Karen Ostrove, left, and Ellen Bloomberg are creating the images children from the JEC will carry in the Salute to Israel Parade, as they have done for the past 12 years. Photo by Elaine Durbach
April 03, 2008
This is their bat mitzva year, say Karen Ostrove and Ellen Bloomberg — the 13th time they are designing and helping to create the posters and banners that students from the Jewish Educational Center’s yeshiva elementary school in Elizabeth will carry in the annual Salute to Israel Parade in Manhattan.
This year they were asked to share their creative expertise with counterparts from other schools, synagogues, and community groups taking part in the milestone 60th anniversary parade up Fifth Avenue on June 1.
Ostrove, who retired three years ago from teaching art at the school for many years but lives nearby, and Bloomberg, the school’s math lab coordinator and math curriculum administrator, were the featured consultants at the pre-parade “Prop Prep” Creative Workshop in Manhattan March 27.
They explained to the 30 workshop participants — teachers from throughout the New York metropolitan area who will be designing parade materials for their own groups — how they make the simple, whimsical, glowingly bright images they have made for the parade each year. In answer to a stream of questions, they explained their use of lightweight insulation board, painted, with inexpensive wall paint and highlighted — though they both hate the stuff — with masses of light-reflecting glitter.
“They kept us longer than anyone else, because people had so many questions they wanted to ask us,” Bloomberg said, discussing the workshop at the JEC the following day.
They also explained to the participants why they keep their images cartoony — so they can easily be seen in the streaming throng of marchers — and yet ambitious enough to engage the children. As Ostrove puts it: “If you can imagine it, you can create it.”
They also admitted to never turning down an idea because of its complexity.
“We like a little bit of a challenge,” Bloomberg said.
The theme for this year’s parade is “The Story of 60: Celebrating Israel at 60” and their plan this time is more ambitious than ever.
“We want the parade to be the culminating event of a learning process about Israel, rather than just an event in itself,” Ostrove said. They have chosen for their banners and placards to focus on faces and places of Israel, so teachers have agreed to create lessons revolving around the country’s flag and other symbols and its population groups, heroes, and famous landmarks. Ostrove and Bloomberg will create images based on these lessons.
Fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders march in the parade contingent (third-graders can come if they have an older sibling marching), about 100 of them joining groups of students from the JEC high schools and the community group organized by the multi-synagogue Israel Support Committee and the Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey. But all the yeshiva grades are involved in the project.
For Ostrove, the illustrator of a number of popular Jewish children’s books, celebrating Israel’s progress has an added pleasure: She was born the year the state was founded and has celebrated each milestone age along with it. This year’s parade is right on her 60th birthday — and she’s quite happy to spend the day on Fifth Avenue celebrating Israel with thousands of others.
She and Bloomberg function like a classic show-biz team, meshing their different talents in perfect harmony. Ostrove’s unbridled creativity combines with Bloomberg’s more methodical, measured practicality — though the math teacher, as can be seen from her classroom, is also artistically talented.
“Karen is much looser than I am. I find it nerve-wracking if I don’t know just how I’m going to do something,” Bloomberg said.
“Ellen’s the perfectionist,” Ostrove said, nodding her approval.
The problem with doing such a good job, of course, is that no one has stepped up to take over from them, and the two women say they are starting to feel the passing years as they clamber about cutting the huge shapes and painting banners too large to be laid out anywhere but on the floor.
They say they are determined to find ways to get the teachers and parents who help them to get more deeply involved, so they will be willing to take over the reins — but for now, Bloomberg and Ostrove are up to their elbows in the process and still bursting with ideas.
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