I am privileged and humbled to make my story, Reach for the Stars, A Little Torah’s Journey, available and hope that children, parents and teachers will find it meaningful. The publisher, Pitspopany Press, is no longer in business and the rights to the story have come back to me. The book was published to critical acclaim and it received the Storytelling World Award in 2005.
Reach for the Stars, A Little Torah’s Journey is the story of the family of Rabbi Dasberg from Amsterdam, of the boy Yoya who had his Bar Mitzvah in a concentration camp, and of Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut. I was in Israel in 2003 to witness the excitement of the launch of the space shuttle Columbia and at home in California on February 1, 2003 watching on TV as it made its tragic reentry. I struggled for a month trying to decide if I could tell the story, but with Professor “Yoya” Joseph’s support, I was empowered to tell the story.
In 2008, I was invited by Rabbi Dasbergs daughters , Fanny and Dina, to visit them on their kibbutz in Israel. Over coffee and dessert with their children and grandchildren, they told me, “Of all the stories and articles written about our father’s Torah, your story best represented our family before the Holocaust”.
Click here to read Reach for the Stars, A Little Torah’s Journey. Today the internet has many more links to historic data then when the story was written, and I have made some of those links available to the reader.
With the daughters of Rabbi Dasberg in 2008
Illustration by Rosalie Ofer of Rabbi Dasberg reading to his children
Professor Joachim “Yoya” Joseph watching Ilan Ramon on TV with the Little Torah
Illustration by Rosalie Ofer of Yoya’s Bar Mitzvah