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Be’chol Lashon Newsletter: MARCH 2008
Be’chol Lashon Co-Sponsors, Feast of Jewish Learning
The Feast of Jewish Learning is an annual, award-winning, community-wide outreach program for Jews of all ages, backgrounds, and interests. From secular to orthodox, talmud scholar to complete beginner, the Feast has something for you! The Feast mission is to provide a taste of Jewish learning, spark interest for further Jewish exploration, and raise the profile of Jewish education. For more information, click here. Be'chol Lashon Co-Sponsors, Freedom SederFriday, April, 25, 2008: 6:30pm 
Jewish Community Center of San Francisco3200 California Street in San Francisco The 12th Annual Passover Freedom Seder: Share in the Jewish celebration of freedom. Hear from those you have struggled and overcome. Partake in a delicious kosher Seder meal. “Overcoming poverty is not an act of charity. It is an act of Justice” $30 in advance, Call the JCCSF Box Office at 415-292-1233 to reserve tickets We welcome your participation in the Be’chol Lashon Newsletter!The Be’chol Lashon Newsletter is reaching more and more people every month. Please send us information about events in your community or articles of interest that relate to Jewish diversity. Please e-mail newsletter submissions to Esther Gibian Fishman, Esther@JewishResearch.org. Submissions are subject to editing for content, clarity and style. Special thanks to all the contributors who make the newsletter interesting and informative
Black Rabbi Reaches Out to Mainstream of His FaithBy Niko Koppel, March 16, 2008, The New York Times
His congregation on the Far Southwest Side of Chicago is predominantly black, and while services include prayers and biblical passages in Hebrew, the worshipers sometimes break into song, swaying back and forth like a gospel choir. As the first African-American member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis and of numerous mainstream Jewish organizations, Rabbi Funnye (pronounced fun-AY) is on a mission to bridge racial and religious divisions by encouraging Chicago’s wider Jewish community to embrace his followers — the more than 200 members of Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation. “I am a Jew,” said Rabbi Funnye, “and that breaks through all color and ethnic barriers.” As a teenager, Rabbi Funnye said he felt disconnected and dissatisfied with his Methodist faith. He embarked on a spiritual journey, investigating other religions, including Islam, before turning to Judaism. He said he found a sense of intellectual and spiritual liberation in Judaism because it encourages constant examination. “The Jew has always questioned,” he said. Like their rabbi, a majority of Beth Shalom’s members came to Judaism later in life, after wrestling with contradictions and questions that they found in their own earlier beliefs. Many refer to their religious experience as reversion, rather than conversion, and feel a cultural connection to the lost tribes of Israel. They say that Judaism has renewed their sense of personal identity. There are no firm national statistics on the number of African-American Jews, said Gary Tobin, president of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research. Usually referred to as Israelites or Hebrews, they have historically been seen to stand apart in theology and observance from the nation’s approximately 5.3 million Jews, mainly of Ashkenazi, or European, ancestry, and have largely been ignored by the broader Jewish community. Rabbi Funnye hopes to change that by speaking about his congregation at synagogues throughout Chicago and across the country. “I believe that people cannot know you unless you make yourself known,” he said. “The only way to do that is to step outside and not fear rejection.” To spread his message, he also serves on the boards of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs and the American Jewish Congress of the Midwest. In addition, he is active in the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, focusing on reaching out to other communities of black Jews around the world, including the Falashas in Ethiopia and the Igbo in Nigeria. Occupying a former Ashkenazi synagogue, Beth Shalom is in the Marquette Park neighborhood. It is just blocks from where Chicago’s Nazi party used to march and where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was struck by a rock while protesting against segregated housing in 1966. The congregation was founded in 1918 as the Ethiopian Hebrew Settlement Workers Association by Rabbi Horace Hasan from Bombay. Members include some Hispanics, African-Americans and whites who were born Jews, as well as former Christians and Muslims. In line with traditional Jewish law, Beth Shalom does not seek out converts, and members must study for a year before undergoing a traditional conversion ritual. Men are required to be circumcised, and women undergo a ritual bath in a mikvah. Many worshipers feel that their devotion to Judaism is misunderstood. “When the broader community thinks of a Jew,” Dinah Levi said, “we don’t fit the profile.” Ms. Levi, 57, raised as a Baptist, is vice president of Beth Shalom, where she said she feels at home with spiritual elements that incorporate the African-American experience. “Since we are a varied people as written in the Torah,” she said, “I think the religion can be embraced by a multitude of people.” Beth Shalom’s service is somewhere between Conservative and Modern Orthodox observance with distinctive African-American influences. Men and women sit separately as the liturgy is read in English and Hebrew. Some members kiss their prayer shawls, pointing to the Torah, as is the practice in traditional synagogues. A chorus sings spirituals over the beat of a drum. Across America, black congregations have been active since the early 20th century. In the past, efforts to reach out to the mainstream Jewish community have been met with suspicion and rejection, said Lewis R. Gordon, the director of the Center of Afro-Jewish Studies at Temple University. That is why many groups stay separatist, aligning themselves more with black nationalism than with traditional Jewish groups. “People ask me, ‘As if you aren’t already in a bad enough situation being black, why would you want to be Jewish?’ ” said Tamar Manasseh, 29, a lifelong member of Beth Shalom. Ms. Manasseh, wearing a Star of David around her neck, attended Jewish day school and is currently planning her daughter’s bat mitzvah. “I can’t change being Jewish just the same way I can’t change being black,” she said. Close to completing her rabbinic studies, she will be among the first black women to be ordained as a rabbi, according to Rabbi Funnye, her mentor. After a Saturday service, Rabbi Funnye has a quiet moment in his office. On the wall is a 1930s black-and-white photograph of members of an African-American congregation. The men, all in prayer shawls, look out before an opened Torah. “We’re not going anywhere,” said Rabbi Funnye, smiling confidently, “I’m going to reach out until you reach back.” Watch slide show here! America's FIlled With Potential, If Only the Community Could See ItBy Gary Tobin, March 6, 2008, JTA
Evangelical and nondenominational Protestantism are the big winners. Catholicism and mainline Protestants are the big losers. As an aging religious group, it is time for Jews to take heed of the changes affecting religion in America because they are Americans, too, and no major trend passes them by. Pew refers to the ”marketplace“ of religions in the United States, and that is exactly right. People shop around for the religious theologies, practices and communities that suit them. Some may try on a number of faiths until they find the one that fits. This is one of the great benefits of the non-establishment clause of the First Amendment, freedom from the government sanctioning any particular religion and allowing many faiths to thrive. The result has been a healthy competition, a country relatively free from the religious strife that plagues so many societies. Competition means that individuals are unshackled by theologies they may not believe or communities of faith that they may find spiritually or otherwise unfulfilling. How wonderful that there are so many choices available and people can find the religious home they seek -- or choose nothing at all if that is where they land. At a time when other religious groups are seeking adherents and promoting their religious faiths, Jewish organizations and institutions generally are so afraid of decline and loss that they turn inwards. The result, however, is that these very insular approaches end up ensuring that decline and loss occur. The reason is that Jews, like other Americans, crave free choice. We are more likely to retain more people because they feel they want to be Jews, not because they have to be. The Jewish communal response to this expression of religious freedom is locked somewhere in another time or place -- Europe and North Africa in the 1700s, for example. We keep having the same tired discussions about “preventing intermarriage” or “strengthening Jewish identity” or saving the Jews from assimilation with the right kind of, or enough, Jewish education. Again and again we respond with rhetoric, ideas and programs that circle round and round in the same orbit -- how do we keep Jews in? Hundreds of years of discrimination, violence and murder take a huge toll. They create a psychology of fear that results in Jewish isolation, a construct of us and them, insiders and outsiders, Jews and enemies. And with unabashed and straight-faced boldness, as if no one else is listening, we ask how do we keep strangers -- meaning all non-Jews -- out of our families, out of our synagogues. Out. We don’t want to be part of the marketplace of religious ideas and practices, thank you, we just want to be left alone to marry each other and keep everybody inside, safe and secure. This of course is an illusion. Still, we fantasize that if we inoculate our young people with enough Jewish education, then they will reject the 98 percent of other Americans they might fall in love with or not be attracted to Zen Buddhism. What nonsense. We all have seen the numbers to prove that the head in the sand, return to the ghetto and hope the gentile will go away strategy is not going to work. No number of day schools or summer camps is going to turn back the clock on religious freedom and competition. It is time for Jews to join every other group in America and quit obsessing about who is being lost and start acting on who might come in. Right now it is largely a one-way street because we cling to dangerously obsolete ideas, attitudes and practices about conversion. We do not welcome people with open arms but rather we stiff-arm. We still question people’s sincerity -- do they really want to be Jewish? We make people jump through hoops. Those who convert have to be persistent enough to batter down the barriers. Yes, of course we need standards and procedures -- and to say that making Judaism more accessible means abandoning rules of admission is a straw argument to cover up how suspicious, off-putting and unfriendly we often are to those who want to be part of the Jewish people. Openness and excitement do not mean that learning and ritual requirements to become a Jew should be abandoned. Just the opposite is the case. Spiritual seekers are looking for meaning, content and purpose. Becoming a Jew can be a deeply intellectual and emotional experience, and spiritual seekers are willing to engage in rigorous education about Jewish life, rituals of conversion and rites of passage to become a Jew. Some rabbis do a great job in dealing with potential converts; many do not. Our synagogues often are less welcoming than we think. And our newspapers, sermons and sociological literature are filled with hysterical reprimands and dire predictions about the demise of the Jews that result from gentiles breaking through our traditional walls. How welcoming do we think it is when we say we wish our sons or daughters would have married someone else, but as long as you are here, we will try and be nice to you? We have a theology that has no intermediary between the individual and God. That is appealing. We have a set of daily, monthly and yearly rituals that provide guidance and purpose. That is appealing. We have rich liturgy, beautiful prayers, deep roots in Israel, a strong communal system. All appealing. By being attractive to others, we will also be more attractive to born Jews. What are we afraid of? We are checkmated by our own notion of ourselves that Jews don’t do that -- we don’t compete for newcomers. Maybe Jews in 18th century Poland did not -- and with good reason. It brought the wrath of the church and the state on them. But this is 21st century America, not 18th century Poland or 20th century Germany. Pew tells us that Americans are switching religions like never before. Do we want to enter the competition armed with our wonderful 3,000-year-old history, or kvetch about assimilation, intermarriage and our dwindling numbers? Those who choose to join the Jewish people will enrich us with their ideas, energy and passion. And born Jews who choose to embrace their Judaism in an open marketplace also will enrich Jewish life. It is time to embrace the America in which we live. We must abandon the paradigm that our children and grandchildren are potential gentiles and promote the new belief that America is filled with potential Jews. A Lead on the Ark of the CovenantBy Dinah Spritzer, February 19, 2008, Jerusalem Post
As Indiana Jones's creators understood, the Ark is one of the Bible's holiest objects, and also one of its most maddening McGuffins. A wooden box, roughly 4 ft. x 2 ft. x 2.5 ft., perhaps gold-plated and carried on poles inserted into rings, it appears in the Good Book variously as the container for the Ten Commandments (Exodus 25:16: "and thou shalt put into the ark the testimony which I shall give thee"); the very locus of God's earthly presence; and as a divine flamethrower that burns obstacles and also crisps some careless Israelites. It is too holy to be placed on the ground or touched by any but the elect. It circles Jericho behind the trumpets to bring the walls tumbling down. The Bible last places the Ark in Solomon's temple, which Babylonians destroyed in 586 BC. Scholars debate its current locale (if any): under the Sphinx? Beneath Jerusalem's Temple Mount (or, to Muslims, the Noble Sanctuary)? In France? Near London's Temple tube station? Parfitt, 63, is a professor at the University of London's prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies. His new book, The Lost Ark of the Covenant: Solving the 2,500 Year Mystery of the Fabled Biblical Ark (HarperOne) along with a History Channel special scheduled for March 2 would appear to risk a fine academic reputation on what might be called a shaggy Ark story. But the professor has been right before, and his Ark fixation stems from his greatest coup. In the 1980s Parfitt lived with a Southern African clan called the Lemba, who claimed to be a lost tribe of Israel. Colleagues laughed at him for backing the claim; in 1999, a genetic marker specific to descendents of Judaism's Temple priests (cohens) was found to appear as frequently among the Lemba's priestly cast as in Jews named Cohen. The Lemba — and Parfitt — made global news. Parfitt started wondering about another aspect of the Lemba's now-credible oral history: a drumlike object called the ngoma lungundu. The ngoma, according to the Lemba, was near-divine, used to store ritual objects, and borne on poles inserted into rings. It was too holy to touch the ground or to be touched by non-priests, and it emitted a "Fire of God" that killed enemies and, occasionally, Lemba. A Lemba elder told Parfitt, "[It] came from the temple in Jerusalem. We carried it down here through Africa." That story, by Parfitt's estimation, is partly true, partly not. He is not at all sure, and has no way of really knowing, whether the Lemba's ancestors left Jerusalem simultaneously with the Ark (assuming, of course, that it left at all). However, he has a theory as to where they might eventually have converged. Lemba myth venerates a city called Senna. In modern-day Yemen, in an area with people genetically linked to the Lemba, Parfitt found a ghost town by that name. It's possible that the Lemba could have migrated there from Jerusalem by a spice route — and from Senna, via a nearby port, they could have launched the long sail down the African coast. As for the Ark? Before Islam, Arabia contained many Jewish-controlled oases, and in the 500s AD, the period's only Jewish kingdom. It abutted Senna. In any case, the area might have beckoned to exiled Jews bearing a special burden. Parfitt also found eighth-century accounts of the Ark in Arabia, by Jews-turned-Muslims. He posits that at some undefined point the Lemba became the caretakers of the Ark, or the ngoma. Parfitt's final hunt for the ngoma, which dropped from sight in the 1940s, landed him in sometimes-hostile territory ("Bullets shattered the rear screen," of his car, he writes). Ark leads had guided him to Egypt, Ethiopia and even New Guinea, until one day last fall his clues led him to a storeroom of the Harare Museum of Human Science in Zimbabwe. There, amidst nesting mice, was an old drum with an uncharacteristic burnt-black bottom hole ("As if it had been used like a cannon," Parfitt notes), the remains of carrying rings on its corners; and a raised relief of crossed reeds that Parfitt thinks reflects an Old Testament detail. "I felt a shiver go down my spine," he writes. Parfitt thinks that whatever the supernatural character of Ark, it was, like the ngoma, a combination of reliquary, drum and primitive weapon, fueled with a somewhat unpredictable proto-gunpowder. That would explain the unintentional conflagrations. The drum element is the biggest stretch, since scripture never straightforwardly describes the Ark that way. He bases his supposition on the Ark's frequent association with trumpets, and on aspects of a Bible passage where King David dances in its presence. Parfitt admits that such a multipurpose object would be "very bizarre" in either culture, but insists, "that's an argument for a connection between them." So, had he found the Ark? Yes and no, he concluded. A splinter has carbon-dated the drum to 1350 AD — ancient for an African wood artifact, but 2,500 years after Moses. Undaunted, Parfitt asserts that "this is the Ark referred to in Lemba tradition" — Lemba legend has it that the original ngoma destroyed itself some 400 years ago and had to be rebuilt on its own "ruins" — "constructed by priests to replace the previous Ark. There can be little doubt that what I found is the last thing on earth in direct descent from the Ark of Moses." Well, perhaps a little doubt. "It seems highly unlikely to me," says Shimon Gibson, a noted biblical archaeologist to whom Parfitt has described his project. "You have to make tremendous leaps." Those who hope to find the original biblical item, moreover, will likely reject Parfitt's claim that the best we can do is an understudy. Animating all searches for the Ark is the hope — and fear — that it will retain the unbridled divine power the Old Testament describes. What would such a wonder look like in our postmodern world? What might it do? Parfitt's passionately crafted new theory, like his first, could eventually be proven right. But if so, unlike the fiction in the movies, it would deny us an explosive resolution. Kosovo Jews Uncertain About FutureBy David Van Biema, February 21, 2008, Time
Unemployment in Kosovo hovers at 50 percent and the average wage is $350 a month. "We all worry how we will get by," says Quono, a university student, wife and mother of a toddler.The future of Quono and her family is uncertain, as they decide whether their destiny is in Israel or in southeastern Europe, where their roots go back to the 15th-century Spanish Inquisition, when thousands of Sephardic Jews fled to the Balkans.There are some 50 Jews left in Kosovo. Belonging to three families, or clans, they all live in the city of Prizren, a rare gem of ancient architecture amid a landscape devastated by war, poverty and Communist-era concrete. The United Nations took over the administration of Kosovo in 1999 after a brutal conflict between Kosovo Albanians seeking independence and Serbian troops controlled by strongman Slobodan Milosevic.Ethnic Albanians account for 90 percent of Kosovo's population of 2.2 million. The Albanians are Muslim, but largely secular.Corruption, criminality and a lack of foreign investment have marked life in Kosovo over the last nine years, during which final-status negotiations between a now democratic Serbia and Kosovo's ethnic Albanian leaders failed. On Sunday, Kosovo's prime minister declared independence with support from the United States and most of the European Union -- and with fierce opposition from Serbia, whose position is backed by Russia.Distressed by a war they watched from the sidelines and facing an uncertain future, the Jews of Prizren are gloomy. When the war started, the other Jews in Kosovo - the 50 living in the capital city of Pristina - fled to Serbia, where they spoke the language and felt a part of the culture. But those in Prizren, where Jews speak Albanian and Turkish - there is a large Turkish population there - stayed.Now, with Kosovo having broken away from Serbia, those like Votim Demiri, Quono's father, who made a decent living under communism, find it hard to leave the homes they built, despite fears of growing tensions with their neighbors.
"Ninety percent of Jews in Prizren are jobless," he said.Earlier this month, the JDC held a brainstorming session on job opportunities with 25 Prizren Jews aged 40 and under."I said, 'If you can think of a shop or service, like giving English lessons, I find some capital to get you started,'" Djerassi told JTA."They tried to explain to me why it cannot happen; they are very pessimistic."There are also obstacles in connecting Prizren's Jews to other Jews in the region."My idea is to make them part of something bigger, to bring them to events in Skopje or Belgrade. But the small children, 15 and under, they don't speak Serbian and that's a problem,"Djerassi said. "Our spiritual life, like our economic life, is a disaster," Demiri said, pointing to his rotting roof. His children, it seems, are preparing for an eventual move to Israel.Quono's sister, Teuta Demiri, 22, recently spent a year at a kibbutz, where she studied Hebrew. A bank teller in Prizren, Teuta is thinking about aliyah but is not confident she can find work in Israel. Her brother is studying Hebrew and also is nervous about his job prospects."I have been thinking for eight years whether to go or not to go to Israel," their father, Votim Demiri said.He shows off a 20-year-old picture of his mother talking to Simon Peres in Ashdod, Israel, where she moved after World War II while her children opted to build a socialist state in the heart of Europe. But they always knew about their Jewish roots. Religion, however, was far from their lives.Demiri is from a generation of Jews who fondly recall life in Yugoslavia, of which Kosovo was a part.A former textile factory director, Demiri has been mostly out of work for the last two decades, and his prospects of employment are dim. What he does have is a beautiful, 19th-century, three-story home, albeit one he cannot afford to maintain.For some of Prizren's Jews, aliyah is complicated by more than employment worries.Ulvi Zhalta, 59, looks decades older than his cousin Demiri, 62, due to such health problems as heart disease and an eye clouded by blindness.Like nearly all Jews who stayed in Prizren after World War II, Zhalta's mother married a non-Jew, in her case an ethnic Albanian."She was buried in a Muslim cemetery. There are no Jewish cemeteries here, but she was registered as a member of the Jewish community in Belgrade," he said.Zhalta said he applied for permission to immigrate to Israel in 2000, but has not yet received permission from the Jewish Agency for Israel. He suspects his mother's Jewish identity is the source of the delay.In response to queries on Zhalta's case, an Israeli representative of the Jewish Agency said the details of individual applications are private."Everyone in my family wants to go to Israel," Zhalta said as the lights went off in his cousin's living room during one of the daily power outages that have gone on for so long in Kosovo that few can remember life without them. IDENTITY
Black-Jewish Ties Converge in Story, Song at MLK EventBy Eric Fingerhut, January 23, 2008, Washington Jewish Week  Survey statistics don't typically become fodder for hip-hop lyrics. Yet, a hip-hop song about the National Jewish Population Survey was among the highlights of a program last week celebrating the meeting of African American and Jewish identities.
Before a mixed crowd of more than 200 people at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School on Wednesday of last week, the Y-Love (Yitz Jordan), an African American who became an Orthodox Jew in 2000, told the gathering he had been drawn to Judaism from an early age. As a young child, he had gone around his house drawing six-sided stars after seeing a "Happy Passover" message on television; the rhyming of hip-hop became a memory aid while studying Talmud in a yeshiva in Jerusalem. His NJPS-inspired song includes the lyrics, "Six out of 14 don't know jack ... 1 out of 36 wear black hats ... Which of his requests are you gonna deny, that is the state of the nation unified." One of the other songs he performed is based on the Kaddish, while others tackle politics and other issues. Y-Love's appearance was part of the third annual Martin Luther King Jr. celebration, co-sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington and the NAACP of Montgomery County. Also telling the story of her journey as an African American to Judaism was Carolivia Herron, a retired comparative literature and creative writing professor who now directs a nonprofit organization that develops literacy and creative writing programs. For Herron, too, an interest in Judaism dated back to childhood, recalling how she read the entire Hebrew Bible and then asked her mother where she could meet a "Hebrew." Told that the shopkeeper down the street was Jewish, she asked him, "Did you know Moses?" He initially thought she was making fun of him, but they soon became friends. Herron, perhaps best known as the author of the controversial children's book Nappy Hair, also related a story about her family's roots that her great-grandmother had told her as a child, which later led her to believe her family had some Jewish roots. And Herron recalled how her father, watching her go through the process of lighting Shabbat candles after her conversion, realized that his mother had performed the same tradition ‹ although he didn't know why. The evening also included the presentation of the King-Heschel Award for Outstanding Community Service, Civil Rights Advocacy, and Community Building to Operation Understanding DC, the 15-year-old organization that brings Jewish and African American high school students together in a yearlong program to learn about each other's cultures and train them as leaders in fighting for social justice. Two program alumni accepted the award. Diandre Watkins, a graduate of Wilson High School in the District and a student at Morgan State University, said that she "didn't realize how big [OUDC] was going to be for me," thanking the organization for helping her realize her "passion for fighting injustices." Benjamin Shnider, a Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School graduate who now attends Emory University, discussed his "A-ha moment" from the program: That took place when he visited the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham during the OUDC Summer Journey and felt the same emotions that he had had while visiting a synagogue in Prague a year earlier. The synagogue had been destroyed by the Nazis in 1939, and the church was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1963; both offered a "semblance of hope in the sea of hatred," he said. "It symbolized why Jews and African Americans are together in ... dialogue to promote understanding," he said, adding that his experience will inform his "worldview in everything I do from here on out." Gerald Roper, vice president of the Montgomery County NAACP, said the unorthodox evening was designed to show the links between African Americans and Jews to the "younger people" in the two communities, noting that links between the older generations are strong, but that there is a "big gap" elsewhere. And those in the younger generations seemed impressed. Fifteen-year-old Jasmine Snowden of Poolesville said she enjoyed listening to Herron tell her story and that she had never seen anyone quite like Y-Love ‹ and said she would be telling her friends all about it. "It was excellent," said Silver Spring's Moshe Landman, 30, a hip-hop fan who said he was pleasantly surprised by Y-Love's background and story. The program showed that African Americans and Jews have "a lot in common" in terms of their pasts, said Landman, who hopes the groups would be working together more in the future. Faces are Different, But Message is the SameBy Harris Meyer, March 24, 2008, Chicago Sun Times 
It may be true that you can't really go home again. But when I recently returned from out of state to my old house of worship near Marquette Park, I found that home was far more interesting than when I left.
My formerly all-white synagogue is now Beth Shalom B'nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation, a temple of mostly African-American Jews. They incorporate drums and other African musical influences in the services. Their Torah discussions, such as how Jacob met Rachel, are bawdier and funnier than I remember. But it still felt like home. When I last attended services with my family at Lawn Manor Hebrew Congregation in the 1990s, the shul had dwindled to a small number of elderly people, down from hundreds of families at its height. In the 1960s and 70s, when my sisters and cousins and I attended Hebrew school there, Marquette Park was an all-white, working-class neighborhood with strong strains of racism. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was hit in the head by a rock during a housing protest in 1966, and the Nazis had an office nearby. Growing up not far away, I constantly heard the N word from my mostly non-Jewish friends and neighbors, and I hated it. At the synagogue, I did not hear expressions of racism. But neither do I remember much vocal support for the civil rights struggles, including Dr. King's protest march just a block away. My bar mitzvah took place two days after Dr. King was murdered. Our main concern was whether the caterers and guests could make it across the city through the riots to get to our celebration. Much has changed demographically on the Southwest Side since I moved away in 1976. According to the 2000 census, the 60629 ZIP code where the synagogue is located is 26 percent black, 49 percent Hispanic, 43 percent white, and 26 percent "some other race" (the racial categories are not exclusive). Many Arab Americans live in the area. With the Southwest Side Jewish community mostly gone and their synagogue fading, my parents reluctantly moved to the North Side in 1998. My father, Sam, died in 2003. My mother, Sarah, followed him this past November. Last year, I learned to my surprise that a black congregation had taken over the building in 2004, relocating from the Southeast Side. After my mother's funeral, my sister and cousin and I, out of curiosity, decided to drive down for Friday night services and say Kaddish for her. We thought Mom would like the idea, but we didn't know what to expect. When we arrived, we were warmly greeted by Rabbi Capers C. Funnye Jr. and his congregants, and were impressed by the lively Torah discussion. After we said Kaddish, we were embraced and consoled by everyone. A burly Vietnam veteran spoke comforting words to me while wrapping me in a bear hug. Rabbi Funnye gave us a nostalgic tour, updated us on the family of our beloved late Rabbi Mordechai Schultz and told us that a number of former Lawn Manor congregants return regularly for services. It was a moving experience that I wish my mother could have shared. All this makes me think that Sen. Barack Obama was right when he said last week that "we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction." It also gave me hope that the once-powerful bonds between Jews and blacks in America can be restored. As our country become more diverse, we can't necessarily return to the same familiar home. But we can find comfort and security in a new home where people share our values. Finding Faith Through FamilyBy Allison Ross, January 20, 2008, Columbia Missourian
Lounging in a chair, blowing her gum into big, pink sticky bubbles, toying with her cell phone, she explained that her bat mitzvah will have a ’50s sock hop theme, complete with a pink poodle skirt for her to wear during the ceremony and subsequent dance. To most of those who know her, Rachel is an average 12-year-old Jewish girl. But because she was born to non-Jewish parents before being adopted by Joel and Debbie Shenker, and never went through a conversion ritual, some Jewish communities would not consider Rachel a Jew. The question of who is and isn’t a Jew has been an age-old debate in the religious community, and it has only grown more potent as adoption and interracial marriage becomes more and more common among Jews. Ancient religious writings and teachings are mixed on the subject of Jewish adoption, said Rabbi Michael Gold, author of “And Hannah Wept: Infertility, Adoption, and the Jewish Couple.”
“Columbia is a good place for nontraditional families,” Wendy Sims said. “We’ve received only positive reactions from the Jewish community.” A Portrait of the Jews Through Chinese EyesBy Susan Fishman Orlins, January/February, 2008, Moment Magazine
Along a cramped aisle of the business section, heads are bent over books whose cover art includes stars of David, the word “Talmud” in gilded letters and images of Moses embracing the Ten Commandments. I ask a small, fortyish woman if she can translate one title for me. It’s the “Jewish People’s Bible for Business and Managing the World,” she replies, adding that the book is a bestseller. I pick up a book whose cover reads, in Chinese and English, The Wisdom of Judaic Trader, and flip through the pages, which are illustrated with big-nosed caricatures. Other tomes that people around me are reading offer morals via spiritual fables; some barely mention religion. In many, the content is simply fabricated, highlighting, for instance, the success of financier J.P. Morgan (who was Episcopalian, not Jewish). I walk upstairs to peruse the broad selection of child-rearing books and notice a Chinese man, a little boy by his side, engrossed in The Jewish Way of Raising Children. I ask why this title interests him. “Because the Jewish people are very clever,” he answers. In this land of 1.4 billion, the widespread perception of Jews as masters of commerce (and much more) has given rise to an entire genre of Jewish how-to literature. While few Chinese can articulate quite what a Jew is, many believe that if they could emulate, among other things, how Jewish parents raise their children—as though there were a prescription—it would boost their offspring’s chances of growing up to own a bank or win Nobel Prizes. Here’s how one thread goes: Einstein was Jewish, Einstein was smart; therefore, Jews are smart. These powerful impressions of Jewish accomplishments are common in the most developed regions of China, all of which are in the midst of an economic explosion; more skyscrapers will have been built across China this year than exist in all of Manhattan. But amid the bamboo scaffolding and the accompanying materialism and corruption, people have also begun to search for moral guidance—which some associate with the Jewish mystique—as they sprint down the path to prosperity. Outside the bookstore I stroll through the old neighborhood where I lived for a year in 1980. Past the vendors hawking roasted corncobs on sticks and steaming sweet potatoes is the hospital where I picked up my adopted daughter more than 20 years ago. Back then my Chinese friends never mentioned Jews; school texts made scant, if any, reference to Jewish history. Then, as now, the only Chinese who called themselves Jewish—numbering in the hundreds—were the descendants of Persians who traveled the Silk Road a millennium ago. They had arrived with camels, bearing cottons to trade for silks, and many never left. Several thousand settled in Kaifeng, the capital of the Song Dynasty that hummed with teahouses and restaurants. Today the Kaifeng Jews know little about Judaism and look indistinguishable from their neighbors, though some—without understanding exactly why—follow dietary laws that resemble kashrut. As for the Jewish expatriates I knew in Beijing in 1980, there were barely enough of us to form a minyan. On Yom Kippur, we gathered for makeshift services in our suite overlooking the glazed tile rooftops of the Forbidden City. Now, however, there are many Jewish expatriate communities in China, and some educated Chinese are even studying Hebrew, a practice which began in 1985, when Beijing University first offered a Hebrew language major. Simon Yu, a member of that class of eight, wanted to learn more than the little available in high school history books. “Friends thought it was strange that I was studying Hebrew,” he acknowledges, “but now people think it’s very charming and special.” Simon Yu, an associate professor at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences’ Center for Jewish Studies, can speak Hebrew, but he cannot attend Jewish services. Independent religion does not exist in China; even the five sanctioned religions—Buddhism, Islam, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism and Taoism—are controlled by the government. (The Vatican, for example, does not fully recognize Catholicism in China because, for one thing, China refuses to cede authority over selecting bishops.) It is hard to conceive of Judaism joining the ranks of government-approved religions, considering, for instance, that the government authorities do not allow Chinese citizens to attend religious services led by outsiders. One night at a Shabbat dinner at the home of Rabbi Avraham Greenberg, his pregnant wife Nechama and their two toddlers, I ask the bearded 26-year-old Israeli rabbi whether Chinese ever show up at his services. “When I arrived, my brother was already a rabbi here,” he says. “After a local Chinese attended his service, the authorities approached my brother, telling him to pack up and leave. But he calmed them down by promising to turn away any such ‘visitors’ in the future. After that, a few tried, but my brother asked them to leave.” After five days in Beijing, I board an overnight train bound for Shanghai. In my sleeping compartment, I open River Town, Peter Hessler’s memoir about teaching in China from 1996 to 1998. I reach a passage in which Hessler is also on a train, engrossed in a book. A woman approaches and comments on how diligently he is working. “She peered at me,” he writes, “and it was clear that she was thinking hard about something. ‘Are you Jewish?’ she finally asked. ‘No,’ I said, and something in her expression made me want to apologize…. I sensed her disappointment as she returned to her berth.” How, then, to reconcile this reverence for Jews with the appreciation for Adolf Hitler that Hessler mentions elsewhere in his book? Hessler writes that alongside “a deep respect for the Jewish people,” Chinese appreciate the icon of Hitler mainly because of Charlie Chaplain’s portrayal in The Great Dictator, which many have seen multiple times. How are they able to overlook that small matter of the Holocaust? For one thing, until recently, it simply hadn’t been taught. For another, the politically controlled Chinese educational system valued rote learning and discouraged much independent thought. It similarly trained Chinese to revere the revolutionary Chinese leader Mao Zedong: At least a dozen educated Chinese I ask for their view of Mao, give an identical answer, that Mao was “70 percent good and 30 percent bad.” Even though Mao had a major hand in substantially more deaths than Hitler in the excesses of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, this has been the Communist Party line since 1981. But this is changing: Fewer Chinese are ignorant of the dark fate of many Jews of the last century. In Shanghai, the port city to which many Jewish refugees fled the Nazis, I meet Yang Peiming, an avid historian and the proprietor of the Propaganda Poster Art Centre. He shows me his private collection of 70-year-old passports that he acquired at a local flea market. Each is stamped with swastikas and a large red “J,” indicating it had belonged to a European Jew who had made it to Shanghai, one of the few shores open to these refugees. “Shanghai’s history cannot be complete without Jewish history,” he tells me. “We learn from Jewish people.” Fudan Fuzhong, the school where my daughter Emily teaches English conversation, consists of low-rise dormitory and classroom buildings on a lush campus. Today I am teaching a Jewish culture lesson to five of Emily’s 12 weekly classes. The seeming identicalness of these groups startles me: each a six-by-eight matrix of 10th-graders with shiny black hair, all wearing navy warm-up suits trimmed in orange. Teachers rather than students are the ones to move, so in every classroom 48 girls and boys—some of China’s most promising—remain in the same tight rows from 7:50 a.m. until 3:55 p.m. with breaks only for physical education and lunch. Twice a day they do eye exercises in their seats, five minutes of impassively massaging around the eyes with fingertips per instructions from a sing-song voice on the public address system. In the evenings they return to their rows from 6:30 until 9:00 for enforced study hall. Emily had alerted me to the students’ reluctance to speak in class so, 15 minutes into the 40-minute session, I hand out paper and ask three questions that I hope will spark discussion: What are your impressions of Jewish people? Where did you get those impressions? What questions do you have for us? Throughout the week, I repeat this lesson, which yields 576 responses. Around 90 percent of the students write that Jews are clever, and approximately half of those add that Jewish people are good at business. Though the consensus is that Jews are rich, some who have seen the Holocaust movie The Pianist say that Jews are poor. A couple of perceptions of Jews as bullies come from government-controlled TV news, during which reporters often portray Palestinians as victims and refer to Israelis as Jews, as though the two are interchangeable. Some students question how Jewish people feel about Germans today. A few want to know how you can tell whether someone is Jewish. Several ask how they can get “rich like the Jews,” including a boy who writes, “Jews own 50 percent of the wealth in America. How do they do this?” There are numerous comments along the lines of: “Jews are friendly, because Emily and Susan are friendly.” The four-hour train ride to Nanjing, a blur of browns and greens, is a welcome contrast to Shanghai’s city skyline reconfigured daily by lofty, dangling cranes. I had emailed the founder of Nanjing University’s Institute for Jewish Studies, Xu Xin (pronounced Shoo Shin), and asked what motivates Chinese students to pursue Jewish studies. He invited me to visit, suggesting a Friday so I could attend his undergraduate Jewish culture class as well as meet his graduate students. Xu Xin greets me in the hotel lobby. At approximately five feet five inches, he walks with a light step in brown leather Docksiders that seem more Nantucket than Nanjing. “As a scholar of American literature, I became interested in Jewish writers after Saul Bellow won the Nobel Prize,” he explains in fluent English. In 1976, Xu began researching Jewish American history and culture, translating works of Norman Mailer, Clifford Odets and others into Chinese and publishing articles such as “Jewish Humor” and “The Image of the Schlemiel in Jewish Literature,” in which he likens the schlemiel to the wise fool in Chinese literature. “In 1985 an American named James Friend arrived here to teach literature for six months,” he explains as we enter the 105-year-old university’s campus. “I had never known a Jew before.” The two professors formed a bond, and Friend invited Xu to live with his family and teach at Chicago State University, where Friend was chairman of the English department. While in the United States Xu attended a bar mitzvah, seders and even Jewish funerals, including that of Professor Friend, whose untimely death from a heart attack occurred toward the end of Xu’s stay. “My time with the Friends provided me with a great opportunity to look at Jewish people,” says Xu. He was impressed that Jews follow laws, rather than an individual or just a set of beliefs. “Their way of living and thinking made me aware that Jewish culture has many lessons Chinese people could learn on their way to becoming a responsible part of the international society.” Xu leads the way into a tall, new building and into an elevator which opens only a few steps from a brass wall plaque that says Institute for Jewish Studies in Chinese, English and Hebrew. “Each year we add two M.A. and two Ph.D. students. And we try to provide a scholarship for our Ph.D. candidates to study in Israel,” explains Xu, motioning for me to follow him into the library. The students want to understand, he says, how Jewish culture has survived, indeed flourished, often in the face of adversity. With a sweep of his arm, Xu shows off more than 10,000 titles that range from Encyclopedia of Midrash to Jewish Wit for all Occasions. The stacks also hold volumes Xu has written or translated, including an abridged version of the Encyclopedia Judaica. Down a spotless hallway is a conference room where glass cabinets display assorted Judaica—a Kiddush cup, a tallit, a small Torah—evoking the quiet ambience of an upscale temple gift shop. Professor Song Lihong and six of the program’s 12 graduate students are waiting for us. Xu seems to delight in the shared aspects of our two cultures, saying, “Both have had a great impact in the world, both have suffered and in both cases, parents do anything they could to give their children better education. Jewish and Chinese are the only major cultures to retain their traditions unbroken for thousands of years.” We board a crowded bus that takes us across the Yangtze River to a satellite campus for Xu’s freshman Jewish Culture class. He tells me that I will be the first Jew most of the undergraduates have ever met. In the spacious classroom, Xu introduces me and hands me the microphone and the 100 students applaud vigorously. They then become utterly silent, riveted before I say a word. In English, I tell them about my semi-secular style of Judaism, a slice of life unlikely to show up in their textbooks. They seem to follow, smiling appropriately when I mention my teenage struggle with my father, who forbade me to date a non-Jewish football player from my school. Their attention is so focused that I wonder if they are scrutinizing me to figure out what distinguishes my Jewishness. Forty-five minutes later, I invite them to ask questions. A slender girl wearing glasses and a ponytail approaches and says, “The biggest difference between Chinese and Jewish culture is that you believe in religion.” I ask about Confucius, and she answers, “He was an educator, not in your heart.” Another adds, “For us, spirituality does not exist.” Later on, at a nearby restaurant. I sit beside Professor Song, a.k.a. Akiba, at the round table where Moshe, Yam, Gal, Omer and Alon, the graduate students I met earlier, have already gathered. Just as the Chinese infatuation with the West has led many to take English names, these students have assumed Hebrew names. The bespectacled Akiba, uses his chopsticks to place a mound of spicy pork with vegetables on my plate. “We don’t have Judeophobia, we have Judeophilia,” he says with a smile. It was the Roman historian and warrior, Flavius Josephus, who inspired his interest in Jewish studies. “There were many renegade Chinese; Josephus was the first renegade Jew I discovered,” he explains. The students join in, explaining the origins of their fascination. One student tells me that she “became interested because of a special year, 135 A.D., when most of the people left Palestine and began diaspora. In spite of anti-Semitism, the Jewish people survived and kept their traditions.” Another is interested in the parallels between the Holocaust and the Nanjing massacre, during which Japanese troops killed as many as 300,000 Chinese, including thousands of women and children. Akiba adds, “The Japanese still have not pled guilty to this crime. In Germany the president knelt at Auschwitz; this is a sharp contrast.” As I survey the table, it’s evident how comfortable these students are in sharing their passion for Judaism. And though each has a different focus, I am struck that I am witnessing such a deep appreciation of Jewish culture. I think of a remark Xu made earlier that although he is proud of the similarities that Chinese culture shares with Jewish culture, he believes Jews have exceeded the Chinese in one valuable quality: Morality. He cited the pirated DVDs sold openly on China’s streets as an example of shamelessness that he finds all too prevalent in his country. I suggested that Xu’s conception of Jews might be a tad idealistic, since I imagined that I myself would willingly buy such DVDs—though I admitted I would feel guilty. “When you buy, you feel guilty,” Xu told me. “You have this moral sense; when Chinese buy it, they never feel guilty. That’s the moral challenge.” He grew solemn and, with the conviction of a rabbi, added, “We could learn to achieve a moral society from Jewish people.” The day winds down and we emerge into the humid air. The aroma of fresh fruit wafts from the back of a faded green pickup truck where students have lined up to buy whole neatly peeled pineapples for around 30 cents apiece. Back at the main campus, I walk with Xu to his bicycle along a tree-lined path. It is the end of the workweek, and a teacher heading the other way nods and says, “Ni hao. Shabbat shalom.” M Adoptive Jewish Families Head Back to ChinaBy Daniel Levisohn, February, 27, 2008, Forward.com
On a recent trip to Washington from their home in Pleasantville, N.Y., they hunted down an ancient carved-stone washing bowl that once belonged to a Chinese synagogue. In New York City, they mined the sacred books room of the Jewish Theological Seminary to examine a Chinese Torah scroll bound with silk. But the most exciting trip, Sameth says, was touring with his daughters, ages 5 and 9, in China last summer. “Now that the girls were old enough, we wanted to take them to see the country,” Sameth told the Forward. “The tour took us to ancient China, medieval China and modern China. And we wanted them to see the Jewish parts of China.” The Sameth family is not alone. As the first generation of adopted Chinese daughters enters early childhood and adolescence, a growing number of adoptive Jewish parents are touring China with their children, in search of a way to explore identities that are both Chinese and Jewish. “A large number of families returning are Jewish families,” Jane Liedtke said. Liedtke founded the Bloomington, Ill.-based Our Chinese Daughters Foundation, which organizes China tours for adoptive families. According to Liedtke, Jews have constituted a growing portion of her clients since she began leading trips 10 years ago. Today, Liedtke estimates that as many as 40% of her 900 clients yearly have a Jewish background. While there are no statistics on how many Jewish families have adopted daughters from China, the adoption rate by American families swelled in the 1990s after the Chinese government opened the country’s doors to foreign adoption. Today, there are more than 65,000 adopted Chinese children living in the United States, though new regulations have made it more difficult to adopt from China since numbers peaked in 2005. Most of the adoptees have been daughters, thanks to China’s policy of restricting family sizes and to the cultural prejudices with regard to girls. For Jewish parents who have adopted daughters from China, a return trip can be driven by a variety of motivations. Some parents see it as a valuable opportunity to synthesize their daughters’ Jewish and Chinese heritages, while others see it simply as a chance to visit the places that shaped their daughters’ first days, such as orphanages. Others find it an alluring locale for a bat mitzvah. “Because she was being bat mitzvahed in an Olympic year, we’d hoped to have an abbreviated bat mitzvah in China during the Olympic period,” said Steven Wolfe, who has been trying to plan a ceremony for his 12-year-old daughter at the Great Wall of China. “I thought that it would have been nice to mix her Chinese descent with her newly adopted religion. I thought the combination of the two would have been unusual and would have brought home for her that she is really from two different cultures.” Wolfe thinks the trip won’t be possible, because of complications with logistics and the difficulty of finding a rabbi willing to travel to the Great Wall. Liedtke says that though she has been receiving requests to organize bat mitzvah trips to China, she doesn’t know if anyone has been able to pull that off. For many parents, planning the trips to China brings up some of the dilemmas of raising a child from two different cultures. Parents can choose to go on a Jewish heritage tour of China, but this type of tour does not put families in contact with other adopted Chinese children. There are also tours set up for adopted families, but these generally do not emphasize Jewish sites. Elena Stein, a Cincinnati rabbi who is engaging in research to plan a trip back to China with her daughter Dahlia, says she is still weighing her options. Touring with other adoptive families would require finding free time to partake in Jewish activities, while traveling with a Jewish heritage tour would deprive Stein and her daughter of experiencing China with families like their own. “I would like for it to be a Chinese-Jewish tour because I would like for her to see her identities as integrated and not separated,” Stein said. But because return trips can often be emotionally charged, she is still considering a tour with other adoptive families. “Depending on what’s going on, we might need the support of that group,” she said. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most adoptive families decide to travel with non-Jewish organizations. Many of these groups arrange for additional excursions to Jewish sites. Our Chinese Daughters Foundation maintains a relationship with Jewish community members in Beijing to meet the needs of its Jewish clients. Another popular stop is the city of Kaifeng in the Henan province, which was home to an isolated Jewish community that formed 1,000 years ago. “They like going back so they can show [their children] there are Chinese people who are Jewish,” Liedtke told the Forward. The Sameth family chose to travel with The Families With Children From China Heritage Tours, which organizes trips for adoptive families and is partly subsidized by the Chinese government. “There were a number of different Jewish families on the trip, and we did have some of those experiences together,” Sameth said. “We went to the bakery and found rolls that looked enough like challah, and we would make our own Shabbat dinners.” But not all Jewish families who travel back to China are looking for a Jewish experience. “To me, what was important was showing her the country, visiting the orphanage and meeting the people who brought her to me, the two nurses, who were there,” said Janet Silverman, who traveled to China in 2005 with her then 9-year-old daughter. Silverman told the Forward that though she wants her daughter, whose own bat mitzvah is approaching, to feel comfortable with her Judaism, that wasn’t the point of their trip. For that purpose she has a different destination in mind. “We are supposed to go to Israel this summer,” she said. “The positive thing about going to Israel is seeing a lot of Jews out there who don’t look like the Jews in Westchester.” Beyond the culture, there are strong reasons to return to China. The latest research has shown that a return can help an adopted child’s development. Whatever the reason, the interest is there and growing, Liedtke says. “We’ve been asked to arrange for a kosher tour,” Liedtke said. “We expect that someday that trip will come.” Reclaiming China's JewsBy Lorne Bell, March 11, 2008, The Jewish Advocate
Oranges, Lemons, Almonds and the Poisoned Apple of Iraqi OilBy Ian Jack, March 5, 2008, Guardian.co.uk
Shamash's book Memories of Eden is published later this month. She died two years ago, aged 94, and the book has been edited from her notes and diaries by her daughter and son-in-law. Perhaps no man could have written it. As Professor Shmuel Moreh of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, says in his foreword, memoirs of the Jewish community in Iraq have come chiefly from men and waver between "the sentimental and embittered". Shamash has remarkably little bitterness. Even as she watches news reports of Saddam Hussein's statue tumbling down in 2003, all she will say is that she was born 25 years before him, "before the creation of Iraq, before another foreign army, British this time, marched victoriously into the city in the name of bringing democracy to the people." And yet one might think there is good deal to be bitter about. In 1941, Jews in Iraq numbered 300,000 out of a population of around 2 million. Jews made up 40% of Baghdad's population. Their ancestors had been in Iraq since the Babylonian captivity 2,600 years before. Shamash, who was born in 1912, grew up in a harmonious city that at the end of the first world war had barely changed since the 17th century. As an outpost of the Ottoman empire, modernity had hardly touched it. "My earliest memories are of water and heat," she writes of a city where the summer temperatures could easily reach 122F and most goods came up the Tigris on a guffa, a kind of coracle waterproofed in bitumen. She was born into a prosperous family - her father, a trader and money-changer, built a big house across the river from where the Green Zone now lies - but the lavatory was still a repugnant slit in the ground. Simple things were unheard of; "when the first watches appeared, children would stand on the street corner, waiting to ask any prosperous-looking passer-by if he could tell them the time." Houses had thick, windowless walls to keep out the heat and cold, and also to protect them from the great Baghdad problem, thievery. Doctors were few and medicine expensive; every year small plagues of cholera and dysentery claimed a crop of victims. Eden? Shamash concedes it was "primitive", but then remembers the compensations: salads eaten with lemon and salt, orchards of oranges, pomegranates, peaches, almonds and walnuts, country excursions to see the shrine of Ezekiel. More important, the Jews felt themselves integrated. Her father wore a fez and a big moustache. Jewish women dressed like their Muslim counterparts in long robes, pantaloons, headscarves and veils. Their influence on the city's life was so great that Saturday rather than Friday became Baghdad's day of rest. Jews were virtually the only instrumentalists in the whole of Iraq. The Baghdad Symphony Orchestra was entirely Jewish from conductor down to kettle-drum, and when Radio Iraq got its own band going in 1936 it contained only one Muslim musician. But by then Iraq was changing very quickly, as a new country cobbled by the British in 1921 out of three Ottoman vilayets or provinces and rewarded with a king, Faisal, imported from Saudi Arabia. The Jews liked the British and that increased the distrust of the Muslims Oil, the principal reason for British interest, was discovered in vast quantities near Kirkuk in 1927. Though the British mandate ran out in 1932, Britain perpetuated its political control through Faisal's playboy son, Ghazi, who inherited the throne and ruled ineffectually until his sports car met a tree in 1939. Westernisation had arrived and was dividing the country between modernisers and traditionalists. Shamash chronicles its impact in small, specific ways: bobbed hair on women, the first cigarettes, cinemas showing Chaplin. The western import with the most far-reaching effect, however, was Zionism. Iraqi Jews were anti-Zionist, perhaps out of a self-interested desire not to rock their own boat, but that didn't stop the "Save Palestine" movement spreading to Iraq and with it a rash of anti-semitic violence. Then the war broke out and, as Shamash writes, "its contagious sickness spread to Baghdad". Arab nationalism was pro-Nazi. She was married by now - an arranged marriage - and desperate to leave with her husband and child. A coup brought a pro-Nazi group led by a lawyer, Rashid Ali, to power in 1941 and sent the regent (the new king was only five years old) packing. The farhud, or pogrom, came soon after. In the first days of June, 1941, during the celebration of the Pentecost, at least 187 people died when mobs attacked Baghdad's Jewish homes and businesses. In an appendix to Shamash's book, her son-in-law, Tony Rocca, shows clearly that it should never have happened. The new Iraqi regime had crumbled and the British army was already encamped on the outskirts of Baghdad, under orders from Churchill and Lt. General Wavell to take the city. If the army had entered as they wanted to, there would have been no massacre. Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, the British ambassador, was the obstacle. He had signed a generous armistice which declared (not for the last time) that Britain's enemies were not the Iraqi people but a particular personage: Rashid Ali. To re-install the regent with the support of British troops would have rubbed Iraqi noses in their defeat, and made the truth - that Britain ran the show - too obvious. Shamash and her family escaped to India later that year and moved eventually, via Palestine and Cyprus, to London. Thousands followed them. Between 1951 and 1952, about 120,000 Jews were airlifted from Iraq to Israel. In 2006, according to her book, about a dozen families remained in Baghdad, still with a rabbi. Reading Memories of Eden, a book not so much about politics and history as about vanished pleasure, it is hard to resist the thought that everything could have been different were it not for the poisoned apple of oil. Iraq had for a time at least the roots of a harmonious, multicultural state, which in the Middle East is now only to be dreamed of. In this way, Shamash's book is both a memorial and an instruction saying: "See, it is not impossible. Benjamin Lapidus' CD Mixes Jewish, Latin CulturesBy Ed Morales, March 16, 2008, Newsday.com
After all these years, the 35-year-old tres virtuoso has finally succeeded in combining the cultures on one record. His new album, "Herencia Judía," to be released this week on the independent label Tresero, is a thoughtful, passionate attempt at combining Jewish liturgical songs with traditional music from Cuba and Puerto Rico. Lapidus was first exposed to Latin music through his father, who played accordion for several different mambo orchestras in Catskills hotels such as Grossingers in the '50s and '60s. "He gave me a lot of those old charts with arrangements by different Cuban arrangers, and a lot of the classic records," Lapidus said. When he was 14, his Brooklyn-bred family moved to the Upper West Side, where Lapidus encountered a new influence, the late saxophonist Mario Rivera. "Mario lived two blocks away from me and I would go to his house all the time," Lapidus said. "He was a tremendous influence on me as far as how seriously you have to take music. At the same time, there were always groups on the street playing jíbaro music, merengue, jazz, rumba." After graduating from Oberlin Conservatory, Lapidus returned to New York and has been the leader of the Latin jazz band Sonido Isleño. "Herencia Judía" is a collection of songs directly associated with specific holidays or weekly liturgy, and in a few cases, Lapidus sees parallels be- tween Jewish and Latino traditions. "During the high holidays, Orthodox Jews do a kind of cleansing," Lapidus said. On the song "Limpieza Judía," Lapidus overlays a cantor-sung melody onto a rhythm used to evoke the Afro-Cuban orisha associated with that culture's New Year. On "Comparsa de Simchat Torah," Lapiuds found a similarity between the Jewish holiday and the street carnivals in the Cuban cities of Guantánamo and Santiago. And with "Kaddish Para Daniel," Lapidus pays tribute to the slain journalist Daniel Pearl. "Most non-Spanish-speaking Jews will not understand what the lyrics are about, and most native Spanish speakers are not going to know what the kaddish is about so for me it was just a way to make peace with the tragedy." Lapidus uses the cantor from his Brooklyn synagogue, as well as his old roommate, percussionist Román Díaz, on the album, and local talent like Onel Mulet (reeds, maracas), Jorge Bringas (bass) and Antonio de Vivo (percussion). In recent years, artists as diverse as jazz percussionist-composer Roberto Rodriguez and rock-rappers Hiphop Hoodios have been exploring this crossover, and Canadian trumpeter David Buchbinder released "Odessa/Havana" (Tzadik Records), a collaboration with pianist Hilario Durán. "I'm not sure if this is a movement," Lapidus said. "But it's a testament to the fact that at some point these voices would be heard." Out of Egypt: Panelists Recall 'Lost World'By Lois Goldrich
"I asked them about their lives — their education, languages, marriages," she said, "not about politics or about what they did when they came here." For the most part, she said, the interviews — gathered on two continents and over a period of five years — were conducted in French, which she later translated into English. While many of the people she interviewed have since died, their stories will remain, said Dammond, who donated all her taped interviews to the archives of the Oral History Division of Hebrew University’s Institute of Contemporary Jewry in Jerusalem. "They only had two oral interviews before this," she said. One of them, she later learned, was with her father. Dammond said she did not "correct" the transcribed interviews but rather let each of the individuals featured "tell their own story. It’s really one story after another," she said. On Sunday, Dec. 16, the author will read from "The Lost World" at the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly. She will be joined by a panel including several interviewees and children of interviewees. During the program, "Fifty Years Ago & Counting: Assessing Life in the Jewish Community of Egypt," the speakers will recall happier days for the Jews in Egypt. According to Dammond, the Jewish community flourished in Egypt for centuries, with Jews enjoying both wealth and comfort. She explained that one apartment building could house people of different religions on each floor, "and there was absolutely no problem." In the mid-1900s, several events caused the Jews to become unwelcome, and most members of the community were forced to leave. According to Dammond’s Website, www.lostworldofegyptianjews.com, "The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, the Suez Crisis of 1956, and the 1967 Six Day War between Egypt and Israel, cumulatively, led to the eventual exodus of the majority of the 100,000 Jews who had lived peacefully and happily." Today, the Jewish community in Cairo has some 30 or so members, most of them older women. Hosting Sunday’s JCC event will be Englewood resident Adina Gordon, who, together with her husband Yitz, endowed the center’s Adina & Yitz Gordon-Rachel Gindi Sephardic Culture Fund. With a master’s degree in Egyptology, as well as a doctorate from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, Gordon, herself an author and lecturer, said her interest in Sephardic culture "stems from deep roots." Not only does she have many Egyptian and Syrian friends, she noted, but she and her husband traveled extensively in Egypt in 1974 and 1983. In 1948, Gordon — then a member of a U.S.-based kibbutz group awaiting the chance to make aliyah — was asked by that group to help Palmach member Raphael Recanati ship arms to Israel in preparation for the War of Independence. She was soon joined in that effort by her (now) husband Yitz. After the war, Recanati founded the Israel-America Shipping Line, which Gordon described as "Israel’s flagship commercial and passenger line." Yitz Gordon remained in the shipping industry after the war and, said his wife, the couple "developed lifelong friendships with the people who gathered around Recanati," many of them Egyptian. One of those people was Liliane Dammond. "I want people attending Sunday’s program to know what a rich background life in Egypt gave the Jews, preparing them for life in exile," said Adina Gordon. Gordon said in choosing panelists she focused on "people who live here in northern Bergen County. I felt it would be more interesting for people who know them but might not know their background." Included in the group are Nicole Romano Gans, who is speaking on behalf of her father, the late Joe Romano of Tenafly, and Dr. Ralph Hallac, whose mother, featured in the book, is too ill to attend. Also on the panel are Albert Guetta and Esie Chalem. Top of Page |
Sunday, March 30, 2008: 4 - 9:30 pm
We are delighted to update you on the progress of the Abayudaya Community Health and Development Plan that provides essential life-saving services to adults and children throughout the region. This project promotes peace and cooperation among Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Uganda. 
Having grown up in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Capers C. Funnye Jr. was encouraged by his pastor to follow in his footsteps. Instead, he became a rabbi.
A study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life shows that Americans are switching religions more than ever. As many as one of every two adults does not practice the religion in which they were born or raised.
When last we saw the lost Ark of the Covenant in action, it had been dug up by Indiana Jones in Egypt and ark-napped by Nazis, whom the Ark proceeded to incinerate amidst a tempest of terrifying apparitions. But according to Tudor Parfitt, a real-life scholar-adventurer, Raiders of the Lost Ark had it wrong, and the Ark is actually nowhere near Egypt. In fact, Parfitt claims he has traced it (or a replacement container for the original Ark), to a dusty bottom shelf in a museum in Harare, Zimbabwe.
On a forlorn road dotted with half-built houses, Ines Quono reflects on her struggle in a land so remote to most Americans it might as well be Oz.But instead of a yellow brick road, there is crumbling, mud-drenched pavement piled high with garbage."The only thing that works in Kosovo is the banks; we all have to borrow money to do something - anything," says Quono, 28.Quono is among the last Jews of Kosovo, a southern province of Serbia about half the size of New Jersey that declared independence Sunday.
Like many Jewish girls her age, Rachel Shenker has already begun planning the celebration of her bat mitzvah.
It is one of those mornings in Beijing when you can’t tell whether it’s likely to pour or whether the sun is simply behind a blanket of smog. I stuff a rain jacket into the basket of my new $40 bicycle and, from my hotel, pedal west to the 10-level Wangfujing Bookstore on Wangfujing Street.
Rabbi Mark Sameth does a lot of traveling with his two Chinese-born adopted daughters in pursuit of the girls’ hybrid cultural heritage.
Aside from annual Christmas Eve dinners at the local Chinese restaurant, most people don’t readily associate Jewish and Chinese culture. But last week at Temple Israel in Sharon, Shi Lei, a native of Kaifeng, China and descendent of the once prominent Jews of Kaifeng, spoke to congregants about his community’s Jewish history.
Memories of Eden
For Benjamin Lapidus, mixing his Jewish heritage and the Latino culture he has grown to love was always natural. "I would have a Passover seder at my house and we would pull out the panderetas and mess around," he said. "In my cousin's house in Havana we make matzo balls with calabaza [squash]."
Liliane Dammond had been away from Egypt a long time when she felt the need to reconnect. "When I retired from my career," said Dammond — author of "The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews: First Person Accounts from Egypt’s Jewish Community in the Twentieth Century" — "I had the feeling that I wanted to go back to my roots."