Oral Histories
Jodi Kushins
Interviewer: This interview for the Jewish Historical Society is being recorded on August 30th, 2025, as part of the Columbus Jewish Historical Society Oral History Project. The interview is being recorded at the Unitarian Universalist Church. My name is Yvonne Burry and I am interviewing Jodi Kushins. Okay, and so we are going to talk a little bit about Sukkat Shalom and its history and then talk a little bit about Jodi and her history. Okay, so, start with, beginning with your involvement with Sukkat Shalom or The Little Minyan.
Jodi: Okay, so…
Interviewer: Give me dates and things, too, if you wouldn’t mind
Jodi: Sure. So my history and Sukkat Shalom’s history are very intertwined. I mean, we can go to before, we can talk about Jodi during Little Minyan and Sukkat Shalom and then we can go back to the, it’ll be like Star Wars. We can go back to the prequel later.
Interviewer: Okay.
Jodi: I first discovered what was then The Little Minyan and is now Sukkat Shalom in 2005 or 2006, thereabouts, when I attended a pig roast in Worthington. I pulled up on the back of a motorcycle that my now husband then boyfriend was driving, and this older woman came up to me and she said, “Hey, what’d you ride in on?” and I was like, “The back of the bike,” like holding on for dear life because I grew up hearing that motorcycles were donor-cycles and you shouldn’t ride them, and I don’t know. My J-dar went off and we started talking and ended up this was a person who was Jewish, from Maine, also from the East Coast originally and we just kind of hit it off immediately, and by the end of our brief conversation, she was inviting me to what was even then, before it was known as The Little Minyan, it was known as The Little Minyan That Could, named after The Little Engine That Could …
Interviewer: Sure.
Jodi: …and so she invited me to come to, I think, a Shabbat service, and I went and then I quickly rolled into going to High Holidays and other things and that was my initial introduction.
Interviewer: Okay, but they had already broken off from Beth Tikvah at that point.
Jodi: Yeah, it was already an entity that was meeting on its own.
Interviewer: Okay and this was at Covenant Presbyterian where they were meeting?
Jodi: Yes, so, Covenant Presbyterian. We met in, there was a lounge there that had this lovely, kind of like the room we’re sitting in right now. There was a lounge that had doors wat went into a courtyard and so we would have, I really responded to, immediately, to the way The Little Minyan was engaged with connecting Jewish practice and environmental affection, let’s just say, and so very often our services, the doors would open and during the Amidah people would go outside and just spend a few minutes being in the trees and looking up at the sky and that was something that really appealed to me.
Interviewer: Okay. Um, so, asking about how the group was organized and the split from Beth Tikvah, maybe we leave for someone else?
Jodi: I think so, yeah.
Interviewer: Okay. Alright, well, then, it started off as a Reform, basically a Reform group, and then kind of shifted into Reconstructionist?
Jodi: Yeah. I don’t know a lot. I mean, I’m not sure if it was ever, it was never officially Reform. I think that it was, my understanding, it was people who had come from Beth Tikvah did start so they had been going to a Reform synagogue but even in the early days there was discussion. Before we affiliated with the Reconstructionist Movement in 2008, before that happened there was lots of discussion, some people thinking that we should not affiliate with anyone, we should be independent, that there was nothing necessarily to be gained by affiliating, and that there was so many diverse streams of Judaism that people were interested in tapping into that they didn’t want to just pick one…
Interviewer: Yeah.
Jodi: …but I was actually, I don’t know if anyone was talking about Reconstructionism yet, but it felt like Reconstructionism to me in the bit that I knew about it. So, I was raised very staunchly in the Conservative Movement…
Interviewer: …in New York.
Jodi: …in New York, but my ex-husband’s father was Reconstructionist and he had introduced me to Reconstructionism, and I just, again, before that it made sense that The Little Minyan became affiliated with Reconstructionism because it presented that way even before, and it could have stayed independent and been the same but it was very much about, like, following tradition but also trying to innovate and find new meanings and the whole DIY ethos of it, so there was no rabbi, and people were sharing the leadership and families were leading their own Hebrew School program, so everything felt very like home-grown and…
Interviewer: Okay. Where have you as a congregation been located then? It started at Covenant.
Jodi: It started at Covenant. I mean, I’m not sure. Again, somebody who maybe who was right there at the beginning, there’s a few people that I’m hoping you guys will get to talk to, may be able to fill in that story, but in the early days we were meeting at Covenant Presbyterian and then we really were meeting there up until we started meeting here at First Unitarian Universalist and that was around, I’m trying to think because my daughter was in school here and that’s how it happened, 2016, it was probably around 2018 that we started meeting here, and that’s been really the primary other than we do a lot of things at people’s houses. Sometimes we do things out in the community, like, at Whetstone Park or, we always do a Tahlikh service up at Scioto Park in Dublin, um, and I think maybe moving into the future we’ll be doing some more things also out in the community.
Interviewer: Okay. Okay. What types of programs or services are you doing?
Jodi: So, we have Shabbat twice a month.
Interviewer: Okay.
Jodi: So, the first, well, we’re about to switch but once a month we have a Kabbalat Shabbat Friday night service and once a month we have what we call Avodat Lev in the morning, a Saturday morning service which, Avodat Lev is a practice. I don’t know where it originated. I first came across it at a Hazon conference, which is a Jewish environmental food group. I went on a Shabbton with them and it was a, there were different services you could attend on Saturday morning and this one was very much about, like, chanting and just like, doing a few prayers deeply instead of like, trying to cover everything which was the thing that really appealed to me again, coming out of Conservative Movement where it was like, you have to say every single prayer even if you don’t know what they mean.
Interviewer: Okay, so, everything in Hebrew.
Jodi: Not everything in Hebrew. I think some of it was in Eng…I mean, yes, growing up, everything was in Hebrew.
Interviewer: And then this congregation, some English, some Hebrew?
Jodi: Yes, and, actually, when I first started attending, that was a point of change for me because I was used to so much Hebrew and, even though it wasn’t necessarily getting my juices going, it was also what I was familiar with.
Interviewer: Yes.
Jodi: It was changing to different tunes and different readings and different songs and so much English. It was definitely like a big change for me.
Interviewer: Okay so that’s where you are now with some Hebrew and some English.
Jodi: Yeah.
Interviewer: Half and half? More Hebrew than English? Where are you?
Jodi: It really depends on who’s leading our services, so we currently, we have had various, over the years we’ve had different forms of leadership, um, but primarily lay-led, but, and currently we are lay-led and so it depends a little bit on who’s leading the service and what they decide to do within the general framework that we adhere to.
Interviewer: Okay. Do you use any kind of book?
Jodi: Yeah. We have a siddur from, a Reconstructionist siddur. It’s called Kol Haneshama, which means, like, all the souls, and, I think, we first obtained, I think we obtained our first collection of those from a larger congregation that was, you know, getting an updated version and was giving them away, from some congregation, and so, but we’ve recently, I think, we lost a few during COVID that went home with people and never came back and we’re just having more people attending our services so, we have recently purchased some newer copies and, but yeah, we really like that prayer book because it does have a lot of, it has all the traditional things in Hebrew. It has a lot of transliteration which is important to our community because we do have a lot of people who don’t read Hebrew in Hebrew and then also a lot of really beautiful like, below the line commentaries and poetry and other things that, again, like, our leaders would draw from.
Interviewer: Sort of like the Talmud and would have commentary on almost every page.
Jodi: Yes. Yes.
Interviewer: Okay. My recollections from Beth Tikvah from years ago was that it was pretty mixed in terms of families that came from, like, yours and mine where there’s one spouse who has a Jewish background and one who does not. Is that characteristic of your congregation here now?
Jodi: Yes. We are predominantly homes that are not two, if there’s two partners, if there’s two people in the house, two adults, they are almost entirely not two Jewish people. We have, we could probably count on a hand, it is a minority really.
Interviewer: And do you have a religious school for the kids?
Jodi: We do. It’s still like a home, a home school-type model so parents, the parents run it. I think on paper we call it Family Education because the parents, I mean, that’s one of the things that happens in our community is that because we are all taking on leadership roles of one form or another. The thing that I’ve really come to appreciate about that, over the years, is that when you are preparing to lead you would know this is a teacher, right? You’re preparing a lesson. You’re learning as you’re preparing and as you’re teaching, and so, our parents in preparing and then executing those lessons, you know, are really learning alongside the kids.
Interviewer: Do the parents stay with the kids at their lessons or do they drop them off?
Jodi: For the most part, our parents stick around, and then that becomes time…
Interviewer: Okay, so, it really is family education in that sense, also.
Jodi: Yeah. Yeah, and at, at one point, she’s still doing a bit of it, but she was much more active, Joanie Calem, who’s a member and also a folk musician and music educator and Jewish educator, was leading a lot of our programming and intentionally calling it inter-generational because we did have all of these people participating of different ages.
Interviewer: Can you spell her last name, please?
Jodi: Yep, C-a-l-e-m.
Interviewer: Okay.
Jodi: And I think she’s on the list of people to interview.
Interviewer: Okay. Alright.
Jodi: It’s Joanie. J-o-a-n-i-e. People always get us…
Interviewer: Otherwise, we have too many Jodi’s hanging around. Right? I know. What does your congregation bring to the Central Ohio Jewish Community or the Greater Ohio Community? How do you define yourself and how do you set yourself apart?
Jodi: This is a question we are really actively, like, living with right now because we are, again, like, celebrating our 20th anniversary. We are in the midst of some big strategic planning. We’re looking back and we’re looking ahead, and so we are asking this question of like, who, what is it that we are doing that’s special? What are we providing that no one else is providing? And, so I don’t have a complete answer to that question yet, because one of the things I really would like to be doing this year, as a person who’s leading up that work, is that I want to learn more about the other congregations so that I can more, because I didn’t grow up here and I have been to some of the other congregations but I haven’t spent a lot of time. I haven’t even spent a lot of time looking at their websites to see, you know, what do they say they stand for, but I think that we do, I like to think that we are not afraid to take risks in terms of taking, not political with a capital “P” but bringing politics into things and taking a stand for various environmental and social justice things and making that a forefront of our, how we are practicing our Judaism.
Interviewer: Okay.
Jodi: We’ve shown up at a lot of protests over the years. Speaking of our kids program, when the March For Our Lives happened after the shooting in Florida, our kids sang a couple of songs at the protest downtown. We do a lot of everybody getting together and going to a protest together or…
Interviewer: So, a lot of social justice causes.
Jodi: Yeah. We welcome a family from, from the Democratic Republic of Congo. I think they had spent a long time in a refugee camp in Uganda, but a couple years ago we took that on, um and so, I know that a lot of other congregations also do things like that but I think that we, because we don’t have a, we don’t have big donors that we’re afraid of pissing off, you know? Maybe that’s what it is and so, we are able, and we don’t have a rabbi who’s answering to those people, so I think we’ve been, had a little more leeway to take some risks in that space and it’s important to us, to many of us. I won’t say overall, but, you know, a hundred percent our membership is excited about getting political in their Judaism because for a lot of people, that’s the other thing is that, you know, I hear from people sometimes we’ve had members over the years who have dual affiliation with Sukkat Shalom and whether it’s maintaining a relationship with Beth Tikvah, because like one of our founding members, I said the other day, “I don’t see you around a lot. What’s happening?” and he’s like, “You know, I was a member of Beth Tikvah for 40 years before Sukkat Shalom started, or Little Minyan, and when my wife got sick and I was looking for, like, my people, like, I wanted to go back and be with my friends,” and so, and I think, Rabbi Kellner has done great things at Beth Tikvah, and he was excited to go back there. So, yeah, I think, the other piece of it is that I have heard from people that we, again going back to when I was saying, like, I don’t want to go to services just to check off the boxes that I said all the prayers, and so it’s that spiritual connection of, we used to have a tag line, “We’re the spiritual and skeptical congregation,” and so it is that we’re like, we try to get deeper into everything and really understand, like, why are we saying this prayer and how can it change us, transform us to say it, not just to say it because it’s Saturday morning and you have to say it.
Interviewer: …and you’re just blah blah blah for two hours or something.
Jodi: Right.
Interviewer: So, let me just loop back a little bit because I wanted to ask you what your role is in the congregation and then have you confirm for me what your role is in this 20th anniversary project.
Jodi: Sure. Yeah. So, say it again, what my role?
Interviewer: If I just say, “Hi. How are you? What’s your role in the congregation?
Jodi: So, my current role is that I have a one-year contract as a project manager for organizational transformation and I am modeling that work after the book Good to Great…
Interviewer: Ahh. Okay.
Jodi: …and I think Sukkat Shalom has been good for a while. We are sustaining some interesting work, trying to provide something different in the Jewish Columbus landscape, but, there’s a lot more we could be doing and as an organization that’s run by volunteers, there’s a lot of burn-out that happens in a small group like ours…
Interviewer: Sure.
Jodi: … and so, we’re sort of at an inflection point of, like, are going to just keep piddling down the road or maybe even start rolling down the hill or are we going to climb up the mountain and, so, that’s the work that I’m doing now is sort of asking this question of what have we been and what could we be in the future to offer something unique in Columbus.
Interviewer: Give me a number line of the size of the congregation if you include…
Jodi: We have about 40 households and…
Interviewer: Okay, and what’s it been historically?
Jodi: We’ve gone from about thirty to…I mean, probably when it started it was much smaller ‘cause, The Little Minyan, I don’t know. I don’t know what the number was.
Interviewer: So, X to forty, so, are you at the most that you’ve been in the time you’ve been here?
Jodi: It’s about, I mean, it’s been pretty steady around 40 for, 36 to 40, for the past five to ten years, I would say. We get, because of like, the university-town-nature…
Interviewer: I’m sure. People leave.
Jodi: …and who we are and that some people end up finding out they really like us and some people, oh, it’s too much work to be part of this community and ‘I just want to go somewhere where the rabbi will tell me what to do and I can drop my kids off at Hebrew School and go to the grocery store or whatever.’
Interviewer: Yeah, and it’s not that.
Jodi: It’s not that.
Interviewer: Yeah, so, you mentioned the University community, which, I’m sure is a, in many congregations, is a big draw because people come to the area looking for a place to connect with their people, right?…
Jodi: Yes.
Interviewer: …but where do your members come from?
Jodi: They’re sort of from all, increasingly, from all over so, like, I said, we are housed here in Clintonville because it’s historically, most of our membership was in Clintonville, UA, Dublin, Worthington, so, like, the northeast side of town,[she corrected herself] northwest side of town, and we know from a census that Jewish Columbus did some time ago, that there’s a lot of unaffiliated Jewish people living in the Clintonville/University area and we’ve long been trying to figure out how to tap into that community but we also know that the trends of people being affiliated with any religious community, Jewish or otherwise, is really down in the United States right now so, you know, we’re fighting against those things, but yeah,, we have members, we have people coming to us now from New Albany, Grandview, Old Town East, like, all over town.
Interviewer: So, it’s going to be people who’ve moved to the area, people who’ve been unaffiliated and decide they want to give it a try, people who were in another congregation and decided they want something a little different?
Jodi: Um hum.
Interviewer: Any other general categories?
Jodi: We’re getting a lot more young people, I mean, especially since October 7th.
Interviewer: Okay.
Jodi: There are a lot of younger people who see us as a congregation that’s open to looking at the Palestinian side of the conflict, and, I don’t want to, again, I don’t know enough about the other congregations and what the other rabbis are saying or not saying…
Interviewer: Sure.
Jodi: …but we have never taken the We Stand With Israel position since that time, which doesn’t mean that some of us don’t. The majority of our membership is very squarely in the middle and not one-si…trying very hard to continue to hold two truths at the same time and very openly do that and say, we see the suffering so much and also, we see the suffering on both sides and that that has been something that we’ve seen it, it seems like it’s been a little hard for others to do, so, I mean, at one point, we did get listed on, I think, it was Jewish Voice for Peace had a list that they were starting of anti-Zionist congregations which we got placed on at some point and I had to have a long conversation with somebody about the fact that we don’t define ourselves that way.
Interviewer: Either way.
Jodi: Right.
Interviewer: You’re not pro- or anti, you’re just considering.
Jodi: Yeah.
Interviewer: What things related to the congregation have shaped you?
Jodi: Oh my gosh, so much so, I guess, can I go back to my upbringing a little bit now, or okay?
Interviewer: Sure. Go ahead. Yeah.
Jodi: So, as I said, I grew up in, I grew up in Great Neck, New York, which, I found a book in the Columbus Library about Great Neck, shockingly. It was written by a sociologist, and it was called, Great Neck, the Quintessential Jewish Suburb and I read that book before I actually, she might have used this term and I didn’t remember it but, um, before everyone was talking really openly about Redlining in the sort of Black Lives Matter and the post Black Lives Matter time, but I came to learn, that the reason there were so many Jews in my public school were because that was the first town in Nassau County where Jews were allowed to buy property. Um, and so, I grew up there and there was one, there was a street that had a Conservative, Reform and Orthodox synagogue and my family went to the Conservative synagogue and I grew up going to Hebrew School three times a week, taught Hebrew by Israelis, taught other things by students from the Jewish Theological Seminary who would come in from Manhattan or out from Manhattan. I spent my summers at Camp Ramah in the Berkshires and met my first husband at Camp Ramah. I was, like, living my parents’ dream for me and in the post- Holocaust, you know, world of we need to keep making more Jews and we need to make sure our Jewish kids are marrying other Jewish kids and doing all the things, but as I said earlier, my, my ex-husband’s father was Reconstructionist and he actually taught Bible as literature at, at Yale and he really, like, opened up for me. He would come to my parents’ house for seder and he would always have, like, a handout and my parents were a little, like, ‘Alright, Leslie c’mon,’ but he, it was always, he was bringing something new to the, whether it was, like, a new version of a song that, like, was talking about the Exodus in modern times or whatever it was and it was very attractive to me and um, at a time when Conservative, you know, I had a lot of amazing memories in my Conservative upbring, as a child, you know. I can remember amazing sukkahs and I can remember being in, like, the overflow room, the ballroom at the High Holidays when they brought, like, an extra cantor…
Interviewer: Oh.
Jodi: …who would sing in this amazing operatic voice…
Interviewer: …for the overflow crowd, right? Yeah.
Jodi: …and, you know, so everything…
Interviewer: The twice-a-year Jews, yeah, yeah.
Jodi: …was just an amazing production, but it just was not grabbing me by the time I was a young adult and so, by the time I found Sukkat Shalom, I was really not practicing Judaism although it was, like, really important to me, and I think, the question you asked was about, like, how has Sukkat Shalom like, what has it brought to my Jewish practice…
Interviewer: Yes.
Jodi: …and I think what it did was, because it is a participatory community where we all sort-of see one another as gifts to the Jewish people and that, like, our passions are something that help make our, we each bring something to the table and um, so I think that fact that Sukkat Shalom needed something from me got me to, like, dig deep into the well of, like, knowledge that I had and then, I’m an artist and educator by training and so I have, like, all this creative energy and I was able to, um, sort of find myself on this spectrum that some guys I like talk about, the Knowledge Chutzpah Spectrum and they’d say, like, ‘Jewish innovation happens somewhere on this spectrum and if all you have is knowledge and no chutzpah or all you have is chutzpah and no knowledge, you can’t like, make up new things,’ so I feel like Sukkat Shalom has been this amazing sandbox for me to play with Judaism, and at a time when there’s a lot of really cool stuff happening in the Jewish world beyond synagogues and that we all are, I won’t say everyone in the membership, but many of us are excited about other things and sharing them, whatever.
Interviewer: So, you bring those things, your revelations or whatever, where you are between creativity and chutzpah, you bring those things into the congregation and do something with them…
Jodi: Right. Yeah.
Interviewer: …and come up with innovations on the practice?
Jodi: Yep. Yep.
Interviewer: Okay.
Jodi: And we’re like co-creating. We’re not just taking it for granted that this is the holiday, this is how you do it. We’re coming up with our own.
Interviewer: Okay. Can you give me an example of that?
Jodi: Hmm. Well, coming up this month, coming up next month, will be Elul, the month leading up to Rosh Hashanah…
Interviewer: Yes.
Jodi: …and so, a number of us have gotten into, like, counting the Omer with the sefirot and the Kabbalistic soul journey between Passover and Shavuot and then there’s another tradition of, that I’m less familiar with the practice with but we’ve been playing with it, of, between Tisha B’Av which is this weekend, and Rosh Hashanah, you count again but backward, and so, and, again it’s seven weeks and so you go through again those same sefirot but in the opposite order and so, this year, there’s been a small group of us who have kind of done Elul programming together. Everyone’s been invited but there’s been a small group of us who’ve been like, really jazzed about it over the years so we’re, hope that maybe a few more people join us this year, but I’m organizing four weeks in Elul of study and gathering around the sefirot that we’ll be going through I think it’s like, Netzach, Hod, Tiferet and something else, combined with, there’s another spiritual work that I’ve been playing around with the last few years that comes from the Buddhist tradition, and a woman named Joanna Macy, who just died, but she had something she called The Work That Reconnects and it’s a spiral of, like, four practices or, I don’t know, stops on this spiral, that actually mirror really well with, like, a Jewish prayer service, so, it’s, you, the first step is Grounding and Gratitude and then Honoring Our Pain for the World, Seeing with Ancient Eyes and then going forth, so grounding and gratitude, if we just think about the morning Shacharit service, like, we wake up, we say the morning blessings, we’re thankful we’re here, then we get into some Psalms, and we’re, like, asking some questions and asking God for some things, and then we go to the Amida and we’re mentioning the ancestors and all that and then the Aleinu is our going forth, what are we going to do with this good energy that we just built, so we’re going to, each week we’re going to, of the four weeks in Elul, we’re going to do some practices from Joanna Macy and talk about the related sefira and see what that does for us to open up for Rosh Hashanah.
Interviewer: Okay. So, then you’re taking sort of a mishmash, if you will, of…
Jodi: Uhmhm.
Interviewer: …Judaism and Kabbalism and Buddhism and just…
Jodi: Yep.
Interviewer: …finding the…
Jodi: Weaving them together.
Interviewer: …touch points where they intersect. Okay, so that is definitely a different approach. What do you think the next 20 years are going to be like? That’s a biggie, isn’t it?
Jodi: Yeah. I hope that we can, um, I, my hope is that we will attract some more members because we have, we have a very dedicated membership, but we also are aging. We have, and we do have a lot of leaders who are sort of tired or, like myself, I’ve come to enjoy doing way more, like, spiritual and educational leadership than I ever thought that I would have wanted to do when I was first taking on a leadership role but there’s still, like, the day-to-day doing the business of the kehillah so it’d be nice if there were other people who were managing the calendars and making reservations for spaces and things like that, so that those of us who want to lead can, can do more of that, and we would also like to, you know, we really do see the potential for anybody who comes through the door to be a leader so, being able to nurture that leadership and have more people leading. I also would really like for us to become, I know that lots of congregations bring in speakers and things like that but I really feel like we’re tapped into some really cool Jewish voices and I would lover for us to start bringing more of those in to attract people who are unaffiliated but interested in finding some way to connect to their history and their family culture and we’ve been attracting a lot of Jews by Choice or people who are just interested in Judaism but aren’t Jewish and that’s, we’ve been talking a little bit about how that’s interesting but don’t have the capacity to, I mean, we do our best to support people and answer their questions but we don’t have a rabbi who can convert people or…
Interviewer: Right.
Jodi: …and it’s not necessarily where we want to spend all of our energy, working with people who are brand new to Judaism, so…
Interviewer: So, it really doesn’t matter if they’re Jewish or not.
Jodi: We welcome everybody to come.
Interviewer: Are you trying to grow the congregation?
Jodi: We are definitely trying to grow the congregation for numerous reasons. We really could use more families that are interested in the kind of youth education, family education that we do. It’s really hard to run a Hebrew School program with, like, six kids in it, and we have tried to see if we can send our kids to another synagogue or Jewish Columbus talked about having a community Hebrew School, which historically, Columbus had something like that and we were sort-of like crossing our fingers for a few years but it doesn’t seem like that’s happening.
Interviewer: Are you trying to reach out to other congregations or are you sort-of just doing your own thing?
Jodi: We have done both. I mean, we continue to do our own thing because we have not really been invited elsewhere at this point.
Interviewer: Okay, and is that on the table that you want to reach out a little bit…
Jodi: We have tried.
Interviewer: …or is that something that will just happen with just the ecology of it?
Jodi: Yeah, we’ve tried a little bit and I can see us trying again. There is a little bit of a concern that once people go somewhere else then they might be, like, ‘Oh, you know,’ and it’s expensive to go someplace else for Hebrew School, too, so, then I would see if you decide you are going to pay that, then, on the one hand, ‘oh, it’s not that much to be part of Sukkat Shalom so you could be part of both,’ but people only have so many hours in the day, you know.
Interviewer: I understand. Let me just, we still have about fifteen minutes more and I’ve got only ninety questions. Oh, take that off the tape, but we can go through some of these. I guess we’re interested in origin stories, or origin, you know, histories, so, talking about where we started, was what’s your name? Do you have a Jewish name? So.
Jodi: Yeah so my name, is, my Jewish name, I have three. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to remember them all right now. The one I use the most is Yehudit and then Yenta, oh, and Yitzhaka, but Yehudit was always the name I really use most, so Judith, and I’ve been learning more about Judith and, man!
Interviewer: Tough chick.
Jodi: Yeah. Like that one.
Interviewer: Yes, totally was. Yes. Were you named for anyone in your family?
Jodi: My parents named me, I mean I think, the Judith, just came from Jodi sounding like Judy and then Judith, and the Jodi, from what I understand, was just a, I was a kid in the 70s, and it was a modern name.
Interviewer: Ah. Okay. Okay. How far back can you or your family trace itself?
Jodi: I feel like…
Interviewer: Before America you were…?
Jodi: …there have been some family histories. Yeah, before we were in America we were from Poland and Russia.
Interviewer: Okay. That’s pretty common. When did you get across the pond?
Jodi: Yeah, I mean, so my direct ancestors came, on my father’s side before World War I and, I think, on my mother’s side in between the Wars.
Interviewer: Okay. To the East Coast.
Jodi: Yes, to New York.
Interviewer: So, all in the basically New York area. Are there family legends or stories that are told, retold, uh, in family gatherings that are related to the Old World part of your history?
Jodi: Hmm. Old World part.
Interviewer: Or even, well, so if you came to America after World War I or between the Wars, it’s like almost a hundred years already…
Jodi: Yeah.
Interviewer: …so, there could be stories from America.
Jodi: Yeah, I mean, the big, my father’s family, there’s some stories. My mother’s family, there’s more, so, so my grandfather on that side was one of ten children.
Interviewer: On your father’s side?
Jodi: My mother’s side.
Interviewer: Okay.
Jodi: So, my mother grew up in Brooklyn and my father grew up in the Bronx, and um, his family was all in the garment industry and my mother’s family came here prim…originally, her mother’s family, because her father and his siblings were all in the Italian grocers business, so, one of them came and learned it and then brought the next one and taught him, and then my grandparents met because my great-grandfather had an Italian grocery in Bay Ridge across the street from my…
Interviewer: Your grandfather, who was Jewish, had an Italian grocery.
Jodi: Yes.
Interviewer: Okay.
Jodi: They sold things they wouldn’t eat.
Interviewer: Like pork.
Jodi: Yes.
Interviewer: Okay. Check. Alright.
Jodi: So, that was my great grandfather, but then my grandfather met, he owned a pharmacy and it was across the street from my grandfather’s…
Interviewer: Okay.
Jodi: …delicatessen, and the big stories were all about the Mafia and how everyone had to pay protection money except for my grandfather with the pharmacy and there’s a lot of stories about why that was and so, he had a phone booth in the pharmacy and he apparently would let them use it as a drop location for various things and he wouldn’t ask any questions. There’s also a famous story about the time he was asked to “make a virgin” because there was some guy had been having an affair with this young woman and then she was getting married and her mother was going to hang the bedsheets off the fire escape or some nonsense, so, he came and asked my grandfather if he could figure out a way to, like, make this woman bleed when she had sex with her husband for the first time and so he made some kind of suppository that would, like, explode on impact and release a red dye.
Interviewer: Wow. Wow. Okay. That’s a great story.
Jodi: But my great-grandfather with the grocery had a reputation of being very, very generous, so, like, during the Depression when people didn’t have a lot of money, he apparently let people rake up a lot of debt that he later ignored.
Interviewer: Yeah. Absorbed.
Jodi: Yeah, so.
Interviewer: Well, that is very generous. A lot of people struggled a lot in some of those times, for sure. Um, father’s and mother’s full names, including your mom’s maiden name if you recall it.
Jodi: Okay, so my mother is Dr. Phyllis Kushins and her middle name and maiden name is Frank, and my father’s name is Dr. Lawrence Kushins and I emphasize the doctors because my mother was one of three women in her medical school class and there are, in their wedding announcement, you can see her transition from, like being, “Dr. Kushins marries Dr. Kushins” or something but then by the end she is Ms. Fank or they just stripped her of all of the work she had done.
Interviewer: And this was in the 60s?
Jodi: Seventies. They got married in ’73 and I was born in ’75. Yeah.
Interviewer: Okay. Well, Feminism was kind of getting going at that point.
Jodi: Yeah. She claims not to have been involved in any of that, that she was, even though she was treated, she had medical school professors who said “You’re taking the spot of a man. You’re never going to actually be a doctor. You’re just going to get married and not work” but she did. She had a long career.
Interviewer: They went to medical school, both of them in the New York City area?
Jodi: My father went to SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn and my mom went to the University of Miami and then they met working at a VA hospital in Florida where my mother was my father’s Chief Resident.
Interviewer: Okay, and so their specialty is…?
Jodi: He was an anesthesiologist, and she was an internist and they met in the summer of 1972 and my mother invited my father to spend the High Holidays with her family because he wasn’t going to go home and he had nowhere to go and by November or something, they were engaged. They got married in February.
Interviewer: So, your mom’s family then was living in Florida?
Jodi: Yeah. They moved to Florida in the late 50s or 60s to South Beach.
Interviewer: Okay.
Jodi: That’s some history like I’d like to know, like, maybe my grandfather and his Mafia connections, like went down with them, I don’t know.
Interviewer: Ah, well, but you don’t know.
Jodi: I don’t know.
Interviewer: Is there anybody around that you can ask to connect the dots at all?
Jodi: My cousin did some family history stuff. I don’t’ know if that particular, that’s like a theory I came up with, you know, watching The Godfather and…
Interviewer: And the Sopranos and whatever.
Jodi: Yeah.
Interviewer: Whatever.
Jodi: Yeah, but that grandfather also did say, so they, my grandfather had very, very dark skin and my mother and her brother also have dark skin, and they tan very easily so when they moved to Florida, they would get very brown and there was still segregation. There were no Jews, no Blacks allowed on the beach in Miami…
Interviewer: Oh, boy.
Jodi: …and my mom has recalled stories even of, like, sitting on the bus, and the bus not moving and everybody waiting for her and her brother to get up and move to the back of the bus, so that grandfather…
Interviewer: Wow.
Jodi: …always said that his family came from Spain and was expelled during the Inquisition, but my brother did one of those DNA tests and he said that he didn’t see any evidence of that and some other cousins have done research but, I don’t know. I like that story.
Interviewer: That’s a really interesting point because this, this little topic has come up for other people, too, that, Spain happened five hundred years ago. Therefore, the amount of genes that are left in the genome…
Jodi: Somebody said that to me recently.
Interviewer: ..is like teensie.
Jodi: Yeah, somebody said that to me when this came up recently, that it doesn’t mean it’s not true.
Interviewer: Yeah. It just that the test is not sophisticated enough yet…
Jodi: Yeah. Yeah.
Interviewer: …so, anyhow. That’s very good and just for the record, you are a little bit younger than a lot of people who are doing these interviews, so the era that your parents came in is, you know, closer to the present in that sense as well. Alright, so your parents were both born in the US.
Jodi: Uhhm.
Interviewer: …and then, let’s see, what else do we need to know? Your parents, so it would be your grandparents or your great grandparents who immigrated depending on which [?]…
Jodi: I have one grandmother who was born in Poland…
Interviewer: Okay.
Jodi: …and all the rest were born here.
Interviewer: …here. Okay and so they all just came in through New York,
Jodi: Uhhm.
Interviewer: …so basically through Ellis Island, kind of.
Jodi: Yeah.
Interviewer: Well, let’s not say do you remember but what stories? Do you recall just a couple of them that your mother and father talked about related to their youth?
Jodi: Their youth. Hmm.
Interviewer: When they were kids. So they had the migration to Florida…
Jodi: Right.
Interviewer: …from the big East Coast hub of Judaism
Jodi: Yeah, well, so, my dad, since I talked about my mom. My dad was born in the Bronx and then his parents moved to Queens when he was, I don’t know how old, but he talks about having, they moved to this neighborhood that was relatively new at the time and the roads were still not paved, which is incredible to me thinking about Queens. I mean, that was not that long ago…
Interviewer: Right. Yeah.
Jodi: …but, yeah, he went to, they both went to public schools, but he went to the New York City Public Schools when there was, like, overcrowding issue, and so he went on this split schedule he went only went, like a half a day and he was accelerated student and so, he talks about having, he had a teacher that would just, he had two teachers that would always play chess the way that they, you know, not with the pieces, the way…
Interviewer: Oh, in the head.
Jodi: …they say “this piece to that piece,” and so he had a teacher who would make him go and tell the other teacher his chess move, but, yeah, I don’t know, he grew up in a Conservative synagogue. My brother, my brother ended up actually having his bar mitzvah there, not because we were members. It was just, I don’t remember exactly the circumstances, but my grandmother had a very strong relationship with that rabbi. She would ask him about everything, you know. ‘Can I put this in the dishwasher? Can I use the dishwasher for that or this,’ or whatever, you know, so, he had a lot of, my grandmother was a bit of a neurotic person, so, yeah, my dad, definitely, like, I cannot watch Curb Your Enthusiasm because it reminds me way too much of my dad and his neuroses but, yeah, really hard worker, very good student. He went to the College of William and Mary as an undergraduate which was, there were not a lot of Jews there at the time. I don’t, I’m trying to think. He grew up with his grandmother in the house and she had come from Russia…
Interviewer: Okay.
Jodi: …so both my parents ended up growing up in kind of intergenerational situations.
Interviewer: Okay, but not extended family beyond the intergenerational. You didn’t have aunts and uncles under the same roof, or did you?
Jodi: My mom did in the sen… like, there was an apartment near the pharmacy and the grocery where a lot of the family had different units.
Interviewer: Like upstairs? Yeah, Okay. Okay and then did your parents have brothers or sisters?
Jodi: They both had one brother. My father’s brother’s deceased.
Interviewer: And what are their names?
Jodi: My uncle on my mom’s side is David Frank and my father’s brother was Joel Kushins. He was a Madison Avenue advertising executive.
Interviewer: Okay. All good, right? And were your parents’ birth order, were they first or second then?
Jodi: My mom was the oldest and my dad was the younger.
Interviewer: Okay. Alright so that’s probably enough on that. Where are your parents now?
Jodi: Florida.
Interviewer: Okay. So, they stayed.
Jodi: Well, they, I was, I grew up in New York, and then they lived in New Jersey for a while.
Interviewer: They went back and forth?
Jodi: No. They moved to New York and then they retired to Florida.
Interviewer: Okay and then back in South Beach or same area?
Jodi: They are in West Palm Beach.
Interviewer: Okay.
Jodi: They belong to a Conservative synagogue there.
Interviewer: Alright. Let’s see. This is a little bit about whether you have relatives who are still back in your family’s countries of origin or contact with family members. They’ve been here too long, not much left over there?
Jodi: I had a great uncle. He actually died last year. He was a hundred and two. He worked for the army his whole life and he lived in Germany part-time for a long time and he, he was sort of, you know, the last link to Europe and he had gone to Poland a few times to try to find. He was born here but he went, just before World War II, he and his mother went back to try and convince some more of the family to come.
Interviewer: Were there family members who perished in the Holocaust?
Jodi: Umhm.
Interviewer: A lot?
Jodi: I don’t know the number exactly but…
Interviewer: Okay, so…
Jodi: Yeah, on my mom’s side.
Interviewer: …that history is somewhat lost at this point.
Jodi: Yeah. Yeah.
Interviewer: Alright so, we are just about at…
Jodi: Okay.
Interviewer: …an hour and let me do this. So, I’m going to, this is the closing statement and then we’ll turn this off and talk some more. On behalf of the Columbus Jewish Historical Foundation [ie. Society] I want to thank you for contributing to the Oral History Project and this will conclude this part of the interview.
Transcribed by Linda Kalette Schottenstein
September 17, 2025