Chapter 2 -- Walking the Walk
Bruce Rogers of Nashville, TN 

Yiches has also come to be associated with the individual who makes his colleagues, associates, and/or his family, just plain proud.  In the case of Bruce Rogers, a grandson of Morris Rubenstein, the yiches derives from how he walks the walk, as well as how he gives public voice to Jewish values we share. 

In 2002, he was chairman of the strategic planning committee of the Nashville Jewish Community Center, having served as president a decade earlier. "We're making decisions on our priorities for the next five years," he said.  "Shall we put more emphasis on senior activities? And would some off-site locations better serve their needs?"

The importance Bruce attaches to the education programs that the Nashville Jewish Federation supports in Nashville's synagogues is as strong as it was in 1998.  Speaking before the Federation at that time, he said, "...when homes are not Jewish, the children in them tend not to be Jewish either."  A fifth synagogue has opened since then, one that does not require attendees to take out a membership.  Thus, it may attract more enrollees in its classes than it would have otherwise, Bruce said, approving of that unusual situation.   

On tour in Ukraine at the end of 1997, he and 11 other leading Jewish citizens of Nashville were looking for the results of support from its Jewish Federation. They stopped in at "the warm house," a small, heated apartment in Chernigov.  Because the Jewish community there was without a synagogue, this small, heated apartment had been provided as a meeting place.  "We support our Jewish Community Center," Bruce later told the Federation, "so it can be a warm house for all Nashville's Jews."

To Bruce's talk 

The men above, symbolic of this section,
will be subjects of future chapters here.


Chernigov is southeast of Minsk.

For Bruce's thumbnail bio, click here; for the text of his talk (with more maps, other graphics, and extensive endnotes), click here. 

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