Elkins Park

The display "Entering From the Inside: The Art of Memory" at Temple Judea Museum in Elkins Park explores the way we live with our environment in constant flux. This evolving interactive exhibit chronicles the history and culture resulting from the merger 26 years ago of Temple Judea in East Oak Lane with the larger Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel, using recorded interviews with members of both congregations and a variety of religious objects. It does this by combining touchy-feely aspects with an awesome amount of subtle high-tech - including the sound of interviewees quietly reminiscing, as suggested by the old saying "If only those walls could speak.

At the end of a secluded driveway in Elkins Park, a rare Gilded Age jewel is poised to enter its third life. Preserved by nuns to a degree historians find stunning, a century-old Italian Renaissance mansion built by tycoon William Lukens Elkins is on the verge of changing hands for the first time in 75 years. In its new incarnation, it will be a yoga and spirituality focused center for a charity founded by Hare Krishna devotees. That plan, which received zoning approval this month, would keep the property largely intact.

Alex Rosenthal, 102, of Elkins Park, an accountant who continued to work with clients until his 96th birthday, died of pneumonia Wednesday at Lankenau Hospital in Wynnewood. Though he officially retired as a partner with the accounting firm Goldenberg Rosenthal in 1989, Mr. Rosenthal continued to show up at the Jenkintown firm every morning for 12 more years. He handled the financial affairs of longtime clients, he told a reporter in 2000, without the use of a computer, calculator, or even an adding machine.

My sister-in-law, Patty, glanced up from the menu at Max & David's with a rebellious look and laid down this commandment with unexpected umph . "I am not going to get the fish!" The pronouncement took me by surprise, at first. Over the dozen or so review meals we've shared over the years, she had dutifully tiptoed across menus strewn with land mines for a kosher eater. With all pork, shellfish, and dishes mixing dairy with meat (let alone any nonkosher meat) crossed off her list, she inevitably settled on fish or veggies.

Dever J. Korsyn, 58, of East Oak Lane, an entrepreneur and inventor, died of an apparent dissected aorta Saturday at home. Since the late 1970s, Mr. Korsyn had been owner of Flex-Adhesive Co. in Philadelphia. The firm produces epoxy and polyurethane products for the automotive and other industries. In the early 1980s, while operating Flex-Adhesive, he also was director of marketing for Topline Automotive Engineering and regularly flew his two-seater plane to the company's headquarters in Chicago.

Back in June, Joann Taylor thinned out her irises in Portland, Ore., packed about 18 pounds of extra rhizomes into a box, and shipped them off to Cheltenham Township, where she grew up. These irises are special, descended from a variety planted by John McDermott, Taylor's great-grandfather, more than a century ago on the 49-acre estate belonging to the Elkins family, for whom the Cheltenham neighborhood Elkins Park is named. The estate, known as Elstowe Manor, was on Ashbourne Road. McDermott, an Irish immigrant, was the Elkinses' gardener, and as Taylor recounts the story, he loved these flowers so much he planted them at his own house on Beech Avenue.

The old man in Arizona belonged to no religion, but at 86 committed himself to creating "a temple that is truly a religious tribute to the living God. " And if God is anything like Frank Lloyd Wright's soaring masterpiece of concrete and glass in Elkins Park, he is as remote as a mountain and as intimate as a garden. He is luminous and brooding, aloof yet embracing, unpretty but beautiful. America's premier architect would never know if visitors to his Beth Sholom Synagogue felt they were "resting in the very hands of God," as he hoped they would.

DORIAN THOMAS should be commended for the ambition he has for his community, for all of our communities (letters, July 18). We would all be better off if people stood up for themselves, but it would be incredibly better if victims could count on the support of the community, to stand as a witness in court against the perpetrators, to make themselves known at the time of the crime - so that both the perpetrator and the victim know that they are...

LET ME assure Jason Conlan (Letters, June 5) that I would much rather applaud my country and my president than find fault. Perhaps the cynicism of the right, and its refusal to consider any but its own greedy self-interest, is as much an explanation for the many tragedies of Iraq as any projected left-wing opportunism which Conlan might hallucinate. Ben Burrows, Elkins Park

Artists often have many issues to contend with, such as the lack of a regular paycheck. When an artist also has a physical disability, life is even more difficult, and judging from a new exhibit called "All About Art," the struggle for self-expression often becomes greater. The annual art show and sale, which runs through Dec. 4 at MossRehab, Einstein at Elkins Park, features work by 58 disabled artists from across the county and abroad. While the show focuses on artistic diversity - everything from paper collage and needlepoint tapestry to jewelry and glow-in-the-dark paintings are found here - it is the exhibitors who are inspiring, according to Susan Beneman, the show's chairwoman.