In July, we had the privilege of a lifetime: to travel with 89 high school students and their chaperones and companions from the Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra as part of their tour to Poland and the Czech Republic.   Representing MYSO’s cream of the crop, these highly skilled musicians from across southeastern Wisconsin practiced for months […]

When Rabbi Levi Stein started operating Friendship Circle of Wisconsin in 2017, as a bakery that trained people with special needs, he could not have imagined where he was headed.  In a few years, Stein would observe the weight of the pandemic on teen mental health, then assign a new mission to Friendship Circle. Even […]

Diana Vang-Brostoff is on two simultaneous missions, one for the world and one for herself.  You may know her as the wife of Alderman Jonathan Brostoff, obm, who tragically died by suicide on Nov. 4, 2024, after much of his beloved, left-leaning Milwaukee social network turned on him, post-Oct. 7. While it’s not possible to […]

In August 2024, we arrived in this wonderful place — the Milwaukee Jewish community. Although we came after a long and intense process of applying, training, and preparing to be ShinShinim* in an American Jewish community — living independently with unfamiliar host families, learning how to represent Israel in countless ways — we still didn’t […]

When freelance archivist Sharon Levy opened a damp, musty cardboard box in a storage room at Congregation Emanu-El of Waukesha, she discovered mildew.   It seemed to be coming from a backpack in the box, long forgotten and blooming with gray spores, with religious school papers that were salvageable.    “It’s really nice to be able to […]

For more than 80 years, a cross marked the grave of Paul Singer, a young Jewish airman from Shorewood, killed in World War II. In May, the cross was replaced with a Star of David.   “When you see that cross get lifted up and, very respectfully, put on a crate, on a sort of a […]