68 | MARCH 31 • 2022
From her earliest years of sitting beside
her mother in the women’s section of
the Orthodox Hungarian synagogue on
Glynn Court in Detroit, Flo said she was
always interested in Jewish learning. But
her family could not afford to give her
a formal religious education. She began
learning when her older sister, Beatrice,
got a job teaching Hebrew school at Beth
Aaron on Wyoming, and she was allowed
to tag along to attend class.
“For three years, I went to religious
school and learned Jewish history, Hebrew
and prayer, and I loved every bit of it,” said
Flo, whose mother was the daughter of a
Holocaust survivor and whose grandfa-
thers perished in the concentration camps.
“I always had a strong, deep feeling of
wanting to teach and spreading a love of
Judaism. It was just in my blood.”
Flo married in 1965 after earning her
bachelor’s degree in medical technology;
but still, she yearned to be in the Jewish
classroom. Soon, she began teaching at
Temple Beth El on Woodward Avenue,
where she and her husband were mem-
bers, and went on to be a grade supervi-
sor and planned many city-wide Jewish
education workshops.
Shortly before taking on the post as
Shir Shalom director of education, she
earned her Reform Jewish Educator
Certificate from the Union of American
Hebrew Congregations-Central
Conference of American Rabbis Joint
Commission on Jewish Education in
the mid-1980s. In 1988, she became the
founding director of Jewish education at
the fledgling Shir Shalom congregation
when it opened.
Flo said all her life, she had intended to
have a bat mitzvah ceremony for herself,
but she was always busy teaching other
children or busy being a mother and then
grandmother.
“When I was education director, I
helped the students choose their Torah
portions, and then I would tutor them
in the Hebrew, but I never read from the
Torah,” Flo recalled. “
As I grew older, I
got busy with my own kids’ b’nai mitzvot,
and then eventually their weddings, and
Flo studying for her bat mitzvah.
Flo is wrapped in her tallit by daughter Marci Bloch and sister Beatrice Mandell.
continued on page 70
continued from page 66