O pinion
New Year’s Resolution: Holocaust Survivors Needs Continue into 2021
BY MARCY GRINGLAS
THE SECULAR NEW YEAR
can be similar to the Jewish
new year. For both, we reflect
on the year that has passed,
and we set intentions for the
new year to come.

Over these past weeks of
reflection, renewal and hopeful
resolutions, we look back at
what we have accomplished as
a community and we plan for
the impact we can make when
we join together and place our
focus on where it is needed
most. Many of us felt ready to
say goodbye to 2020, a year in
which those who were most
vulnerable were made even
more so. The 30,000 Holocaust
survivors living in poverty
across the United States were
among that population, and,
became, like so many others,
that much more disadvantaged
and isolated.

And yet, amid the darkness
of the pandemic, KAVOD
SHEF (Survivors of the
Holocaust Emergency Fund)
serves as a bright light of assis-
tance for survivor emergency
needs. The KAVOD SHEF
initiative, partners with the
national nonprofit aid organi-
zation KAVOD, and directly
responds to survivor needs in
nine emergency areas: food,
medical, dental, vision, urgent
home needs (utilities, rent,
repairs), emergency home care,
transportation, essential deliv-
eries and PPE.

Seed the Dream Foundation
proudly partners with more
than 25 foundations and
philanthropists to provide
national dollars that match all
funds raised by local commu-
nities and enables KAVOD
SHEF to address these ongoing
and increasing needs.

What began in 2019
as emergency services for
Holocaust survivors across 12
cities, including Philadelphia,
quickly expanded in 2020
to community partnerships
in more than 28 U.S. cities.

Together, we succeeded in
filling more than 15,000
emergency requests across the
country — including 2,000
emergency assistance requests
right here in our Greater
Philadelphia community.

When we come together and
work together, our collective
reach extends beyond what we
thought possible.

KAVOD SHEF has become
our proof. And, we have more
to do as we enter into this
new year. Too many Holocaust
survivors, those who survived
the unimaginable, are suffering
still. Some face food insecurity,
while others struggle to keep
their homes. While some are
forced to choose between heat
or medical bills, others cannot
afford basic home repairs.

My resolution for this new
year is simple: We can and
must do more to alleviate these
impossible choices and help
our survivors live in dignity
during their last years.

Seed the Dream Foundation
remains dedicated
to addressing the emergency
needs of Holocaust survivors
and supporting SHEF in the
United States and Israel.

In 2021, we are committed to
expanding these partnerships. It
is our hope that current partners
and new partners will join
together with us to exponentially
increase the resources avail-
able for our survivors. Through
this unique initiative, we work
together with Jewish Federations
such as the Jewish Federation
of Greater Philadelphia, Jewish
Family Service agencies, national
philanthropic partners and local
donors to bring much needed
emergency aid to our survivor
community and amplify our
impact. One hundred percent
of all funds raised are directed
toward these needs — and our
heroic KAVOD staff partners
continue to work tirelessly to fill
all of the survivor requests with
urgency. In 2021, Seed the Dream
Foundation will renew our
commitment to match all
national dollars raised for
KAVOD SHEF during the
next year. As a result of the
COVID-19 crisis, Holocaust
survivors in Philadelphia
and across the United States
need us even more. We will
continue to band together with
local and national organiza-
tions to widen and deepen our
reach, and we ask you to join
us. The Jewish Federation of
Greater Philadelphia remains
our strong and steadfast local
partner. As we move into what
we hope will be a much brighter
new year, we are grateful for
their leadership and the light
they continue to bring to the
ever-growing needs of our
survivor population.

This is the time for us to come
together, work together and
act together, to ensure that the
emergency needs of Holocaust
survivors are met. Let us show
our survivors that they are not
forgotten. We are here.

As we begin this new
year with new hope and new
optimism, please join us in our
collective communal response.

May 2021 bring health, light
and intention.

Survivors in need, please call
this confidential national phone
hotline for assistance today:
720-295-8484. l
Nonprofit organizations are
guided by mission and values.

When the coronavirus hit, the
pressure to respond to those in
need was enormous. Leaders were
challenged to find ways for their
organizations to not only survive
this crisis but also to thrive.

The drive to design innovative
and sustainable opportunities
to deliver services, the ability to
be nimble and the openness to
pivoting to new modes of outreach
were integral to thriving.

In the many discussions I
had with nonprofit leaders in the
Greater Philadelphia area and
across the country, conversations
centered on how organizations
were raising dollars to support
new needs, which technologies
could be used to reach those
who were isolated, and how
leaders drew on enhanced
communication strategies to
be transparent about decision-
making and support staff.

I have found that the most
profound sharing that has
occurred with other executives
has centered on our vulnera-
bility as leaders. Looked to for
answers and guidance, leaders
at this time experienced the
same fears and anxieties as
their associates, consequently
drawing them closer together
and inspiring a greater ability
for everyone to “hang in” and
work through uncertainty.

Marcy Gringlas is the president
and co-founder of Seed the Dream
Foundation. What Is the Story That Will Be Told?
BY PAULA GOLDSTEIN
THE PFIZER VACCINES
are being distributed, and
our country has approached
the beginning of the end of a
critically challenging time.

COVID-19 has ravaged us,
taking the lives of 1.8 million
14 JANUARY 7, 2021
people worldwide and more
than 350,000 in the United
States. Life has changed dramat-
ically, and many say there is no
going back to the way things
were before. How our world will
change in the long term has yet
to be determined.

One thing I continue
to think about, though, as a
leader of a nonprofit, is the
story that will be told: How
will our response toward our
employees and our community
be remembered when we look
back on the pandemic?
An analogy to answering
the above question could come
from how we conceptualize a
person’s life after they die.

We frequently hear family
and friends recount the
deceased’s life with less focus
on their successes and more on
the quality of their relationships
and the choices they made. The
memories of that individual are
formed by their values and how
those values guided their life.

Although it’s certainly not
the same with the pandemic, the
coronavirus is a force that has
inserted its presence into our lives
over the past year, and as we work
to eradicate it, we can perhaps
apply the same principles upon
its death to how we existed during
this time, providing life lessons
on what is ultimately important
— namely, how we take care of
and support one another in the
midst of unfathomable challenge.

JEWISH EXPONENT
See Goldstein, Page 27
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM



O pinion
Teaching Torah: Making Room for More Voices
BY AVIGAYIL HALPERN
MANY OF MY fellow rabbin-
ical students and friends are
enthusiastic about a new
strategy for elevating women’s
voices in Torah study into the
beit midrash this fall.

The Kranjec Test — named for
Pennsylvania’s Danielle Kranjec,
the Jewish educator who created
it — holds that collections of texts
known as source sheets must
include at least one non-male
voice. It’s the Jewish studies
equivalent of the well-known
Bechdel test for film — in which
movies pass if they include two
women having a conversation
about something other than men
— and it quickly gained currency
among my colleagues.

On paper, I perhaps ought to
have leapt at this new frame-
work. I have been committed to
women’s Torah study since I spent
summers during high school
studying at the Drisha Institute,
one of the first institutions in
America to open the doors of
Talmud study to Orthodox
women, and I wrote my under-
graduate thesis on finding new
modes for feminist Talmud study.

I’m currently blessed to spend
my days immersed in full-time
Torah study as a rabbinical
student, and questions of what
feminist and queer Torah are and
ought to be are at the forefront of
my interests.

And yet I balked.

My reservations
were primarily practical. My current
Torah learning involves intense
study of Jewish law, and for the
course of Jewish history, the vast
quantity of received wisdom on
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM areas like kashrut and Shabbat
simply has not included writing by
people other than men. I worried
that adding texts in those areas
to meet the Kranjec Test would
amount to tokenism at best.

My instinct was to look at
the absence of non-men’s voices
with clear eyes. Yes, it’s a canon
written by men! That problem
can’t be solved, I thought, by
pretending that’s not the case.

I am not the first to point
out that the problem is not a
failure to include existing voices
in the Jewish canon but the fact
that these voices don’t yet exist.

Rabbi Becky Silverstein and my
teacher Laynie Soloman made
this argument in their response
to the original article proposing
the Kranjec Test. Some of my
Orthodox women friends
argued that meeting the test
would require turning too often
to texts from outside the tradi-
tional rabbinic canon. Rabbi
Michael Rosenberg framed that
criticism, which he ultimately
argues against, in his writing
about the Kranjec Test, as “Does
such a source sheet send the
message that ‘Torah’ is for men,
and ‘supplementary materials’
are for non-males?”
I also had another concern:
Learning Torah as a queer
woman is already at times hard,
and teaching it can be harder.

There are the inevitable moments
of hurt and alienation that
come from loving a vast body
of wisdom that was not created
by people who share some of
my most fundamental experi-
ences. Along with that comes
the workaday burden of sexism
I face as a young woman trying
to hold the attention of a class-
room: interruptions, a student
implying that I’m unqualified
and the whole genre of experi-
ence so familiar to so many of us.

Should I now make that
process even harder by also
taking extra time and energy
to seek out a source I other-
wise would not have and try
to integrate it into my work? Is
this not an additional ask for
those of us who already strain
so much for our Torah? And, on
another level, would my voice as
the teacher then be made invis-
ible? After all, I was contributing
to the Torah I offered by putting
it together and teaching it, and I
am a woman: Did I really need
to put another non-man on the
source sheet on top of that?
In the middle of all this
thinking, I looked around and
realized I had unwittingly been
adhering to the Kranjec Test
without meaning to. At my
yeshiva, we start each day of
Zoom learning with a 10-minute
dvar Torah on the parshah from a
student, and every other Tuesday
it was my turn. The first time,
I posted to Facebook looking
for specific sources about the
few verses of Lech Lecha I was
planning to speak on. A friend
recommended a recorded sermon
from a woman teacher, and her
Torah was exactly the insight I
had been seeking. Two weeks
later, preparing to teach my 10
minutes on Chayei Sarah, I was
at a loss looking at the commen-
taries on the page of my Chumash.

I turned to the bookshelf behind
me and pulled out a book of
essays on the parshah, and again
the crystallizing insight I needed
came from a woman.

After that, I committed to
myself that each turn I had to
teach on the parshah, I would
include the voice of someone
who was not a man in my dvar
Torah. I made this commitment
gently, tentatively — every time
I told myself, “Well, I’ll see what
I can find, and if it becomes too
hard, I won’t hold myself to it.”
And every time I was able to
turn up exciting, fresh Torah
with minimal difficulty.

The parshah is doubtless the
easiest area in which to find
Torah teaching from women
and other non-men. Thank God,
there is such a wealth of weekly
divrei Torah by people of all
genders across every stream of
Judaism, and the weekly parshah
See Halpern, Page 27
JEWISH EXPONENT
KVETCH ’N’ KVELL
Interfaith Relationships No Call for Celebration
AS WE SETTLED IN to the read the Dec. 10 issue, we
were surprised and disappointed that there was such a large
[article] (“Interfaith Couples Navigate Unusual Holiday Season”)
highlighting the diversity of intermarried couples — a sizable
percentage of whom were celebrating Chanukah and Christmas.

Is this really a call for celebration?
If the author was trying to write a “feel good” story it may
have had the reverse effect. Jewish people make up a very small
percentage of the U.S. population, especially in comparison to
those celebrating non-Jewish holidays. Due to this, it is just so
much easier to be part of the mainstream religious celebrations
and that is what so many of these couples will do. And studies
show that couples who raise their children with both religions will
very likely no have Jewish grandchildren, so who are we kidding?
Perhaps the Exponent will soon be listing baptisms, confir-
mations, et cetera and will still be calling itself “The Jewish
Exponent.” Let’s not bring out the champagne just yet.

We no longer feel there is a reason to continue to read or
support the publication if the publication paints a picture so
anathema to the tenets of Judaism.

Bette Klein | Philadelphia
Torah Illuminates Current Context
I fully agree with Rabbi Jason Bonder’s notion that each year we
read Torah and may well find something new, a Chidush, in the
stories (“Same Words, Different Meaning,” Dec. 24).

I agree, too, that the context provided by the year 2020 or
any other year potentially changes one’s reading. Still, any given
context may be understood differently by different readers.

For me, someone who has been disturbed greatly by the outgoing
administration, in general, and by the president’s behavior, in
particular, I read it differently. My reading of Joseph’s dreams —The
Sun and the Moon and the Eleven Stars are bowing down to me and
an analogous agrarian one in which sheaves bow down to him —
are symptomatic of what occurs when one child (Donald?) is favored
by a father (Fred) who had to himself be the chosen one (achieved by
any means), in both birthright and blessing.

Joseph’s inner world is one where others have no particular
existence, no subjectivity, except in their relationship to him.

The dream’s faceless dancers, representing the brothers, are just
nondescript stars or sheaves and are not permitted, in the dreams,
to interact. They are not seen as persons in their own right.

Years ago, a psychiatrist in a class I was teaching asked me
for a book on parenting. I suggested that she read Torah and
wonder about the sequelae of the showing of favoritism and that
she might consider doing just the opposite. Joseph’s tormenting
of his brothers — both before and in Egypt — serve as proof for
me of the toxic effects of such parenting, just as the “Presidency
of a Chosen Rich Kid Who Would be Emperor” convinces me of
the dangers of preferential parenting, in general. l
Howard Covit | Elkins Park
STATEMENT FROM THE PUBLISHER
We are a diverse community. The views expressed in the signed opinion columns and let-
ters to the editor published in the Jewish Exponent are those of the authors. They do
not necessarily reflect the views of the officers and boards of the Jewish Publishing
Group, the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia or the Jewish Exponent. Send
letters to letters@jewishexponent.com or fax to 215-569-3389. Letters should be a
maximum of 200 words and may be edited for clarity and brevity. Unsigned letters will not be
published. JANUARY 7, 2021
15