Sunday, April 04, 2010

 

Ari B. - San Francisco

i can't believe it's already april. It's as if we've already lost a quarter of the year, but yet we still have so much to go until 2011. It's almost like losing someone in your life, or losing a member of our moishe house community. So many people come through our doors, some more than others, but it seems as though a good amount of people transplant to other cities. I guess that's inevitable for a group of 20-somethings, with grad school and job opportunities taking people all across the country. We have an email list of nearly 500 people, and I'd guess that in any given month we have 25-50 people either unsubscribe or ask to join our list. Most emails sound something like: "Hi, my name is ____ ____stein and I just moved to SF. I've heard about Moishe House and I'd love to come by." However, for every one of those emails, we also get a "Please unsubscribe me, I'm going to law school."

While that's expected, what about when a roommate leaves? How can you keep the moishe house vibe going strongly if the moveout situation isn't exactly ideal? In my experience, I think it's real important to recognize that Moishe house is bigger than all of us, and it's a true privilege to be a part of it. Understanding that we're here as a larger movement and goal should help to realize the relatively insignificant consequences of a rooommate moving out. I don't know if this is much help to anyone, but it seems to me that one of the main issues left unattended by the Moishe House organization is how for roommates to deal with one another. While we're roomies in the sense that we leave together and do non-moishe house things, we're all here for the larger purpose of carrying out Moishe House's mission statement. Have a a great month, I wish I could've written this on April 1st because I love April fools stuff.

Cheers.

 

Yom Hashoah

This upcoming month marks the annual anniversary of Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. Throughout the years I have tried to make an effort to do something out of the ordinary for this special day. Last year, as well as this year, I plan on attending a dinner and conversation event which is sponsored by one of the local synagogues, here in San Francisco.

There is something incredibly powerful and humbling about the evening experience of being able to deeply delve into the personal experiences and life stories of a person who lived a lifestyle during a time period none of us can imagine. Trying to understand, make sense of and even find ways to appreciate the events that took place in people's lives 60 or 70 years ago during WWII is a fascinating and incredibly interesting experience, something all Jews, and all humans, young and old, should make a priority of doing.

There are not a lot of Holocaust survivors left, as many of these people are either getting too old to remember and be able to relive and retell their stories due to a variety of health effects, or they simply are no longer living with us. My grandfather is a survivor and often times I ask myself why I did not ask him to tell me and my sister his stories more regularly, or even at all; even though it was hard, scary, emotional, incredibly difficult, and very sad to see him revisit those upsetting and horrific experiences. Unfortunately, due to Alzheimer's he is not in the position to retell these stories, even if for some whirlwind reason he felt more comfortable doing so now than he had in the previous 70 years...

This population of people are some of our richest historical heirlooms and we should continue to take advantage of the resource and privilege we have by still having them in our lives, even if we only have the opportunity to really hear and experience their stories one time a year.

Danny in SF

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