“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

 “Outside of being Melissa’s husband, and Jonah, Micah, and Alexa’s father, there is no greater privilege than this role,” Judge Kass said at his formal investiture on Friday, May 1 at the City of Virginia Beach Judicial Center. Together, his family assisted him in putting on his robe, an act symbolizing their support.

 The opening invocation was led by Rabbi Jacob Herber of Congregation Beth El, and remarks were given by Joshua Baker of Waldo & Lyle, PC, David Lacy of Christian & Barton, LLP, and Matthew Foster of Bangel, Bangel & Bangel, LLP.

 Kass formerly worked as a personal injury lawyer for Kass Law Firm, P.L.C. He is a graduate of the Marshall-Wythe School of Law at the College of William and Mary, and he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Georgetown University.

 In his speech, Kass emphasized the importance of recognizing that attorneys face mental health struggles, such as anxiety and depression, at alarming rates, approximately 2-3 times greater than the general population.

 “I hope, that while I’m ensuring the parties on both sides, on some of the most stressful days of their lives, feel heard and achieve justice, that I never forget that those of you advocating on their behalf have stressors as well. As the saying goes, you never know what someone has going on,” he said.

 Kass extended his heartfelt thanks to his family, friends, and colleagues. “To say this is a team sport is an understatement, and you all are wonderful teammates,” he said, addressing the packed courtroom.