Last month, Relief Resources of Baltimore sponsored One Crucial Night to Raise Mental Health Awareness. Before the program started, Zahava List, with a smile that could light up a room, stood behind a table in BJSZ’s foyer, displaying brochures for Chazkeinu and a sample gift for women with postpartum depression. She’s the president and cofounder of this two-and-a-half-year-old peer group of Jewish women. Chazkeinu’s aim is to provide empathetic support and positive connections to Jewish women coping with mental illness and to help dispel the stigma of mental illness. Zahava knows firsthand about that stigma. That’s why she readily shares

It’s 3 a.m., the night after Chanukah, and I’m sitting at the computer trying to recapture its spirit. Dreidels lie deep in my coat pocket, Chanukah paper plates float around the kitchen, and chocolate gelt glitters on tabletops, tempting me to savor just one more. A tall silver menorah, rescued from the Holocaust, still sits in the window. My husband lit it for the first four nights, then we were off to see children and grandchildren for the fifth, sixth, and seventh nights in Far Rockaway and the eighth in Lakewood. There were gelt and gifts for the children, a party with laughter and latkes, and memories to cherish. But, for me, what was special about this Chanukah began in Baltimore before the first candle was lit and kept inspiring and challenging me even when I thought it was over.

On Sunday evening, as the winds of the “bomb cyclone” that hit Baltimore calmed down, Rabbi Menachem Goldberger, of Congregation Tifereth Yisrael, stood before a crowd of 500 at a concert celebrating his shul’s 32nd anniversary and spoke of unity. The chasidic Rav said that in the upcoming week’s parsha, Vayakhel, Moshe Rabbeinu gathered the people together, united as one, to hear the words of Hashem. Many in the Baltimore community experienced a similar feeling of unity when power outages, falling trees, and closed bridges threatened the sanctity of Shabbos on Friday, Shushan Purim, just three days before.       

After the storm passed, the stories began to emerge. Among the most astonishing were about the Jews who had been traveling from New York to Baltimore that erev Shabbos, some on their way to simchas, but never made it. With tractor trailers overturned by the wind littering the Susquehanna River bridge, this essential passageway to Baltimore was closed, and traffic was snarled for miles behind it.

At his annual teshuva drasha, on the Thursday evening before Yom Kippur, Rabbi Yissachar Frand thanked Eli Schlossberg for his work in bringing the yearly lecture to the community. Then he congratulated Eli on his new book, My Shtetl Baltimore. “It’s always a great pleasure to take a walk down memory lane,” said Rabbi Frand.

I would add that this book – 557 generous pages of reminiscence, nostalgia, history, and memoir – is definitely a pleasure to read, even for someone who didn’t grow up in Baltimore’s frum community. Raised in the ’40s and ’50s on Shirley Avenue in lower Park Heights, I wasn’t frum (yet). But in those days, traditional Judaism influenced the whole community – even the non-observant. Perhaps that’s why Eli Schlossberg’s memories spark mine.

I was about 10 years old when my Great-Aunt Cele led me into Congregation Beth Jacob’s sukkah on Park Heights Avenue. It was my first time in a sukkah, and, even as a child, I knew that this was a special place. Streams of sunlight shone on tables laden with fruit. More fruit hung from above. But what I remember the most was an indescribably sweet smell. Today, I think of that sukkah as a window on Gan Eden.

“Any sukkah by definition is special because it’s a very holy space...an atmosphere of complete kedusha,” says Rabbi Menachem Goldberger, Rav of Congregation Tiferes Yisroel. Yet making a sukkah more beautiful lies within the domain of hidur mitzva, according to Rabbi Goldberger. He quotes a passage from Az Yashir (Song at the Sea): “Zeh Kaili ve’anvaihu – This is my G-d and I will adorn him.”