Inaugural KI Storytelling Event Showcases Writers

By MICHAEL AUSHENKER | Contributing Writer

Laughter, tears, defiance, anger, regret, understanding and reconciliation colored the personal journeys described by a dozen raconteurs at Kehillat Israel (KI) last Sunday as the Sunset-based Reconstructionist synagogue held its inaugural storytelling showcase. The theme—“Legacy: Stories for the Generations.”

On a sunny, particularly windy Palisades afternoon, about 175 people gathered inside the synagogue’s sanctuary to hear short monologues by participants and KI congregants Laura Diamond, Sheldon Welles, Tom Elias, Alicia Albek, Linda Schibel, Richard Willis, Audrey Greenberg, Judy Silk, Karen Rappaport McHugh, and Robert Benun and his older brother John Benun.

Nancy Handler and Jahna Perricone, led by guitarist Daniel Leanse, broke into song during two breaks.

“Legacy” turned out to be topical on this day, as March 6 marked the passing of former First Lady Nancy Reagan. However, American politics was the furthest thing from the details discussed by these storytellers, most of whom interpreted “legacy” to reflect aspects of their own personal history.

Not surprisingly, directly or indirectly, the Holocaust shaded many of the stories shared by these Jewish congregants.

Greenberg related her moving story of how she became the woman she is today; how her mother was deeply traumatized by the Holocaust, despite having made a move to America that predated it, because the letters back home to Poland had stopped coming after her sister Bluma and other relatives had disappeared in the death camps.

Greenberg concluded that she was grateful, despite taking two decades to shake phobias her mother had transmitted to her, for also instilling in her a “Jewish soul.”

Albek broke down in tears at the end of her remembrance of her father and Holocaust survivor, who died at age 90 last year.

Recalling a day in Jerusalem during a KI mission to Israel, John Benun contrasted how the morning had begun with solemn moments at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial center, to a bar mitzvah celebration for three KI teens that soured after Arabs began throwing stones at the celebrants.

“We decided to stay and stand our ground,” Benun recalled, interpreting the incident as a metaphor for the state of Israel’s survival.

Not every story contained the specter of the Holocaust’s horrors.

McHugh shared her feelings of being age 12 and suffering through her parents’ divorce and then gradually accepting her mother’s new boyfriend, “the interloper, the replacement partner.”

Schibel shared an account of her Minnesota bat mitzvah at a time when such ceremonies for girls were uncommon. Silk described how she went from a kid balking at receiving a copy of “Mr. Popper’s Penguins” for Chanukah (“This isn’t a present! It’s a book!”) to growing into an avid reader, then an author.

Elias shared his harrowing and inspiring medical triumph when, in 1997, he needed a kidney transplant and KI’s then-rabbi, Steven Carr Reuben, his wife Didi and an attorney congregant all generously offered to donate one of their kidneys.

“Not what you’d expect from a lawyer,” Elias quipped of the latter.

Elias eventually received the kidney of an Israeli cousin, however, “those offers still stagger me. Even now. We have some of the most generous, caring people at KI that [Elias’ wife] Marilyn and I have found anywhere.”

One of the most powerful, most poignant stories was one of contrast that came from Willis about his late father. At a baby’s circumcision, Willis had trouble focusing on the ceremony because he was worried about his 80-year-old father, diminutive with age, disappearing in the crowd in the back of a packed, sweltering room. After finally rescuing his father from the room, his father made a joke and broke into a smile that the younger Willis somehow felt would be his father’s last.

Post-program, Welles shared with the Palisadian-Post why he felt so comfortable relating from the dais his humorous story of trying to verify the small Russian town his grandmother came from. A former vice president of technology at Hughes Aircraft Company, he is used to public speaking.

“I’ve had this story that needed telling,” said Welles, who has already written it for a memoir he’s working on.

During the reception, the event’s creators, Silk, McHugh and Diamond, discussed formulating their nascent program, which they considered a success in both turnout and execution.

Six months ago Silk and McHugh, avid stand-up comics and storytellers, came up with the idea of forming Kehillat Israel’s version of the Moth, Tasty Words and Expressing Motherhood forums they had been frequenting.

“They just jumped on it,” Silk, flanked by supportive daughter Alice Rona, said of KI.

Diamond admitted she was not surprised to find many stories referencing the Holocaust.

“It’s the post-traumatic stress of the Jewish people,” she said.

“It’s a part of our history,” John Benun added. “We have to remember it, and we have to talk about it so that [future generations] don’t forget.”

One of the important aspects of storytelling, McHugh said, is to connect people in an age when too many are immersed in the false, synthetic world of cyber connections.

As if to illustrate her point, she related how after she mentioned her father and his upbringing in passing from the podium, fellow longtime KI congregant Ritta Effros realized she had attended the eighth grade with McHugh’s father decades ago in Brooklyn.

Effros gave McHugh her business card, which McHugh intends to relay to her dad.

Human connection through the oral tradition of storytelling—it’s one of the oldest, most primal rites of mankind, or in a word… “legacy.”