IJN Special Sections
HUMAN memory wavers like fickle candlelight across the mind, obscuring faces once adored, illuminating others hardly known. Kaleidoscopic images — a favorite toy, a hiding place, an ancient dream — invade our daily routine then disappear. Out of thousands of spring mornings past, one single and completely average morning survives with extraordinary clarity. Every sound, shade, shaft of light stands out so vividly that the present moment fades in comparison. Thousands of spring mornings have vanished into oblivion.
“It’s funny what you remember, what comes to you,” Rose Zelinger said about the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society (JCRS), where her mother died in 1916 and her father worked for 70 years.
DELEGATES to this year’s General Assembly will see lots of local Colorado faces during their Denver stay — some more than others. One of those on the “more” side will surely be Doug Seserman, president-CEO of the Allied Jewish Federation of Colorado.
Not only is it his responsibility as the professional leader of the hosting federation to meet and greet executives from federations across the continent at the GA — it’s also his nature. Friendly and outgoing, Seserman embodies the wa...
Paul Epstein — 6’4”, wavy white hair flowing past his shoulders — bends slightly to greet his guests in the back hallway of Twist and Shout, Denver’s massive, independently owned music store on East Colfax Avenue.
His office, smaller than one might expect for the owner of this local and national landmark, is right down the activity-packed hall. Once inside, he suggests muting the music. “It might be less distracting,” he says with a sympathetic grin.
Epstein, 52, spent the first...
The art of Witold K. has taught Witold and painted a fascinated a great many people over the years, and mystified perhaps even more.
They have seen in his creations the elements the artist has intentionally put there — diminutive and lost-looking human figures, enigmatic black holes both terrifying and beautiful, images vaguely reminiscent of the American Southwest or of Eastern Europe, muted earth tones and vivid rainbow hues.
They have also very often seen, or felt, something less plainl...
ONCE upon a time — until very recently, actually — the Denver Jewish community had something called the Community Talmud Torah.
Hundreds of Denver Jewish kids passed through its classes in the 27 years that it existed. Meeting on Tuesday nights, they learned the fundamentals of Judaism, Jewish holidays, basic Hebrew, rudimentary Torah — all the foundational lessons that constitute what Jewish educators have long called supplemental or religious school.
Then the CTT came to an end.
Facin...