?It’s amazing how easily luxuries can become necessities. When that happens, we start taking those luxuries for granted. I was fortunate to have grown up in a home where nothing was taken for granted. My mom and dad appreciated whatever they had and were grateful for it. As a result, it was natural for them to express immediate appreciation for even the most simple gift or kind gesture. These days, expressing appreciation and saying thank you seems to have fallen on hard times.

Showing hakaras hatov (gratitude) to Hashem for His blessings is challenging for those who don’t naturally express thanks to others. It seems that too many people are self-absorbed almost to the point of narcissism. I’m wondering if there is a direct correlation between the volume of one’s material possessions (i.e: “stuff”) and the dramatic decrease in the measure of gratitude one demonstrates.

Taking a few moments to pause our hectic race against our “to do” lists to look at the world around us will reveal the bounty of blessings we receive every day. We live in a time when technology allows us to connect with family and friends who live far away, we enjoy the familiarity of our close-knit neighborhoods, and we are free of the weight of anonymity that plagues larger, “in-town,” communities. We are also fortunate to live in a state where the seasons change, each one bringing new gifts. The shift in the temperature, and the mood that comes with it, breaks the monotony of daily life, such that each morning promises adventures in weather that even the meteorologists can’t predict.

Dr. Elie Krakowski is no stranger to the readers of the Where What When. We interviewed him over 20 years ago, shortly after his move to Baltimore, and over the years he has graciously agreed to contribute articles in response to our pleadings. Now we turn to him again to explain the current crisis in Ukraine.

Dr. Krakowski, mostly retired now, has a PhD in international relations from Columbia University in New York. During the Reagan administration, he was Special Assistant to the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon. He coordinated multimillion-dollar programs in humanitarian aid and contributed to presidential national security directives. He helped U.S. intelligence agencies improve the way they collect, analyze, and distribute intelligence data. His main role while at the Pentagon was as an architect of American policy on Afghanistan. He also participated actively in the negotiating process that brought an end to the Soviet-Afghan war.

Sara Levin* is a spunky 8^th grader who attends the local Bais Yaakov. Her father is a lawyer and her mother is a professional organizer and party planner. Sara is the youngest child in a large family. It has always been the goal of Sara’s parents to raise fiscally responsible children, and for the most part, all six of Sara’s siblings are prudent with their money and make educated decisions about it. How did Sara’s parents accomplish this? Let’s use a small example to illustrate how Sara’s parents have helped her be fiscally responsible.

My son and I were up late one night shmoozing. It isn’t often we get to spend time talking about deep and meaningful subjects. I would have stayed up even longer if my drooping eyelids would have agreed.

We spoke softly because of the lateness of the hour, and my son, who is usually running from one thing to the next, sat across from me talking quietly or listening intently, causing my love for him to overflow as I gazed into his warm eyes while adoring his trademark smile.

by Hinda Cohen

Sarah had wanted to be a teacher since she was in elementary school when her favorite activity was to play school with her friends. Sarah loved teaching alef-bais, ABCs, addition, and subtraction; you name it and Sarah could teach it beautifully – to her friends, that is. Then came her first opportunity to teach in her alma mater. Sarah was hired to teach a high school secular subject to bright ninth graders. But Sarah only knew what she had been taught in high school – and she had not saved her notes. Sarah was in trouble.

Soon the girls began to misbehave. They scored poorly on her first test, which was too long, making the girls late to carpool. No matter what help Sara received here and there, she always seemed to face a new battle of either poor curricular or pedagogic knowledge. One day, Sarah just returned her materials and quit, her dreams shattered.

Faina Vaynerman was born in a large Ukrainian shtetl Piytegory, about 50 miles from Kyiv, where, historically, Jews and Ukrainians lived side by side. She was only two years old when World War II broke out. Fortunately, she and her parents were able to flee from the Ukraine in her uncle’s truck. Otherwise, she said, they would have shared the fate of the other Jews in their shtetl, who perished from the many massacres that were carried out in Europe.

Faina shares her family history going back another generation: “In 1919, when my father was seven years old, dozens of Jews from our shtetl were forced to gather in a local synagogue. Among them were my grandma, Chana Shlima, her older daughter Rivka, and three-year-old son. The Ukrainians set it on fire and whoever tried to escape the fire was shot. My two grandmothers were murdered by the Ukrainian nationalist anti-Semites. My other grandma, Hinda Khmelinsky had found her death in 1941. They were murdered only because they were Jewish.”

I remember as a little girl taking a nap on erev Pesach in order to be able to stay up for the Seder. It was thrilling to get dressed for Yom Tov and be part of all the excited hustle and bustle. We had a Seder plate that my parents had created together out of wood, with a design composed of colored pebbles. My mother made a special velvet curtain that went around the Seder plate. It was very big and sat proudly in the center of the table. 

We set the table differently than usual. There were no plates or silverware, only the cup to drink the wine and a Haggadah. The food was not the important part of the Seder and only came out close to midnight. I remember my mother hurrying my father up as it got closer to chatzos, because we had to eat the afikoman before then. 

Baltimore is blessed to have a number of beautiful urban parks, many interconnected as part of the Baltimore Greenway Trails Network, ringing our city with a green canopy. A further treat is that several of the parks, described below, contain impressive summer mansions built in the mid-1800s by some of Baltimore’s most famous titans of industry and recently faithfully restored. Taking a walk or hike through these parks gives one a better understanding of the early history of our city.

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.