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WEST HAVEN — Congregation Sinai, located in West Haven since 1929, recently sold their 78-year-old building in West Haven, and started construction of their new Milford synagogue space, located on the second floor of an existing commercial building at 55 Old Gate Lane.

Rabbi Dana Bogatz, who grew up in Meriden, and has been serving as rabbi of the Conservative (though not affiliated with United Synagogue) Congregation Sinai for three and a half years, has been proud of her congregations process in making decisions about their future.

Bogatz observes, Our congregation is aging, our building is aging, and West Haven is not a place where young families are moving to. The congregation wrestled with what to do. Im terribly impressed by the fact that the primarily elderly congregation believes it can and should continue to exist-and that changes needed to be made.

The Congregation Sinai building, at 426 Washington Avenue in West Haven, was sold to a church in November 2006. The church allows the synagogue to use two rooms until their proposed mid-June 2007 move to Milford.

Bogatz is confident about the future.

When I came here four years ago, there was not one child in synagogue, there was no Hebrew school, and there hadnt been a bar or bat mitzvah in eight years. Now, we have a Hebrew school and we have at least one bar or bat mitzvah scheduled every year for the next seven or eight years. That means there is a future-the congregation will continue! There are 100 individuals who are members of the congregation.

Bogatz, who recently purchased a house in Milford, notes, Milford is the first town in New Haven County outside of Fairfield County, the town offers the best of old New England and contemporary culture, and Milford has a Jewish population of young, educated families.

Congregation co-president (and incoming president), Becky Goodman-Olshansky, celebrated her bat mitzvah at Congregation Sinai in West Haven, was married there, and has been a life-long member.

Goodman-Olshansky, herself a Milford resident, feels that Milford is a vibrant, up and coming community and she loves the fact that downtown Milford has never been built up and remains quaint. Goodman-Olshanskyobserves that there are a number of young and unaffiliated Jews in the Milford area.

Daniel Krevolin, the other co-president, notes that a number of young families have already expressed interest in the Hebrew school. At a future date, the synagogue will likely become Congregation Sinai of West Haven and Milford, adds Krevolin.

While pleased with the move, Krevolin acknowledges, The thing that really hurts is that we will not have this beautiful sanctuary any more. Visitors have always been impressed with the beautiful, plain and simple sanctuary. But it was larger than we needed. Krevolin notes that the sanctuary had been totally refurbished following an arson fire on May 5, 1989.

Congregation Sinai will be the only year-round synagogue in Milford.

Says Bogatz, While Milford offers the seasonal (Orthodox) Woodmont Synagogue, there has been no year-round synagogue in Milford since the last one closed in 1981.

The board is sensitive to the needs of their elderly congregations who live mainly in West Haven and in the Towers in downtown New Haven. Members often pitch in to assist in transporting fellow congregants to the West Haven building, and will likely do the same after the move to Milford.

The new building is in a very good location-right off the highway, reports Krevolin. We wanted to be near New Haven Avenue so members could come from West Haven without having to go on the highway.

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NEW HAVEN — When Professor Doron Ben-Atar was growing up in Israel, his mother, Roma Nutkiewicz Ben-Atar, seldom spoke of her Holocaust experiences.

When she did start speaking – “some time after the Six-Day War,” reports Professor Ben-Atar — her incredible story filled an entire book, “What Time and Sadness Spared: Mother and Son Confront the Holocaust” (University of Virginia Press, 2006). Now, Professor Ben-Atar has written “Behave Yourself Quietly,” a play based on a moving story from her experience at Auschwitz, which will be performed at the Little Theater in New Haven on April 28 and 29.

The play is sponsored by the Department of Jewish Education, Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven, The Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, and Fordham University.

Proceeds from the two performances will provide scholarship money to support The March of the Living, which sends high school students from around the world to Poland and Israel. Bi-annually, the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven sponsors between 30-50 teens to experience the March of the Living.

Ben-Atar learned of the experience that inspired his play when his mother went to Auschwitz again as part of the March of the Living.

On the trip, his mother began speaking of her experiences in various ghettos and camps from age 12 until her liberation. At Auschwitz, she began telling the group about her imprisonment there, at age 16, six decades earlier. As they walked past the bunk where she slept as an inmate, she paused at the latrine and told the group, “This was like our coffee shop…where we could laugh and gossip.”

Prof. Ben-Atar, chair of the history department at Fordham University, member of Fordham’s Middle East Studies and Women’s Studies programs, had never heard that story before, but it made an impression.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about her comment about the latrine-that there was this autonomous place in Auschwitz, where people laughed, gossiped, and bickered,” he said. “I thought about it, wrote, left it, and came back to it – I couldn’t let go of the comment.”

The latrine remark led to Ben-Atar’s play, just over an hour in length, which depicts the lives of three women in Auschwitz in July, 1944. The play takes place against the backdrop of the most dramatic escape in the history of the concentration camp. The three female inmates are startled by the news and react in different ways. The play begins in the women’s latrine and moves through other intimate spaces of existence in Auschwitz.

Director Jane Tamarkin has been working with Ben-Atar on the project from the moment he asked her to read the first draft of the play.

“There was great stuff in it, because he is a historian and a writer,” observes Tamarkin. “It was provocative, and filled with facts, but, as a director, I think about how it can be played. A story can be a great read but not playable.” Ben-Atar accepted some suggestions from Tamarkin and re-worked the script. Tamarkin, who has acted off-Broadway and at the Long Wharf Theater and has taught acting classes and directed productions at the Hopkins School in New Haven for 13 years, then invited several friends from her female choir to read the play aloud. When Ben-Atar decided he was ready to see it on the stage, he invited Tamarkin to be the director. “This was a very exciting process,” reports Tamarkin. “This was not like directing ‘Death of a Salesman’ or ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ — this was brand new. We have been working on rewriting the script and the order of the lines until very recently.”

Tamarkin and her actors and actresses received an unexpected gift one month before the show’s opening. “Doron’s mother was in the States for Passover, and she came to a rehearsal and sat and talked with us for 45 minutes,” Tamarkin said.

Ms. Ben-Atar’s incredible memory for detail helped the actors truly envision the scene from 60 years ago. “There is a scene where clothes are being sorted,” notes Tamarkin. “She walked us through the way it was done. She remembered the exact height of the tables, and the certain way the clothes were folded. It was very moving.”

At the end of the preview, Ms. Ben-Atar, who reports reading the re-written script in one sitting, told the cast that she loved the play, and that it “really moved” and had “a lot of action.”

“My mother is an impressive person,” Prof. Ben-Atar said. “She is brilliant, really an intellectual. And she doesn’t give you standard cliches.”

“Behave Yourself Quietly” will be performed April 28 at 8:30pm and April 29 at 2pm at the Little Theater, 1 Lincoln Street in New Haven. For more information or to purchase tickets, call (203) 387-2424, ext. 310. Proceeds will provide scholarship money to support The March of the Living.

Donations to the March of the Living may be made directly by sending a check made out to “March of the Living,” c/o Ruth Gross, Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven. 360 Amity Road, Woodbridge, CT 06525.

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NEW HAVEN — Thanks to the construction of a new eruv (fence), life just got better for Jews at Yale.

The eruv, which is attached to the eruv which already serves Westville and several other New Haven neighborhoods, will enable Sabbath observers on the Yale undergraduate and graduate campuses and in surrounding neighborhoods to push strollers to synagogue, carry food to friends’ homes, and otherwise enjoy Shabbat with children and friends.

Rachel Novick, a Yale PhD student in ecology and evolutionary biology, said there were “a lot of kids and a very festive atmosphere” at the Slifka Center on Feb. 3, the first Shabbat the eruv was in place. Novick, husband Tzvi (also a Yale graduate student) and six month old son, Aiden, residents of the East Rock neighborhood, were able to be, in Rachel’s words, “part of a social community again.”

“For the last six months, we had been taking turns going to shul – this was our first Shabbat at shul together, as a family – and we went out to lunch at a friends’ house.”

After the second Shabbat of the eruv being in place, Rabbi Jason Rappoport, associate rabbi of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, co-director (with wife, Meira) of the Jewish Learning Initiative at Yale, and himself a Yale PhD student in philosophy, received a letter of praise from a community member: “For the first time since we arrived in New Haven the whole family went to shul and went out to a Friday night meal. Thank you so much for your hard work getting the eruv up.” Sabbath observers will now be able to bring food to people in the hospital, and they can enjoy a picnic on the Yale campus.

Rappoport is also the Rav MaMachsir for the eruv’s halachic committee. In this capacity, he coordinates such halachic matters as arranging consultations and visits with rabbinic eruv experts, training and hiring weekly eruv checkers and contractors (who can fix problems, even at the last minute), and he notifies the community (via hotline and website) of the eruv’s status.

Rachel Novick hopes that having an eruv will encourage people to remain in the community even after their graduate training. Many have left the Yale/New Haven community, or moved to the Westville neighborhood.

Joseph Bartel, a Yale Law School graduate who now lives in Florida but wanted to be a member of the eruv committee and contributor, cautioned, “Now that the eruv is up, and the task of construction is completed, there is still plenty of work to be done raising money to ensure that the eruv is self-sustaining.” Rappoport added, “We need to raise $250,000 to endow the eruv.”

To learn more, view the eruv map, and check on eruv status each week, visit http://www.jli.co.il To contribute to the eruv and to learn about naming/sponsorship opportunities, contact Rabbi Rappoport at jason.rappoport@yale.edu

To check if the eruv is up each week, call 203-387-3897.

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Sundays may never be the same for Florence Katz or Andy Bedford — unless Rabbi Yossi Hodakov of New Haven finds another station to host his weekly radio program.

Rabbi Hodakov’s Jewish Radio Hour, broadcast on WYBC AM for four years on Sunday mornings from 10am to 11 a.m, has come to an end.

“The station is meant to be a training ground for broadcasters,” reports Hodakov, who explained that by law, the station’s broadcasters are given just a four-year, non-renewable contract.

But many listeners from around the state are disappointed that Rabbi Hodakov’s show will no longer be on the airwaves.

Florence Katz, an elderly resident of New Haven’s Tower One, remembers the 50 years when Beryl Howard had a Jewish radio program in New Haven. And she remembers the years when there was no Jewish radio program.

“Then Rabbi Hodakov came,” reports Katz. “Every week he would play beautiful Jewish music, tell us what the Torah portion was about on Saturday, and play the news directly from Israel.”

Katz found his voice to be “smooth and delightful. I’m legally blind-it was good for me! You get used to it. Now, it is not on. It is very unpleasant.”

Dr. Andy Bedford, a Woodbridge gastroenterologist and father of two, also enjoyed “The Jewish Hour,” broadcast.

“What a natural he was on the air,” reports Bedford, who particularly enjoyed the way Rabbi Hodakov, would teach, using examples from the Torah portion, Jewish history and real life. “It is one of his gifts-like a good attorney giving closing arguments and pulling it all together.” Bedford enjoyed the format of the show, with its musical opening, Hodakov’s talk about the weekly Torah portion, his interesting guest, and his sharing “something on his mind.”

Bedford said he looked forward to hearing the news from Israel, and Hodakov’s discussions of such topics as the war in Lebanon.

Hodakov, a Jewish educator and currently a teacher of Jewish Studies and Chasidism at the Southern Connecticut Hebrew Academy and at the Beit Chana Academy, always wanted to host a radio program. He called many stations and was delighted to find the non-profit WYBC.

“To get a program, you have to apply to be a member, undergo training to know how to work all the machinery, and submit a demo show,” reports Hodakov, who notes that WYBC, which mostly features shows by Yale students, is a station where you “come in, and turn the lights on and off yourself.”

Hodakov publicized his shows by emails, word of mouth, and via ads in Jewish publications.

Hodakov talks with great enthusiasm about his loyal listeners.

“There is such a wide range-in age, observance, everything.”

What were Hodakov’s favorite moments?

“The most enjoyable moments were when we had live contact with a fellow in the Old City of Jerusalem on Purim-he was deep in his Purim Seudah (meal) and was talking to our listeners,” Hodakov recalled nostalgically. “And when we had a rabbi who was a New York City police chaplain.” Hodakov was particularly fond of the show’s variety-from music, to interviews, to talk about the Torah portion and upcoming holidays, and the Arutz Sheva hookup from Israel.

“If you listened long enough, you would hear something you liked,” he said.

Hodakov’s fans hope he will be back on the air soon.

“I never missed his show,” said Hayden Leventhal of New Haven. “He spoke a normal person’s language-he spoke my language.”

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