Eric Flamm, z”l, died of cancer on March 6, 2022, at his home in Portland. He was 56 years old.  With him were his wife, Robin; their children, Olivia and Jonah; and his brother, Michael. He is also survived by his mother, Ellen, and his sister, Maya.
Eric was born in New York City in 1965 and raised in Northfield, Minn. From childhood, he had a sweet and gentle spirit. As a teenager, he was both conventional and unconventional. He played youth hockey – a rite of passage in Minnesota – and was an Eagle Scout like his father. But Eric also enjoyed listening to music that never appeared in the Top 40, and he sported a Mohawk for a time. And he loved to tinker with his old Volkswagen Super Beetle.
Eric was at heart an adventurer who loved to travel. After high school, he backpacked through Europe in 1983 with two friends. The following year, he moved to Portland to work at radio station KCNR. After studying English literature and learning Mandarin at Lewis & Clark College, he biked across the country from the Pacific to the Atlantic in 1989.
Eric was always curious about other cultures, cuisines and customs. For the next five years, he lived and worked in Taipei as a journalist. He polished his Mandarin skills, embraced tea drinking, immersed himself in the expat life and even participated in dragon boat racing. 
But he also became interested in exploring his Jewish identity and moved to Israel in 1994. He learned Hebrew, found an apartment near the beach in Tel Aviv and surfed every morning before he went to work at a footwear software company. Two years later, Eric became an Israeli citizen and received his draft notice. He could have chosen sentry duty in Tel Aviv, but that was not his way – he always had a deep sense of obligation and service to community and country. He volunteered for combat and joined an artillery unit in the Negev Desert.
But Eric’s reserve duty in the Israeli Army largely consisted of patrolling Palestinians in the West Bank. This experience made a lasting impression, convincing him that the occupation was morally unjust and politically as well as economically unsustainable. For the rest of his life, he was a peace activist who advocated for Palestinian rights and the “two-state” solution. He also served as the president of the Portland chapter of J Street for several years.
Eric met Robin Miller, his soulmate and life partner, in Tel Aviv in 1998. They married in 2000 and moved to Portland the following year.  Olivia was born in 2002 and Jonah in 2004. As a family, they celebrated life together with love, friendship, adventure and, above all, plenty of laughter.
Eric may have seemed easygoing and laid back to casual observers. But he was also organized, disciplined and methodical. Every morning, he first took care of what he needed to do. Then he focused on what he wanted to do. Every day presented new opportunities, and he wanted to take full advantage of them.
Eric was a creative and artistic person who curated his family’s life in photos and videos, maintained a regular blog (portdaddia) and crafted greeting cards with clever graphics. He also wrote constantly, and in 2019 published Portland Zionists Unite, a collection of short stories.
Eric cherished the great outdoors and the active life. Although he loved his Portland home, Hood River was his happy place. The prevailing west winds made it perfect for windsurfing or kiteboarding (he switched later in life). At other times, skiing, hiking and biking with family or friends brought him endless joy and satisfaction.
Eric first battled – and defeated – cancer in 2005. He was consistently grateful and appreciative for the additional years he had with family and friends. He was also relentlessly positive – the essence of who he was – and incredibly generous to friends, causes and the community. As important, Eric always looked for the best in people and never assumed the worst. Even when someone tried his patience or sought to take advantage of him, he remained good natured and even tempered.
The family held a memorial service at Havurah Shalom on March 10 and requests donations in his name to J Street or Friends of the Columbia Gorge.