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Oral History Interview with Deborah Strauss
Audio from Oral History Interview conducted on February 16, 2000.
Transcript of Audio
Interviewer: How do you feel you help preserve Jewish culture here at the Shula?
Deborah: [chuckling] Gee… [Loud laughter] Let’s see, our biggest goal is to have an inclusive, warm, accommodating place for kids to come and to feel welcome with their families also. And that means that whatever backgrounds, whatever constellation their family is comprised of in terms of the family background. We have a lot of intermarriage families, lot of people who come from very different kinds of backgrounds, Yiddish backgrounds, women’s circle backgrounds, and some not who just want a warm good place for the kids to come and feel proud of their identity. And for us that means an identity stemming from Easter European background, which is in some part of their family constellation, so that means Yiddish language, Yiddish music, but also more generalized Jewish knowledge, history, culture, everything that makes them feel proud, and that they belong to something larger than themselves, something beyond the few friends they meet with here, something that feels worldwide and goes across time, space and history, and countries at times. We really do that, if it means standing on our heads we stand on our heads to do that. Which means we try to draw on skills and interests of the kids because of this emphasis. It’s one of the reasons we are growing.