Fern Bogot was photographed by Leah Missbach in April 2000 as part of the CITY 2000 photodocumentary project. I interviewed her the following September in her home, which was liberally decorated with food-related tchotchkes.
Project Kesher is another organization I volunteer for. We work with Jewish women in the former Soviet Union. Women from the Western world who have expertise in some area will go over and run a seminar about leadership training, grassroots organizing, health care, personal safety, other topics that are of import to women over there. Plus a little bit of Jewish stuff, because we’re a Jewish organization.
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My mother’s father was also a rabbi. Where my father’s father was like a scholarly rabbi, my mother’s father was more like a salesman rabbi. He left Lithuania in the 1890s and went to America to seek his fortune, but then he went back to Lithuania. But his son, my uncle Morris, my mother’s older brother, also went to the United States and he stayed here. My mother had never met him, because he was gone before she was born. But she knew about him, and she wrote him letters.
My mother passed away two years later, and she left a chunk of change that I had no idea she had. That has allowed me to spend the last couple of years looking for what will make me happy and what will help me change the world a little bit at a time.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Leah Missbach.
