Steve Lipman

She packed her skis, as usual. She packed her poles, as usual. She packed her bindings, as usual.
Dr. Ruth Spector, an avid skier, was hitting the slopes last week.
She also packed her helmet, not as usual.
You don’t risk injury when you have leukemia.
“I never wear a helmet,” says Spector, a 41-year-old anesthesiologist who lives in Lake Success, L.I.

A photocopy of a small, handwritten note in German, composed about 60 years ago, was another translation job for Philipp Bulgarini the other day.
The final words of a death camp-bound Jew in Nazi Germany, scribbled in a crowded cattle car, the message was apparently thrown off a train with the hope that it would reach his or her relatives still in safety.
Bulgarini says the words spoke to him.

Visitors to Salt Lake City during the Winter Games have seen the first signs of the city’s effort to change its public face — tree-lined mediums on major streets, a light rail system, more parks.
And some visitors have met the man behind the changes — Stephen Goldsmith, Salt Lake City director of planning and fourth-generation Salt Lake City Jew.

Prayer and spirituality were the themes of a retreat attended by representatives of synagogues throughout Westchester one Sunday last month. But current events soon became the topic du jour.

Adam Cohen had two dreams as a kid in Great Neck: to play shortstop for the Mets and to become a sportscaster.
The Mets haven’t called yet. “I don’t think that is going to happen,” he says.
But his second dream has come true.
Cohen, 22, has teamed with Avi Bloom, 21, to broadcast the Yeshiva University men’s basketball team home games this season over the Internet.
Their broadcasts on the school’s Web site (www.yu.edu) replace the ones that were carried for several years on the now-defunct student radio station.

Only a few thousand Jews live in Utah, international center of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, better known as the Mormons.
But, says a researcher in Salt Lake City, several thousand Jews are on the Mormon Church’s membership rolls — Jews who were posthumously baptized and converted into the Mormon faith.

Yossi Goldberg played soccer and basketball as a boy growing up in Israel, but figure skating was in his blood — his mother was a figure skater in Lithuania.
That, says Goldberg, founder and president of the Israeli Figure Skating Association, is why he has devoted a dozen years to a winter sport in a Mediterranean country.

A congregant in Rabbi David Hirsch’s synagogue approached him with a request one recent Shabbat after shacharit services: She wanted a new prayerbook, one with more-extensive commentaries.
Rabbi Hirsch, spiritual leader of the Fleetwood Synagogue in Mount Vernon for four years, was delighted. The veteran member of the congregation was part of the new Fleetwood Kollel, the first community kollel of its kind in Westchester.

Ruth Magied sits down at the piano in her Midwood apartment and dives into Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” Her fingers lightly, fluently, dance over the keys.
The music stops after a few minutes and Magied stands up. She turns from the piano, the instrument that filled her childhood, to the topic that occupied her adolescence — pain.
“Pain,” she says, “can destroy your brain. It’s like having four root canals that never go away. It’s like having someone hitting you over your head with a frying pan.”

A public opinion pollster is interviewing people on the street. He stops four people and asks, “Excuse me, what is your opinion of the meat shortage?” 
A Russian says, “What is opinion?”
A Pole says, “What is meat?”
An American says, “What is shortage?”
An Israeli says, “What is ‘excuse me’?”


My first time in Israel  was an education. But not in the way I had anticipated.