The Charlotte Jewish News- October 2026- Page 2 Jewish Federation of Greater Charlotte
From the Editor’ s Desk: All That We Inherit
Every so often, my 7-year-old daughter, Lucy, asks me if I am sure she is not actually Italian. Her reasoning has nothing to do with genealogy, geography or some previously undisclosed branch of our family tree( we are not Italian). She simply cannot imagine that someone who loves pesto, meatballs and pizza as passionately as she does could possibly be anything else.
I haven’ t had the heart to tell her that a fervent enthusiasm for carbohydrates, basil and avalanches of Parmesan does not constitute Italian ancestry. Perhaps because, in my own way, I understand the sentiment.
My love affair with Italy began in the summer of 1998, when my parents took my sister, brother and me on an extended adventure through Florence, Tuscany, the Amalfi Coast and Rome. I was 18 years old and had just graduated from high school. None of us could have known this halcyon time together would later alter the trajectory of my life.
I fell completely under Italy’ s spell. I have fond memories of eating gelato in Piazza Navona as Joe Cocker bellowed from a nearby shop, wandering Florence’ s narrow cobblestone streets in pursuit of leather jackets for we Breyer girls, arriving in Venice by boat and eating ripe figs for breakfast in Positano beneath a canopy of bougainvillea. We said“ ciao” everywhere we went, swept up in the irresistible rhythms of Italian life.
Everything felt exuberant, loud, unfamiliar and wildly exhilarating. I had traveled extensively before, but this corner of the world stirred something different in me. For the first time, I wasn’ t simply enchanted by
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JEWISH
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Published by Jewish Federation of Greater Charlotte
Editor Elizabeth Johnson
Sr. Communications Specalist Jessica Goldfarb
Social Media Manager Shelby Robinson
Director of Marketing Dylan Vander Velde
5007 Providence Road, Suite 101 Charlotte, NC 28226( 704) 944-6765 www. charlottejewishnews. org elizabeth. johnson @ jewishcharlotte. org
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NEWS being somewhere else. I could imagine belonging somewhere else.
Three years later, I returned to Florence to study abroad, eventually spending seven months there. That window of time gave me the confidence and curiosity to build a life overseas. In 2002, I did just that, moving to Düsseldorf, Germany. Europe would remain home for years.
Not long ago, I found the battered Fodor’ s guidebook we carried through Italy that summer, its pages marked with notes and stuffed with old trattoria receipts, faded train tickets and museum stubs. Holding it again, I found myself thinking less about the places we visited and more about how extraordinary it is that an experience my parents gave me at 18 became so deeply woven into who I am. At the time, I doubt they knew what they were setting in motion. And maybe that is true of much of what we give our children.
Some of my most prevailing childhood memories of Judaism were formed in similarly regular moments. At our Seders, I remember watching my father put on a kippah and effortlessly read Hebrew. My siblings and I were utterly gobsmacked by this other, unknown side of him. Here was our dad, but somehow it was also someone we didn’ t entirely know.
I also loved pulling out the white leather photo album from his bar mitzvah and staring incredulously at the boy in the black-and-white photographs. How could my father possibly have once been that young? I was equally fascinated by photographs of my stunning blondhaired, blue-eyed grandmother in her glamorous evening dress. Which leads me to her cheese blintzes. That one needs no theological explanation. I certainly wasn’ t contemplating Jewish continuity or cultural heritage. They were simply pieces of my childhood. Only decades later could I recognize how deeply they had become part of me.
As parents, grandparents and members of a community, we rarely know which moments will lodge themselves in a child’ s memory. We plan the monumental occasions, try not to miss the smaller details and take the photographs, assuming those will be the things they remember. Often, it is something much smaller: a melody sung every Friday night, the smell of a particular food, the feel of a hand holding yours on the way into synagogue.
This may be one reason I find myself thinking about these memories during Sukkot. For seven days, Judaism asks us to step outside the permanence of our homes and dwell in something intentionally temporary.
We gather beneath the sukkah, welcome others and celebrate the harvest. The structure itself will come down, yet what happens inside it remains.
And there is something in that impermanence that asks us to reconsider what makes a home a home. The walls do hold our lives, but home is also what remains when those walls are gone. A mug of something hot before the rest of the house wakes up. The view out the kitchen window of a favorite tree. A meal that takes us back to where we came from. The habits and memories that somehow become portable, carried with us long after the places where they were formed have disappeared.
That distinction carries considerable weight. Judaism has survived not because any single building, community or generation was permanent, but because people kept passing something forward. A story. A prayer. A recipe. A melody. A language. A tradition. A memory. A long embrace. Even a kiss. Each generation received something from the one before it and, consciously or otherwise, placed some version of it into the hands of the next.
As Sukkot gives way to Simchat Torah, we reach the final words of Deuteronomy and immediately return to the opening words of Genesis. We finish, and we begin again. And that wonderful story continues because we continue telling it.
This October also brings the third anniversary of Oct. 7, a traumatizing day now etched painfully into Jewish memory. Our responsibility to the next generation requires bearing witness to the enormity of that grief. But it also means ensuring the Jewish story they inherit is not defined by tragedy alone. Our enduring narrative is one of joy, celebration, learning, food, music, laughter and the special rituals of Jewish life.
Part of our responsibility in this season is not simply to tell the next generation what happened before them, but to give them a Jewish life they will want to make their own. My father’ s words always return to me here:“ We are forever together with our memories.”
My parents could not have known that a family vacation so many moons ago would ignite a
love affair with the world that would still be burning nearly three decades later. Years afterward, when choosing a school for my own daughter, I found myself drawn to one that places global awareness and connection at the heart of her education. What began as their gift to me had become something I also want to give her.
We never really know what will become part of them. And so, we keep setting the table, telling the stories, sharing the photographs, singing the melodies and making the recipes. Each year, we build the sukkah knowing we will take it down.
And, apparently, we continue serving enough nine-layer lasagna, crispy beef meatballs, homemade anchovy tomato sauce and countless shapes of noodles that one little girl in Charlotte remains reasonably convinced she is Italian.
Elizabeth Johnson Editor The Charlotte Jewish News
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