh Bicycle Path

When I was a teenager and younger I loved to ride my bicycle.  It's one of those things I haven't done for decades, but it's also one of the few things still popular, at least in this part of the world, Israel.  One of my sons finds cycling to be the most efficient and quickest commute to work.  The bonus is that it keeps him fit, and he has to be fit for his job.

Way back when, in the "old country," my friend Louise Rosenstein and I met up a couple of times in-between Bayside and Great Neck on Northern Blvd at the bicycle path near the Throgs Neck Bridge.  We'd cycle to the "end of Queens," then go into a store, buy a big container of ice cream, get some plastic spoons and then finish off the ice cream, sharing it until the very last drop.

Israeli cities, including Jerusalem, have bicycle paths which you can see on the sides of roads.  And even here in the Shiloh area there's a new bicycle path to tour Emek (the Valley of) Shiloh, Tel Shiloh to Eli.

When I was at Tel Shiloh on Rosh Chodesh we spotted a number of cyclists riding by.

Here's a video of it; hat tip: my husband.


חנוכת שבילי האופניים בשילה הקדומה from Ronen Siman Tov on Vimeo.
אירוע חניכת סינגל במרחב מעיינות שילה- עלי, אירוע מאורגן למופת על ידי תיירות אזור בנימין, בהובלה של חברת בוץ ובעבודת בנייה של חובב, מאות רוכבים התקבצו ובאו להפנינג של רכיבה בנופים מרהיבים. הסינגל זורם ומהנה ביותר! וההשקעה בבנייתו ניכרת. שיר הנושא הוא "דרור ויקרא" בביצועו של שלמה בר מהברירה הטבעית.

I finished that Great Neck book.

Inventing Great Neck is the perfect title, since so much of the book is an "invention" of sorts.

Of course like the joke about the blind men and the elephant, we all see things from different perspectives. Except that this is just a blog, my personal perspective of the world, while Inventing Great Neck, by Judith S. Goldstein is supposed to be a serious history or sociology book, not a personal memoir.

It's bad enough that she skips, totally ignores, the presence and growing strength of the more Orthodox Jewish community during the 1950's and 1960's, but her attitude towards their numbers and commercial power in her Epilogue echoes what Mrs. Sears, Great Neck North's sewing teacher, who retired in 1967 used to say:

"Great Neck was so much better before the Jews came."

Never one to allow such a statement to pass, I asked her what she meant.

"We used to have such beautiful Christmas pageants."

Mrs. Sears also took off an entire grade, from A to B, when I refused to appear on Shabbat at her "Fashion Show."

Goldstein doesn't like the Great Neck of today, with its wealth of kosher restaurants and Sabbath-observing, strictly kosher stores. She admits their existence in pain, as if she's announcing a surprisingly rapid-growing cancer.

Well, the long-serving rabbi, whom she ignores in her listings of rabbis, Rabbi Wolf, of the Great Neck Synagogue, not only planted those Orthodox spiritual seeds, but he carefully tended them for decades. He and his family moved to Great Neck in the 1950's, during the time that Goldstein claims she's reporting. His widow still lives there.

Goldstein praises the Hebrew Schools and youth activities of the Reform Temple Bethel and the Conservative Temple Israel, but she ignores the fact that soon after Jews and gentiles united in the early 1950's to establish the North Shore Hospital, the North Shore Hebrew Academy, Great Neck's Orthodox Jewish elementary school opened its doors to any child whose parents wanted a full Jewish education. Rabbi Wolf even provided rides to children who had no other way of getting to class. By the late 1970's or early 1980's, the Great Neck Public School's were emptying out, as secular Great Neck was aging, and the NSHA leased a school building.

In the early-mid 1960's the most active and intellectually stimulating Jewish Youth activities were in the Great Neck Synagogue, which were also open to teens whose parents weren't members.

We also ran the best "dances." I was on the committee, auditioned the bands, made the posters and sat at the entrance collecting money. When the other shuls saw our success, they imitated and had dances, too. As I became more religious and Joel Paul was hired as Youth Director, the dances ended.

Goldstein only focuses on the Reform and a bit on the Conservative communities. She really hasn't a clue. The major difference between Orthodox and the others is that Orthodox Jewish Life is full-time. Every aspect of life is affected, food, clothes, education, daily prayer.

People have asked whether it's worth reading the book. If you're not from Great Neck, don't bother. I don't consider it accurate enough. If you're from Great Neck, I'd appreciate your comments to the blog, please. If you just want a general idea of how Great Neck grew, I found that interesting, if it's really accurate. Because of the omissions I know of, I'm suspicious of everything else. Some of her mistakes are inexcusable like the building of Great Neck South campus, which was easily a decade earlier than she implies.

Yes, that's me, as I'd go to Great Neck North, Class of '67.

What are you reading?

This isn't an official meme, but you can continue the chain...

I'm reading Inventing Great Neck, by Judith S. Goldstein. It was given to me by my good friend, whom I've known since we were in Great Neck North together.

So far, I've found one very major mistake. She's off by over a decade concerning when the second high school/junior high campus, Great Neck South, was built. She claims that it was built in the 1960's or 1970's. Badly edited, the book mentions both, but the truth is that the campus was functioning by 1958, so the planning must have begun during the very early 1950's.

The author is concentrating, it seems, on the growth of the Jewish community in Great Neck. Granted that I'm just in the middle of the book, but it seems more ludicrous than ironic, that she ends the book in the 1960's rather than closer to now.

It was in the 1970's that the character of the Jewish community in Great Neck changed drastically. Considering that she totally ignores the legendary pioneer, strictly Orthodox Rabbi Wolf of the Great Neck Synagogue, it shouldn't surprise me that she ends her book before the Great Neck Jewish Community became strongly Modern Orthodox. I guess that she finds the fact too disturbing.

I'll write more when I finish reading the book.

"all the non-conformists have green bookbags"

While popping in to comment on some blogs on Shiloh Musings's sidebar, I got sucked into a different blog world. Soccer Dad linked and quoted from Irina's Ignoble Experiment's Blogosphere's gone PC?, who had ranted over a topic on Suburban Turmoil called "Talkin' Bout My Generation." All I can say is that they take themselves very seriously. They think they've invented the wheel.

Every generation thinks they've done it better than the previous one, and most people, by nature must conform to whichever group in society they feel is best for them. That's life. That's human nature.

In the 1960's, when I was a teen and became a "person," there were all sorts of crowds in my Great Neck, Long Island, New York's suburban high school. There were the popular kids who were both top students and athletes, Jon Avnet was one of its stars. There was also a "hoody" crowd, which had very few Jews; most of the kids in that group had gone to the local Catholic elementary school, "Saint Al's" and weren't accepted into their high school. Then there were the "non-conformists," and the rest of us who didn't quite fit into the important categories. I'd say that Andy Kaufman was in a group of his own. I was in my own tiny group of those of us who were getting more involved with Judaism.

Which group was the most "uniform?" The non-conformists, of course!