Out of exile: Giving props to Jewish refugees from Arab lands

by dan pine, j. staff forjweekly.com

Daniel Khazzoom remembers long-ago family gatherings around the sopa (kerosene space heater), roasting chestnuts and enjoying chilly winter nights in Baghdad.

Those are the only happy memories he has of the land of his birth. In the span of a few years, through a steady campaign of violence and expulsion, Iraq rid itself of a Jewish community that had thrived for two millennia.

Khazzoom fled as a teen in 1951, vowing never to return to the country that perpetrated unrelenting oppression against his family and his fellow Jews.

Now a retired economics professor living in Sacramento, Khazzoom, 82, once served on the board of JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa), a San Francisco–based organization that advocates for Mizrachi Jews and helps preserve their history.

Khazzoom is one of the 850,000 Mizrachi Jewish refugees from Arab countries who were forced out of their homelands after World War II and the establishment of Israel, and for whom justice has been denied. By and large they built new lives in Israel, the United States and elsewhere, choosing not to dwell on their misfortune.

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Are the Ultra-Orthodox the Key to Israel's Future?

How a misunderstood minority can help spur the Jewish state’s economy and repair its tattered social fabric.

by Aharon Ariel Lavi in Mosaic Magazine

While much is known about the tough situation facing Israel externally, less familiar, even to Israel’s supporters, is the social and economic situation at home. Of course, Israeli exploits in the fields of science and technology are deservedly the stuff of legend; the Jewish state is indeed the “start-up nation” par excellence. Dig a little deeper, however, and one might also hear about special difficulties posed by two underperforming sectors of the society: Israeli Arabs, and haredi or ultra-Orthodox Jews.

It’s the latter of these two groups that will concern me here, and for a simple reason: socially and economically, the state of Israel is on the verge of either a leap forward or a crippling regression. To a large extent, the outcome depends on whether, and how, its haredi population can be integrated into the larger society.

In Israel as in the United States, the ultra-Orthodox constitute the fastest-growing sector of the Jewish population. In and of itself, this demographic success is a fascinating example of how a community can maintain a demandingly pious way of life in an era of boundless personal freedom. Yet, in Israel, the social and economic infrastructure of the haredi sector is exceedingly fragile, which—given that they now make up 10-15 percent of the Jewish population—makes their situation and their future a national test of the first order.

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Anti-Semitism Creeps Into Europe's Daily Routines

Signs for Continent's Jews Are Not Good

By Deborah E. Lipstadt, The Jewish Daily Forward

Ten years ago the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe convened a conference on European anti-Semitism. Last week it met to assess what had happened in the past decade. The signs are not good.

While a good part of the meeting was dedicated to official presentations by the participating nations,

it was what one heard in the hallway over coffee that was most significant. At one point the White House delegation, of which I was part, met with representatives of an array of European Jewish communities. What we heard left me shaken.

We knew about the murders in the Brussels Jewish museum, the children gunned down on the Toulouse schoolyard, the fate of Ilan Halimi, a young French Jew who had been lured by a group of Muslims who then held him captive, tortured and eventually murdered him. We were aware of the violent demonstrations, assaults on synagogues, and the aggressive rhetoric — including “Jews to the gas” — that had occurred in various European cities. We anticipated that this would be our informants’ main concern.

While they certainly worried about this type of violence, what weighed upon them more was a “changed daily routine” that leaves them feeling “under threat.” Schools and Jewish institutions are under heavy guard. While this reassured some people, other parents described how, when they deposit their children at the Jewish schools and see the visibly armed guards protecting the site, rather than feeling reassured, they are reminded of the Toulouse schoolyard and the murdered children.

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Why I Started Lighting Shabbat Candles

Why I Started Lighting Shabbat Candles

As a Soviet émigré, I didn’t grow up caring about Jewish traditions. But a visit to a concentration camp changed my mind.

By Alina Dizik for Tablet Magazine

Toward the end of a semester abroad at a Belgian university, I went with a group of fellow college students—most of them not Jewish—to visit Breedonk, a concentration camp 30 miles away. The trip was planned as part of our study-abroad program, and I didn’t give it much thought until we walked through the entrance. It was empty and eerie. There was a train car that had been used to transport prisoners into the camp. We spent over two hours wandering the grounds, going into dimly lit barracks and walking in circles on the outside paths.

Visiting the camp, I suddenly felt a connection to the Holocaust—and to other Jews—that I never felt on American soil. Learning about the atrocities in the same place where they happened helped spark my own connection to Judaism, and made me want to celebrate my own Jewish roots. I’d always been proud to be Jewish, but I never made time to observe holidays or follow traditions.

When I returned home from Belgium the next semester, I started looking for a Jewish tradition I could incorporate into my life, as a student living on my own. I wanted something that would be a constant commitment and that I could do without going to a synagogue and pretending to follow along in Hebrew. I wanted a ritual where I didn’t feel judged for not knowing everything about the religion. I decided to start lighting Shabbat candles.

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CHANUKAH AROUND THE WORLD: 8 WAYS TO CELEBRATE

By Rabbi Ruth Abusch-Magder, Be'chol Lashon Rabbi-in-Residence

Chanukah is a holiday with 8 different lights and many traditions. Explore how different Jewish communities around the world celebrate the holiday.

Chanukah is observed with joy and celebration in Jewish communities around the world. Like the Hannukiya, there are many similarities that join these celebrations but also some elements that add unique light to the holiday.

1) In Alsace, a region of France, double decker Chanukah menorahs were common with space for 16 lights. The two levels, each with spots for 8 lights, allowed fathers and sons to join together as they each lit their own lights in one single Hannukiya.

2) There is a custom of placing your Hannukiya in a place where people will be able to view the lights burning and appreciate the miracle of the holiday. In some Jerusalem neighborhoods, there are spaces cut into the sides of buildings so people can display them outside. Historically in countries like Morroco and Algeria, and even some communities in India, it was customary to hang a Hannukiya on a hook on a wall near the doorway on the side of the door across from the mezuzah.

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Rediscovering the First Woman Rabbi

Ordained in 1935, Regina Jonas died at Auschwitz. Now, she’s being honored.

By Laura Geller for Tablet Magazine

Judaism acknowledges the day of one’s death and not one’s birthday. It makes a certain kind of sense: You can only really measure the impact of a person’s life after it is over. But what if we don’t know the date of a yahrzeit? That is what happened to the first woman rabbi, Regina Jonas, who was deported from Terezin on October 12, 1944, and arrived at Auschwitz on October 14. It was Shabbat, Shabbat Bereshit, which this year falls on Oct. 18. After that there is no record of her.

It is time to honor her memory. That’s why a growing number of rabbis and Jewish leaders have designated this Shabbat, Oct. 18, as her yahrzeit and will say kaddish for her.

Born in Berlin in 1902 into a poor Orthodox Jewish family, Jonas was influenced by her rabbi, Dr. Max Weil, who, though Orthodox, allowed girls to become bat mitzvah. At his urging, Jonas continued her studies at the liberal Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin from 1924 to 1930. All the other women in her classes were there to become teachers; Jonas, like the men she studied with, wanted to become a rabbi. Her primary supporter was Rabbi Eduard Baneth, who was determined to ordain her, but died just before she finished her training. Though her thesis—“Can a Woman Be a Rabbi According to Halachic Sources?”—received praise from her teachers, none of them agreed to ordain her, including Rabbi Leo Baeck, the leader of the Jews in Germany, who wasn’t willing to jeopardize the unity of the Jewish community as the Nazi threat was intensifying.

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The Convict Synagogue at the End of the World

Australia’s oldest temple was built by Jewish penal colony prisoners in 1845

By Mark I. Pinsky for Tablet Magazine

As Jews around the world gathered earlier this fall to observe the High Holidays, few houses of worship rivaled the exotic history of the Hobart Synagogue in Tasmania, the remote island state off Australia’s southern coast. Here, no tickets were required for seats. Just 25 people attended lay-led Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services in a sanctuary that seats 150. This faithful—if disputatious—remnant clings tenaciously to Judaism at the farthest fringes of the diaspora.

“There’s a determination among a number of us, a dozen or so only, to make sure that there is a continuing congregational life,” Tony O’Brien, on of the synagogue’s lay leaders, told me last summer. One congregational history, he noted, was titled Survival Against All Odds. “What animates us is a determination that Judaism will survive ‘against all odds’ as a living community in this island at the end of the earth, as some have called it.”

The oldest surviving synagogue in Australia was built by Jews who were former convicts in the bleak, infamous penal colony. There was special seating—numbered benches—in the sanctuary for those co-religionists who were still in bondage, some in chains. Being excused from work on Saturdays and given a home-cooked meal helped encourage piety and filled the pews in the 19th century.

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Rachel Shabi’s Mizrahi post-Zionism: a Critique

By Lyn Julius for fathomjournal.org

Historian Rachel Shabi and a group of other post-Zionists have tried to use historical prejudice against Mizrahim—i.e., Jews of North African and Middle Eastern origin—to undermine Zionism. In her view, Mizrahi Jews are really “Jewish Arabs” who ought to make common cause with Palestinians against the state of Israel. Although ethnic prejudice and discriminatory policies have certainly existed in Israel, Shabi exaggerates them wildly, fails to understand then in their historical context, and idealizes Jewish-Muslim coexistence in the Arab world beyond all recognition. She also, writes Lyn Julius, ignores the fact that this prejudice is largely a thing of the past:

Although it was . . . a struggling developing country, Israel took in the stateless, the destitute, the sick, and the elderly—because they were Jews. . . . . Today Mizrahim are generals, doctors, property developers, bank managers, and have held every government post except prime minister. Most importantly—a hugely significant fact that Shabi simply glosses over—intermarriage [with Ashkenazi Jews] is running at 25 per cent, and the mixed Israeli family is fast becoming the norm. Soon there will be no such thing as Mizrahi or Ashkenazi in the Israeli melting pot.

Shabi’s nostalgia trip to a world before Zionism leads her up a blind alley. She confuses the interpersonal with the political: good neighborliness with the (unequal) power relationship between Jews and Arabs. An overlap of culture and language with Arabs over 14 centuries did not protect Mizrahim from pogroms, dispossession, and expulsion, to the point where fewer than 5,000 Jews live in Arab countries today, out of a 1948 population of one million. This is a lesson lost on some who eagerly espouse Arab-Israeli coexistence projects.


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A modest proposal for women’s conversion

By Michal Tikochinsky for The Times of Israel




The arrest of an American rabbi on suspicion of filming women in various stages of undress at a ritual bath has raised calls to banish men from this unique women’s space. While routine immersions of women in a mikveh for purposes of ritual purity are overseen by women, when a woman immerses as part of her conversion, the ratification of a Beit Din (religious court) is necessary. While I am not an expert on how such procedures are conducted in the United States, I do know how they are conducted in Israel, and it is high time for a change.

As described on the ITIM website, when a woman immerses as part of a conversion ceremony, she immerses once in the regular manner, observed by a woman. She then comes out of the water, puts on a long, dark, wide robe that allows water to permeate but still ensures that she is modestly dressed, and re-enters the water. Three male religious court judges (dayanim), who constitute a Beit Din for the purposes of immersion, then enter the room and ask her questions about Judaism while she stands in the water. After she has answered their questions, these men, who are usually not the same rabbis who served on the religious court that tested her for the purpose of conversion, ask her to recite the first line of Shema Yisrael and to repeat the acceptance of the yoke of mitzvot that she recited in the presence of the conversion court. They then watch as she immerses a second time, after which they announce her new Hebrew name and welcome her to the Jewish people.

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Women Cantors

How Jewish women worked their way into the field of synagogue music.

By Irene Heskes for MyJewishLearning.com

Reprinted from Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia with permission of the author and the Jewish Women's Archive.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Jewish women in America had taken on significant roles in the rapidly developing cultural phenomenon of Yiddish American theater.

Not only were they performing as stars in a wide range of dramatic productions, but they were singing all sorts of Jewish songs, including the religious hymns and liturgical chants, and newer music of spiritual significance.
For example, Sophie Karp (1861–1906) introduced a Yiddish ballad written especially for her, "Eli, Eli" (My God, My God), with text material derived from Psalm 22 and other Jewish prayers. The song became a favorite solo of many other female performers of that day, including the renowned actor Bertha Kalich (pictured) and opera singers Sophie Braslau and Rosa-Raisa.

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The Crazy New App For Using Your iPhone on Shabbos

By Ester Bloom for Jewniverse

Shabbos and technology: two great tastes that taste great together? The makers of the new Shabbos App, available in February from the iTunes Store and Google Play, want to convince you that, though it may seem counterintuitive, their spirituality-practicality hack will allow you to keep the Sabbath better from the comfort of your own phone.

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Western Wall plaza dig reveals structures dating back to Herod

‘Significant, beautiful’ remains, including lavish public buildings, found by archaeologists 20 meters from — but not under — Temple Mount

By Times of Israel staff

Israeli archaeologists recently dug up an ancient subterranean structure, parts of which date back to Roman times, just meters from the Temple Mount, Channel 10 reported Sunday.

“It’s one of the [most] impressive, beautiful and grand places found recently in Jerusalem,” Israel Antiquities Authority Jerusalem Region Archaeologist Yuval Baruch told the station.

“It is one of the most significant remains” found in Jerusalem in the last generation,” he said.

The ongoing excavations, which are taking place beneath the Western Wall plaza in the former Mughrabi Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, feature a Mamluk-era caravansary dating to the Middle Ages and remains of lavish public buildings from the Herodian period, over 2,000 years ago, some 20 meters (65 feet) from the Temple Mount.

Baruch explained that when digging began, the earthen fill reached the ceiling of the now-restored caravansary, and that archaeologists had no idea how large the structure was.

“We understood that there was something else here, in terms of size, in terms of grandeur,” he said.

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The Other Persian Jews

By Jenny Levison for Jewniverse

If you’re not from the region and you’re not a Near East cultural scholar, chances are that when you think about Persian Jews, you either go all the way back to the Book of Esther, or you think about the Jews of Tehran and Isfahan. But there’s another vast community of Persian speaking Jews in Central Asia and beyond: Bukharan Jews.

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Belarus town honors Eliezer Ben Yehuda, father of modern Hebrew

Dozens of people, including a number of Israelis, gather in Glubokoe to celebrate life of ancient language reviver

By JTA in Times of Israel

A ceremony honoring Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the father of modern Hebrew, was held in the presence of Israeli dignitaries in a Belarussian town connected to his past.

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The ceremony, which launched the second Jewish learning conference in Belarus of Limmud FSU, was held Thursday at the main square of Glubokoe, located 100 miles north of Minsk, where Ben Yehuda, who died in 1922 in pre-state Israel, learned Jewish studies and where his wife was born.

Israelis attending the gathering of a few dozen people near a statue honoring Ben Yehuda, which was erected in 2010, included Ambassador to Belarus Yosef Shagal and Gil Hovav, Ben Yehuda’s great-grandson, a celebrity chef and food critic in Israel.

“Beyond being a great man and a visionary, my great-grandfather was also a man who was very much preoccupied with being respected,” Hovav said in his speech, which was delivered in Hebrew. “He would get into fights with people who he thought should show him more respect, and he rarely won in his lifetime.”

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Three Things We Should Never Say Before Rosh Hashanah

by Rabbi Benjamin Blech for aish.com

Insights from President Obama on how to prepare for Rosh Hashanah.

President Obama recently got into trouble for three statements he made about his role as the leader of the free world.

Obviously his words are important. His decisions play a crucial role in determining our national destiny. They will eventually face the verdict of history. Our personal resolutions almost assuredly pale in comparison.

Yet in the view of Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher held by tradition to be second only to Moses, there is reason to believe that the choices we make in our own lives may very well have cosmic significance comparable to those of the most powerful political leader.

As we approach the High Holy days, Maimonides asks us to imagine that the fate of the world is placed on a scale weighing its good versus its evil – and is found to be perfectly balanced. Every one of us must view our lives as bearing the potential to sway God’s divine decree to one side or another based on the quality of the deeds we add the total equation.

It is a remarkable insight that imposes upon each of us the notion of a kind of collective responsibility which grants inestimable meaning and value to the seemingly minor roles we play on the stage of the world’s history.

Let us explore the words of President Obama – not as a political jibe – but in order to gain some insight that will help us properly prepare for Rosh Hashanah.

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Amid Zara's 'concentration camp' shirt debacle, Swedish retailer's sold-out T-shirt is more homage than exploitation.

Hannah Dreyfus for The Jewish Week

What do H&M and Jewish Voice For Peace have in common? Mishnaic sage Hillel, of course.

Both the Swedish retail giant and the far-left political group are using “If not now, when?” the rhetorical question found in Chapters of Our Fathers [Pirkei Avot]: H&M as a T-shirt slogan and JVP as a hashtag.

A large billboard in Times Square features Hillel’s urgent question, the third in a series after “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I?” written in oversized black letters on a slinky tank top selling for $9.95. But the t-shirt isn’t in the store.

“That’s been one of our most popular items this summer,” said Kiera Elliott, H&M saleswoman in Times Square, who explained the shirt’s conspicuous absence from sale-racks. “We sold that item out weeks ago, but people keep asking me about it. It obviously made a lasting impression.”

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The Mikveh Lady Has Left The Building

The Mikveh, Lady

by DeDe Jacobs-Komisar for MayyimHayyimBlog.com

I’m going to be honest – before I found this place I was totally ambivalent about the mikveh. Growing up Orthodox, we teenage girls were taught to venerate the mikveh as a mysterious, holy, beautiful thing.

We toured mikva’ot on school and camp field trips, where mikveh ladies would show us how gorgeous the rooms were, how intimate and spa-like the experience. That we would immerse monthly, for niddah, after marriage, was a foregone conclusion that did not even require discussion.

I confess that I barely remember my first immersion, which was the night before my wedding. I recall meticulously running down the checklist of preparations, worrying that I forgot something and that I wasn’t clean enough. My next memory is of emerging from the mikveh itself, underwhelmed. Was there something wrong with me? I shrugged it off and figured it would get better with time.

It didn’t. I’ve been married almost ten years now, and in that time, I’ve been to mikva’ot in four states and two countries. Nice ones, not-so-nice ones, nice mikveh ladies, intimidating mikveh ladies, one who yelled at me for not cutting my nails short enough. One who came equipped with her own cart of wipes and proceeded to, unasked, wipe my face down to remove any errant makeup.

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Busting the Shtetl Myth

What you think you know about Jewish life in Eastern Europe is wrong, argues a fascinating (but problematic) new book.

By Andrew N. Koss in Mosaic Magazine

“Deconstructing Fiddler on the Roof” is a favorite gambit of professors introducing students to the history of East European Jewry: begin with what they think they know about life in the shtetl, and then start busting the myths. Were matchmakers women? (No.) Did Russian police instigate pogroms? (Rarely, if ever.) Is there a single documented case of shtetl residents singing “Sunrise, Sunset” at a wedding? (Come on.)

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, a historian at Northwestern University, has given us a vigorous, well-documented, and entertaining new version of this trick in his recent The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe. In fact, he uses Fiddler on the Roof as a foil, beginning and ending with references to the musical while devoting the bulk of the book to everyday shtetl life in the half-century from 1790 to 1840.

The word shtetl refers to the small market towns where, for several centuries, a large portion of East European Jews lived. (The shtetl was a “Jewish town” only in the sense that Jews usually made up about half the population; it was not in any sense a ghetto.) The story of the shtetl begins in the second half of the 17th century, when Jews in Poland-Lithuania began to forsake the countryside for population centers that were assuming growing importance as hubs of commerce and manufacture, linking agricultural villages to major trade routes. Encouraged by the Polish nobility, Jews played a crucial role in these activities throughout the 18th century. When, between 1772 and 1795, Russia, Prussia, and Austria systematically dismembered their hapless neighbor, Poland-Lithuania, the majority of shtetls came under Russian rule. It is these that form the focus of Petrovsky-Shtern’s book.

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Orthodox Women Turn to Other Orthodox Women During Pregnancy and Childbirth

Observant mothers-to-be hire doulas who share their religious practices and understand their specific needs

By Kylie Jane Wakefield for Tablet Magazine

Miriam Shapiro was on all fours in her hospital bed reciting Tehillim—Psalms—when she felt another contraction. She summoned her doula, and together they placed a quarter into her tzedakah box. After that, she knew that the baby was ready. She took a deep breath and started reciting prayers. “Right when I was pushing Adina out, my doula reminded me, ‘It’s a good time to pray,’ ” Shapiro told me in a recent email interview. “When you’re pushing a new life into the world, it’s like all the gates are open upstairs.”

Doulas, who offer women advice and companionship during their pregnancies and then coach them through labor, have been growing in popularity among pregnant women for several years—and Orthodox Jews are no exception. But since Orthodox women have a unique set of needs during childbirth, they’ve been turning to doulas who are themselves Orthodox women, to provide mental, emotional, and spiritual support before, during, and after they give birth.

For these women, Orthodox doulas are preferable because they understand what the mothers are going through from a halachic perspective. For instance, when an Orthodox woman gives birth, her husband cannot touch her because she is niddah, or bleeding, and it would go against the laws of family purity if her husband held her hand or rubbed her back. If a doula is present in the delivery room, however, she can massage the woman, do breathing exercises, adjust her tichel (headscarf), or fix her clothing to ensure that she is still upholding the laws of modesty, even during childbirth.

According to Chana Barak, an Orthodox doula in Texas, observant doulas understand the distinct rituals surrounding birth, especially family purity. “It can be hard to explain to someone that your husband won’t be nearby for the birth or that he won’t hold your hand when you are in pain,” she said. “A Jewish doula already knows these things and respects [them].”

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Jew Hatred: Understanding the World’s Insanity

Anti-Semitism renders irrelevant the justice of Israel’s war in Gaza.

by Sara Yoheved Rigler for aish.com

Joan Rivers was stopped by an impromptu interviewer and asked about the war in Gaza. She answered that if New Jersey were shooting rockets at New York, “we’d wipe out Jersey.” The interviewer continued to pry her with questions about Gaza’s civilian casualties. Joan, incredulous, erupted, “They started it. You’re all insane. They started it!!”

In the eyes of Israel’s advocates, the necessity for the war against Hamas is as indisputable as a mathematical equation. Support for the ground invasion of Gaza spans Israel’s political spectrum. According to a poll taken last week, 91% of Israeli Jews support Israel’s military campaign (the first time in anyone’s historical memory that 91% of Israeli Jews agreed on anything!). To us in Israel it is simple and clear: Hamas, committed to the destruction of Israel in its Charter and in its actions, poses an existential threat to our lives and the lives of our children.

Yet, no matter how clearly Israel’s advocates state their case, diplomats around the world, leading news outlets, the UN, and even the American administration, all people who are certifiably sane and even smart, don’t seem to get it. In Israel it feels like we’ve fallen down a rabbit hole where everything is topsy-turvy, and nothing makes sense.

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The Jews Who Carved the Carousel Horses

By Jenny Levison for Jewniverse

There’s nothing like mounting a horse, tossing your head back, and riding off in the California surf. Unless, of course, your horse is handcrafted by Torah ark woodcarvers, and mounted to a pole in the heart of New York City. That’s right, the carousel horse you loved to ride as a child might have been carved by Jewish artisans.

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Star of David: A common symbol for Judaism and Israel

From MyJewishLearning.com

The six-pointed Star of David is a common symbol for both Judaism and Israel.

Known in Hebrew as a Magen David (shield of David), geometrically it is two triangles superimposed on each other, forming the shape of a hexagram.

Though today the symbol popularly communicates Jewishness, its associations with Judaism are newer than one might think. Some historians trace it to Jewish communities in the Middle Ages, but these claims are neither fully substantiated nor widely accepted.

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Circassian: A Most Difficult Language

Caucasian Tongue Has Phenomenal Number of Consonants

By Philologos for The Jewish Daily Forward

The other day, I was in the waiting room of a doctor’s office in Haifa, when three people walked in and sat behind me. Two were men dressed in Western clothes, one looking to be in his 30s and the other in his 50s or 60s; the third was a woman in her 20s of extremely fair complexion, wearing a black chador and a white headscarf that crossed her forehead in a horizontal line just above her eyebrows.

I took them to be Israeli Arabs — a wife, her husband and her father — most likely Druze, to judge from the headscarf. Yet when they began to speak in low voices, they quite clearly weren’t speaking Arabic. In fact, they weren’t speaking any language I had ever heard. It wasn’t Persian, or Turkish, or anything I could connect to an obviously Muslim woman in a chador. I sat and thought. In the end, both the husband and I rose to stretch our legs. “Excuse me for asking,” I said to him, “but were you speaking Circassian?”
He nodded without asking me how I knew, we both returned to our seats, and that was the sum of our interchange. It left me, though, with a small measure of satisfaction, the way one feels when successfully solving an unusual, if not particularly difficult, puzzle.

The Circassians, 3,000 of whom live in the two villages of Kfar Kama and Rihaniya in the Galilee, are Israel’s smallest indigenous non-Jewish population, so small that most Israelis have never met even one of them, and many don’t know of their existence. Called tsherkesim in Hebrew, their ancestral roots are in the Caucasus, which they left for Palestine in the 1870s. They were part of an emigration — mass flight might be more accurate — of more than 1 million of their people, which took place after the Russian conquest of their homeland from the Turks in the 1860s and the brutal anti-Muslim ethnic cleansing that followed. A majority resettled in Turkey; some wandered farther. Today, an estimated 130,000 live in Jordan with another 100,000 in Syria (at least prior to the current hostilities there), and some 35,000 in Iraq. In all these countries they have undergone linguistic assimilation, but Circassian continues to be spoken by some of them, including those who live in Israel.

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What Happens When Ex-Orthodox Jews Need To Learn How To Date?

by Jessica Wakeman for TheFrisky.com

Dating is hard enough. But what about dating when you’ve recently left an insular religious community that pretty much forbade interaction with the opposite sex?

Such is the problem faced by ex-Orthodox Jews who are “Off the Derech” (derech is Hebrew for path), or OTD, and assimilating into secular society. Hasidic communities separate boys and girls while young; girls often marry around 18 or 19, while boys tie the knot in their early 20s, having children shortly after. Touching members of the opposite sex to whom you are not related is forbidden and interaction is generally discouraged. Is it any wonder ex-Orthodox Jews are utterly bamboozled when it comes to l’amour?

That’s where dating coach Israel Irenstein comes in.

In a profile on Slate.com, Irenstein explains how he uses his own status as an ex-Orthodox Jew to help teach OTD guys how to date in secular society. He left the lifestyle after he was married with two kids when he became concerned about how Hasidic teachings were affecting his young children. Not surprisingly, he says, after his divorce he had “no idea how to talk to women.” It’s likely that parents and/or a matchmaker were involved in any marriages in the Hasidic community, so men need to learn basic dating skills, like how to flirt and how to get a woman’s number. Then they need assistance with more high-level queries, Irenstein explained, like whether it’s acceptable to pay a woman for a date, what to wear on dates, and how to handle the splitting of the check.

Oftentimes I turn a critical eye towards dating coaches and their douchier cousins, pick-up artists, for enforcing outdated gender roles (instead of encouraging people to just be who they are) and boiling down romance to “tricks.” But I think nothing but good things can come from helping people who were formerly blocked off from a huge swath of the modern Western human experience get acclimated. Being close friends with an ex-Hasid myself (who recommended that I link to the nonprofit support network Footsteps for anyone in similar straights), I know it’s a lonely, confusing road. And — I mean this with affection and respect — they deserve all the assistance they can get.


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Europe's Oldest Mikveh

by Jacqueline Alio for Best of Sicily Magazine

The island of Ortygia is an ancient district of Siracusa (Syracuse) that was inhabited into the Middle Ages, long after most areas of equal antiquity (now the archaeological park on the edge of the "modern" city) had been abandoned. It is here, among graceful limestone palaces, castles, churches and houses, that we find many of the city's rare treasures. A few have been rediscovered following centuries passed - literally - in the dark. One is the mikveh in the Giudecca, the city's Jewish quarter until 1493.

Indeed, this is the oldest mikveh (or mikvah or miqwa) known to survive in Europe. By definition, a mikveh is a ritual bath, consisting of at least one pool but perhaps several. The mikveh is an important part of Jewish tradition, and it was the inspiration - or at least the precedent - for analogous practices in Christianity (Baptism) and then Islam (Ghusl). Whereas Baptism is a sacrament that is performed only once (originally by full immersion as it is still practiced in the Eastern Orthodox Churches), Ghusl customs are more similar to Judaic practice. Obviously, one form or another of ritual bathing is a shared legacy of all three Abrahamic religions.

In Judaism, ritual bathing, or ablution, in the form of tevilah (full-body immersion) in fresh water, may date from Mosaic times, and has certainly been practiced since the period during which the Book of Leviticus was authored, before 322 BC (BCE). Both the Mishnah and the Talmud refer to the practice, and many Jewish rituals are rooted in this era.

The Jewish congregation of Syracuse was probably the first to be established in Sicily, and one of the first few in what is now Italy. Judaism was present here long before the arrival of Christianity on Sicilian shores.

The first Jews of Sicily were present during Roman times (archaeological evidence indicates that a community of the Samaritan sect also flourished in Syracuse). It is thought that while in Syracuse circa AD (CE) 59, Paul of Tarsus preached to Jews as well as Greeks. Of particular note, a few Jews arrived as slaves following the Siege of Jerusalem a decade later in AD 70 during the First Jewish-Roman War (The Great Revolt), commemorated in Rome's Arch of Titus where one of the earliest depictions of a menorah appears as a spoil of war.

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