HURTS SO GOOD?
‘ESAU’ JUST OK
Weak female characters hinder a film
depiction of Esau and Jacob’s story.

DECEMBER 17, 2020 / 2 TEVET 5781
PAGE 16
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM — WHAT IT MEANS TO BE JEWISH IN PHILADELPHIA —
$1.00 OF NOTE
LOCAL Remembering
Rose Sandler
Adventurer struggled with
depression .

Page 4
LOCAL ‘Hanukkah
Hotties’ Debuts
LGBTQ community
celebrates Festival
of Lights.

Page 6
OPINION We Let the Kids
Plan Chanukah
And we learned a lot
from the experiment.

Page 11
Volume 133
Number 36
Published Weekly Since 1887
Penn Hillel
Rabbi Departs
After Nearly
17 Years
JESSE BERNSTEIN | JE STAFF
BEFORE THE NEW YEAR rings in,
Rabbi Mike Uram, 44, will leave his post
as executive director and campus rabbi of
Penn Hillel aft er nearly 17 years on the job.

Uram, who won a National Jewish
Book Award in 2016 for “Next Generation
Judaism: How College Students and Hillel
Can Help Reinvent Jewish Organizations,”
will become the chief vision and educa-
tion offi cer of Pardes North America, the
American arm of the infl uential Pardes
Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem.

In his time at the University of
Pennsylvania, Uram had a front-row seat
to the changing priorities and tendencies
of Jewish college students — regarding
Israel, denominational differences,
religious practice and more — and will
bring that fi eld experience to his position
at Pardes, which charges him to increase
the frequency and quality of Torah
learning in America.

Uram spoke to the Jewish Exponent
See Rabbi, Page 9
Fran Orkin meets her great-grandson Bradley, who was born during the pandemic.

Photo by Rachel Keiser
Oh, Baby: Pandemic
Complicates Motherhood
JESSE BERNSTEIN | JE STAFF
DEC. 13 MARKED a full nine months
from the beginning of the pandemic’s
life-changing eff ects in Pennsylvania —
that Friday in March when adults left their
offi ces and children left their schools and
both, in many cases, did not return.

For women who got pregnant just
before the pandemic, or just aft er it began,
a period in their lives that was already
sure to introduce them to a complex set of
medical considerations and emotions was
made even more convoluted.

Early news reports signaled that
women giving birth could be barred from
having anyone else in the hospital with
them as their deliveries were underway,
to say nothing of their newly required
solitude when it came to doctor’s
See Motherhood, Page 10