Chris Leppek

Goldie Safadi Prizament has a few pleasant memories of her early childhood in Beirut, Lebanon. She remembers the summers with fondness, when Beirut would get very hot, and her mother and nine siblings would spend three months in the nearby mountains to stay cool while her father, who sold fabrics door to door, would stay behind in Beirut. She loved going to beaches on the Mediterranean Sea. It was the 1960s, and Beirut was one of the main entertainment and recreation locales in the Middle East, with lots of discotheques and theaters, but Goldie’s family never went to them.

Monday, Oct. 7, was a day of mourning for the world Jewish community, marking the one-year anniversary of the Hamas massacre of more than 1,200 Israelis and others, an attack that triggered the war in Gaza and now in Lebanon. It was also a day of mourning at the University of Denver campus. But there, in a “Vigil for Palestine” sponsored by a group called DU4Palestine and other anti-Israel actors, the goal was to “Come together to mourn and remember our martyrs after 1 year of genocide.”

Terrorists were on the offensive. More than a thousand Israelis, civilians and soldiers alike — and children — were killed. StandWithUs was born in the midst of strife and bloodshed in Israel. Anti-Zionism, and sometimes anti-Semitism, fueled by orchestrated waves of misinformation, rose across the globe. But as familiar, and as recent, as all this sounds, it took place more than two decades before Oct. 7, 2023. The year, in fact, was 2000, and the Second Intifada was underway.

It is a rare individual indeed who has the privilege of knowing precisely what his mission in life is, let alone the opportunity to actually realize it. Scott Levin is that rare individual. He had known of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and been a volunteer on its behalf, well before he became its Mountain States regional director in 2010. By then, having served as chairman of the Rose Community Foundation and president of Temple Emanuel, and as a supporter of many other local Jewish causes, Levin was firmly planted in to Jewish community activism.

When Myron Pollock had his Bar Mitzvah — officiated by the late, great Rabbi Daniel Goldberger of Beth Joseph and HEA — he originally intended to save his Bar Mitzvah money and, following the advice of his father, eventually buy a car with it. He changed his mind. “I’d always been interested in the drums, always,” Pollock told the Intermountain Jewish News earlier this month. He’d been learning from a neighbor friend, a drummer, how to beat the skins and had repeatedly requested to join his school band as a drummer. His parents weren’t too thrilled with the idea.