"Inside the Jewish life of Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland"

jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com

Americans have heard a lot about Merrick Garland since President Barack Obama nominated him to fill the vacant seat on the Supreme Court...

Here’s what we do know.

He is proud of his family’s Jewish immigrant story — so proud that he talked about it in his speech when his nomination was announced in the White House Rose Garden.

“My family deserves much of the credit for the path that led me here,” Garland said. “My grandparents left the Pale of Settlement at the border of western Russia and Eastern Europe in the early 1900s, fleeing anti-Semitism and hoping to make a better life for their children in America.”

His father, Cyril Garland, was born in Omaha, Nebraska, but hailed from a Latvian Jewish immigrant family. He ran an advertising business out of the family home and died in 2000. Garland’s mother, Shirley Garland, still lives in the Chicago area and at one point was the director of volunteer services at the Council for Jewish Elderly in Chicago.

Garland was raised in Lincolnwood, a heavily Jewish suburb of Chicago, and had his bar mitzvah at a Conservative synagogue...

Garland’s wife, Lynn Rosenman, is a fellow Jewish Harvard graduate who comes from a distinguished family. Her grandfather, Samuel Rosenman of New York, was a state Supreme Court justice and a special counsel to two presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

Garland and his wife met at a rehearsal dinner where they were seated together. They married in 1987 in a Jewish ceremony at the Harvard Club in New York. A Reform rabbi, Charles Lippman, presided.

The couple settled in the Washington, D.C., area and raised two daughters, both now in their 20s. Garland and his wife live in Bethesda, Maryland, and are members of Temple Sinai, a 1,100-member Reform congregation in Washington led by Rabbi Jonathan Roos. Both the Garland daughters, Rebecca and Jessica, reportedly had their bat mitzvahs there.

The Garlands have hosted some distinguished guests at their Passover seders. In 1996, then-U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno was a seder guest.