Fridays with Manny

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INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY

I am currently helping a young woman, who was born in India, to buy her first condominium in San Francisco. Her name is Isha which in Hebrew with the accent on the last letter “a” means a woman. She told me that in Hindu (with the accent on letter “i”), her name means God. Online I found out, it is actually “a gender-neutral name of Hindu origin, meaning “one who protects”. It comes from a Sanskrit word, which means “the ruling Goddess”. The word Isha also has Arabic roots which translates to “life”. Since Hebrew and Arabic both belong to the same Semitic language family, they are very similar languages, so we can see that everything connects.

A woman who protects and rules her family life and by extension, is part of the large family of the whole world. And this brings us to the celebration of today’s day – March 8th, which is International Women’s Day. When I was growing up in Riga, Latvia, The Women’s Day was an important event, which allowed men an official reason to drink vodka so as to toast for women’s health.

I was blessed to live all of my life surrounded by women. Besides my hard-working and loving mother, I had a sister who was twelve years younger, and I was her babysitter. Then, at twenty, I got married and moved to live in an apartment with my wife’s mother, who became my new mother. Shortly after, our first daughter was born. After immigrating to Israel, we were blessed with the birth of our second daughter. We came to San Francisco in 1980, and in 1985 together with my wife Elfa, started Pacific Bay Financial Corporation, which we manage together to this day. And now we added one more female to our family – our 3.5 years young granddaughter. My assistants and processors are women, so are many of my clients. One of my life’s rules is “my wife is always right” (from time to time I try to challenge this rule, just to arrive to the same conclusion). In my view, we do not need a special day to celebrate women, we can do it all the time. 

These three beautiful images of flowers are my gifts to every woman.

 Enjoy and Share with a Friend!

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