One afternoon while digging through the Jewish Light archives, I stumbled upon a name I didn’t recognize—Moses Mendelssohn—in a full-page story spread from 1979. What grabbed me wasn’t the name at first, but the opening line by columnist H.H. Bremier:
“Fifty years ago, I stood at the grave of a man in the old cemetery of Berlin who had become the symbol of such a renaissance after the dark ages. Now is the time for his 250th birthday and Moses Mendelssohn should not be forgotten.”
No local tie. No synagogue event. Just a full page story dedicated to a long-gone Jewish philosopher from Germany to mark his 250th. That told me he mattered…