Still My Sister

“There are very few events I can point to and say that I had that level of simchah. I wanted a sibling for so long and finally, here she was. For a long while, I didn’t notice everything else that comes along with having a new sibling, like adjusting to the new family dynamic, getting used to having a baby around, accepting that I wasn’t the youngest anymore.”

Ita was already married with a child when her parents welcomed another one of their own, baby Henny. The two siblings weren’t only 21 years apart and at very different stages of life, they also lived in different parts of the world — at a time when international calls were sparse and expensive.

“We saw glimpses of Henny as she was growing up, but I didn’t actually know her,” Ita says. “There was this concept — I knew I had another little sister — but it wasn’t more than that until she was a teenager and able to travel overseas. In day-to-day life, it didn’t play out as something that was part of my life.”

Still, Ita found it beneficial. Her daughter was the same age as her sister, which meant that she and her mother were attending PTA, planning bas mitzvahs, and sending daughters to seminary at the same time — it gave the two a concrete way to be close.