Books on the Beach raises funds for Hadassah Rehab Center

MIDDLETOWN – Over 170 Hadassah members and friends turned out for this year’s Books on the Beach fundraising event, which featured authors Jennifer Rosner and Allegra Goodman.

The elegant event, held on Aug. 7 at the Wyndham Newport Hotel, started with a lunch of salmon or eggplant and plenty of time to schmooze. This was followed by several Hadassah speakers, whose pleas for donations were more impassioned than usual – because these are troubled times.

Nancy Falchuk, a past president of the Boston Chapter and the 24th Hadassah national president, said Hadassah was the second-biggest employer in Jerusalem (after the government) and has been credited with starting modern health care in Israel.

“But,” she asked, “is Hadassah still relevant today?”

Never more so, Falchuk said, citing the Gandel Rehabilitation Center, which is still being built but opened an emergency hospital soon after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Since the attack, Hadassah has sped up the opening of the first three floors of the center, in Jerusalem, but there is more to be done to reach its planned capacity of 400 patients a day, or 10,000 a year.

Thousands of Israelis have been wounded during the Israel-Hamas war, and the need for physical and emotional therapy is urgent, according to Hadassah.

“We need to step up,” Falchuk urged the audience. “Every single dollar counts.”

At Hadassah’s medical facilities in Israel, she said, “soldiers will put their arms around you and cry and thank you for what you’ve done.”

Hadassah Magazine Executive Editor Lisa Hostein, who attended Temple Habonim, in Barrington, as a child, interviewed the two authors.

Jennifer Rosner is the author of a memoir and two novels about the Holocaust, “Once We Were Home” and “The Yellow Bird Sings,” each based on a Holocaust survivor. One child survivor hid with her mother in a shoemaker’s attic for 24 months, and the other worked to reclaim Jewish children from the Gentiles who had provided them with a safe harbor.

Rosner spoke about the widespread pain of these “hidden children,” and often their Gentile caregivers, who harbored the children for years only to have them snatched back by Jews when they were discovered.

Some of the children did not want to return after growing attached to their rescue families, and some did not even know they were Jewish, she said.

Rosner said her novels also address the question of “How do you reroot after a rupture or ruptures?”

Hostein said Rosner’s compelling books are about “identity, home and belonging.”

Allegra Goodman began publishing short stories about Jewish characters while in college, and many of her early books were Jewish-themed. Goodman found inspiration for “Kaaterskill Falls” in childhood summers spent in the Catskills, and her story cycle “The Family Markowitz” tells about a family's matriarch and her descendants.

Goodman said she still writes about Jewish characters, but in her later novels, they are less observant. Her newest novel is “Sam,” which New York Times bestselling-author Lily King called a “powerful and endearing portrait of a girl who must summon deep within herself the grit and wisdom to grow up.”

Her next novel, “Isola,” is an epic about a 16th-century French noblewoman deserted on an island where her survival depends on the power of her faith and love.  

The Books on the Beach fundraiser is sponsored by Hadassah Southern New England. All money raised at the event will provide crucial funding for the Gandel Rehabilitation Center, on the campus of Hadassah’s Mount Scopus Hospital, in Jerusalem.

Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, was established in 1912. Working to advance philanthropy as well as women’s leadership, advocacy and health, Hadassah has over 300,000 members and supporters.

To donate to the Gandel Rehabilitation Center, go to go.hadassah.org/GRC1.

CYNTHIA BENJAMIN is a former copy editor at Jewish Rhode Island.