If I do a Google satellite search to my house in the very heart of Beachwood, then pull back perhaps a mile in each direction, I will have, in the camera’s eye, what is perhaps the most impressive aggregation of Jewish institutions in the Western world.
Welcome to my shtetl, or, to be more technically and historically correct, my shtot.
There is something enormously impressive, yet curious, about, what has become of this very small area of the Greater Cleveland Metropolitan area in a relatively few short years. Not long ago this same community found itself angry and deeply divided over what seemed to be happening. The New York Times included us in a major Jew vs. Jew Sunday Magazine special. Perhaps the time has come for that gray lady and the story’s author to re-visit my shtetl.
