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How one special Pink Day helps save and support cancer patients
When Rachel Wojnilower was an undergraduate at American University in Washington, D.C., she did all kinds of activities with her Jewish sorority, Alpha Epsilon Phi. Now 36, Wojnilower has let most of them fade from memory.
But in retrospect, one in particular stands out.
That’s because about five years after graduating, Wojnilower got married and underwent genetic testing along with her husband as they both prepared for future children. They were surprised when they each tested positive as carriers of a potentially dangerous mutation, and even more so when Wojnilower learned, after additional testing, that she also carried a mutation in the BRCA1 gene.
Such mutations, which are 10 times more common among Ashkenazi Jewish men and women than among the general U.S. population, significantly elevate the risks for breast cancer and ovarian cancer, and also increase the risks for melanoma, pancreatic and prostate cancers.
Without any intervention, there was a 50-50 chance that the couple would pass down this dangerous mutation to their children. Wojnilower didn’t know what to do.
“As you can imagine, my stress and anxiety levels were through the roof,” Wojnilower recalled. “I didn’t know a single person who had ever gone through this before.”
Then she remembered one of the volunteer opportunities she had done with Alpha Epsilon Phi: a fundraising drive for Sharsheret, the national Jewish breast cancer and ovarian cancer organization.
Wojnilower reached out to Sharsheret and spoke to one of organization’s social workers, who explained more about the mutation and what measures she could take to protect her health and that of her future children. The social worker connected Wojnilower with a trained peer supporter — another young woman who had had a very similar experience.
Ultimately, Wojnilower and her husband decided to pursue pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) — a cutting-edge procedure used with in-vitro fertilization (IVF) to screen embryos. This enabled them to identify which embryos were lower-risk and thereby reduce the chances of passing on the BRCA mutation.
Wojnilower has since given birth to two healthy children, both free of the genetic mutations that she and her husband carry.
“That’s really the essence of what we do at Sharsheret, which is Hebrew for the word chain. We are connecting women, families, and communities to each other and to life-changing and, quite frankly, lifesaving resources,” said Jordana Altman, Sharsheret’s director of marketing and communications. “Whatever the issue may be, you’re not alone, and we have skilled trained professionals and a community of thousands who together form a chain of support and information.”
Sharsheret Pink Day events, like this student-run fundraiser at Binghamton University, now take place at more than 150 college campuses, Jewish day schools and companies around the world. (Courtesy of Phi Mu Chapter of Alpha Epsilon Phi at Binghamton University)
In the years since Wojnilower was a student, Sharsheret has expanded its activities on college campuses and in Jewish day schools much more widely. One centerpiece of Sharsheret’s activities on campus is Sharsheret Pink Day — an annual day in February dedicated to the cause during which students and faculty dress in pink and undertake other activities to raise awareness of the risks for breast cancer and ovarian cancer as well as Sharsheret’s critical support programs.
The goal of Pink Day is to engage young people to participate in activities that they will remember later in life so that when one of them confronts a cancer-related challenge or helps someone who is, they’ll remember the resources Sharsheret offers. This year, Sharsheret hosted Pink Day activities around the United States at college campuses, Jewish high schools and day schools.
“We are planting seeds about Sharsheret,” said Ellen Kleinhaus, Sharsheret’s regional director of education and outreach. “While today you may only need Sharsheret to better understand your risk, you or someone you love will need Sharsheret for support in the future. There isn’t a family or a community out there that is not touched by breast cancer or ovarian cancer.”
Pink Day’s origins can be traced to 2006, when a New Jersey Jewish high school organized a dedicated day for students to support Sharsheret by wearing pink and sharing resources with their parents.
“It was such a memorable part of my high school experience,” said Tzvi Solomon, one of the students who initiated Sharsheret Pink Day. “People really rallied around it.”
Solomon was so inspired by the event that when he went to Israel for his gap year, he asked peers in the United States and Israel to bring Pink Day to their schools. Now an international initiative, the program engages thousands of participants at more than 150 schools and companies globally.
“I think it’s a reflection of our community being sensitive and recognizing the importance of having an organization like Sharsheret,” said Solomon, whose young son wore a pink shirt to school on this year’s Sharsheret Pink Day.
Amanda Goldsmith, 28, has been involved with Sharsheret since her Jewish day school hosted a Pink Day. Years later, while attending New York University, Goldsmith remembered Sharsheret when her parents called her one morning to inform her that her mother had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Goldsmith immediately turned to Sharsheret for help and information, and she referred her mother to the organization’s peer support network.
During her mother’s treatment, Goldsmith vowed that once her mother was cancer free she’d start an initiative to get college students in New York City more involved with Sharsheret. She ended up establishing a local student board for the organization in New York City.
On Sharsheret Pink Day last year, Goldsmith, a human resource professional, implemented Wear Pink at Work, where her colleagues gave a $5 donation to Sharsheret and wore pink to the office. Her family also established a new Sharsheret program for young adults called YAD: The Young Adult Corner, which helps young adults understand their loved ones’ diagnoses, provides peer support and manages a website about cancer for young adults.
“It’s really just about spreading Sharsheret’s mission because they do so much good for so many people,” said Goldsmith, whose mother is now cancer free. “Pink Day might seem like something relatively small, but it’s hugely important.”
To learn more about Sharsheret, YAD: Young ADult Caring Corner or Sharsheret Pink Day 2024, email info@sharsheret.org.
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The post How one special Pink Day helps save and support cancer patients appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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He was a hidden child during WWII. The French town that saved him lost his painting and rediscovered a chapter of its history.
The day Isabelle Siméon cleared out a basement storage area in the town hall in Houdan, France, and found a rolled-up painting on top of a bookcase, she discovered a forgotten piece of history. My father, Philip Orenstein, a professor of art at Rutgers University, had started work on that painting in 1989 and donated it to the town in 1994 at an event marking the 50th anniversary of its liberation by American forces.
My father donated the painting because he felt a deep debt to the town that saved his life during the Second World War. A hidden child in Houdan from 1942-45, my father was saved by a parish priest who threatened to excommunicate anyone in this small market town who informed the occupying Germans about the Jewish children, resistance fighters, or downed allied pilots concealed there, or other acts of resistance. And by a farming family — the Trouvers — that took in children of French POWs, including Jews.
Yet by 2024, when Siméon, a municipal official, made her discovery, the town had forgotten not only the painting that had gone straight into storage, but its proud history of sheltering Jewish children and its heroic French resistance priest Abbé Pierre Condé. A dramatic page in the town’s 1,200 years of recorded history was lost. Even among the Jewish community in Yvelines, the bucolic region immediately to the west of Paris, the story was unknown. In France, the story of the hidden children, Jewish children sent to the countryside or small towns under various pretexts to avoid detection by Nazi occupants is well known. Several towns have established national reputations as places of refuge. But not Houdan and not elsewhere in Yvelines according to Valérie Boussard, president of the Council of Jewish Communities of Yvelines.
After spending more than a year to find my father based only on his signature and then restoring the painting, the Tannery (La Tannerie) gallery in Houdan is now hosting an exhibition through Nov. 1 to celebrate the restoration of this painting and this forgotten page of the town’s history.
Houdan today has changed. For many Parisians, this part of France serves as a country retreat and Houdan has fought hard to preserve its ancient town center. The result is a small town that continues to serve as a delightful regional hub with open air markets, restaurants situated in old farm buildings, an enormous fair each September, and increasingly fancy small shops, perhaps akin to the Cotswolds in England.
I accompanied my father to Houdan for the opening of his exhibition on Sept. 10 and stood with my extended family and Mayor Jean-Marie Tétart who proudly announced the future installation of the painting to a pride of place in the town hall. A former parliamentarian, Tétart seeks for Houdan the recognition it deserves as a place that, when times were at their hardest, resisted antisemitism and sought to repair the world. Even today.
Yet the town’s proud embrace of my father, his work, and this vital chapter of its history raises an important question: How was this history lost in the first place? And why was it rediscovered only now?
According to my father, the hidden child whose family survived the war and then emigrated to Brooklyn, France was simply not ready to receive this history before. It was not until 1995 that France officially took responsibility for the Vel d’Hiv roundup in Paris that claimed the lives of my father’s cousin Henri Herzhorn and thousands of other children who died in the French concentration camp in Drancy in inhumane conditions or in Auschwitz, their final destination. My father intended the seven murals that he painted starting in the 1990s to force France to recognize this history.
Paradoxically, with the dramatic rise of antisemitism that has deeply worried the French Jewish community, this history and the history of those who resisted resonates even more loudly. With every online or physical or verbal attack, the Jewish community and its allies in France respond with acts of memory.
My father’s work is at once personal and political, mixing family imagery with images of the grand politics of the day and oddly juxtaposed popular culture references. His murals stun the viewer with outsized images of a DeGaulle and Pétain or the D-Day landings, overlaid with family photos, Parisian graffiti, posters, and film advertisements. The colorful, powerful, and emotional images rush together and appear to jump off a graffitied wall in Paris as you are passing by.
“The Big Cheese,” his painting in Houdan, features an outsized image of the Ile de France steamship sailing across a brightly tricolored French flag background. The ship that bore him and his family to New York appears to be racing away from images of the iron cross, yellow stars, Drancy, and Karl Marx towards Mt. Rushmore, Max Beckman, and Statue of Liberty sunglasses. The work is colorful and epic in composition, on the one hand, while also inlaid with engaging and perplexing historical symbols designed to draw one in from afar and up close. My father has always dwelt on this history.
“As I worked on the seven canvases I describe as murals — my major body of work — I constantly thought of my cousin Henri Herzhorn, whom I had never met, as well as the more than 4,000 Parisian children who were victims of the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup — my contemporaries, who, like me, left France,” my father said when he was in Houdan.
Today, though France seems open to revisiting this history, mysteries still remain. Particularly the postwar life and fate of Abbé Pierre Condé. I spoke with Monsignor Luc Crepy, the Bishop of Versailles for Yvelines, who has begun to research Houdan’s wartime hero together with the current Curé of Houdan, Father Pierre Bothuan. Condé left behind a published journal recording the major events of the war, occupation, and liberation of Houdan. After that, he too disappeared from collective memory.
Growing up in my father’s house, surrounded by this history, I came away from Houdan shocked at the distances we have traveled and the voids that remain. My father and his older brother Stephen, a former professor of nuclear physics at CUNY — hidden with him in Houdan — never expected to survive 1944, let alone to return there in 2026. The house where they lived lay just beside a small bridge that the Germans planned to dynamite after D-Day to slow the advance of Patton’s army. Yet the town’s postman cut the wires and my father and uncle survived to consider the contemporary relevance of a lost painting and a lost history to a lost world in need of repair.
The post He was a hidden child during WWII. The French town that saved him lost his painting and rediscovered a chapter of its history. appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu to confront Mamdani’s call to arrest him in U.N. address this week
(JTA) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday accused New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani of supporting Hamas and inciting violence against Jews, setting up a showdown between the Israeli leader and one of the most prominent American pro-Palestinian politicians ahead of Netanyahu’s visit to the city.
Netanyahu said he would respond to Mamdani’s criticism of him and Israel during his speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, when he will visit New York for the first time since Mamdani took office.
Mamdani on Monday renewed his demand for the arrest of Netanyahu, who he called “a war criminal and an architect of a horrific genocide of the Palestinian people” in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. He acknowledged that he did not have the authority to carry out a warrant for Netanyahu issued by the International Criminal Court, but said the warrant should still be “honored” to protect “accountability” to international laws.
“If the International Criminal Court deems someone worthy of an arrest because of a violation of those laws, then who are we to say that anyone should be above that?” said Mamdani.
Netanyahu responded in a video statement, “Shame on you for supporting the Hamas terrorist monsters who butchered our people. Shame on you for inciting riots against New York Jews.” A number of prominent New York Jewish figures have asked Mamdani to tamp down his rhetoric about Israel, linking it to rising violent attacks on Jews. Mamdani has said that he is mayor for all New Yorkers, including Jews, and denounces antisemitism.
“I’m coming to the U.N., I’m going to tell the truth about our heroic soldiers, and I’m going to tell the truth about you,” added Netanyahu.
Mamdani pledged during his mayoral campaign last year that he would seek to arrest Netanyahu if he visited, but admitted in July that the city could not legally do so.
The ICC issued its warrant for Netanyahu in 2024, accusing him of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The United States and Israel are not signatories of the treaty that created the ICC in 2002 and do not recognize its jurisdiction.
Netanyahu has prominently featured Mamdani in campaign ads as he currently seeks reelection in Israel, framing the mayor as both a pro-terror extremist and a leader reminiscent of Nazi Germany.
Netanyahu is set for one of his shortest trips to the United States, where he is not slated to meet with President Donald Trump, according to The Jerusalem Post. He is currently scheduled to leave New York on the same day he arrives. Protests are expected both outside the United Nations and inside during Netanyahu’s speech, which last year saw representatives from dozens of countries walk out.
Meanwhile, Mamdani had his third meeting with Trump on Monday, continuing a rapport between the two populist leaders on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Despite their stark differences on issues including immigration enforcement, Trump praised Mamdani during a press conference on the lawn of Gracie Mansion.
“I want him to be a great mayor, and he’s certainly got potential,” Trump told reporters before shaking Mamdani’s hand and patting his arm.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Netanyahu to confront Mamdani’s call to arrest him in U.N. address this week appeared first on The Forward.
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Could going to synagogue help or hurt a Jewish candidate? This poll offers a clue
Voters may react differently to a Jewish politician who publicly practices their faith than to one who simply identifies as Jewish, a new poll found. The distinction could matter for Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a possible 2028 presidential candidate who has made his Jewish faith central to his public life and service.
The Politico poll of 2,002 U.S. adults showed that Democratic voters were less likely to vote for a candidate who regularly attends synagogue than for a candidate not practicing a religion or attending services once a year. Among Republicans, however, a candidate who regularly attends synagogue performed better than one who attends only once a year.
The survey, conducted online in partnership with the London-based polling firm Public First between August 8 and 14, asked respondents to choose between hypothetical candidates with different characteristics, including political ideology, age, race, profession, sexual orientation and religious practice. The sample has a reported margin of error of plus or minus 2.2%.
The poll offers a window into how religious observance may shape the way voters view a Jewish candidate. In an earlier poll conducted by the same firm in May, among 2,038 voters, candidates were identified simply by religion rather than how often or where they worshipped. Being identified as Jewish hurt a hypothetical candidate among voters in both parties compared with being identified as Christian.
The findings could be particularly relevant to Shapiro, the popular Pennsylvania governor running for reelection this fall. He maintains a traditional Conservative Jewish lifestyle, keeps kosher and is a longtime member of Beth Sholom Congregation in Elkins Park, outside Philadelphia. In his recent memoir, Where We Keep the Light, Shapiro detailed experiences shaped by and tied closely to his Jewish identity, including his vetting as a vice presidential candidate in 2024.
Shapiro has been viewed as a potential first Jewish president since his gubernatorial campaign in 2022 and is one of three prominent Jewish Democrats — along with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel — mentioned as possible 2028 presidential candidates.
Religious identity, particularly Christianity, has become more central in Republican politics since President Trump returned to the White House in 2025. Trump and his Cabinet have made religious faith a prominent part of his administration’s agenda. He created a White House Faith Office to work with religious organizations and established a Justice Department task force focused specifically on what the administration calls anti-Christian bias. At the same time, an increasingly vocal faction on the far right has made Christian nationalism and antisemitism central to its politics.
The Politico poll does not explain why Republican voters responded differently to Jewish candidates based on how often they attended synagogue. But the gap aligns with the broader split in positions among conservatives who have warmly embraced visibly religious and politically conservative Jews, while criticizing liberal or less observant Jews over their politics and commitment to Judaism.
Trump has repeatedly drawn that distinction himself. During the 2024 election, for example, he said that Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats “hate their religion.”
The post Could going to synagogue help or hurt a Jewish candidate? This poll offers a clue appeared first on The Forward.
