Club Z founder Masha Merkulova. Credit: Courtesy.
(Article by Jewish News Syndicate – December 27, 2021)
Ten years ago, Masha Merkulova was a single mom working full-time as a labor-and-delivery nurse. The furthest thing from her mind was spark-plugging a national organization to draw young Jews closer to their people and their homeland.
But when her 7th-grader came home from Sunday school talking about a movie they’d seen with a crying Palestinian girl and hate-spewing religious Jewish boy, “I was absolutely stunned,” Merkulova says. “This film, which was endorsed by NPR for use in schools, was so clearly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel, and they were showing it in our synagogue, which I’d thought was a safe space for my child to learn to love his Judaism.”
