SHANAH TOVAH!
SEPTEMBER 2, 2021 / 25 ELUL 5781
RAISED BY
WOLVES? Netflix’s “MIsha and the Wolves” examines a
since-discredited survivor story.

PAGE 19
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM — WHAT IT MEANS TO BE JEWISH IN PHILADELPHIA —
$1.00 OF NOTE
LOCAL Synagogues Work
to Retain Members
Pandemic adds to
the challenge.

Page 4
LOCAL High Holidays
Services Free at
Some Shuls
See our list of both
in-person and
remote services.

Page 6
LOCAL O Canada:
Survivor, 96,
Heads North
Federation Housing
helps a man’s dream
come true.

Page 7
Volume 134
Number 21
Published Weekly Since 1887
High Holiday
Sermons to
Focus on
Community JARRAD SAFFREN | JE STAFF
RABBIS SAY THAT High Holiday
sermons are about enlightening and
motivating individual souls for the year
ahead, the goal being to help people under-
stand how to live as productive members
of their communities.

But what is a community now that
COVID has shown us that we can be
together without being in the same room?
And how can we, as individuals, focus
on our communities when the larger
world has so many problems? Area rabbis
will open 5782 by using their sermons to
try and answer these fundamental and
profound questions.

Rosh Hashanah starts on Sept. 6 at
sundown and Yom Kippur ends on Sept.

16. Rabbi Moshe Brennan leads the Chabad
of Penn Wynne, and his High Holiday
sermons will reach hundreds of congre-
gants. And his message is clear.

“We need to change the conversation,”
he said. “Instead of trying to solve the
world’s problems, we should try to make a
State Correctional Institution-Phoenix is home to a dozen incarcerated Jews who, prior to the
pandemic, gathered to observe the holidays.

Courtesy of Pennsylvania Department of Corrections
Teshuvah on the Inside:
High Holidays Limited for
the Incarcerated
SASHA ROGELBERG | JE STAFF
THOUGH STATE CORRECTIONAL
Institution-Phoenix in Montgomery
County has no synagogue, a small,
resolute group of Jewish men in the prison
See Sermons, Page 10
still gather and pray.

In past years, before the pandemic,
the men incarcerated across the prison’s
east and west sides gathered weekly in the
smallest of the prison’s multipurpose faith
rooms for Shabbat services and an oneg
See Inside, Page 11
LEARN TO DRIVE
IN A TESLA!