?I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point, I grew up. The special thing about growing up 50 or 60 years ago is that growing up meant taking responsibility for yourself. If you were a guy and you wanted to get married, the first question your perspective father-in-law asked was “How do you plan to support my daughter?” These days, the question commonly asked to parents and prospective in-laws is, “How do you plan to support the young couple?”

As this Purim edition of WWW is about to go to press, we are witnessing terrible news from Ukraine.

We humans have defense mechanisms which give us the ability to emotionally separate ourselves from unpleasant realities. As a result, when we hear bad news, we can allow ourselves to be somewhat cushioned through detachment. We have the ability to create a distance between ourselves and the tragedy we hear about. While we are saddened to learn of an awful event, we are grateful that we and our loved ones are safe.

My first professional position in Jewish communal work was as the Youth and Education director in an “out-of-town” community, Wilmington Delaware. My wife Arleeta and I arrived with our one-year-old son Doniel in July of 1969. We were excited to take up a new and exciting challenge. Wilmington had a very small Jewish community, and we barely had a minyan of shomer Shabbos Jews.

A few days after we moved into our lovely apartment, the elderly chazan of the one and only OINO (Orthodox-in-name-only) shul asked if I’d join him in the shul’s kitchen for tea. The chazan was an ehrliche Yid from “de heim.” He had made it to the U.S. before the war and found work in Wilmington as a shochet and cantor. He was an old-school Jew who preferred Yiddish to English.

On December 8, 1941, my Dad, who was at that time too old to be drafted, quit his job and volunteered to join the fight against tyranny. Two-and-a-half years later, on June 6, 1944, he was on a landing craft approaching Omaha Beach at Normandy. After surviving the greatest and most costly invasion in history, and after suffering through the Battle of the Bulge, he was among the first American soldiers to enter Germany on March 22, 1945.

After the war, my Dad returned home, tossed his medals into a cigar box, hung up his uniform, got a job, and got married. He rarely spoke about the war until a couple of years before his death in 2006.