Skip To Content
logo/forward/small
Open Search Field
Get our NewslettersShop our Store
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Support Our WorkSupport Us
Life

A Living Lens: Rockland County, N.Y.

By Alana Newhouse November 14, 2007

Three anecdotes from my event at the Rockland County JCC:

1. Caption Correction, a Teensy Bit Late: As guests were piling in, I noticed a man walking toward me with a large frame. When he got a little closer, I recognized its sepia color — the distinguishing mark of the pages of the Forward’s Sunday photography section. (The section, also known as the roto or rotogravure, is one of the reasons we have such a vast, rich collection). The picture on the top right showed a young boy and girl lighting a menorah with two adults, and the caption read: “Their First Hanukkah Celebration on U.S. Soil: Mr. And Mrs. Hendel with their children, refugees from Yugoslavia, shown celebrating the Festival of Lights at the emergency Refugee Shelter in Oswego, N.Y. The boy in the picture was, of course, the man now standing in front of me — who had come to the event to tell me we got the caption wrong. His name is William Kremer, and he is pictured not with his parents and sister, but with his aunt and uncle (the Hendels) and his cousin. I know it’s about 60 years overdue, Mr. Kremer, but you’ve got your correction.

2. What the F!: Vera Boehm never spoke or read Yiddish. And so, when her grandfather asked her to go to the store and pick up his copy of the Forverts, she had to think fast. How would she know which one it was? Young Vera came up with a great solution while staring at the paper’s masthead: She zoomed in on the shape of the pheh, the first letter of the word Forverts in Yiddish, figuring she’d just hunt for its replica on the newsstand. Unfortunately for Vera, there was another newspaper at the time that started with a pheh — the communist paper known as the Freiheit. She can still hear her grandfather yelling…

3. Calendar Chaos: Natalie Stein’s mother came to America from Russia in 1908, at age 4. By the time she got to middle school, she noticed something amiss, and decided to turn to the Forverts for help: “When,” she asked in a letter to the editor, “is my American birthday? I know I was born on erev Shavuos 1904.” Sure enough, a reply came soon after: May 29, 1904.

Alana Newhouse, the Forward’s Arts & Culture editor, is touring the country, speaking about her new book “A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life From the Pages of the Forward.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

$36 $500
$120 $180 Other amount

Dive In

Explore

Most Popular

In Case You Missed It

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at editorial@forward.com, subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

A Living Lens: Rockland County, N.Y.

Copied to clipboard
Copied to clipboard

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.

Exit mobile version