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Flourishing in France
Liberal Judaism in France, which just marked its 100th anniversary, is more vibrant than ever before. France's 14 synagogues are all full for Shabbat services, rent large concert halls to accommodate High Holiday demand, and have such popular religious schools that families have to wait in long lines to sign up.
Facts Make You Free
The Holocaust horror stories my parents told me as a young child forced me to shoulder a heavy emotional load. First I contemplated revenge against the Nazis. Later I tried escape into normalcy by blotting out painful memories. As the years passed, I discovered that going to the places where these terrible events occurred eased the psychic burden.
History Held Hostage
In 1998, shortly after joining the staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I was invited to a meeting with the director of the International Tracing Service (ITS). The director had come to Washington in hopes of copying some archival collections I had helped the Museum acquire. When he was asked about access to ITS's massive and secretive Holocaust-era collections, he reported that the International Commission of ITS had decided in principle to open the ITS archives-but not for three to five years, the estimated time required to make digital copies of the millions of documents in its possession. The director declined further discussion.
The Jews Who Lived Among Us
In the early 1930s, about two hundred Jews lived in Siegen, a small city 100 miles north of Frankfurt, Germany. Today there are none, but they have not been forgotten. For more than three decades, Klaus Dietermann, a local schoolteacher, has been obsessed with documenting and restoring the memory of this vanished Jewish community. He wants local residents not only to lament the loss of the town's Jews to the Nazis' horrors, but also to celebrate their noteworthy contributions to Siegen life.
Haiti-Acts of God?
In August, when most rabbis were crafting High Holiday sermons, I traveled to Haiti. Our small delegation, led by American Jewish World Service (AJWS) President Ruth Messinger, had come to assess the country's recovery from the hemisphere's worst earthquake in 200 years-300,000 people dead and more than a million and a half homeless. Even before the January 12, 2010 eruption, Haiti had been among the poorest nations in the world, crushed by corrupt former leaders, debilitating debt, and ill-conceived foreign aid. To help, AJWS had been supporting local grassroots organizations working to promote sustainable development, human rights, women's empowerment, and reproductive health.
Strategic Bedfellows
Some 40,000-50,000 Israelis travel to India each year (many of them "unwinding" in the country after completing military service), and are a very visible presence in the country. In some outlying locations Israelis comprise a dominant percentage of foreign visitors.
Days of Darkness, Days of Light: The Unknown Story of Iran's Jews
Jews have lived on the Iranian plateau since about 720 B.C.E., approximately a thousand years before the arrival of Islam. In antiquity they participated freely in every sphere of society, from the army to the courts. But with the arrival of Islam in 650 C.E., all non-Muslims came to be deemed as second-class citizens and were compelled to wear clothes of specific colors. In 807 Caliph Harun al-Rashid issued a decree forcing Jews to affix yellow patches on their clothes. The plight of the Jews worsened in 1501 with the ascendancy of the Safavids, who made the Shi'ite creed the dominant form of Islam in Iran. The Shi'ite clergy then introduced the notion of religious impurity and applied it to all non-Shi'ites, even Sunnis. Jews were subjected to a wide range of humiliating and dehumanizing restrictions: they could not leave their houses on rainy days, build homes with walls taller than those of their Muslim neighbors, paint their houses white, buy property from Muslims or sell foodstuff to them. In public, to distinguish themselves from Muslims, Jewish men had to wear unusually large turbans and women had to attach bells to their chadors (veils). A Jew who touched food in a store was forced to buy it at whatever price the merchant demanded because it was now impure and no longer consumable by a Shi'ite Muslim. These policies--waxing and waning in their severity and implementation--would last for the most part until the beginning of the twentieth century, when in 1906 the Iranian Parliament opted a Constitution which stated (in Article 8) that Jews, Zoroastrians, and Christians could no longer be treated as second-class citizens. Consequently, the Jezieh or poll tax imposed on all non-Muslim citizens was appealed, as were a host of other discriminatory practices. Jews were now permitted to partake in military service, buy homes, and open shops outside the Jewish quarters. In short, it took nearly thirteen hundred years for the Jews to regain the freedoms they had in ancient times.
In Khomeini's Shadow
Revolution. Everything in Iran changed on February 1, 1979, the day Ayatollah Khomeini returned to our country a few days after the departure of the Shah. Suddenly, millions were demanding an end to 2,500 years of monarchy--including hundreds of young Jews who joined the revolution against the wishes of their elders, hoping to recast their identities as secular Iranians who could assimilate seamlessly into the fabric of the promised utopia.
Paradise Lost - An Iraqi Jewish Story
Tamara Ruben, the education director of Temple Emanu-El in Westfield, New Jersey, was born in Iraq in June 1950, only two weeks before her family, along with thousands of other Iraqi Jews, fled their country in search of a safer life. She was interviewed by RJ editor Aron Hirt-Manheimer.
Transcending Walls in Tel Aviv
To attract the younger generation, who do not have the same motivation as their grandparents to be members of a synagogue, we have to think beyond our comfort zone.