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Retiring Temple Shalom administrator most proud of putting Reform congregation “on the map”

Ruthie Maman

By MYRON LOVE

In her eight years as Temple Shalom’s administrator, Ruthie Maman – who is retiring at the end of the year – says that the highlight of her tenure at Winnipeg’s Reform congregation was bringing the synagogue into the Jewish mainstream in Winnipeg. mainstream in Winnipeg.

 

 

 

“When I came to Temple Shalom,” she recalls, “I knew very little about the congregation or Reform Judaism. Everyone I talked to outside of the congregation put us down. As the administrator, I intended to make sure that Temple Shalom was accepted as an integral part of the Jewish community. I made sure that our events and programs became widely known within the larger Jewish community.”
She says that the turning point came when Temple Shalom was included in community-wide programs with the other synagogues – in particular the by-now annual joint Shavuot study and seudah
“We went to the first Shavuot event at the Shaarey Zedek in 2014,” she recalls. “The next year, the program was hosted by the Adas Yeshurun Herzlia. I felt that if the Herzlia could host the event, so could Temple Shalom. In 2016, we made sure that it was our turn. It went very well. We had 120 people participating from all the synagogues. We made sure that all the food was kosher so that Herzlia members would be comfortable participating. We also arranged for a separate service downstairs with a mehitza for the Herzlia members.
“We will be hosting again next Shavuot.”

For Ruthie Maman, Temple Shalom was the most recent on a long and winding career path that took her at a young age to Israel and, later in life, back to Winnipeg. The daughter of the late George and Molly Soudack was introduced to the Jewish homeland at the age of 15 when she went on a North America-wide United Synagogue Youth-sponsored visit to Israel. (She was a member of the former Rosh Pina Synagogue’s USY chapter.) At the age of 17, she made aliyah – her older sister, Pneena Sageev – had made aliyah earlier – as part of a Nahal group.
“I was part of the Nahal group,” she says. “Nahal was my IDF service on the Syrian border north of Lake Kinneret. Our settlement was called Korazim.
(Nahal brings together groups of young people to start new agricultural communities near Israel’s borders – creating “facts on the ground” in the words of Israel’s founding father and first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion – who aimed to create Jewish communities in all parts of the land of Israel.)
“I served my time in the IDF,” she says. “I got married. We lived first in an agricultural community near the Syrian border. We later moved to Ramat Yishai in the Jezreel Valley.”

After her four children had reached school age, Ruthie Maman went back to school herself. She enrolled in a teacher’s college in her area which was affiliated with Haifa University. She taught for several years at the school in Ramat Yishai. “I taught ESL, drama, civics and even sex education,” she recalls.
In 1996, after 36 years in Israel, she returned to Winnipeg. It was a low point in her life. Newly single, she was having difficulty making ends meet in Israel.
“I had kept in touch with friends in Winnipeg over the years,” she says. “They told me about an opening for a Hebrew teacher at Ramah School.
“My kids were all out of the army by then,” she adds. “They understood my situation.”
(One of her daughters, Shirit Pais, and her family, now also live in Winnipeg, while her other daughter lives in Toronto.)
Maman subsequently taught he middle grades at Gray Academy until 2011.
“On my return to Winnipeg, I found the community to be warm and accepting,” she observes.

Maman was introduced to Temple Shalom in 2005 by her sister teacher, Sherry Wolfe Elazar. “I hadn’t been affiliated with a synagogue for many years,” she recalls. “Sherri invited me to Temple Shalom for her daughter’s bat mitzvah. Then, she invited me to the Temple for the High Holidays. I was very impressed.”
She subsequently became a member and, as she always had a love of singing, she soon joined the choir. She also became a Torah reader and a teacher of conversational Hebrew.
“When I learned that the congregation was looking for an administrator – having just retired from teaching, I applied,” Maman says. “It was a perfect fit for me.”
She feels confident about Temple Shalom’s future – and is especially enthusiastic about newly-appointed Rabbi Allan Finkel.
As to her own immediate future, she intends to remain actively involved in the life of the congregation – going back to teaching conversational Hebrew and the proper way to chant the Torah and singing in the choir.
“I may start going to the Gwen Secter, too,” she says.

 

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Seeking gangsters, must speak Yiddish: Bringing the Hasidic underworld to life in ‘Caught Stealing’

Liev Schreiber, Austin Butler and Vincent D’Onofrio in Caught Stealing. Photo by Niko Tavernise

By PJ Grisar September 3, 2025

This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.

A duo of burly, gun-toting Hasidic gangsters and their doting bubbe are the breakout characters in Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing — at least, for figures not of the feline variety. To bring them to life, the film had a secret weapon: a Yiddish whisperer.

Motl Didner, program director for the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, first heard rumblings of the crime caper through a casting notice seeking Yiddish-speaking actors. He didn’t know the notice was for an Aronofsky film, but he passed the details along to members of the company, and even sent in a self-tape to be considered for a role.

Later, the production got in touch to use him as a Yiddish coach.

“That’s when I found out who exactly it was that I lost out to,” Didner said in a phone interview. “I don’t feel so bad about losing out to, like, Liev Schreiber.”

Didner worked with Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio and Carol Kane — respectively playing a pair of frightening drug lords and their grandmother — settling on a Hungarian dialect for their dialogue, and even rewriting some of their Yiddish lines. (The dynasty to which the brothers belong is never specified, but their scenes with Kane were filmed on location at a Lubavitcher household in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.)

The duo show up as a threat to the film’s protagonist, Hank (Austin Butler), who finds himself caught in the middle of their quest to recover piles of money from other ethnic gangs in 1998 New York City.

Kane, Didner said, took naturally to the mamaloshen. While she isn’t conversational in Yiddish in real life, her breakout role was as a Yiddish-speaking immigrant in Hester Street, and she more recently had Yiddish scenes in the Amazon Prime show Hunters.

Schreiber, for his part, sang Yiddish songs growing up, and “had an ear for it,” Didner said.

D’Onofrio, who isn’t Jewish, was “really kind of thrown deep into the Jewish world,” Didner said, but was very meticulous in getting his “meshugenahs” on point. Crucially, he nails the pronunciation of his beloved bubbe’s title: For native Yiddish speakers, it sounds more like “boh-beh” than “bubbie.”

Didner was on set for the scene in which Butler’s Hank slurps a bowl of matzo ball soup with the brothers. Somehow, word spread that the Oscar winner was shooting in the neighborhood, something of a novelty for the Hasidic enclave. Evidently the heartthrob has a young Chabad fan base.

“When filming wrapped at the end of the day, there were a couple hundred teenage girls waiting to get a glimpse of Austin Butler,” Didner recalled. It was like the reception of the Beatles or, better yet, Elvis.

Didner wasn’t the only dialect coach for D’Onofrio and Schreiber; they had a separate one for English.

“Darren Aronofsky was very specific,” Didner said of “the boys” — how Aronofsky referred to the characters. “He didn’t want them to speak English with a Yiddish accent.”

Instead, they speak with Hank in a measured, yet still menacing, American aksent. It’s when they discuss how to handle him — and whether he deserves to be roughed up — that they revert to Yiddish.

There were also separate consultants, Didner said, to make sure the customs included in a bustling pre-Shabbat sequence at Bubbe’s house were authentic.

Didner saw the film over the weekend, and was happy to see diverse languages included in it.

“There’s also Spanish and Russian in there,” Didner said, adding he hopes that linguistic richness is “part of an increasing trend that people are looking for that sort of authenticity.”

PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at grisar@forward.com and @pjgrisar on Twitter.

This story was originally published on the Forward.

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What led to the complete disappearance of Sabra Hummus from store shelves?

“Don’t it always seem to go

That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone”

-from Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” (1970)

By BERNIE BELLAN I wasn’t actually thinking about Sabra Hummus until one day recently when I was sitting together with a group of guys – some of whom were Israeli-born when, out of the blue, one of them asked me if I knew why you couldn’t find Sabra Hummus anywhere in Winnipeg?

“Can’t find it?” I thought. Surely it must be available somewhere here. I said that I thought it must be on a grocery shelf at least in Sobeys on Taylor because if any store was going to have a product with as obvious an Israeli name as “Sabra,” it was going to be Sobeys on Taylor.

After all, going back a few years, anytime you went shopping for hummus the Sabra brand was ubiquitous.

So, I said to the fellow who had asked the question that I was now curious to delve further into whether Sabra Hummus had indeed disappeared from Winnipeg store shelves. I added that I would start by inquiring at the Sobeys store on Taylor – where I knew the manager, Dave McDonald, and that I would ask Dave whether it’s true that Sabra Hummus is no longer available at his store.

I emailed Dave asking him that question but, while I was waiting for a response, I began to search on the internet to see whether there might be an explanation as to what had happened to Sabra Hummus – and whether its disappearance from store shelves wasn’t something unique to Winnipeg.

Naturally, I began with a Google search for Sabra Hummus. While the search led me to discover many different things about Sabra Hummus, the one thing that I found most surprising is that Sabra Hummus, despite its Israeli name, is now wholly owned by PepsiCo.

It was when I received a phone call from a Sobeys representative in response to an email I had sent that it also emerged that, as has been the case with many other products that come from the US, Sobeys had decided to stop importing Sabra Hummus (which used to come in 30 different varieties) ever since Trump imposed his tariffs on Canadian exports going back to February of this year. (Sobeys, by the way, owns many different brands of stores: Sobeys, Safeway, IGA, Foodland, FreshCo, Thrifty Foods, Farn Boy, Longo’s, and Lawtons Drugs.)

But, to my even greater surprise, I learned from a representative of PepsiCo that Sabra Hummus is not even being produced any more – at least not in the plastic tubs that had the very recognizable Sabra logo on them. I’ll have more about what the PepsiCo representative wrote in an email to me, but first – a brief history of Sabra Hummus – and the many problems it’s endured over the years.

Most of my information came from – where else? Wikipedia, but it turned out the Times of Israel also had a very interesting article – written in December 2024, that examined the effect that the Boycott Divest Sanctions movement (BDS) had on Sabra Hummus.

Yet, while both the Wikipedia and the Times of Israel articles did talk about the problems that the Sabra brand had been encountering in recent years, it was only when I received that email from a representative of PepsiCo that I was able to verify that, as of now, Sabra Hummus is no longer being manufactured altogether although, as I’ll explain later, Pepsico does plan on bringing it back into production in 2026.

What happened to Sabra Hummus then?

Here’s some of the information about Sabra Hummus that is largely taken from the Wikipedia article about Sabra Hummus:

“The company was founded in 1986 by Zohar Norman and Yehuda Pearl as Sabra-Blue & White Foods. The company was bought in 2005 by Israeli food manufacturer Strauss.

“In March 2008, Strauss entered a joint-venture partnership with Frito-Lay, a division of the multinational PepsiCo corporation. Strauss owned 50% and PepsiCo 50% of the company. In November 2008, the company announced the construction of a new $61 million plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia, expected to employ 260 people and come on line in mid-2010. The company grew over 50% between August 2008 and August 2009.

According to Wikipedia, by 2016, Sabra Hummus had become the dominant player when it came to selling hummus in the United States: “By 2016, Sabra had gained a 60% market share of hummus in the United States, and, through its co-ownership and sales channels with PepsiCo, was close to $1 billion in annual sales.”

The Times of Israel article noted that Sabra’s share of the hummus market in the US grew even more: “At the start of 2021, Sabra Dipping Company — which is jointly owned by Strauss Group and PepsiCo — sold US supermarkets nearly two-thirds of their hummus.”

Yet, it all seemed to start coming apart in recent years. By 2024, according to Wikipedia, Sabra’s share of the US hummus market had dropped to only “36%.”

There are many reasons for Sabra’s rapid descent from dominance of the US hummus market and both the Wikipedia and Times of Israel articles examine those reasons, but it does seem strange that, notwithstanding the drop in sales that Sabra might have suffered in the past few years, PepsiCo has simply stopped producing it altogether.

I wouldn’t have believed that until I received the email from a representative of Pepsico, to which I referred earlier. Here’s what I was told: “Regrettably, we are temporarily stepping back from full-size hummus tubs to improve product offerings. We know that’s a big disappointment since fans like you have been looking high and low for it!

“Our full-size hummus tubs are expected back in late 2026. In the meantime, our Guacamole and Hummus Snackers remain available at many grocery stores across Canada.”

After reading that email, one might be forgiven for thinking that something drastic – something beyond loss of market share, had happened to Sabra Hummus.

But Sabra had had huge problems in the past – from which it always bounced back.

Here’s what Wikipedia noted about problems Sabra had encountered in the past: “On April 8, 2015, Sabra recalled 30,000 cases of its classic hummus after a tub in Michigan tested positive for Listeria.”

Then, the Wikipedia article went on to say: “On November 19, 2016, Sabra voluntarily recalled multiple hummus varieties across the U.S. after Listeria was discovered at one of its manufacturing plants, though the company stated the bacteria had not been found in any of its actual products.

“In March 2021, Sabra recalled about 2,100 cases of 10 oz. Classic Hummus, following a routine inspection by the FDA in the US, due to a possible salmonella contamination. The recall affected 16 states in the U.S.”

Yet, despite all that, as has previously been noted, the Times of Israel article of December 2024 pointed out that, prior to that March 2021 product recall, Sabra Hummus still dominated the US market for hummus, to the extent that nearly two-thirds of the hummus sold by US supermarkets came from Sabra.

Sticker on a tub of Sabra Hummus that called for a boycott of Sabra products

To this point we haven’t mentioned one other factor that certainly affected sales of Sabra Hummus, although to what extent is very hard to determine: The concerted boycott campaign which was part of the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) movement that targeted Sabra Hummus in particular, and which had been started at several different universities in the US, beginning in 2010.

According to the Times of Israel December 2024 article, the “campaign against Sabra hummus started on the US West Coast 14 years ago, when anti-Israel activists began denouncing Sabra for donating food to the IDF Golani Brigade.

However, despite that campaign having “kicked into higher gear”… with “hundreds of supermarkets and other stores in North America and Europe” having had stickers denouncing Israel placed on tubs of Sabra Hummus, the ToI article insists that the BDS campaign which was carried on mostly on US college campuses was not a major factor in declining Sabra Hummus sales.

Instead, the Times of Israel article claims it was the March 2021 product recall that was the decisive factor in Sabra Hummus sales plummeting. According to the ToI article, “a salmonella contamination recall on products made at Sabra’s Virginia factory took a devastating toll on the brand, which lost half its market share in just one quarter.”

And yet – to make matters even more complicated, an article in still another publication suggested that, notwithstanding that March 2021 product recall – which also led to a complete shutdown of Sabra’s primary manufacturing plant in Virginia, sales began to bounce back in 2022!

In a December 2022 article in an online publication titled “Manufacturing Dive,” Sabra CEO Joey Bergstein is quoted as saying that the brand has been “‘consistently climbing back,’ and it has regained its No. 1 position in the hummus category, according to IRI data cited by Sabra. When it was missing from shelves, he said more than half of consumers decided not to buy hummus instead of switching to another brand. Those who did switch are coming back to Sabra, the IRI data showed, and the brand is taking back market share.

“‘When you stop production, you open the door for a competitor,’ Bergstein said. ‘We’ve been able to grow back in a relatively short period following that disruption, which I think speaks to the health of the brand.’”

In the final analysis, there is a combination of factors that have led to the disappearance of Sabra Hummus from store shelves – not, as I first thought, perhaps only in Winnipeg but, as it turned out, everywhere in Canada and, as I learned after reading that email from the PepsiCo representative – in the US as well.

There were multiple incidents of suspected contamination of Sabra products; there was the campaign that was part of the BDS movement to boycott Israeli products – especially Sabra products; and finally, there was the decision by major Canadian grocers to stop importing products from the US.

Although I did like Sabra Hummus, I can’t say that I’m heartbroken to learn of its disappearance. But it is sad to think that a product which had such an identifiably Israeli name is no longer available – even if that product had stopped being manufactured in Israel years ago.

One more note: In 2018 PepsiCo acquired another well known Israeli food company: SodaStream. SodaStream still has a plant in Israel although, again after coming under fire for having a plant on the West Bank, SodaStream closed that plant in 2015 and opened a new plant within the green line. Chalk that one up to a victory for the BDS movement. I wonder whether, in the future, we’ll learn more about how much damage the BDS movement really did cause Sabra Hummus. It still seems strange to me that a product which was, until quite recently, the dominant player in its field, has simply disappeared. It suggests to me that the BDS movement had quite a bit more impact than one might be willing to concede.

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Many Religious “Nones” Around the World Hold Spiritual Beliefs

But at lower rates than people who identify with a religion

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Sept. 4, 2025) – Around the world, many people who do not identify with any religion – a population that has climbed rapidly in the recent past – nevertheless hold a variety of spiritual and religious beliefs, according to a Pew Research Center study of 22 countries with relatively large religiously unaffiliated populations. 
In general, religiously unaffiliated people – sometimes called “nones” – are less likely to hold spiritual beliefs, less likely to engage in religious practices and more likely to take a skeptical view of religion’s impact on society than are Christians, Muslims and people who identify with other religions. But sizable percentages of religiously unaffiliated adults do hold some religious or spiritual beliefs. 
Here are some of the key findings of the study:Who are religious “nones”? “Nones” are adults who describe themselves religiously as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.” In nearly all of the 22 countries analyzed in the study, the largest subgroup of “nones” is people who say their religion is “nothing in particular,” rather than those who identify as atheist or agnostic. For more information about these three subgroups, refer to the report’s overview.
Do “nones” hold religious beliefs or follow religious practices?In all 22 countries surveyed, about a fifth or more of “nones” believe in life after death. The shares who say there is definitely or probably an afterlife range from 19% of unaffiliated adults in Hungary to 65% in Peru.
Large shares of “nones” in some countries believe that “there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we cannot see it.” For instance, 61% of “nones” in Mexico and 65% in Brazil express this belief.
Many religiously unaffiliated adults also express belief in God. This includes solid majorities of “nones” in South Africa (77%) and in several Latin American countries, such as Brazil (92%), Colombia (86%) and Chile (69%). By contrast, religiously unaffiliated adults in Europe and Australia are much less inclined to believe in God. Just 18% of “nones” in Australia, 10% in Sweden and 9% in Hungary are believers.
Compared with the large percentages of “nones” who hold religious beliefssmaller shares tend to engage in the religious practices asked about in the survey.
How do “nones” view religion’s impact on society?Many “nones” express negative views about religion’s influence on society. In 12 of the 22 countries studied, religiously unaffiliated adults are more likely to say religion encourages intolerancethan to say it encourages tolerance.
In every country included in the analysis, at least half of “nones” say religion encourages superstitious thinking.
Across the countries surveyed, a median of 53% say religion mostly hurts society, while a median of 38% say it mostly helps.
How important is religion to “nones”? Most religiously unaffiliated people feel that religion plays only a minor role in their lives. In half of the 22 countries analyzed, at least six-in-ten “nones” say religion is not at all important to them.
In a few countries, however, about half or more of “nones” say religion is either somewhat or very important in their lives. This is the case in Brazil, Colombia, Peru and South Africa – possibly reflecting the prevalence in these countries of traditional African, Afro-Caribbean, or Indigenous and Indian religious beliefs and practices (even among people who don’t identify with any religion).
These are among the key findings of a new Pew Research Center analysis of 2023-24 surveys conducted in 22 countries with samples of religious “nones” that are large enough to analyze and report separately. The Center interviewed more than 34,000 respondents in the 22 countries, including more than 10,000 who are religiously unaffiliated. This analysis was produced by Pew Research Center as part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, which analyzes religious change and its impact on societies around the world. Funding for the Global Religious Futures project comes from The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation. 
To read the report, click here: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/09/04/many-religious-nones-around-the-world-hold-spiritual-beliefs/
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