Ramble Arch

The Obligatory Group Photo of our gang from Shutterbug Excursions at our photo meetup in Central Park last weekend.

As I led them through the Ramble, I found Ramble Arch, the narrowest arch in the Park and a great favorite of mine. I knew I had to get a photo of the group in the archway.

Puttin' On The Ritz...

The inscription for the elegantly-dressed gentleman pictured here reads

Our beloved father

An honest and righteous man

Reb Moshe Yitzhak

son of Yehezkiel

At the very bottom of the image is inscribed the family name, Black (here phonetically spelled as "Bleck.")

In this cemetery in Woburn, I saw several tombstones from the 1920's and '30s with these little portraits of the deceased. This is something I've never seen in the Baltimore area, except in recent years among Jews who immigrated from the former Soviet Union since the 1970s.

Po Nikbara...

Po nikbara Yehudit bat Reb Mordechai...

Here is buried Yehudit (Judith) the daughter of Reb Mordechai...

Among Ashkenazi Jews, until recently, the first inscription near the top of a tombstone has been פנ, letters with the sounds of "P" and "N." These are the initial letters for the phrase פה נקבר (PO nik-BAHR*), meaning "here is buried."

I became interested in Hebrew tombstones when researching the history of my Dad's family. He came from a small town, Hoof, outside Kassel in Germany. Several years ago, an resident of Hoof generously sent me about 80 photographs of tombstones taken in the Hoof-Breitenbach cemetery that served the Jewish communities of the two neighboring towns.

Those old-style tombstones, dating from the early 1800's until just before WWII, were generously inscribed in Hebrew (many also had German) in a style rarely used by postwar Jews in America. But this past weekend, I stumbled across several old Jewish cemeteries in Woburn, MA, each containing a wealth of the older-style tombstones.

Here's an excellent guide to decoding a Hebrew tombstone inscription.

* note: Hebrew verbs indicate the gender of the subject or object. While nikbar is masculine, nik-bah-RAH(נקברה), as in the case of this stone, is femine.

Judkins Pond, Winchester MA

We were in the Boston area to visit our daughter Leah this past weekend. The weather was spectacular, and we were treated to an early (for us) display of fall colors.

I got up early Sunday morning to get some good light, and was rewarded with this scene in Winchester, the town next to where our motel was.

Grate Expectations

After a morning of purposeful picture-taking in Annapolis and Eastport, went off to do some of the day's errands. As I was walking back to my car in a parking lot, I stumbled across this scene.

All morning long, I was composing images in mind - beautiful images of beautiful places in the harbor on this beautiful morning. Yet, even though this one came outside of my picture-taking session, I think it's the best photo of the day.

Sometimes you just get lucky.

Opa and Ben

Here's my favorite photo of my my late father and Ben. I took it in February 1992, when Ben was not quite six years old.

What prompted me to get this one out and scan it is that Ben finished his very last day of school this past Thursday (classes, at least - finals are this week.) I asked him to have someone take his photo on campus so that I could pair it with the one Sandy took of him on his first day of kindergarten. While I was looking for that picture, I found this one just a few pages later in Sandy's well-organized photo album.

Back in '92, I had considered myself no longer a photographer, but simply a family snapshooter. I used a succession of auto-focus rangefinders that I bought for Sandy, my "good cameras" having been long before sold off.

But every once in a while, the photographer in me would come out, and this was one of those times. I had visualized this photo earlier in the day, knowing that Grandma and Opa were coming to visit. I got out my dusty, little-used Nikon EM and had Dad and Ben pose for just a few seconds.

I'll take some of the credit for this photo but not by any means all of it - the lion's share is thanks to the loving bond between Dad and his grandson.

Morning Stroll

Our resident heron takes a stroll across the Pond.