A muy bien Sisterhood seder

Last Wednesday's Sisterhood seder was another impressive seder in a long string of wonderful Sisterhood seders. Led by Rabbi Kalfus, Rabbi Samansky, Cantor Ken, and our amazing Jennifer Bennett to a sold out crowd, it featured stories, songs, and Jewish history from Mexico, Central and South America. You can find pictures on our Sisterhood website (www.tassisterhood.org). The Haggadah (with the sephardic charoset recipe on the last page) is on our website too. Click on "Events & Programs", then "Past meetings and Events", and then click on the seder flyer. Or go to our Facebook page, where a direct link to the Haggadah is posted.

Mucho thanks to the seder committee (Committee Chair Arlene Stone, Mel Birken, Becky Breuer, Sue Issler, Diane Levine, Sherry Lucks, Rhonda Mayer, Laraine Miller, Alyce Schultz-Rozsa, Laurie Scher, Sonia Smith, Judy Stehr, Tammy Singer) for all their excellent work making it happen. And thanks also to Rabbi Kalfus, Rabbi Samansky, Cantor Ken, and Jennifer Bennett for leading the service. A special shout out to Jennifer and Cantor Ken for their humorous rewriting of "What's New Buenos Aires" and "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina". Jennifer's a capella rendition of these songs was just perfect!

On an unrelated note, on April 5, the Google graphic celebrated Hedwig Kohn's 132nd birthday. Despite being born in an era when being a woman and being Jewish made accomplishing anything extremely problematic, Kohn perserved, educated herself and made significant contributions in the fields of flame spectroscopy and radiometry. Time.com has the following description of her accomplishments along with Google's interesting graphic at http://time.com/5564908/google-doodle-hedwig-kohn/. 

Born in Breslau Poland on April 5, 1887, Kohn became one of only three women certified to teach physics at a German university before World War II. As a Jewish woman, Kohn was barred from her teaching position in 1933 when Germany’s Nazi regime started to remove Jews from government positions. But she did not give up. She continued her work by taking up research contracts in industrial physics.

In 1940, when it was clear she could no longer safely stay in Germany, she fled to the United States, where she was able to pursue her dream of teaching at the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina and Wellesley College in Massachusetts. In her basement lab, she mentored Ph.D. students in their research and developed her work in flame spectroscopy, a project she had started in 1912, a year before she received her doctorate.

After retiring from teaching in 1952, Kohn took on a research associate position at Duke University in North Carolina. Kohn’s work was published in 20 journals and a textbook that was used to introduce students to radiometry (the science of measuring electromagnetic radiation, including light) well into the 1960s.

She died in 1964 at the age of 77. Her work continues to be cited and her legacy as a resilient pioneer, who found opportunities at a time when they were scarce, will surely be remembered.