Steve Lipman

In the basement of her Oceanside, L.I., home, next to a window and a hand-lettered “Patience” poster, Irene Hizme sits at a drawing board, creating works of intricate calligraphy and flower-filled branches.

A Czechoslovakia-born Holocaust survivor in her “early 70s” and retired biochemist/computer programmer, she spends much of her free time these days making thank-you notes and birthday cards. She does many of her works as a volunteer for The Blue Card, an organization that offers financial assistance to aging Holocaust survivors.

The first time Holocaust survivor Fanya Gottesfeld Heller told her story at Pacific High School, an alternative public school in downtown Brooklyn, she jumped every time a school bell sounded. The students, mostly black and Latino, all from low-income and troubled homes, noticed.

And all understood. Some 70 years after she came under Nazi rule as a young teen in her native Ukraine, and some 50 years after she immigrated to the United States, part of her is still that frightened adolescent.

Maybe he’ll fare better in yeshiva than in the ring.

Yuri Foreman, boxer and aspiring rabbi, lost his first bout on Saturday night, the first defense of his World Boxing Association super welterweight title. Wearing a black brace on his right knee, a result of a previous injury, he slipped on the wet canvas in the seventh round and twisted the knee. Foreman fought on in pain, hobbled and limping, until the fight was stopped on a technical knockout in the ninth round.

For most of the Jewish world, Shavuot, the Jewish feast of weeks, was observed about two weeks ago, on May 19 and 20.

For some residents of Israel, Shavuot came this week, on May 30.

The few thousand members of the Black Hebrews community in Dimona and surrounding Negev towns celebrated Shavuot on Sunday with singing and dancing.

Over lunch several years ago, across a table at a Manhattan kosher restaurant from a middle-aged rabbi with a graying beard, large knit kipa and critical opinions about the spiritual life of most American Jews, I told my guest to ‘fess up.

“You can tell me the truth,” I said to Rabbi David Forman. “You’re really an Orthodox rabbi.”

The Jewish community of Nashville, largely unscathed by this week’s flooding of the Cumberland River banks, is assisting displaced members of the Jewish and wider community, Jewish leaders report.

The Jewish community of Nashville, largely unscathed by this week’s flooding of the Cumberland River banks, is assisting displaced members of the Jewish and wider community, Jewish leaders report.

Sunday is Mother’s Day. For a Jewish take on the holiday, and on mothers, The Jewish Week sought out arguably the country’s leading authority on Jewish mothers: stand-up comic Judy Gold. An Emmy Award-winning writer and producer on “The Rosie O’Donnell Show,” she starred in a one-woman Off-Broadway show, “25 Questions for a Jewish Mother,” based on interviews she conducted with 50 Jewish mothers across the United States. Gold also wrote “25 Questions for a Jewish Mother,” based on her show.

A year after he became head of New York City’s Roman Catholic community, Archbishop Timothy Dolan visited a prominent Manhattan synagogue last Thursday, praising the state of Jewish-Catholic relations and calling for increased dialogue between Jews and Catholics.