HEADLINES | 4
ROSH HASHANAH | 14
TEMPLE CHAI VOTES TO SELL PROPERTY
NOT YOUR AVERAGE KUGEL
Synagogue set to find new home
Creative twists to old favorite
AUGUST 20, 2021 | ELUL 12, 5781 | VOLUME 73, NUMBER 23
Delta variant changing High Holiday plans for local synagogues NICOLE RAZ | STAFF WRITER
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he leadership team at Temple Beth Sholom of the East Valley began planning High Holiday services in May. “We were going to assume we were back in person and deal with a pivot if we had to,” said TBSEV Rabbi Herschel ‘Brodie’ Aberson. The synagogue resumed in-person services for all members recently, after a year of hosting them virtually. And, for a time, only vaccinated members could come in person. Social distancing and mask wearing continues to be required. “We’ve taken such serious steps because honestly, I was anticipating something like the delta variant, where it would bypass our assumptions,” Aberson said. “And if we assumed a greater potential danger than actually existed at the time, we would be ready if something came up.” Now that COVID-19 cases are on the rise, the synagogue — like many across Greater Phoenix — is reevaluating its High Holiday plans, trying to balance the high rate of vaccination within the community with the threat from the delta variant. “I think anyone who’s being rational is looking at the trend in our numbers in Arizona and going, ‘This is bad,’” Aberson said. Arizona reported 7,485 new daily COVID cases in the past week, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ranked Arizona the eighth highest case rate per 100,000 people among states and territories as of Friday, Aug. 13. Decisions about how to plan for yet another holiday season in COVID’s shadow are keeping synagogue leaders up at night. Those decisions range from whether to hold services indoors or outdoors, on Zoom or in-person or both, with masks or without, with social distancing or without, and with options available only to the vaccinated or
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Plans for $15M Phoenix Holocaust museum include hologram-like exhibit NICOLE RAZ | STAFF WRITER
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olocaust survivor Oskar Knoblauch has touched thousands of lives, sharing his survival story and its lessons. And despite being 95, he will continue his work for decades to come with the high-tech help of Phoenix’s future Holocaust education center. Knoblauch will become a hologram-like exhibit that is planned for Arizona Jewish Historical Society’s $15 million, 4,000-square-foot facility. AZJHS’s goal is to open the center in 2024, contingent on fundraising. It will be only one of seven Oskar Knoblauch is filmed as part of a USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions locations in the world where this hologram-like in Testimony hologram-like exhibit for the Arizona Jewish Historical Society. PHOTO COURTESY OF ARIZONA JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY technology is available. “I will be done and finished — ready to go — to be presented to the public by mid-2023,” he said. “All I need is this one room in that museum where I can be seen by hundreds of thousands of people around the clock.” Lawrence Bell, AZJHS’ executive director, said the not-for-profit has had a vision for a Holocaust education and heritage center for about five years. With recent funding for the project, plans are finally coming together. Now more than ever, the general public needs to know about what happened during the Holocaust and why the Holocaust took place, he said. “We want to show people the destructiveness of intolerance, hatred and racism, and how it consumes the societies that fall for it,” Bell said. “It leads to political division; it leads to situations akin to civil war at times; it can lead to totalitarian states. It leads to genocide, to war and, eventually, it leads to your own self-destruction.” AZJHS hired Gallagher & Associates last year to design a preliminary plan for the center, which includes four spaces. Plans call for the center to begin with an entry that project manager Jeffrey Schesnol described as focusing on the “frighteningly similar” fertile ground for discrimination and prejudice nurtured by radical groups today. The center will also feature artwork by Scottsdale artist Robert Sutz, who has chronicled local Holocaust survivors since 2000. SEE HOLOGRAM, PAGE 3
Heat hacks Jewish Arizonans share summer hacks to beat the heat. To read more, go to p. 19. PHOTO COURTESY OF FARAH BESHARAT
SEE PLANS, PAGE 2
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