HAFTR trio family stories honored

A trio of local seventh graders wrote about their families and won recognition for their stories of kindness, poetry, and survival. The HAFTR team sumbitted their works to the Jewish Heritage Essay Contest, run by Torah Atlanta, a Jewish outreach organization. This year’s contest attracted 20 schools from around the country, with one from South Africa.

Ayelet Segal and Chloe Thall won second and third places, respectively for creative writing; while Haley Ottensoser won third place for poetry.

In her essay, titled “Tikun Ha'Olam-Changing the World,” Segal recounted a story from her aunt about a woman she met in Israel. A child of traveling hippies, the woman’s parents stumbled upon a large Conservative synagogue in Houston, Texas, where her uncle, Rabbi Jack Segal, accepted the gentile travelers, allowing them to use the shul’s facilities and sharing the kitchen with them. It was their first encounter with a Jew. After a week, the travelers vacated the shul’s parking lot.

Rabbi Segal’s kindness inspired this hippie family to convert and make aliyah.

Demonstrating the interdependence of people, Segal concludes by noting that her aunt was seeking to purchase a bat mitzvah gift from this convert. The recipient was Segal, who also ended up learning about her uncle’s ability to “change the world.”

Thall recounted life lessons she learned from her grandmother, a Hungarian-born holocaust survivor. “Sometimes, I will rush in the door from school telling my mom that I’m starving. My Safta cannot stand this,” Thall wrote. “She explains to me what ‘starving’ really is. How she had no food and whatever she got, she and her sister, and her mother were so grateful for.”

For poetry, Ottensoser put her impression of the Western Wall into verse:

A dove builds a nest in your cracks,

Among notes of despair and hope.

You stand in the blazing sun and through many moons.