Red at Rutgers Gardens Sale
Do you have popular plant sales where you live?
And these are just photos of the annuals!
For more photos with a little or a LOT of red, visit:
Central New Jersey
Happy Birthday Israel
Here is a scene from last year’s march around the block for Israel. Will I make it to the little school parade today? Busy day ahead … we shall see. My daughter is already dressed in blue and white in honor of the birthday of the State of Israel.
Earth Day in Highland Park; Benjy in NJ
Next week on Thursday, April 22 from 6 to 9 pm there will be an Earth Day Extravaganza and a health fair at the Highland Park High School.
Also, stand up comedian Benji Lovitt reports he will be in Whippany, New Jersey on April 18: “Because the Middle East is funny.”
Last night my husband and I attended our first college application planning meeting along with a roomful of other parents at my son’s school. College? Wasn’t he just born yesterday?
Ruby Tuesday: English Daisy
I took many photos of flowers late last week (azaleas, magnolias, tulips, cherry blossoms), and only this one was close to a Ruby. It’s an English Daisy plant that I bought at a small florist in North Brunswick, New Jersey when my boys were having orthodontic visits.
For more Ruby Tuesday posts, visit Mary’s blog.
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Shameless plug:
#NJSM09 Voting begins today until Sun. April 25, 11:59pm EST to choose the NJ Social Media Hall of Fame Inductees! Vote only once, by leaving one comment on the NJ Social Media Facebook fan page, naming your choice of Finalist and briefly explain why they should be inducted into the NJ Social Media Hall of Fame. List of Finalists to choose from (in reverse alphabetical order by Twitter user name): @tweetamar Itamar Kestenbaum, @podcaststeve Steven Lubetkin, @njplaygrounds Sheila Sayah, @njfamilymag Lucy Banta, @lynetteradio Lynette Young, @leoraw Leora Wenger, @jessicalevin Jessica Levin, @jerseybites Deborah Smith, @hhrmediagroup Don Povia, @AmyVernon Amy Vernon
This week you can vote on Facebook (later you can vote via blog, LinkedIn or Twitter). All are great choices!
Holocaust Remembrance in Central New Jersey
Holocaust Remebrance Day (Yom HaShoa) is today. Here are some events in the Central New Jersey area:
- Monday night: Commemorating the Holocaust and Heroism in Middlesex County
- One of the paintings at Judy Rosenstein’s exhibit at the Highland Park Public Library is described in a Jewish State article called Highland Park’s Judy Rosenstein on the ‘Ah’ of art:
One picture in Rosenstein’s new exhibit, however, is very serious. She painted it in honor of her husband’s mother, whose 12 brothers and sisters and parents died in the concentration camps. “Joe’s mother and father were on the last ship out,” said Rosenstein. The picture in the show, which she calls “Defiance,” shows striped pajamas with a gold star in the background surrounded by green, representing the forest, and Jewish people in all directions. The sense of the painting, she said, is that there is nowhere to run.
To learn more about Yom HaShoa:
- Jew Wishes Re: Yom HaShoah (thank you for including my post on Mariampole, Lithuania) Be sure to also read her post on the terrible Polish tragedy yesterday.
- A Mother in Israel: The Story of the Treblinka Extermination Camp
- Shimshonit: The Shoah in film
- Holocaust Remembrance Day – Yom HaShoah 2009 posts
- Ilana-Davita tells of Yom HaShoah 5770 in Europe.
- Mary the Teach: Genocide Among the Flowers: Kaftan’s Ponary Paintings: Holocaust Remembrance Day 2010
A story about the mother of an East Brunswick friend, from the East Brunswick Sentinel (article is a year old, so I am copying it in full):
EAST BRUNSWICK — Henia Konopko was a young girl, about 10 or 11 years old, when her brother, Harry, rescued her and his wife, Luba, from a Jewish ghetto in Poland during World War II. He took them to live deep in the primeval forest near the town of Lida, now part of Belarus. There, they hid from the Nazis for more than two years, with the help of the legendary Bielski partisan group.
East Brunswick resident Molly Kaplan said she always knew her mother, Henia, was a Holocaust survivor. But it wasn’t until Kaplan was a teenager that she learned the heroic details of Henia’s epic struggle for survival.
Truth is stranger than fiction, and the remarkable story of the Bielski partisan group has now leapt from the dustbin of history into the din of popular discourse with the recent release of the movie “Defiance.” The film made its national debut in theaters earlier this month. It chronicles the efforts of three Jewish brothers who created a safe haven in the forest where they eventually saved more than 1,200 Jews from the Nazis.
“Brothers Tuvia, Zus and Asael Bielski took it upon themselves that they were going to save Jewish men, women and children,” Kaplan said. “During the Holocaust, there were other partisan groups, resistance fighters — there were Polish, there were Russians. But the thing that was unique about the Bielski group was that those other resistance fighters refused to take women and children.
“It was because of my uncle saving my mother’s life, bringing her out to the Bielski partisan group, and because of Tuvia Bielski and his brothers that I’m sitting here today.”
On May 8, 1942, the Nazis marched an estimated 6,000 Jews from the Lida ghetto to the outskirts of town to be shot and dumped in a mass grave. Harry broke from the crowd and took a bullet in his head as he sprinted for cover. Miraculously, the bullet lodged half an inch from his brain, and Harry was able to make his way back into the ghetto where a Jewish surgeon successfully operated on him, removing the round. Harry then went into the forest and joined the Bielski partisans before sneaking back into the ghetto to rescue his sister and wife.
Henia described how she and the Bielski partisans lived in the woods by digging out underground caves. The Nazis sent out frequent search parties with dogs, and the partisans were always on the alert and frequently on the move. Kaplan said that Harry, approaching 20 at the time, went out with the partisans on sabotage missions targeting Nazi supply lines.
“My Uncle Harry and Tuvia Bielski and his brothers — I taught my kids that those are what true heroes are,” said Kaplan.
After the war, Henia met her husband, Jacob Karp, in Israel. Karp also had survived the Holocaust in Poland, and the two were married before emigrating to the United States in 1957. They raised Molly and her older brother, Fred, in The Bronx and Brooklyn. Henia died in 1993, Jacob in 1999, and from time to time, Kaplan would run into people who knew her mother.
Kaplan said she once met a woman who was is the forest with the partisans, and she remembered Henia not by name, but by her smile.
“I showed her a picture of my mom as a girl, and she told me, “Now I remember her, I remember that smile.’ Kaplan said she is most happy when her friends say her three children have their grandmother’s smile, and Kaplan finds strength in the fact that Henia was able laugh and smile throughout her life.
“Despite all the hardships she’d been through, she was always very happy, with a joy for life,” said Kaplan. “One of the things she always said to us was that the way they succeeded against the Nazis was not only by fighting, but also by living.”
Kaplan also once met Tuvia Bielski after he spoke at Brooklyn College, her alma mater. After a lecture Tuvia gave, she ran up to him and introduced herself and told him he saved her mother’s life, adding, “I’m here because of you.”
“He was very humble, to him it was no big deal, he wasn’t looking for prestige,” Kaplan said. “He said “Thank you’ and told me he was happy we met. But he didn’t perceive himself as having done something so great. My uncle Harry was the same way, and that, to me, is what the essence of a true hero is.”
Kaplan said she attended Tuvia Bielski’s Shloshim ceremony 30 days after his death — going out to Flatbush in Brooklyn; she was surprised to see only a scant few in attendance. She thinks the movie “Defiance” will change the way the Bielski partisans are remembered and said her mother always wanted people to know of their story before she passed away.
On the bottom of Henia’s gravestone in Elmont, Long Island, Kaplan said there is an inscription that reads: “Never say that you are going your last way.” The words are from “The Partisan’s Song,” which they sang in the forest to keep their spirits up.
“The words in the song are in Yiddish, and they say to never give up hope in life, don’t ever say that the situation you are in means death,” Kaplan said. “The song says that its own lyrics are written in blood.
“Yes, you fight back when needed, but you fight back to live, you fight back for life.”
Arts and Gardens in Central New Jersey
Some Artsy Events Upcoming in New Jersey
- Rutgers Gardens will be having a photo contest in early September. I am tempted to enter or at least to visit Rutgers Gardens (a short drive from Highland Park) a few times over the next few months and take photos of the lovely grounds and flora. (hat tip: Jill)
- Raritan Valley Community College will be showing the ballet Sleeping Beauty in late March. I would love to take my daughter, but it is the week before Passover. I will be “industriously” cleaning my house for Passover.
Jacob informed me via Twitter that he has already started working in his garden. Have you?
New York City Reds
Yesterday we (my family) were in New York City for a wedding – a very, very happy occasion. The wedding was the Faculty House at Columbia University, and I took a photo of this red brick building (Wien Hall) as we walked from the (expensive) parking garage to the wedding. My middle son, who convinced me to take my smaller camera so I would pay more attention to the wedding and less to taking photos, said we would have gotten to the wedding a few minutes sooner if I had not stopped to photograph a few buildings on the way.
At the beginning of a Jewish wedding the groom is marched to the bride accompanied by dancing friends and family and by musicians. The musicians at this wedding were from the orchestra Nafshenu. The groom then checks to make sure it is really his bride (as biblical Jacob got tricked, the groom wants to check).
The red in the photo was in the musicians’ eyes – I selected the red in Photoshop using the magic wand tool, desaturated the red, and adding back in enough color so their eyes looked brown.
On the subject of cameras and photographers, there were many photographers at the wedding (I believe some were friends of the bride and groom). I was jealous of their gigantic lenses, as was my father’s cousin, who said there is no end when it comes to desiring good photography equipment.
In New York City one can pay to park one’s bicycle. The bicycle fees were considerably less than the car parking fees.
For more photos with a little or a lot of red:
Mosaic Wall in Sepia
You can see a full color version of this mosaic wall at Raritan Valley Community College in this post. To put this in sepia, I copied the original photo to a new layer in Photoshop, desaturated the photo, added yellow and red to get sepia, and then set the opacity of the sepia layer to 90% so just a wee bit of color would show through. I wanted to use the sepia effect to emphasize the textures of the mosaic.
For more sepia photos, visit Sepia Scenes:
Cape May Zoo Pics
I’ve been wanting to post my photos from our trip to the Cape May County Zoo in southern New Jersey from last August. I hope you enjoy the tour.
I think they painted a mailbox zebra colors and wrote “Zoo Donations.” The zoo is free, so donations are greatly appreciated.
I don’t know what kind of bird this is, but it was wandering around, mingling with the zoo guests. Maybe a guinea fowl?
This is a bald eagle. It was hard to photograph him in his cage.
The flamingos were fun to watch. See that gull who looks like he owns the place?
Here’s Mr. Gull again, resting with the flamingos.
I cannot remember the name of this animal, but it had tons of energy.
Giraffes are beautiful animals.
Animals behind fences, like the leopard, were harder to photograph.
This zoo guest had a great time. Photos of family come out nicer when everyone is having fun.
NJPlaygrounds has more photos of the zoo and the nearby playground.
Thanks for coming with me to the zoo!
Doors and Windows of Allaire
We visited Allaire State Park back in early November. Here are some of the doors and windows of that pretty park. The above building in the historical village was closed, but many were open.
Strictly speaking, this is not a door or a window, but it is OPEN – so it’s like a gateway to the bakery. I enhanced the saturation of the colors in Photoshop.
We were able to visit the original home of the Allaire family. As I said on a previous post, we were not allowed to photograph inside, but here’s the doorway to that interesting home. It was said to still be inhabited by a descendant of the original Allaire founder in the 1950’s, and that 1950’s owner kept a horse in his kitchen. Eccentric.
This was a vertical photo, so I increased the canvas size to make it horizontal, and then I used the clone stamp tool and the blur tool to get the main part of the photo to extend a bit into the side areas.
What is that white board that looks like a door but is curiously up too high to be a door? Where there once steps there? I didn’t notice this until today, when I was looking through these photos. Does that happen to you; do you find mysteries in your photos that you didn’t recognize when you were on the scene?
These are windows in the train of the Pine Creek Railroad, which is next to the Historical Village. The train ride just goes around in circles, but we did get to see some deer as we circled about.
For more windows and doors, visit Window Views (hosted by Mary the Teach):
