Passover bakers, start your ovens please

Last year, the first annual Jewish Light Cook-off Contest centered on kugel and revealed that the St. Louis Jewish community is home to more than 75 amazing kugel cooks. This year, the second annual installment will focus on Passover desserts, as it invites local bakers to demonstrate their best and their tastiest offerings for the holiday.

Together with the JCC, we are asking you to submit your favorite Passover dessert recipe and email it to [email protected], typing “Passover dessert recipe” in the subject line. Or you can mail it to Ellen Futterman, c/o St. Louis Jewish Light, 6 Millstone Campus Drive, Suite 3010, St. Louis, Mo. 63146. All entries must be typed (or clearly printed) and received by 5 p.m. March 25.

Our panel of judges will review the recipes and select the top eight. Criteria include originality, creativity, and degree of difficulty, with more points earned for those recipes that use fewer ingredients and/or are easier to replicate. The eight cooks will be notified shortly after March 25 and asked to prepare their dessert and bring it to Room B at the J’s Arts and Education Building, 2 Millstone Campus Drive, at 10 a.m. Sunday, April 3. At that time, judges will review and taste each entry, before deciding on a winner and a runner-up. Prizes will be awarded to each. Both winning recipes will be published in the Light prior to Passover and all eight recipes will be published online at www.stljewishlight.com.

So get busy and start baking! Feel free to email or call me at 314-743-3669 with questions.

Combating cyber-bullying

In late May and early June the Light published a multi-part series called “State of Hate,” which looked at the changing face of hate crimes and its victims both locally and nationally. From that series, it became clear that the next hate-related frontier was the Internet, specifically cyber-bullying. And no one knows this better than Tina Meier of St. Charles County.

In 2006, Meier’s daughter, Megan, committed suicide shortly before her 14th birthday. An investigation into the matter found that her suicide was attributed to cyber-bullying through the social networking website MySpace. A neighbor of the Meiers was later indicted on the matter but eventually acquitted.

Tina Meier has since established the Megan Meier Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to awareness education on the subject of cyber-bullying. At 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 6, she will speak about this subject at the Jewish Community Center Performing Arts Center, 2 Millstone Campus Drive. The event is free and open to the public, and is directed to youth and parents. Meier will share her story, her expertise and a plea in favor of a safer online environment. She notes that with the ease of Internet access, it is critical that youngsters learn to recognize and respond to inappropriate behaviors, to safely navigate the Web, and to be instilled with high self-esteem. Children can learn to protect themselves, and parents can take active measures to eradicate bullying.

A question-and-answer session will follow the presentation.

Braggin’ rights

In Yiddish, it’s called naches (pronounced NAKH-es) and it’s the best word I can think to describe parents’ (or grandparents’ or even in-laws’) joy from their child. Here are a couple of naches readers shared with me this week about their kids:

• Reform Jewish Academy student Maddie Goldberg will head to Washington D.C. at the end of the month as part of the lobbying team for the Epilepsy Foundation. She was the only child chosen this year to represent Missouri. Maddie already traveled to Jefferson City, Mo. where she spoke to legislators about the unjust laws affecting people like herself who live with epilepsy. These laws include adults with epilepsy being barred from adopting children, and parents who adopt a child “returning” that child if he or she turns out to have epilepsy.

• A new National Geographic Channel documentary “Finding Atlantis,” which will be broadcast nationally Sunday, March 13 (check for local times and re-broadcasts) follows a team of American, Canadian and Spanish scientists as they employ satellite space photography, ground penetrating radar, underwater archaeology, and historical sleuthing in an effort to find a lost civilization. Richard Freund, chairman of the University of Hartford’s Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies, and his team are responsible for the documentary. The team is trying to match artifacts and geological formations to Plato’s descriptions of Atlantis, the legendary “lost city” whose existence has been debated for centuries. Freund is the son-in-law of Dr. Alberto and Berta Goldgaber of St. Louis.