The concept might not immediately resonate with children, most of whom have not lived quite long enough to gain a real perspective on their place in the world. 

Nonetheless, there are myriad ways to introduce the holiday and familiarize youngsters with it in a meaningful way. Here, three Strelitz International Academy families share their approaches.

In Irina Komarovsky’s home, Rosh Hashanah is all about sweetness. She leans into the holiday’s central wordplay, calling it a “sweet new year,” and fills her table with apples dipped in honey and an array of desserts. One small, playful touch has become a family favorite: Swedish Fish, meant to symbolize being a leader.

This year, that table will look a little different. Komarovsky’s son, Palmer, nine years old and a fourth grader at Strelitz International Academy, will be joined by his soon-to-be stepfather, Nick, and four-year-old stepbrother, Luca – the family’s first Rosh Hashanah as a blended household of four.

The holiday is now a chance for the two boys to bond. Palmer has taken on a teaching role of his own, sharing his collection of PJ Library books with Luca to introduce him to the holidays their new family will celebrate together. 

Komarovsky, who was born in the former Soviet Union and immigrated to the United States as a toddler, says her own approach to the holidays shifted after she lost her grandparents and became a mother.

Growing up, she says her family didn’t always celebrate at home, but she wanted to change that – both for Palmer, and to honor her grandparents’ memory.

“I want Palmer and Luca to remember the smells of the house while Nick and I cook,” Komarovsky says. “I want them to remember the warmth around the table as we include both found family and blood family when we celebrate Jewish joy.”

Other parents point to the shofar as a point of fascination. Aly Yaary’s oldest son, Asher (who is, by his own emphatic correction, three and three quarters), has always loved music and instruments. 

When he learned that Rosh Hashanah has its own instrument to blow, he was thrilled. There was just one problem: the family doesn’t own a shofar.

Undeterred, Asher enlists his mom to “fake blow” one by making trumpet noises. He coaches her through the holiday’s four traditional blasts – tekiah, shevarim, teruah, and tekiah gedolah – and he does not let mistakes slide.

Asher is far from the only child with a shofar hyper fixation. Pati Oliszewski shares that the shofar has made Rosh Hashanah particularly meaningful to her six-year-old son, Ben.

Given that his father is Rabbi Ari at Temple Emanuel, Ben has been watching his dad blow the shofar since he was born. Last year, his parents gave him a mini shofar of his own to play at home. 

He did so well that he and two friends now take part in the official shofar blowing during services.

“It gives them a real role in the holiday rather than simply watching the adults celebrate it,” Oliszewski says.

Apart from the shofar, she highlights community as an important aspect of Rosh Hashanah. Going to synagogue and seeing everyone (especially those they only see once a year) is part of what makes this time of year so special.

“That feeling of belonging and experiencing the holiday together is something I really value and hope our children will remember,” she says.

It’s wonderfully intuitive – as participants in the ritual tear up the pieces of bread, they acknowledge their sins with a faint whisper and a prayer. Then, once repentance is made clear, the guilt-ridden crumbs are thrown into the running water, to be carried away by the currents. 

The crumbs, however, are not always carried afar. Where many Jews live, including in Tidewater, the breadcrumbs often wash up on the beach, remain floating in the lake, or are eaten by the aquatic animals inhabiting their waters.

As Joanne Palmer of the Jewish Standard, a regional newspaper serving North Jersey and Rockland, New York, recalls, “someone at our lunch fantasized about the ducks getting ready for their annual feast. ‘I know I shouldn’t eat all that bread but I can’t help it,’ she imagined a duck saying. ‘It’s so tempting. Even though it goes straight to my thighs.’” 

It’s a funny anecdote, but ultimately, there is some truth in the anthropomorphic situation posed here. Ducks, fish, and other wildlife that receive the sin-contaminated bread, in many ways do not benefit from the extra gluten cast into their waters. 

In fact, according to an article on the Chabad website, the ritual is not exactly aligned with Jewish law. “On Shabbat and holidays, one is not allowed to feed any animals that aren’t one’s responsibility and are not dependent upon him for their sustenance.” 

In the decades since this moral dilemma has been posed, alternatives such as frozen peas and river-friendly grains have been championed by Jewish environmental organizations. The Jewish environmental organization Repair the Sea (Tikkun HaYam) has pushed the conversation a step further by introducing a new kind of Tashlich ritual that suggests cleaning up pollution in waterways rather than producing more. 

Created in 2018 by Rabbi Ed Rosenthal, Reverse Tashlich is essentially an organized trash clean-up through a Jewish lens. 

Rooted in the Jewish value of Repair the World (Tikkun Olam), the concept of Reverse Tashlich is maybe just as intuitive as its traditional counterpart. It was brought to Tidewater by Andrea Tank, Ohef Sholom Temple’s Sisterhood president. 

Having worked for the Sierra Club and lobbied on behalf of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Tank is extremely aware of the environmental crisis of the 21st century and the importance of Tikkun Olam.

“There’s a lot of young people that have a huge concern for our environment,” Tank says. “To me, this is a very physical way to demonstrate your care and repair of the world.”

Ohef Sholom’s Rabbi Rosalin Mandelberg agrees. “It is a creative and good way of reimagining an old tradition for a new day,” she says. “And though it isn’t a replacement for the traditional ritual of casting one’s sins away, it calls upon Jewish communities to do something just as important – be good stewards of the planet.”

The idea began as a joke when Rabbi Rosenthal, founder and CEO of Tikkun HaYam, was explaining the tradition to members of Scooby Jew, the Jewish scuba-diving club he created at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla. One of them pushed back.

“There’s already more than enough human sin in the water,” the student said. “Why don’t we take some of it out instead?”

Rosenthal took the challenge seriously. He recruited five students, and together they pulled about 75 pounds of debris out of the mangroves along Eckerd’s mile and a half of waterfront. 

The next year, the group grew to 10 students, eventually prompting Rosenthal to take the concept off campus and reach out to synagogues across the Tampa Bay area. 

“I was really surprised at the response,” he says. “It showed me that there’s an interest, but there was no vehicle in the Jewish world to raise awareness of it.”

Almost a decade later that response has scaled well beyond Tampa. Last year alone, 320 teams in 31 countries participated in reverse Tashlich events, including a Newport News-based chapter already serving Tidewater.

“When you combine the awareness of the mitzvah and recognize it’s fulfilling the mitzvah,” Rosenthal says, “an ordinary action like a beach cleanup becomes a holy action — no different than going to synagogue.”

The concept has strong roots in religious values, drawing heavily on Bal Tashchit, the biblical prohibition against needless waste. Rosenthal also points to Tza’ar Ba’alei Chayim, the prohibition against causing needless suffering to animals.

“It’s very bad for the fish,” Rosenthal says of the use of bread for Tashlich. “It’s not their normal food.” But he doesn’t ask people to abandon the traditional ritual altogether. 

Instead, he recommends observers use pebbles and seashells – things already native to the water. Seashells are made of calcium carbonate, a compound that the ocean is increasingly starved of by rising acidity.

As Rabbi Rosenthal says, “We in the Western world take water for granted, because it’s the most common substance on the planet… in Hebrew, our tradition refers to it as mayim chayim — living water. The water is alive, and it gives life. It sustains life. Without it, we die.”

 Margaret Sawyer and Alice Titus, co-chairs of Ohef Sholom Temple’s archives, along with their team, spend hours each week exploring and preserving documents, photographs, and oral histories that chronicle nearly two centuries of Jewish life in Tidewater. 

 Both women devote their Wednesdays to the temple’s archives as volunteers. Their motivation is simple.

 “American Jewish history sometimes gets omitted,” says Titus. “Sometimes it’s because people don’t know it. Sometimes it’s because they choose other things to focus on.”

 While researching local stories, Titus was struck by how often Jewish contributions appeared only in passing. “You pick up older histories of Norfolk and Tidewater, and they only sometimes mention a Jewish person. They only sometimes mention a Jewish congregation,” she says. 

 OST’s archives provide a fuller picture of the region’s development by documenting the civic, cultural, and philanthropic roles Jewish residents have played throughout Tidewater’s history. 

 “We’re collecting things that have not been published or mass circulated,” Titus explains. Unlike a library, which houses published materials that can often be found elsewhere, archives preserve unique historical records.

 The work is meticulous, but it often leads to unexpected discoveries. Volunteers spend hours cataloging documents, rehousing materials in archival folders, and learning the stories behind each collection.

 Researchers, filmmakers, authors, and family members regularly turn to Ohef Sholom’s archives for assistance. For example, the archives supported research into the SS Quanza, a ship carrying Holocaust refugees back to Europe that had to stop for coal in Norfolk in 1940. Records preserved in the archives documented the efforts of local Jewish leaders who advocated for the passengers. 

  “I don’t think there’s ever a Wednesday that somebody doesn’t have an ‘aha’ moment,” Sawyer says of the archives’ team’s regular meeting time. “All of a sudden something jumps out at you.”

 In addition to preserving historical records, the archives also connects families to their own history.

 One day, while sorting through family records, Sawyer found handwritten notes created decades earlier by a congregant who had passed away, but whose family still belonged to the temple. She made copies and passed them along to the woman’s granddaughter. 

 “She was in tears,” Sawyer recalls.

 In another particularly meaningful case, the archives provided documentation that helped establish a deceased woman’s Jewish identity, allowing her to be buried in a Jewish cemetery in New York City.

 Those moments transform routine archival work into something more personal, offering glimpses into lives that might otherwise be overlooked.

 Among the collection’s most valuable holdings are more than 40 oral history interviews, preserving the voices and experiences of community members.

Titus and the other volunteers also offer educational programs and presentations highlighting the archives’ collection and efforts. 

 For Sawyer and Titus, preserving history is about more than organizing old documents. It is about ensuring that future generations inherit stories and hear the voices that shaped Jewish life in Tidewater.

 “I love it here,” she says. “The people are so lovely, intelligent, well educated, well-traveled. Just really nice to be around.” 

 In fact, she says, “I’ve always loved Virginia. The first time I came here, I was nine years old. I visited Williamsburg.” 

 After a lifetime in Birmingham, Alabama, Luria and her husband, Herbert, moved to Tidewater approximately four years ago to be near their daughter, Elaine Luria, who had made Norfolk her home. Not long after the couple’s move – about a year later – her husband died following a long illness.  

Luria’s roots in Birmingham were deep – a city where she, along with her late husband and daughter, were all natives. There, she was extremely active in Jewish communal life, serving in leadership roles with organizations such as the National Council of Jewish Women. She was also involved in the arts, volunteering for decades at the Birmingham Museum of Art as a docent.  In addition, Luria was a Blue and Gold officer for the Naval Academy where she interviewed candidates and helped them through the application process. In fact, 25 of her candidates were accepted to the Naval Academy and all graduated.

 When she relocated, however, she says she was ready to step back. 

 “I had done so much volunteer work. I was ready to take a rest.” 

 In Norfolk, Jewish life looks different but is still familiar in feeling. She is a member of Ohef Sholom Temple and speaks warmly about the congregation and Rabbi Rosalin Mandelberg. She attends services roughly once a month, often with neighbors, and occasionally joins Sisterhood events. 

 Much of her social life, however, is rooted in the broader community of where she lives, at Harbor’s Edge. She has also joined the American Friends of Lafayette and travelled to France, New Orleans and Richmond with the group.

 “I just talk to people,” she says. “That’s how I meet everyone.” 

 That ease of connection has become the foundation of her new life. She rarely eats alone, instead making daily plans with neighbors and friends. Jewish or not, she describes the community as deeply welcoming. 

 Looking back, she doesn’t hesitate when asked about the move. 

“It was definitely the right move for me,” she says. “There are so many wonderful things to do here – you can’t even imagine.” 

And, of course, it doesn’t hurt to have her daughter’s family – Elaine, Robert, and Violette – close by.

 Born in Germany to Polish Holocaust survivors who met in a displaced persons camp after World War II, Meier grew up hearing the language at home and among her parents’ friends. English eventually became her dominant language, but decades later, Yiddish still connects her to the people who shaped her childhood. 

 Today, she reconnects with that heritage at the Simon Family JCC’s Yiddish Club, where members gather monthly to explore the language through conversation, music, poetry, film, and more. 

 For Meier, Yiddish was always close to home, but with time and assimilation it became just out of reach. 

 “My parents would speak to me in Yiddish, but quickly I started answering them in English,” she says. After she entered preschool in the United States, where “everybody spoke English,” eventually “they just gave up and started speaking to me in English.” 

 Still, Yiddish remained present in her family’s life. Her parents and their friends continued speaking the language, sharing jokes, stories, and memories. 

 “Even amongst their friends, when they got much older, they were pretty much speaking English most of the time,” Meier says. “But they’d get together with friends and speak Yiddish.” 

 Though her father never taught her the language, she remembers him preserving it through music. “My father sang beautifully,” she says. “He would sing songs in Yiddish, and I remember a lot of them.” 

 Rabbi Israel Zoberman remembers a similar shift in his early years. 

“When I came to Israel, I was about four years old,” Zoberman says. “We were told, ‘Don’t speak Yiddish on the street. No one will play with your kids if they hear them speak Yiddish.’”

 Born in Kazakhstan in 1945 to Polish Holocaust survivors, Zoberman spent his infancy moving across postwar Europe before his family settled in Israel. At home, his parents spoke Yiddish – even though it wasn’t welcome outside. 

 In the years following Israel’s founding, Hebrew became a symbol of national renewal. Many immigrants embraced it while leaving Yiddish behind, seeing it as a language associated with exile, persecution, and the destruction of European Jewish life. 

For club organizer Harry Graber, however, Yiddish was never a reminder of the past – it was his first language. He grew up speaking it on the Lower East Side, where Yiddish was part of everyday life in many Jewish neighborhoods. 

 Today, he sees the club as a way to show that Yiddish was not only a language of survival, but a language of creativity, humor, and culture. 

 “I want people to understand that the language is fun, that the language was used by people in very complex ways,” he says. “It was their everyday language… they used it for poetry, literature, and music.” 

 Now, once a month, members of the Yiddish Club gather at the Sandler Family Campus to read, laugh, and explore a language that once connected millions of Jews across Europe – and continues to connect them today. 

 Meier says part of what makes Yiddish so difficult to translate is its humor. “There are so many wonderful Yiddish expressions,” she says. One favorite saying she remembers is, “With one rear end, you can’t dance at two weddings.” Another colorful curse wishes someone would “grow like an onion with your head in the ground.”

 With the Yiddish Club, they’re preserving not only a language, but the memories it carries — something deeply personal to club member Myrna Amdursky. 

 “What comes up is a part of my life that is now gone,” she says. “That was the language of my parents and grandparents’ generation.”  

 Similarly to Meier, Amdursky’s parents were set on helping their children fit into American life. She says her father intentionally chose not to teach the language to his children. 

 “He did not want me and my brother to learn Yiddish because he thought it would influence our English pronunciation,” she says. 

 Yiddish became what Amdursky calls, “a language for parents only” – something spoken among adults when they didn’t want children to understand the conversation. 

 But while some may assume the group functions as a language class, Amdursky says that’s not quite accurate. 

 Members discuss contemporary efforts to preserve and revitalize the language while exploring Yiddish films, music, and other forms of media.  

Yiddish sayings are woven throughout the meetings, but the main point of the group is remembrance and discussion.  

 “It is not a structured learning environment. We are not studying Yiddish as a language,” Amdursky says. “We’re absorbing the culture.”  

 While Yiddish is often associated with prewar Europe and the Holocaust, Graber hopes the club can expand that understanding. 

 “Yiddish is so much portrayed, and to some degree rightfully so, as the language of pre-World War Two Europe,” he says. “But I tried to do some stuff that’s post-World War Two, so to see how it’s being used today.” 

 To Graber, preservation does not mean freezing Yiddish in the past. Instead, he sees it as a language that has evolved. “Not a language that died, but a language that has changed.” 

“It is important to me for people to understand that the Yiddish language is not simply a folk language but a sophisticated language used by Ahkenazi Jews for one thousand years,” says Graber. “Hebrew was the language of the bible and Aramaic of the Talmud but Yiddish was the language of a civilization of Jews expressing itself in philosophical, theatrical, literary, scientific, academic and all other terms and formats reflective of a people successfully reaching beyond the limits of oppression.”

The Yiddish Club meets on the first Tuesday of each month at 1 pm at the Sandler Family Campus. Information: jewishva.org/Adults or contact Sarah Cooper at SCooper@ujft.org.

 This is how Jennifer Lenay, Simon Family JCC fitness instructor, guides students through gentle, breath-synced movement in Flowing Waters, an aquatic take on traditional tai chi. 

 Held Tuesdays and Thursdays at noon in the indoor therapy pool, the class combines slow, intentional movement with warm water, making it well-suited for people managing pain, injury, or limited mobility. 

 Movements are paired with steady inhalation and exhalation, creating a rhythm that participants carry through each motion. That connection between breath and movement helps shift the body out of stress responses. 

 “When we are stressed… we absorb those things,” Lenay explains. “Breathwork helps reset our nervous system, and it puts us back into a parasympathetic mode.” In this state, combined with the warm water, participants can fully work through pain points without accumulating further tension. 

 The class is a gamechanger for many of its participants who come with a variety of health concerns. 

 Sue Ellen Crounce, 78, for example, has been deeply involved in the JCC’s fitness community for years. Before discovering Flowing Waters, she was a regular at many JCC classes. Then life brought significant health challenges, including knee replacements and major heart surgery. Movements that once felt simple on land, such as stepping sideways, shifting weight, and maintaining balance, became difficult. When she tried Flowing Waters, she found that the therapy pool provided a safe container to work through those limitations. 

 Lenay echoes that sentiment, explaining the benefits of underwater exercise for older adults. 

 “With water, there is minimal impact, if not zero,” she says. “The strengthening is inevitable. Once that injury is under the water, you’re going to strengthen that area.” 

 Crounce is one of many seniors who have regained the confidence to strengthen vulnerable muscle groups without fear of injury. “I still feel safe,” she says. “But I can see what I need to work on.” 

 That sense of safety and feeling of stability extends beyond the class. “When I leave and go home after being in the therapy pool, I can sleep,” Crounce says. “I’m not achy.” 

 In fact, Crounce recalls nearly tripping over her rocking chair in the middle of the night and catching herself at the last moment using balance skills she developed in Flowing Waters. To her, the class is now a necessity. 

“I need this,” she says. 

 Crounce describes the class as her sanctuary and advocates for its future. When enrollment was low earlier this year, she was among a group of participants who petitioned the JCC to keep the class running. 

 To reinforce the class’s mental and spiritual benefits, Lenay asks participants to choose a word to carry with them through the movements. On a recent afternoon, Crounce chose “joy.” 

 “I have to find joy,” she says. “Even with everything happening, we can still find it in our day. We have life. We can pray for other people and remain in joy.” 

 For Crounce and many of her classmates, Flowing Waters is more than an exercise class. It is a place to find balance in mind, body, and spirit that can be carried into life outside of the pool.  

For information on Flowing Waters and other fitness classes at the Simon Family JCC, go to simonfamilyjcc.org.

Zerbib echoes that sentiment. “It’s been nice to hear their opinions and the way they see Judaism,” she says. “I’ve really appreciated their openness and acceptance.”

While long-distance community building is a central goal of the program, the students also gain firsthand experience with a healthcare system very different from their own.

“These comparisons are important because they broaden your worldview,” Zerbib says. “People think the American system is the most advanced, and in some ways that’s true.. but in Israel, preventive care is very common, and community medicine is very strong. Each system has things the other can learn from.”

Sirota says she was impressed by communication systems in U.S. hospitals and the benefits of shorter physician shifts, but noted the prevalence of chronic illness among younger patients.

“I was surprised to see the volume of patients that had very complicated background diseases,” she says. “For us in Israel, it’s relatively rare for women in their mid-20s and 30s to have conditions like Type 2 diabetes, chronic hypertension, and chronic kidney disease.”

The exchange comes as many Israeli medical students complete portions of their education amid war and instability. Sirota recalls taking exams during missile alerts.

“During those tests, you suddenly hear a siren,” she says. “You stop the test, go to the shelter, come back after 10 or 15 minutes, and then you have to continue the test.”

This reality, she says, required constant mental adjustment. “You have to change your mindset very fast. You’re in danger, and suddenly everything is okay, and you have to be focused for your test.”

Those experiences have shaped the students’ understanding of the role physicians play during times of crisis.

“During war, patients don’t always come just for physical symptoms,” Zerbib says. “Sometimes they come just to talk, to share the stress they’re feeling. The doctor might be the only person they speak to that day. The human connection becomes much more important during times of uncertainty.”

Warsof says programs like this one serve as a reminder that those connections can endure despite distance and conflict.

“Medicine, education, and community don’t stop during war,” he says. “Relationships continue. Learning continues. And those connections help strengthen Jewish communities on both sides of the ocean.”

For both students, the impact is immediate.

“It really felt like when we got here that there’s some sort of flow of connection that’s being kept through us just coming