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.

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