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Olney Kehila and Giant Food A+ BonusBucks

Olney Kehila is now a part of the Giant Food A+ BonusBucks program! You can designate Olney Kehila as your designated school (or one of up to three schools), and Giant Food will automatically donate a portion of your sales to our community. Most of us are already familiar with this program, so you know that there's no easier way to support Olney Kehila. Remember to tell friends and family! To sign up for the program, go to www.giantfood.com/aplus, and click the link to Designate Schools.

Purim!

We enjoyed a most excellent Purim carnival on Sunday, March 16. Miki and our teachers, along with lots of support from parents, put on a great festival during Hebrew School. Kids made their own hamentaschen, and they made sand art, too. (Hint: keep it in a plastic bag or you will soon feel like summer has come early to your floors.)

A new feature this year: Holly pulled aside a bunch of parents for a 15-minute seminar on Purim. Thirty minutes later, they were still deep in conversation, despite all of the mishegos going on around them.

Mishloach Manot (Purim Baskets)

Kids and grown-ups alike made mishloach manot, baskets for the folks at the Hebrew Home, stuffed with candy, raisins and hamentaschen (I understand that prune is especially popular there).

Hope Decederfelt, one of our very busy parents at the carnival, shared this with us:

I just wanted to let you know that the mishloach manot was very well received at the Hebrew Home. Their Purim party was scheduled for 2 pm. We arrived there before that time (I went with my mother and [my daughter,] Sarah) and first went to my father's unit. We passed out the goodies to all who would not make it to the party. The smiles were wonderful! We did a little unstapling and unwrapping for those who needed help, and then went to the party with my dad (he is in a wheelchair). There was a food table to place our gifts on, but we tried to hand them out to as many people as we could. Once again, everyone was so pleased. I don't think they get a lot of gifts. The person who was running the party was very thankful and thought it was wonderful that our children did such a beautiful job and took the time to think of them.

Havadalah Service

On Saturday, March 15, our terrific 3rd graders conducted a wonderful Havdalah service at the Sandy Spring Friends School. This was our first Havdalah service of the year, and only the second in our history, as I recall. The kids did a great job of reading and presenting the customs and prayers (a braided candle…who knew?), which was especially helpful for those of us who have made it to our very late 30's (and then some) without ever learning this tradition.

Happy Birthday, Grandmom

March 17th was my grandmother's birthday. (Many of you have recently seen a photograph of her that I was considering using in a flyer.) Her name was Anna Buckberg, originally Anna Litwack, and she was originally from Lithuania. She came to the United States near the turn of the last century with her parents, her sisters Sarah and Esther, and a brother, Philip, for whom I was named. They settled in New York, where she went to school, went to work, married Isadore, had two sons, and moved to Washington DC in 1936, when my father was 7 years old. Her oldest son is my Uncle Albert, who will be 86 this year and shares a birthday with our oldest Miniature Schnauzer, Midnight, who will (knock on wood) be 17. (I like to remind my uncle of this special family bond.) Between the two sons was a daughter Miriam, who died at age 13 months of whooping cough, not uncommon in the mid 1920's. I am Isadore and Anna's oldest grandchild. My grandfather was, by all accounts, a jubilant man. After he died in 1962, my grandmother spent almost every weekend at our house. She lived long enough to enjoy my bar-mitzvah, and then passed away about 6 months later, at the age of 76, shortly after arriving home from work.

The thing is: March 17th wasn't her real birthday. She never knew her actual birthdate. As I have been told, in "those days" there were no records, and among poor Jews immigrants, birthday celebrations were just not part of the routine. Who knows how her family lived in Eastern Europe, what they owned, what they remembered, what they chose to not remember? That history is gone, except for extrapolations I can make from scholarly works and PBS specials.

When my own children start to tell me what they want for birthday gifts, perhaps I'll remind them that their great-grandparents didn't even have birthdays.

- Phil