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“Butterflies don’t live in here, in the ghetto.” The phrase is the last line of a poem, “The Butterfly,” penned in 1942 by Pavel Friedman, who was in the Terezin concentration camp and ghetto constructed by the Nazi Gestapo in the Czech Republic. More than 150,000 Jews were sent there. The Butterfly Project, founded by educator Jan Landau and artist Cheryl Rattner Price, was created to commemorate Yom Hashoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Fainbarg and Chase ...

Like you and the entire world, for the past several months we’ve balanced COVID worries, economic downturns and social unrest with hope and with the desire to do something meaningful. Though our many JCC Cares volunteers have hunkered at home away from the Merage JCC and away from our numerous nonprofit partners, we have remained busy. We’ve been reaching out, and staying connected in a number of ways: collecting hundreds of masks, filling our food drive canisters with groceries, ...

CIF Finalist Aurora Duncan Will Be a Second-Generation Panther With Commitment to Drury Junior National qualifier Aurora Duncan of Irvine, Calif. has announced her decision to attend Drury University beginning in the fall of 2021. She will become a second-generation Panther as her mother, Gina LeBlanc-Duncan, competed in the first two NCAA Championships for Drury and head coach Brian Reynolds. Reynolds will also be Aurora’s coach. She told Swimming World: “I am thrilled to ...

Community and Leadership Heartbroken. I have been searching for other ways to describe what I was feeling throughout the events of this past Wednesday. How is it possible that such things were playing out in the United States Capitol and literally right before our eyes, before the eyes of the entire world? A breakdown in our society. Decency abandoned. Betrayed by our leaders. The events of January 6 did not emerge out of the blue but were rather the not entirely ...

Everything seems like it is changing. In this era of the great quarantine, we shop, work, exercise, and eat (hello carbs!) differently. It won’t be a surprise to you, that Camp has changed as well with rules and regulations governing every aspect of fun and care. In addition to taking temperatures and conducting health questionnaires each morning, we are making huge efforts to reduce the number of people campers cross paths with. Cohort sizes are smaller and large group fun is a lot ...