Oral Histories

Joan Ellen Calem

Interviewer: Start with your full name.

Calem: My full name is Joan Ellen Calem. I go by Joanie.

Interviewer: I would like to do a little bit in the beginning about if you have a Jewish name and who you were named for.

Calem: I do not have a Jewish name even though I lived in Israel for 23 years. I always went by Joanie. The story of my name is that I’m the youngest of three children. My parents told my older siblings that, if I was a girl, my sister got to name me, and if I was a boy, my brother got to name me.

Interviewer: Not too traditional.

Calem: No. My brother was going to name me Jacob, Jacob Jacobson because my maiden name was Jacobson. So, we’re all glad that I was female. My sister named me for her two best friends at the time when she was nine. Nothing is significant.

Interviewer: That’s very interesting. How far back can you trace your family and from where?

Calem: We have traced, I believe, let’s see, it would be back to my grandparents’ great grandfather. My paternal side of the family was from Lithuania. My maternal side of the family was from Ukraine.

Interviewer: Family names?

Calem: The paternal family name was Jacobson, which is a little weird to everybody because it wasn’t Jacobovich or Jacobobovsky. It was Jacobson. On the ship manifesto my grandfather was listed as Nathan Jacobson. Nobody really has an explanation for that.

Interviewer: He came to the states?

Calem: He came to the states in 1918. My mother’s father’s last name was Guran which had been shortened at Ellis Island from Guralnik. Jacobson is the Jewish version, son rather than sen, the Scandinavian. My grandfather came to the states in 1911. Maybe I’m wrong about my other grandfather, maybe it was earlier. I could check on that.

Interviewer: That’s fine. You were born in the United States?

Calem: I was born in the United States.

Interviewer: You were born where?

Calem: I was born in Seattle, Washington. My family was from the Detroit area. Both sides of the family had immigrated through Pittsburgh, through New York, through Pittsburgh up to Michigan. The rest of my family was all born in Detroit, but my dad got a job with Boeing out in Seattle, and I was born out there.

Interviewer: How did you end up in Israel?

Calem: My father was one of four siblings. Two of his siblings, his brother was very active in Hashomer Hatzair and went to Israel on one of the illegal ships in 1947 and was one of the founders of Kibbutz Barkai which is kind of right smack in the center of the country. My youngest aunt moved to Israel with her American husband in 1951, I think. My father had kind of always felt a little bad that he hadn’t taken us all over to Israel. It wasn’t a big part of our, you know, messaging, but in the family, we had done internal exchange programs, not through any school system or anything but cousins from there would come here for a year, cousins from here had gone there for a year. We had all gone in 1967 after the Six-Day War. My father hadn’t seen his siblings for a good twenty years at that point. My aunt, my second aunt who stayed in Detroit, she had gone back and forth a lot. After the Six-Day War, my brother was supposed to have his Bar Mitzvah, and my aunt said, “You know, why doesn’t he go to Israel and do his Bar Mitzvah with the broader family. We’ll all go. We’ll have a family reunion. He could do his Bar Mitzvah at the Western Wall. That’s what people are doing now that it’s recently available.” So, my parents said to my 13-year old brother, “What do you think?” My brother was like, “Let’s go to Israel.” So we had all been there in 1967.

Interviewer: Your siblings’ names are?

Calem: My sister is named Susan, and my brother was originally Thomas John, but he is a Sikh so he changed his name to Kirpal Singh Khalsa, many years ago. At that time, he was Tommy. We all went in 1967. We had a huge family reunion. My aunt and her family from Detroit came. I fell in love with the country. It just always stuck in my head so, I started talking about doing a year in Israel when I was going to get to high school. Originally, I was going to go with a friend and then she backed out and I was like, I’m just going, and I ended up staying. I did not do just one year. Initially, I was in Jerusalem, in Kiryat Yovel with my aunt and uncle. My uncle, who had been a founder of Barkai, had since left. Every part of the family has its own story. I was originally going to live with him. I was going to go to Kibbutz Barkai. When he left, I’m like, okay, I’ll go to Jerusalem. In many ways, you know, the road less traveled. My life circled back to Kibbutz Barkai many years later. My cousin still lives there. By going to Jerusalem, I ended up being able to go to the Academy of Music. I had studied piano for years in America. My aunt and uncle really wanted me to go to the hoity toity heavy duty academic high school where all of my cousins went. I really wanted to go to the Academy of Music. I ended up doing that. That was definitely pivotal in my musicianship because you go from private, once-a-week lessons in American to seven hours, six days a week immersion. It was fantastic. I’m eternally grateful that it worked out for me to go to Jerusalem instead of Barkai.

Interviewer: Then you stayed in Israel?

Calem: Then I stayed.

Interviewer: In what area?

Calem: I stayed, let’s see, I graduated from high school. I moved in with an urban community of friends, and I got a job at the Jerusalem Hilton, not in music. I was trying to prove to myself that I could make it in business if music didn’t work out. We moved from Jerusalem in 1983. The whole community moved to the Tel Aviv area, and then I got a job in a program called Interns for Peace ניצני שלום (Nitzanei Shalom), which was a program for Jewish/Arab rapprochement. That’s where I met my husband. He was an American who had come over to work in the program. We lived in Tel Aviv until, I think until 1987, maybe 88, and then moved to the Barkai area, not to Barkai. We moved back to the center of the country and lived there until we left Israel in 1998. At the same time as I started working for Interns for Peace, I also started teaching piano. I wove music back into the picture, and then we came back to the United States. Well, in the summer of 1993 my husband had a really bad accident. He had taken a summer job at a construction site. He’s an English teacher. His name is Douglas Charles Calem. He likes to say he was born in the small slice of time when his parents were trying to assimilate. His older sister has a Jewish name. His younger brother has a Jewish name. He, of course, is the one who went to Israel. He had an accident. He had been an English teacher after he finished working for Interns for Peace. He became an English teacher. He worked for a wonderful school in Hadera, called The Democratic School, which is an open school where the kids determined the rules and ran a parliament, and a wonderful, wonderful place. After he had his accident, he was left with paralyzed vocal chords and a very bad thyroid condition. It was brought on by the trauma of the accident. He came home from the doctor one day and the doctor said, “Well, the thyroid condition you have is exacerbated by heat and tension.” He was really sick. He was sick a lot of the time. His immune system was really knocked out. So, he really wanted to come back to the states. He interviewed at a lot of amazing open schools around the country that you kind of had to volunteer because they had no budget. We had two little children. Most of the staff were people who had done their corporate job, paid off their cars and their houses and their kids’ school, and were on to their second career. His brother, at the time, worked for a high-tech company that had a big project here in Columbus, Ohio.

Interviewer: And his brother’s name?

Calem: His brother’s name is Mark Asher Calem.

Interviewer: Just briefly what have you done traveling wise, career wise in Columbus since you moved back?

Calem: After I left the Interns for Peace program, I went full time into teaching music in Israel. I taught both private lessons at home, and I taught pre-school music. That’s a really active, well supported area in Israel. I mean there is no pre-school, home or public, that does not have a music specialist. I don’t know if that’s still the case. I would imagine it is. I have a cousin that still works in the field. That was an extra kind of expertise that I developed. So, when I arrived in Columbus, my mother-in-law, who was alive at the time, she had called the JCC, here in Columbus. She did, what’s it called, advance scouting for me.

Interviewer: Maybe a little pulling the strings?

Calem: I don’t think it was pulling the strings, it was just hey, let me let you know my daughter-in-law is arriving in Columbus. She speaks fluent Hebrew. She’s a talented musician and music teacher. Do you need anybody? So, she was my advance agent.

Interviewer: That was wonderful. Just a little bit on the family part. Do you have, maybe one or two, just brief anecdotal stories from your family history? So, like the consummate little morsel of family history is.

Calem: My maternal grandfather was a Wobblie, a card-carrying member of the International Workers of the World, a union. He was a union activist. He was a union organizer.

Interviewer: In what area?

Calem:  In Detroit. He was on the road a lot organizing strikes. My mother was taught that, if men in suits ever come knocking on the door, whether papa is home or not, you say he’s not home and you haven’t seen him in weeks. If there was a knock on the door, my grandfather, if he was home, would immediately take off to the attic.

Interviewer: Gosh (laughs) pretty serious.

My parents were also definitely social justice activists. We were not religiously Jewish in anyway, but we were the red diaper babies. Everybody that my parents were close to were Jewish activists. So, Judaism for us, as I learned more about Judaism, I realized what my parents were, and my grandparents were embodying Tikkun Olam. They weren’t synagogue goers. My parents ended up being very active in their synagogue later in life, but not while I was being raised.

Interviewer: They were not very observant?

Calem: No, well later on they were observant, Reform observant. For my entire youth they were not observant.

Interviewer: Did you encounter any antisemitism in your youth. We have America, Israel, America, especially in the early times?

Calem: One incident, which I did not take seriously, my parents were infuriated, but I was not. This happened when I was 7 or 8. Myfather struggled a lot with what he viewed as antisemitism. He was an electrical engineer.

Interviewer: An electrician?

Calem: No, he was an engineer and he worked on airplanes. He worked for Boeing. He was a stress engineer, that’s what he was. He worked on the wings of airplanes, making sure that they could withstand the stress of flight. He felt like he encountered a lot of antisemitism in the engineering world.

Interviewer: There weren’t many Jews?

Calem: I guess, well certainly not in Seattle, Washington. He had taken us out of the Jewish area. There were Jews there, but maybe not a lot. That was part of the messaging. You’ve got to watch out for antisemites. You’ve got to watch out for antisemitism. I was always kind of like what are you talking about? You know, people are people. What I witnessed more was racism, not being directed at me but being directed at friends of color.

Interviewer: Asians also when you were in Seattle?

Calem: We were only in Seattle till I was five. Then we moved back to the East coast.

Interviewer: Where?

Calem: Initially to New Hampshire. We were only there a year, and then to the Boston area. At that time, I don’t remember any Asian kids. In Seattle, there would have been. There were certainly kids of color if you lived in a town that had an air force base. There were Air force and Army kids. I had a few friends who were Black and I witnessed them parlaying things that were like, huh. I wouldn’t have noticed this if I wasn’t standing right next to them. There was one incident where I think I was about 7 or 8 and I was playing somewhere down the block. Some kid who I wasn’t friends with, who was kind of not well liked amongst the kids on the block. He was kind of scrappy. In retrospect, as an educator, he was kind of neglected. He was kind of unhappy. I can look back and say oh. I think even at the time, I kind of felt that. I don’t even feel that’s a recent observation. I think, even at the time, I was like he’s was not a very happy person. He at one point said to me, “You’re just a stupid kike.” I had no idea what that meant. I went home and I said to mom, “Ma, what’s a kike?” She just said, “Who told you that? Who said that?” She stormed out of the house. Apparently, she went to speak to his parents. I mean she came back a half an hour later so there was this period of time when she was really out of the house. I don’t remember if I asked. I don’t remember ever getting any explanation about what went on in that half an hour. She may have stormed down the road, and no one was home. I don’t know. I said, “So what is it?” “That’s a terrible thing to say to Jewish people. That’s terrible that he said that.” I don’t know if it was me or her saying he must have heard that from his parents.

Interviewer: Right, kids and words that are being prohibited become a very interesting dynamic.

Calem: Right, because you’re going to use a word that’s being prohibited. You’re going to try it on for size.

Interviewer: Right, and watch for the reaction.

Calem: Again, in retrospect, when he said it to me, I was just kind of puzzled. I had no response at all. He didn’t get the reaction that he was supposedly expecting.

Interviewer: What about your kids, tell me just their names and a little bit about them and what they’re doing now.

Calem: They were both born in Israel. My daughter’s name is Tenara Lorien Calem. Her name is based on two books that my husband and I loved. My mother-in-law really wanted us to name her Tilley, after her mother. There was no way we were going to name her Tilley, so we did choose a T name, so she is named after her paternal (great grandmother). She is now 32 ½. She lives in Philadelphia. She is a theatre person. She has a Masters in Devised Theatre. That was her passion. Devised Theatre is where you create an idea, and instead of writing a script, you create a play with a group of theatre collaborators. That’s what she graduated, got her Masters in. That’s what she does for art. Professionally, she does not want to have to be dependent on an art salary, especially in 2025, so she is teaching at a local college in Philadelphia. She’s teaching public speaking, hoping to parlay that job, if they like her, she likes them, into also teaching play writing. She does a lot of child care. She loves children. She does a lot of elder care. She loves elders. She does all this Devised playmaking with her collaborator friends. She is married.

Interviewer: Children?

Calem: Not yet, working on those, wants those. My second child is Devin Gabriel Calem. He was born in Israel, but we wanted to give him a unique name. We felt like he was going to be a bear, so his Hebrew name would be Dov. Devin is based on that. Gabriel is the Arc Angel. He is 30. He lives here in Columbus, not far from us. He has Autism. He has a degree from CCAD in Two-dimensional Animation. He’s a very talented animator. He is currently trying to get involved in theatre because animation is a very lonely profession.

Interviewer: I’m skipping a couple of these things because I think we can wrap them up when we talk a little more. Community activities and organizations, board positions, what are you involved in.?

Calem: For years I was the President of the Board of Children’s Music Network, which is a national organization supporting people who do music with children. I hopped from that to being on the Board, and now the Chair of The People’s Music Network. The full name of The People’s Music Network is The People’s Music Network for Songs of Peace and Justice. It’s very lefty, founded by Pete Seeger and a bunch of other people. I will only be in that position until January of 2026. I am also on the Board of Sukkat Shalom. I’m very involved in all kinds of local activism. I’m involved with an organization called Seeds of Caring that creates volunteer positions to teach children, ages 2-12, the value of volunteering. I do a lot of music programs that are with families of young children and elders, Senior Centers, also families of young children with young adults with developmental disabilities, the whole point being to allay the children’s fear, the elderly, or the disabled. I do a lot of political activism. I sing at a lot of rallies. I also volunteer.

Interviewer: It’s all very good. Let’s transition to Sukkat Shalom. How did that become part of your Jewish journey?

Calem: My husband was raised Reform. He grew up in Puerto Rico, but he grew up attending a Reform synagogue that his parents started. His parents were ex-pats.

Interviewer: They were Americans?

Calem: They were Americans living in Puerto Rico. They moved to Puerto Rico in the Sixties. There were no Reform synagogues at the time so they, and a few families, started the Reform synagogue. He grew up very active in the Reform synagogue. Then he went to Israel. You know, in Israel, you don’t have to be involved with any congregation. When we moved back here, we just did home Judaism. We did all the holidays, and we did holidays by having lots of people over to celebrate with. We were teaching our kids about Judaism. They were born in Israel so they had that reality. Eventually, my son, we were out in Seattle visiting my parents. My parents, by the way, had lived in Israel. They had moved to Israel after I did. They lived there for seven years. When they went back to Seattle, they wanted to be involved in a synagogue. They became involved in a Reform synagogue there. One Chanukah we were out visiting them, and there was this big party at the synagogue and my son with Autism said, “I want to know more Jewish kids.” We started looking for congregations so he could go to Religious School. That was very complicated because he had Autism, and that was the aughts, and Jewish congregations still struggle with inclusion, but they’re doing far better than they were then. He ended up being really bullied at one of the congregations. I am now an inclusion activist. For me it’s like, if Joanie in 2025 was his mother in 2006,7,8, it would have been very different. I would have known how to handle it differently. I would have insisted that I go into his classrooms and I’d do inclusion activities with the kids. He ended up being really turned off by American Jews and very unwilling to have anything to do. Sukkat Shalom reached out to me to do music on a number of occasions. Bill Cohen worked with them as a musician, and Bill is, was an incredible musician. They wanted me to do work with the kids. I started by just kind of showing up here and there to do things with their religious school. When my parents died, 2 ½ months apart, for that first High Holidays after they passed, it was really hard, really, really hard, and I wanted to say Kaddish, and I wanted to be part of High Holidays, so that’s where I went, and I love, love, loved and still love Rabbi Jessica, just a wonderful human being, a wonderful Rabbi, a wonderful Jewish leader.

Interviewer: Toby asked me to, as an aside, ask you if you have anything from TSS (Sukkat Shalom), T shirts, mementos, tchotchkes, photos, anything?

Calem: No, I don’t. Oh, I have a hat, but I’m not willing to give the hat over. I can give you a picture of the hat. It’s a hat I use (laughs).

Interviewer: That would be great. So, a little bit about TSS (Sukkat Shalom). You started out being asked to do some music programming and then you got more involved.

Calem: I’m terrible with years. One of the 15 year olds in the congregation was a newborn, so it must have been about 2010. That was when I started doing music with the kids, dropping in to do something with the religious school sometimes, about 2010. Then my parents passed in 2013. That’s when I started coming a little more to Services.

Interviewer: You felt the need to get more involved?

Calem: I mean I think for the first few years I was what I had sworn I would never become. I was that Jew who showed up for High Holidays and nothing else. But I also got much closer to Rabbi Jessica. Here and there she would say, “Okay, will you come to this?” I would say, probably for the first couple years, I was just coming for the High Holidays and then, probably 2015, I was doing more. Then 2016, after the Election, the families were like just horrified, what do we do, and I kind of took on the family education at that point. Initially, we were just getting together once a week at my house to sing, the families and the kids, and any adults that wanted to come, not any organized Service.

Interviewer: Not like Shabbat.

Calem: No, it was kind of in place of religious school. We really just did a lot of singing. We would sing a lot of Hebrew. We would do a lot of Israeli songs, a lot of Jewish songs, a lot of just flat out religious songs, prayers, a lot of left-wing American songs.

Interviewer: It was what everybody needed. Do you have any comments or were you involved in any way in how the group moved from Reform to Reconstruction?

Calem: I wasn’t around for that, but I hadn’t even heard of Reconstructionism.

Interviewer: Do you know anything about the Torah that they have used?

Calem: That’s the ultimate mystery. We’re getting closer to figuring out, I think we now have it placed. Have you interviewed Cheryl (Lubow) yet?

Interviewer: No, but I’ve been trying to.

Calem: Cheryl has some information because she had a visiting scribe look at it. He was able to identify probably what year it was inscribed.

Interviewer: What do you remember from that in terms of what did the person do to identify it?

Calem: No details. I’m terrible at details. Cheryl, I’m sure will remember. I think she also wrote it down, which is why she is Chair because she is really responsible. What I remember is that he could identify the location, that it was probably inscribed, and more or less the year by the style of the script. I’m a song writer and in my head is very much the mystery of the Sukkat Shalom Torah. That’s a song waiting to be written, or a story waiting to be told. We know that we borrowed it from Agudas Achim. Agudas Achim knows nothing about it. They have no clue. They don’t have anything written down anywhere. It turns out that they have a number of extra scrolls.

Interviewer: They don’t know anything?

Calem: I don’t know if they don’t know about the other ones. But it’s like this one is not in any way missing. No one knew that we had it except that we’ve been paying them an annual Mitzvah Thank You donation because of it and they never know what to do with the donation, apparently, like this line item that they don’t know what to do with in their budget.

Interviewer: That’s very interesting. I’d like to sort of ask a general question about your Jewish journey. Could you make a comment or two about what that has been?

Calem: I always, always, always felt very Jewish. My family were like, my parents would define themselves as agnostics. My very best friend growing up in America, who we are still best buddies, more so now that I live here again. She grew up Catholic so occasionally I would go to First Communion with her. I wouldn’t go up, but I would sit in the pew, and I would listen and I would go home and ask questions. My parents were like Oh and rolled their eyes. They never told me not to go. I don’t think they even said to me make sure you don’t take Communion. You know, I wasn’t allowed to. For me, I was always very Jewish. I always had a sense of some bigger being, invisible, that I couldn’t see. I always felt some connection to this invisible something that, in my experience, kept me safe somehow, didn’t protect me from all bad experiences. There was, for me, a very strong element of connection. When I went to Israel as a seven year old in 1967, I landed in this place that I had never been in this life. I got off that plane, as a seven year old, I’m home.

Interviewer: That’s profound.

Calem: Yeah, we were there for two weeks and everywhere we went, I felt I’m home. I don’t feel this in America. I am home. For me that was super powerful. I didn’t feel like I had any connection to Rabbinical Judaism. When we came back from Israel, I said to my mother, “I want to learn Hebrew. I want to be able to speak like my cousins. I want to be able to speak with my cousins. I want to learn Hebrew.” So, what did she do? She found there was no synagogue in the town that we lived in. She found a synagogue in the next town over and she signed me up for Hebrew School which was three afternoons a week and Saturday morning. I was immediately handed a Siddur. I was immediately being taught “Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu melech haolam.” I’m like, this is not what my cousins were talking about. This is not what I want. Apparently, I was a real pain in the butt in the class and in the three weeks that I was in Hebrew School, the teacher had called my mother five times, so my mother wisely realized this is not going to work and that was the end of my Hebrew School education. For me as a seven year old, it was like there are very different ways to be Jewish and you can’t tell me I’m not Jewish because I don’t know these prayers. That was my journey.

Interviewer: Were you involved with Sukkat Shalom during the Little Minyan stage?

Calem: Yeah. It was still the Little Minyon when I was involved. You know, I’m a children’s educator. I always thought that’s always a little too much like the little engine that could which was very much part of why they named it. I totally respect that. It kind of felt denigrating. I was one of the people urging for a name change. The name was beautifully thought up by one of the, the name was beautifully thought up and voted on in our back yard.

Interviewer: In your back yard?

Calem: Yeah, at this very large meeting that involved the elders and Rabbi Jessica, she was still involved at the time, and a whole bunch of kids who had come up through the religious school. The youngest ones there who were all pre Bar Mitzvah at the time, they’re like, “No, this was the Little Minyan. This will always be the Little Minyan.” The teens, the post Bar Mitzvah kids, the teens and the twenty somethings were like no, actually it was one of, have you interviewed Deborah Seltzer yet?

Interviewer: No, I’m going to.

Calem: It was Deborah’s daughter, Tova, I think, the one who came up with the name. Everybody loved it and it’s perfect.

Interviewer: Are there any occurrences you have experienced with being part of this congregation?

Calem: What kind of occurrences?

Interviewer: Notable things that have happened. I mean you told me you know a lot of anecdotal things. Is there anything else that comes to mind?

Calem: Because I’m a Jewish musician and because I have really lobbied long and hard for inclusion in the Columbus Jewish community, and I was very active in pushing on Jewish Columbus, the Jewish Federation at the time, to hire an inclusion advocate, I’ve been involved with the larger Jewish Columbus community, and I have really pushed Sukkat Shalom to get on the map. Post October 7, 2023, when the entire Jewish American world, the entire Jewish world, has been grappling with the Israel/Palestine reality, I think Sukkat Shalom stands out very much in the Columbus Jewish landscape because we openly say the word Palestine. We openly say no we don’t support the current Israeli government. I mean, I’m Israeli. I did not vote for this government. I was actually there at the last election. I voted. I did not vote for this current government. I would not ever. I feel, as an Israeli, that there is no connection between anti current war and antisemitism. That’s a tough place to be in the Columbus Jewish landscape. I think that there are people that would maybe have gravitated towards us pre Oct. 7 who now would stay away but there are also people who are specifically coming to us. There’s a family that I just had a conversation with on Friday that they’re not comfortable with the rest of the congregation’s stance so they are specifically coming to us.

Interviewer: We’re kind of wrapping up now. What do you hope to see for the congregation in the next 20 years? You’re at a 20 year milestone, what next?

Calem: I hope to see more of a, I’m not sure how to say this concisely. We are a DIY (do it yourself) congregation. We currently don’t have a Rabbi. We do really well, I think, with our worship team. We have a robust worship team and we each bring a beautiful flavor. People come to our Services and appreciate our Services. We struggle with family education because we don’t have an educator. I did it for many years, and I can’t do it anymore. We need that DIY understanding on the part of our members. Because most members grew up in a more traditional congregation, they assume that they are coming to a place where there are professionals taking care of these roles. Somehow, what I wish for the next 20 years is that more people come who are eager to be part of that DIY experience so that those of us who are now playing many roles can somehow confine ourselves to one role or step out of any roles because we’ve been doing it for many years.

Interviewer: Absolutely. How has the congregation impacted your with and your practice of Judaism?

Calem: As a fluent Hebrew speaker, I understand every single word in every prayer, in traditional siddurim. In those traditional siddurim there are many prayers that don’t mesh with my, with Judaism because of the language used, because of the exclusivity used, because of some of the aggressive language that’s used, because of some of the ableism that is very evident in some of the traditional prayers. Being part of a Reconstructionist/Renewal congregation, I have been welcomed into a more expansive understanding of Jewish prayer, and I am a song writer, so I have written my own settings for many of the more expansive prayers, and I’ve also felt the liberty to change the wording because that’s what Reconstructionism and Renewal do. That is a direct result of this congregation.

Interviewer: That’s very profound. What do you value most about your time with the congregation?

Calem: It’s a community. It’s just an amazing group of people. I love these people. I really, really cherish each and every one, and the people that come. We’re certainly not everything to everybody. There are people that cycle closer and cycle further away. There are people that come only once a year on the High Holidays. I just really cherish the community.

Interviewer: We’re at the end of the things that I wanted to ask you. Do you have any thoughts or comments, things that brew around in your head which you didn’t get a chance to say as we were talking?

Calem: More when you were talking about my personal family. I have a very unique family history. We just had my daughter’s engagement party over Labor Day weekend.

Interviewer: Mazel Tov.

Calem: Thank you. I just loved, my heredity is really unusual in the American Jewish landscape and certainly in the Columbus Jewish landscape. There were times with a child I think, Oh, why can’t I have a more normal family, but I think there are lots of other people that experienced similar upbringing to me and don’t find their place in typical American Judaism, either because spiritually they don’t feel attracted to typical American Judaism or because they didn’t grow up learning the prayers. They feel like that’s what they’re supposed to know. Somehow the American Jewish congregation has to, especially at this time, not just the congregations but the larger community has got to find ways to open its doors to what it is to be Jewish in America.

Interviewer: Do you feel this congregation opens one of those doors?

Calem: Absolutely, but I also feel like our congregation totally understands people’s ambivalence about being part of organized religion. Organized religion has all kinds of tricky things that go with it. It’s really a question of how does the broader American Jewish community find ways to include people who actually now need some kind of community, but they don’t necessarily need the rules of the Jews that go with it. That’s the only other like tangent.

Interviewer: I’ll finish by saying, “On behalf of the Columbus Jewish Historical Foundation, I want to thank you for contributing to the Oral History Project and this concludes our interview.