Penina Steinbruch

That I’m bigger than that. I feel like a spoiled little girl crying for more ice cream while she’s still holding the melting drippy point of her cone. I watch young mothers with flowing maternity tops walking down the street pushing double strollers, and a voice deep inside me cries out, “I want that, too!” only to be followed moments later with the admonition, “You had your turn. What right do you have to complain?” But it doesn’t help.

Late on Motzaei Shabbos, Rabbi Boruch Ber Bender of Achiezer got a phone call from Sholom Jaroslawicz, Achiezer’s director of operations, about a local resident who had passed away over Shabbos, leaving over no children. A frum neighbor had found him and contacted the family members, who took over the arrangements and planned to have him cremated.

And, say the dedicated staffers, the past three months haven’t been as bad as they thought. “We had the dreaded quarantine and were really petrified at first,” says Mrs. Beila Lehman of P’ninim Seminary in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood. “But looking back, it was such a special part of the year. In ‘normal’ years, the girls spend the first weeks of school running away from the strangers in the dorm to the safety and familiarity of family in Israel and friends in other schools.