When Randy Rabney and her wife, Fran Lichtman, decided it was time to pack up their lives in Manhattan more than a decade ago, they only had one New Jersey town on their list of possible destinations: Maplewood.
As native New Yorkers, Rabney said they drove to the town “to rule it out,” never expecting to take the plunge into the New Jersey suburbs, but the couple quickly decided that’s the place they wanted to raise their son, who was two and a half at the time.
“For us, what we were looking for was a community where we could truly be integrated into the fabric,” Rabney said, a place where people would look at their son and say, “There’s Zan,” not, “There’s that Jewish boy with two mothers.”
For them, Rabney said, Maplewood — and neighboring South Orange — has been that community.