2-Holiday Book Celebrates Parents’ Legacy
Moody Jew Danny Frankel and his brother have combined Mom's Purim recipes and Dad's High Holiday sermons.
Purim, like the High Holidays in the fall, presents the perfect opportunity for sharing a two-direction book recently published by Danny Frankel of Suwanee and his younger brother, David, who lives in West Hempstead, N.Y., in tribute to their parents, Max and Gloria Frankel.
One side of the book, “Ha-Meir La-Aretz Ve-la-Darim,” is ideal for Purim because it features more than 40 shalach manot recipes transcribed from Gloria Frankel’s care-worn recipe cards.
Chanukah had barely ended each year when she would convert the Frankel home into a makeshift bakery that was reminiscent of the famous “I Love Lucy” episode in the chocolate factory, Danny Frankel said. “Her bakery was a far more orderly affair, but the cakes and cookies emerged from her oven without end.”
The other side of the book features 16 Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur sermons written and delivered by Max Frankel when he facilitated High Holiday services in the 1970s and 1980s at Cincinnati’s Golf Manor Synagogue.
Perhaps best known in Cincinnati for the 25 years he served as the executive director of the city’s Bureau of Jewish Education, Max Frankel was the longest-serving head of a bureau or central agency for Jewish education in the United States when he retired.
Danny Frankel, a guitar player and vocalist for the Moody Jews, said his father’s High Holiday sermons were powerful at reaching a person’s heart and soul, but his mother’s Purim recipes reached even deeper. “I still recall the smiles my brother and I would receive each year when we’d deliver the plates and plates of floury goodness that our mother prepared for our friends and neighbors. Nobody made shalach manos like our mother.”
The Frankels said the 180-page book was a labor of love, as was the creation of a YouTube channel highlighting their parents at www.YouTube.com/user/MaxandGloriaFrankel.
“We intended our book as a vehicle for honoring our parents and as a legacy gift for our children,” Danny Frankel said. “That we’re also able to share it with the Atlanta Jewish community and beyond is, well, icing on the hamantaschen.”
The book is available at Amazon. The brothers welcome feedback by email to DavidTFrankel@gmail.com.
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