Bernier-Conen
Dalilah Bernier and Jordan Conen married May 25, 2025, celebrating at The River Club of Mequon.
Rabbi Joshua Herman officiated. Dalilah is employed by Milwaukee Jewish Federation.
The mother of the bride is Nita Bernier-Cirioni, Tallahassee, Florida. The father of the bride is George Cirioni, Tallahassee.
The mother of the groom is Marcy Conen, Glendale. The father of the groom is Jeffrey Conen.
“A Teddy Bear for Emily – and President Roosevelt, Too” by Nancy Churnin, illustrated by Bethany Stancliffe, published by Albert Whitman & Company
This is a stunning picture book, telling the story of Russian Jewish immigrant, Morris Michtom, who gave his toy elephant to a sad child as they traveled on a boat to America. Years later, that act of kindness inspired Morris’s wife and daughter to sew a “Teddy Bear” to honor President Roosevelt after he saved a bear’s life. They then displayed the bear at the family store. When people wanted to buy it, Morris didn’t feel comfortable without President Roosevelt’s permission. So, he wrote to him. Roosevelt was delighted. And that’s how Teddy Bears came to be. Filled with Jewish joy, this is a book children will want to hear repeatedly—most likely clinging onto a favorite stuffed animal.
“On the Wings of Eagles” by Tami Lehman-Wilzig, illustrated by Alisha Monnin, published by Apples and Honey Press
In 1949, when the Jewish community of Yemen was forced to leave, a telegram arrived at the Alaska Airlines office asking for assistance. A pilot named Warren knew he had to help. This is a moving story about how kindness has the power to bring hope and transform lives. “On the Wings of Eagles” has several important and beautiful meanings, one rooted in the Torah and the other connected to an airplane that was part of the mission to bring 49,000 Jewish Yemenites to Israel. A perfect book to highlight this Jewish history.
“Many Things at Once” by Veera Hiranandani, illustrated by Nadia Alam, published by Random House Studio
Newbery Medal-winning author Veera Hiranandani shares an intimate and vulnerable portrayal of growing up with a Jewish mother and a Hindu father. Her maternal and paternal history contain painful traumas and joy, showing common threads. They open the door to many lessons about how to treat one another with kindness and respect. The gorgeous illustrations complement the touching narrative. “Many Things at Once” provides an illuminating window into interfaith families and will promote important conversations.
“I Have a Jewish Name” by Rochel Vorst, illustrated by Dena Ackerman, published by Hachai Publishing
This is a beautifully written and illustrated book. It will instill a sense of pride in having a Jewish name, whether it’s Biblical or given to honor the memory of a loved one. The book distinguishes naming a boy at a bris and a girl at a baby naming. A perfect way to share our Jewish traditions and make every child feel special to have a Jewish name.
The Chronicle ‘Book Corner’ column is by author Liza Wiemer, of Fox Point, who has taught in nine of our Milwaukee-area Jewish religious schools and day schools. Her latest novel, “The Assignment,” is appropriate for ages 12 and up.
In an era where acts of violence, including those fueled by antisemitism and other forms of hate, pose significant threats to communities, preparedness is paramount. The FBI’s “Active Shooter Event Quick Reference Guide” serves as a resource, offering strategies to enhance individual and collective safety during such critical incidents.
The FBI defines an active shooter as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” This definition underscores the unpredictable nature of such events and the necessity for immediate, decisive action.
The guide emphasizes the “Run. Hide. Fight.” protocol. Here are some key details:
Run: If a safe path is available, evacuate the area immediately. Encourage others to come along, but do not delay if they choose not to follow.
Hide: If evacuation isn’t possible, find a secure hiding place. Lock and barricade doors, silence electronic devices, and remain quiet.
Fight: As a last resort, and only when your life is in imminent danger, attempt to incapacitate the shooter using any means necessary.
When law enforcement arrives, it’s crucial to remain calm and follow their instructions. Keep your hands visible at all times and avoid sudden movements. Providing accurate information to 911 operators, such as the shooter’s location, physical description, and type of weapon, can aid in a swift response.
The FBI’s guide also highlights the importance of preparedness:
Awareness: Stay vigilant and report any suspicious behavior or threats to authorities.
Training: Participate in active shooter drills and familiarize yourself with emergency procedures.
Communication: Establish a plan for contacting family and friends during emergencies.
The FBI’s “Active Shooter Event Quick Reference Guide” is available at a link from this story online.
Welcome to the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle’s annual Standing Up Against Hate special section. I proposed that we launch this special section several years ago. I had no idea how relevant it would become.
For this year, at a time of consternation and heightened antisemitism, I’d like to share a list of people around me whom I have love for. Elie Wiesel famously said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” With that in mind, I now toss this list – which is not comprehensive, just a sampling of people to love – into the universe. Who would you add? Who would you put on your list?
Rob’s list of love
I have love in my heart for you if you are much more observant than I am.
I have love in my heart for you if your father was Jewish, but not your mother.
I have love in my heart for you if you are transitioning, or if you love someone who is the same sex as you.
I have love in my heart for you if you struggle with mental health, or if you are disabled.
I have love in my heart for you if you, or others, think you are in some way unsuccessful.
I have love in my heart for you if you are a person of color in a room full of people who are white.
I have love in my heart for you if you were born into the Jewish Milwaukee community, or if you are new to it, or you’re in another Wisconsin city.
I have love in my heart for you if you live up north in a little town where the supermarket checkout clerk sweetly strikes up a conversation with you about their dog or their mom or their kids for 20 minutes, yet you don’t know what they think of the Jewish people, or if they think of us at all.
I have love in my heart for you if someone you know clicks “like” on an uninformed, troubling post on social media.
I have love in my heart for you if you ask me for food as I hurry past you.
I have love in my heart for you if you are suffering, or different, or excluded.
The world could use more love, so I invite you to join me in this. It can’t hurt, and what we’re doing in some corners of the world is not quite working.
Rob Golub, editor
Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle
There is general agreement that silence in the face of everyday hate is not helpful.
Elie Wiesel, the renowned survivor and conscience of the Holocaust, taught us that. He pointed out that silence and indifference help the perpetrators of undue hatred because it unwittingly condones it. Although the Beatles sang “All You Need is Love,” Wiesel taught us that love is not enough, that love is not the opposite of hate. Goodness knows that the most intense, volatile, and recalcitrant hatred can come out of the closest relationships, such as intimate couples and families.
As a consequence, standing up to inappropriate hate has become a popular stance against antisemitism and other hatreds. But a bit of caution is in order. It can feel good to stand up to the bad, but ineffective. How do you successfully stand up without being knocked down, ignored, or making things worse? Moreover, and common among the Jewish people, we have internal disagreements, which often have to be resolved or ignored to present a united front, otherwise haters and enemies can use a divide-and-conquer strategy. And, first, we must remember that sometimes hate is appropriate and deserved, perhaps like my hatred of Hitler as an obvious example.
My field of psychology and psychiatry has some answers, but they may seem counterintuitive and thereby not used often enough. Not using them enough may help explain why we haven’t made enough progress against hate, which is a natural tendency of human beings toward those we fear or dislike because they are different. A quest for power over those who are different ensues. That sort of negative othering can also be due to jealously of the success of the other. Hatred can be of those viewed as inferior as well as the jealousy of those viewed as superior or chosen as superior.
Scientific research has shown us the best ways to open people’s minds toward new ways of thinking and reacting. It is not through protests, hostile arguments, or shaming the other. Contempt of the other is the worst. It breaks up relationships, like in marriage. The best approach is through curiosity and respectful conversations. Otherwise, what we call confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance comes into play, leading to values and ideas becoming even more embraced, the opposite of what is desired. If humiliation is involved, backlash and revenge of some sort is not unusual. As another participant in an intercultural meeting: “I had to learn not to call out in anger, but healthily.”
In other words, we need to be more upstanders than bystanders. Another term for upstanders is everyday heroes. Although some people are more naturally upstanders and everyday heroes, it can also be taught and imagined, such as by the nonprofit Heroic Imagination Project, which conducts workshops for businesses and schools to promote acts of heroism in everyday life. Imagining and practicing how one might respond to threatening hatred can help prepare one to respond helpfully.
Because standing up to hatred can also be dangerous, it is important to assess the situation, and to have adequate security nearby or called if seems necessary and practically possible. Being part of a likeminded and supportive group can be supportive in its own right and reduce the danger.
Besides these sorts of opportunities with strangers or acquaintances, corrective emotional experiences can help change the most hateful antisemites. That means slowly developing a positive relationship that counters the haters’ assumptions. Once that is established, education can be accepted more easily, including for those who have been trapped by cultish and conspiracy thinking. If worse comes to worse, formal interventions like anger management or even incarceration for criminal hate crimes become necessary.
Prevention is actually the best way to stand up to hate because it reduces the occurrence of undue hatred in the first place. Needed are empathic parents and teachers who instill within children an acceptance of those who are different in normal ways. Adults who identify with all people are also less likely to hate. I am a Jewish American Earthling! Finally, societal opportunities for self-actualization reduce the likelihood of blaming others for the shortcomings we all have. Clearly, we humans can do better.
Hate is so destructive, primarily to the recipient but also to the perpetrator, that in our recent Interfaith Seder in Milwaukee, I labelled it as the 11th plague. Not only that, but when the hatred hits the Jews first, it inevitably ripples out to other vulnerable societal groups.
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About the writer
From the beginning of the Covid pandemic, Wisconsin’s Dr. H. Steven (Hillel) Moffic has been writing a column – now numbering over 600 – about “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” four weekdays a week, as well as a weekly video – now numbering over 200 – about “Society and Psychiatry” – for the largest psychiatric publication in the world, Psychiatric Times. Many include the relevance of his Judaism. He is currently a pro bono private community psychiatrist.
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Moffic’s 7 words for Standing Up Against Hate
Cantor Martin Levinson, right, and religious education director and teacher Carrie Barbakoff led children in song at Congregation Emanu-El of Waukesha, on Sunday morning, May 4. As in synagogues everywhere, they greeted the children in Hebrew: “Boker tov!” (“Good morning!”) Photo by Rob Golub.
Built on the foundation of the annual Community Passover Food Drive, Good Deeds Day – Milwaukee was a full day of community-wide volunteering. The day was held April 6th, 2025, organized locally by Tikkun Ha-Ir, Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center, and Milwaukee Jewish Federation. With opportunities for all ages and abilities both at the JCC and throughout Milwaukee, Good Deeds Day saw over 25 organizations and 250 volunteers join together to #DoGood. Photo by Janet McMillan
Ted Neitzke IV, who is not Jewish, had never heard directly from a Holocaust survivor.
An educator, Neitzke had read extensively about the genocide. He researched. He wrote. But it was all, as he said, “through one-dimensional, breathless texts.”
Then he met southeastern Wisconsin’s Eva Zaret, a survivor. Zaret, of Budapest, Hungary, shared her experience on Neitzke’s “Smart Thinking” self-improvement podcast.
“We began to realize we’re running out of primary source voices,” Neitzke said. “But we thought, in the Milwaukee area, how can we start to capture these great voices and these both horrific life experiences and the lessons from them?”
For a 2021 episode of the “Smart Thinking” podcast, Zaret joined Neitzke to do just that. She shared photos and told stories of horror, of resilience.
Neitzke’s Holocaust education journey didn’t stop with his podcast. He is now transitioning to a new format – meant not just to preserve stories but also to make educational resources available to Wisconsin students.
The most powerful part of the 2021 podcast experience, Neitzke said, was having his daughter in the room to hear Zaret’s words. Neitzke’s daughter, Grace, is studying to become a history teacher.
“My daughter will be alive for the 100th anniversary of the end and the beginning of the Holocaust,” he said. “No Holocaust survivor will be. But Grace will be able to now transfer her personal experiences and knowledge to her teaching.
Beyond his daughter’s classroom, Neitzke, the CEO of the nonprofit Cooperative Educational Service Agency 6 and the mayor of the city of Port Washington, wants to preserve survivors’ stories so others can learn. And he wants to tell those stories in a consumable format – “legacy pieces,” he said.
So, Neitzke is producing video recordings of survivors detailing their experiences.
“That’s the power of capturing this on video, is that these stories from people, while two-dimensional, will never be lost,” he said.
Neitzke’s videos are joining the library of primary sources available through the Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center, where he serves as a board member. The endeavor creates resources for Wisconsin educators, who under 2021 Wisconsin Act 30 are required to teach about the Holocaust and other genocides.
Teachers, Neitzke said, can break the videos down into curricular units. He envisions them pausing a video to reflect on different aspects of survivors’ experiences. For example, they can open a map and show students just how far people traveled, perhaps from Warsaw, Poland, to Siberia.
“Great teachers can pull so much out of just a simple conversation to bring relevance to everybody,” Neitzke said. “That’s my personal visionary goal for this.”
The whole Neitzke family has adopted the cause. In addition to his daughter’s plans to teach history, Neitzke said both his wife and son teach social studies. He said he is willing to travel anywhere to bear witness to and preserve these stories.
On top of creating primary sources, Neitzke said his goal is to prepare people to be tolerant advocates. People who learn about the resiliency of the Jewish community – even if they’ve never personally met that population – can advocate.
“That’s what I always wanted for every one of my students, is to understand the world in which they live,” Neitzke said. “At the very minimum, they can advocate for themselves and then others.”
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Back in mid-April, the Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center teamed up with Wisconsin teacher Maria Prust to host a Holocaust education event, featuring a survivor and a child of one, at Wausau’s Grand Theater. The event drew more than 800 students from several districts in the central part of the state.
Prust is a special education teacher, dual-certified in social studies, at D.C. Everest Senior High School in Weston. Part of her duties include co-teaching social studies classes. Prust, who is not Jewish, works in an area that does not have a large Jewish population.
She and her other social studies co-teachers attended a professional development class two years ago about Holocaust and civil rights education. HERC later reached out, asking her to serve as a Holocaust education fellow.
“It’s all about promoting Holocaust education in the state and also gathering resources of who else is teaching those types of classes, so we have a network, so to speak, to share resources and share ideas.”
At one meeting, Sam Goldberg, HERC’s director, said that the organization was looking to do a “big event” that could gather students from multiple schools.
“I immediately jumped on it, to say Wausau’s got a great spot with the Grand Theater,” which could accommodate a large crowd, Prust said.
The event, which took place on April 17, featured survivor Eva Zaret, along with Nancy Kennedy Barnett, the daughter of survivor George Kennedy. Both came from Hungary.
Elie Wiesel’s “Night” is taught to the entire sophomore class at Prust’s school, and that class was invited to the event. Her school’s English classes also conduct some Holocaust education, which it has tied in with modern lessons about antisemitism.
“Part of how the English classes teach ‘Night’ is they teach ‘upstander’ versus ‘bystander,’ to understand that concept,” Prust said.
She noted that antisemitism is “definitely” on the rise in central Wisconsin, with occasional news reports about antisemitic flyers, including in Wausau last June.
“Especially with kids that I spoke to, we really try to frame it as, ‘This is an authentic learning experience for you, to hear people’s stories that experienced something very tragic, a monumental event in human history,’” Prust said. “To hear their stories firsthand, and/or second hand, is something that you may not hear very often, or for very much longer.”
While she noted that she was nervous heading into the program, “once everybody got there, it was just this amazing feeling of doing on this kind of scale,” she said. She added that other schools have reached out about wanting to participate in similar programs in the future.
“The personal story matters,” Goldberg told local TV station WSAW when they reported on the event. “Our Holocaust Center was built off of the lives and the backs of child survivors who wanted to make sure the story was told. Reading it in a history book isn’t the same. You need the personal story, you want to feel for these people.”
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The program Student to Student dates back to 1992, when it was created by the Jewish Community Relations Council in St. Louis. It aims to fight antisemitism by having students talk to other students, including some who might have little previous familiarity with Jewish people, to foster understanding.
Twelve students recently entered the Milwaukee Jewish Federation version of the program; two are area high school seniors, Rachael Meldman and Golan Altman-Shafer. Meldman lives in Grafton, and Altman-Shafer lives in Fox Point.
As part of the program, Jewish students talk with peers “who haven’t really met any Jewish kids at all,” Altman-Shafer said.
The idea, he added, was “getting Judaism kind of out there so that antisemitism hopefully would decrease in the future, if they see familiarity with Jews and their practicing and their culture.”
Meldman added that the idea was that students, by the time they got to college, would have at least met a Jewish person before.
Altman-Shafer was recommended to the program, as his mother Tziporah Altman-Shafer works for the Federation, and connected with Dalilah Bernier, whom he credits with bringing the concept to Milwaukee.
“I found myself being in the position that I needed to explain Judaism to a lot of people,” Altman-Shafer said. “And so I kind of got a skill, I kind of learned how to do it pretty well.”
Meldman was nominated by her regional director in BBYO.
“I think it was a lot of, because I’m in a community with so few Jews, so I know how it is,” she said. “And then also just because I really enjoy my religion and stuff. And I take great pride in it and stuff. And I like talking to people.”
What does one of their talks look like?
They cover everything from Jewish rituals and holidays to cultural matters to stories about the Holocaust.
“Yes, we talked about the Holocaust,” Altman-Shafer. “We spare a little bit, but we mentioned that it’s very sad, and it’s very important for the Jewish canon, and that being insensitive to it was never the best thing.”
“Two of [my group members] actually have grandparents who are survivors, so they kind of shared like, ‘My grandparent is a survivor,’ [and] you should take the opportunity if you ever have one to meet a survivor or hear one speak.”
Israel is also discussed, including discussions of the daily lives of people there.
“We want peace for everyone,” Meldman said of the message she conveyed in their talk. “Instead of talking about the current conflicts, that we’re going to talk about Israel’s past and history for the Jewish people and stuff,” Meldman said. “So we talked about, like, Israeli culture. So we didn’t really bring the war into it.”
Also part of the lesson is a discussion of Jewish life cycle events, including weddings. So the students staged a mock wedding, including holding up the chuppah and breaking the glass — which the classes especially enjoyed.
Meldman comes from a Reform background, while another member she has presented with is Orthodox, reflecting the wide range of practices among Jewish people.
“I think for me, the most important point that drives home is that although we are Jews and we have a different religion, we are people first and foremost,” Altman-Shafer said. “And I think we kind of get that message across by explaining the huge amount of diversity that we have within practices.
“So yes, we go through the whole holiday, go through all the observances that we have, the special laws, but we also make it an important point to tell everyone that some people practice differently,” she said, just as is the case with other religions.
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