Rabbi & Spiritual Leader
  Stan Levy
Executive Director
  Peggi Sturm
Events Coordinator
  Eva Nathanson
Youth Education Director
  Rina Daly
Comfort Group Coordinator
  Linda Rubin

High Holy Days 2001

For the 11th year, the members of B'nai Horin and our friends and families are returning to Brandeis-Bardin Institute to celebrate the Holy Days in a peaceful and beautiful natural setting.

Many of us delight in staying overnight in the cabins, making new friends, eating meals together, walking to services and leaving daily life behind for a few precious hours.

Our services follow the Jewish Renewal path, with meditation, prayer, music and dance to stir our hearts and souls, connecting us to our ancient roots, speaking to each of our lives today.

Our cantorial soloists, singers and musicians inspire us with traditional and modern ninguns, prayers and songs. Each prayer is presented, its' meaning and tradition explored, then spiritually experienced anew.

We celebrate in the House of the Book, a stone building built in the shape of a Torah. It is modern and air-conditioned, yet timeless.

On Yom Kippur afternoon, with songs and prayers, we await the sunset on a large circular patio on top of the mountain.

As the sun sets and the moon rises, we bless our new year, the spectacular world that surrounds us, the wine and challah before enjoying the break-the-fast meal.

Each New Year we return to B'nai Horin and Brandeis-Bardin Institute, with more members, more family and new friends! We hope you will join with us this year.
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From Rabbi Stan

AFIKOMEN
The Hidden Treasures of the Passover Seder
One Life Story in our Haggadah

Where does one look to find the Afikomen, the hidden treasure of the Passover Seder? The courage to live, the courage to care?

Maybe it’s true, the Messiah is the person sitting next to us, hidden like the Afikoman.

On one side is my mother Belle, now 94, who spent nine hours of the first night of Passover in the emergency room of Cedars-Sinai Hospital. She was also in the emergency room another nine hours, three nights earlier. Now she was here to bless and light the Yom Tov candles and usher in the second night of Passover.

On the other side is Irene Gut Opdyke, a sweet, blue-eyed, eighty-year-old grandmother, our special surprise guest. She was 17 when Germany and Russia both invaded Poland at the start of the Second World War. A Polish Catholic, she fought for the Polish partisans and was captured and raped by Russian soldiers. She was exchanged for German prisoners and found herself working as a waitress for the officers’ dining room of the Nazis occupying the town of Radon, Poland. There, she passed food and blankets, then information, to the Jews in the ghettos. Then she smuggled Jews from the work camps into the forest. And when she was made the housekeeper of a Nazi major, she hid ten Jews, including one woman who became pregnant, in the basement of his Polish villa in Ternobol. Irene was discovered and caught by the Nazi major and pleaded with him to sacrifice her life so that the innocent Jews might live. His terms: become my secret mistress and you and they will live. She did. And she and the Jews lived, and soon thereafter the baby was born in the forest. Irene was determined to deliver the Jews from evil and death. It was as simple and impossible as that. But miracles do happen and she and those she saved were liberated. Now, 55 years later, she was here to share her Passover story with us.

The young ask the questions at the Seder, “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

Irene gave us her answer:

“I did not ask myself, should I do this, but how will I do this? Every step of my childhood brought me to this crossroad; I must take the right path or I would no longer be myself. I did not become a resistance fighter, a smuggler of Jews, a defier of the SS and the Nazis all at once. One’s first steps are always small.

“For the young people, who can accomplish the impossible and can achieve greatness by finding the strength in God and in the goodness of the human spirit, I dedicate my life story to encourage them to find hope and strength within themselves. Courage is a whisper from above: when you listen with your heart, you will know what to do and how and when.”

Two women at the Seder, Mom Belle Levy and Irene Gut Opdyke, like Shifra and Puah, the Egyptian midwives to the Hebrew slaves who defied their Pharaoh that Jewish babies may be born and live, give us hope, courage and inspiration that God’s four promises of deliverance, rescue, liberation and redemption do come true, for them and for us. May we too fulfill the promise of Passover, to live life fully and be truly free and help others become free.

Irene Gut Opdyke was named by the Israeli Holocaust Commission as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations.” She has received the Israel Medal of Honor at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. The Vatican has given her a special commendation and her story is part of a permanent exhibit at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

Irene’s life story is told in her book “In My Hands: Memoirs of a Holocaust Rescuer,” published in 1999 by Knopf, a division of Random House, and available in hardback and paperback by Anchor Books.