Toronto’s Tears For Couple In Mystery Slaying

This article was first published in The Jewish Daily Forward.

David (Donny) Pichosky and Rochelle Wise (photo taken from Facebook)

The Toronto Jewish community has been stunned into a mournful silence by the murder of beloved educator Rochelle Wise and her husband David (Donny) Pichosky in Florida last week.

Many turned inward with their grief as the couple was laid to rest on Monday at the Bathurst Lawn Memorial Park. However, one man, whose children went to the school where Wise had worked and who also knew Pichosky, spoke to The Forward after attending the funeral and burial, calling the murder “a huge shock and a double tragedy.”

The father said he planned on generally acceding to the request from the Bialik Hebrew Day School, where Wise was Preschool Vice Principal for four years before recently retiring, to avoid speaking to the media out of respect for the family of the deceased. “However, I will say that nobody has anything but wonderful things to say about Rochelle,” he shared. “She was a fantastic educator and a warm person. We all held her in high regard. We wished she had stayed at Bialik longer, but understood her wanting to retire and enjoy life with Donny.”

Wise, 66, who had founded and run the popular Crestwood Valley Day Camp for many years before working at Bialik, was discovered by concerned neighbors dead alongside her husband, 71, in their Hallandale Beach, Florida townhouse. The retirees were “snowbirds,” Canadians who spend up to half the year in Florida to escape the cold northern winters.

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© 2013 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Israel’s School Lunches May Get a MO-bama-Style Makeover

This piece first appeared on The Jew and the Carrot blog at The Forward.

Jerusalem City Councilmember Rachel Azaria (second from right) and other parents protest unhealthy school lunches.

One of the signatures of modern Israeli cuisine is fresh, flavorful food made with fruits and vegetables that grow almost year round in the country’s temperate Mediterranean climate. So, it might be a bit surprising to learn that Israeli kids are eating school lunches that are as lacking in freshness and good nutrition as some of the worst American school lunches.

Armed with examples of fixes for the problem, like First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move initiative and British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution campaign, Jerusalem City Councilmember Rachel Azaria is leading the fight for healthier school lunches in her city and throughout Israel.

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© 2013 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

It’s Not Easy Being A ‘Rabbi’s Daughter’

This article was originally published in The Jewish Daily Forward.

Having a rabbi for a father can be tough, something that filmmaker Racheli Wasserman knows all too well.

When we think of children who carry the burden of having famous parents, we often think of the offspring of movie stars or politicians. But in the Religious Zionist sector of Israeli society, being the child of a prominent rabbi comes with some very heavy baggage.

Filmmaker Racheli Wasserman, herself the daughter of such a rabbi, carries this load, and decided to unpack some of it by making “The Rabbi’s Daughter.” The short documentary, which Wasserman made as a student at the Ma’aleh School of Television, Film & The Arts in Jerusalem, is an intimate and sensitive portrait of three young women who not only live in the shadow of their revered fathers, but who have also made the fraught decision to leave the religious life behind and forge new paths for themselves.

“The Rabbi’s Daughter” has caught the attention of Israeli film critics and the Israeli movie-going public alike. In December, it was awarded the best student film prize for the Israeli Documentary Filmmakers Forum, and earlier last fall it won the award for the best short documentary at the 2012 Haifa Film Festival. In 2011, the film was awarded the Aliza Shagrir Prize for outstanding documentary. Exceptionally for a student film, “The Rabbi’s Daughter” has been viewed more than 45,000 times online.

The half-hour film follows three young women as they interact with their rabbi fathers and expose their previously private thoughts and feelings about their complicated relationships with them. Tamar Aviner, daughter of Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, head of the Ateret Cohanim yeshiva in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City (and who recently declared that women should not engage in politics or run for seats in the Knesset), is a free-spirited artist and sensitive soul who struggles with being thrust into the public eye. Still clearly a spiritual person, Aviner has adopted a hippy-like peripatetic existence, living in a van and working as a street artist.

For Tamar Tzohar, daughter of Rabbi Yoram Tzohar, dean of Ulpana Bnei Akiva Kfar Pines (a residential religious girls’ school), and for Ruth Katz, daughter of Rabbi David Bigman, who heads Yeshivat Ma’aleh Gilboa, the struggles are more about religious observance. Tzohar, a talented photographer and graphic designer, feels she has no way to connect to her father and seems to linger on the periphery of her family’s religious life. On a visit to her father’s school, which she once attended, she notes the irony of her father’s serving as a father figure for thousands of girls, while she — his actual daughter — feels so distant from him.

Katz, married to a young man named Motti, confronts her parents for the first time about the disapproval she senses from them about her choice to move away from religious observance. She tearfully tells her parents how frustrating it is for her and her husband to feel they have to hide details of their everyday life from them.

Click here to read more and view the film’s trailer.

© 2013 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.