The following recipes are super-versatile. They could grace your Purim or even your Pesach table. They might even be candidates for an unusual shalach manos offering.

Before presenting my “eggciting” egg recipe, I’d like to weigh in on one of the most persistent kitchen controversies of all time: how to peel a hardboiled egg. You’d be surprised how strongly some people feel about their own tried-and-true methods. I have friends who swear by the running-under-cold-water method. Others make a pinprick or cut the egg shell in half and scoop out the inside with a spoon. (What? You haven’t heard of that? It is only for people who don’t care if the egg salad has crunchy bits of shell in it. I definitely do not recommend this method.)

Purim Sixty Years Ago

by Raphael Blumberg

Sixty years ago, we lived on Palmer Avenue in Lower Park Heights – a different planet, a different Purim. There was no drinking on Purim as celebrated on Palmer Avenue. There was no Purim seudah that I can recall. There was a Megillah reading at Rabbi Sadovsky’s shul, with groggers. Each year, I went to Beth Tefiloh Day School in an ornate costume put together by my father. And there were my mother’s hamantaschen, the best in Baltimore! (They had to be.). My mother made two types: poppy seed (which we called “mun”) and date. My father was in charge of preparing the poppy seeds. This involved cooking them and then letting them hang in a bag in the laundry room, dripping water on the floor. I recall nothing more about that process. It hasn’t been passed on to me. I don’t know if people still do that today, although something tells me they don’t, just as my mother’s salting and kashering chickens right in our own home rather than receiving them kashered from the butcher might be a thing of the past. That said, I have one special memory of Purim I would like to share.

My father, Professor Arnold Blumberg, a”h, was preoccupied with Jewish survival or, more precisely, destruction and rebirth. He had witnessed the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel soon after. In 1943, he lost an eye as a 19-year-old boot-camp soldier in a war-games training accident at Fort Bragg, North Carolina and, paradoxically, thus survived the war. All his basic-training comrades were wiped out a few months later in the battle at Normandy. His life’s experiences – the annihilation and rebirth of the 1940s, the odd twist of fate that had kept him alive – all strengthened his sense that the world had a divine order to it, and restored him to the Orthodoxy of his grandparents. He even named my brother “Michael Seth,” using the Hebrew name Sheis, Adam and Eve’s third son, born to start a new world after Cain sowed destruction by killing Abel. In my entire life I have never met another Sheis, but it was the best way my father had of expressing his appreciation of destruction and rebirth.

Thus, in 1963, when I was eight years old, our last year on Lower Park Heights before we moved up to Glen Avenue, my father sent me out with my mother’s hamentashen to go door-to-door and give out shalachmanos to all the neighbors, Jew and non-Jew. I was instructed to tell each neighbor, in two sentences, the story of Purim: how the Jewish people were almost annihilated by Haman and how we celebrate our having been spared. Today, 57 years later, it is hard for me to believe that he asked me to do that, and it is hard for me to believe that I actually agreed, but this really happened.

That was my Purim back then. Was there a conventional Purim seudah? If there was, I don’t recall it. My father had to make do with the bag lunch he brought with him to work. Our Purim was primitive, without any social milieu. Call it a “Swiss Family Robinson” Purim. There was also no men’s table, no under-the-table drunkenness, no teenage “Purim cigarettes,” no fretting over whether what you gave the neighbor was as good as what you got. There was no “dvar Torah” – I didn’t know the meaning of the words – and certainly no clever dvar Torah that I spend months looking for so I can entertain my friends after drinking my 750 cubic centimeters of sweet wine.

But there was content all the same, a clear, simple message that you could share, and I definitely benefited from it.

Raphael Blumberg lives in Kiryat Arba.

Visiting the homebound, raising money, cooking and delivering food, running Chinese auctions and plays, providing money to the underprivileged, helping the childless, providing support for the physically and mentally ill, and a myriad other tasks are done by workers who are never paid for their time, energy, and devotion. I’m talking about volunteers, of course, and we all know people who devote hours and hours, days and nights, to helping others. What motivates them? Why do they do what they do?

As we in the United States grapple with widespread flu, alarming headlines about the newest lethal coronavirus, called the Wuhan coronavirus or the new or novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), initially reported on December 31, 2019, in Wuhan, China, have been appearing daily in publications globally. Although the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared it a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), is it really a direct threat to us here in the States? The Where What When thanks Dr. Robert Edelman, Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in the Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health, for graciously sharing his knowledge of this virus and its potential threat to us.

I will never forget an extremely kind and generous neighbor while growing up. Each year, he would invite individuals with a wide range of developmental and very complex learning challenges from various residential and day centers to his home for Thanksgiving dinner. His children once politely asked their father, “Why can’t we ever invite regular people?” The father responded, “Regular people will always be invited by others, but we will invite these people with special needs.”

While chesed, kindness, is one of our most revered virtues – applicable in all times and places – today’s attitudes toward disabilities and handicaps have broadened to include other ways to respond to those who have them. We are taught in Pirkei Avot (2:5), “Do not separate yourself from the community.” Accordingly, Jewish tradition supports the idea of not allowing anyone to be separated from the community against his or her will. Rather, we should provide equal access to all and facilitate the full participation of individuals with disabilities in religious and

One of my father’s favorite sayings was “Al tistakel bekankan eila ma sheyeish bo – Don’t look at the barrel but at the wine in it.” In other words, don’t judge a book by its cover. One of the unfortunate traits of many people is to judge a person by his or her outward appearance, nationality, or ethnicity. Gypsies or “Roma,” as they prefer to be called, are often thought to be dishonest, uncouth, and utterly outside the norms of society. They are said to have originated in northern India, but they have wandered around Europe for around 1500 years. They live a nomadic lifestyle and have their own language and practices. But, we err if we prejudge people in that way. To quote Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust, “…There are two races of men in this world, but only these two – the ‘race’ of the decent man and the ‘race’ of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people.”

“Shetizku livnos bayis ne’eman b’Yisrael – May you merit to build a loyal Jewish home.” It’s the ultimate bracha at a vort, a chasana, and a bris. But do those of us who receive this blessing fully appreciate the ko’ach (power) within it? This article is in tribute to a woman whose upbringing would not have foretold the fulfillment of this beautiful bracha. It was through her life decisions that the bracha’s power came into full force and was actualized in her progeny.

It is my privilege to pay homage to my mother-in-law, Dena Lerner Gerber a’h, an ardent WIT student, a devoted member of Suburban Orthodox, and a dedicated volunteer with Meals on Wheels until her passing on March 10, 2019 at the age of 92. Woven into the fabric of the Baltimore Jewish community, Dena Lerner Gerber was zochah to be an actively involved matriarch of four generations of “batim ne’emanim b’Yisrael”.

n this series of articles about addiction, sponsored by the organization Chayeinu, we have been discussing paths toward opioid addiction and opioid overdose. In the last article, I wrote about the problem of teenagers progressing from alcohol or marijuana use to opioids. Often, they start with prescribed opioid medications (found in the family medicine cabinet, perhaps) and transition to illegal drugs. This is the most common path to opioid addiction. In this article, we will consider an alternate path to opioid addiction that might occur as a result of opioids prescribed to treat pain.

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Opioid analgesics like oxycodone and hydrocodone, and to a lesser extent codeine and tramadol (a synthetic analgesic), are considered frontline treatments for moderate to severe pain, including some chronic pain conditions. It is interesting to consider that over any two-year period, about a third of all adults in this country receive an opioid prescription. Physicians in the United States seem to be more open to prescribing opioids than doctors from other countries.

“It’s a safe place to share what’s going on in our minds,” says Sara Brejt about Jewish Women of Wisdom (JWOW!), a new international organization she helped found for women in their 50s and 60s. After engaging audiences in Lakewood, Monsey, Brooklyn, and the Five Towns, JWOW! is bringing the conversation to Maryland.

Several years ago, Mrs. Brejt, a lawyer, career coach, and teacher at Women’s Institute of Torah (WIT), was listening to an interview about women’s midlife issues on Chazaq Radio. She recognized the speakers, whom she had met at conventions: Miriam Liebermann, author and inspirational speaker, and Faigie Horowitz, Rebbetzin of Agudas Achim in Lawrence, activist, and prolific writer for Jewish publications. Mrs. Brejt contacted them. Around the same age, the three frequently spoke about their challenges and opportunities as midlifers and empty nesters.

My family and I just passed the shloshim of my father, Herbert A. Kelman, MD, a”h. During the shiva, as I shared with friends and family my father’s challenges and life achievements, I also discovered fresh anecdotes of his life from his surviving friends and colleagues. Sadly, not too many of them remain; after all, he was the last of his generation, passing away at the ripe old age of 95! My daughter Naomi shared with us an interview she penned about his life as part of a college course. Upon reading it, I was amazed at how many particulars of my father’s life I had forgotten or had never known, even though I thought I knew all the details of his long life.