The last community synagogue in Gondar, in the north of Ethiopia, is in a rented building cordoned off from the street by large metal sheets. Several men passively stand guard in front. From the outside, a Jewish Agency for Israel sign is the main indication of what lies within. But neighbors know. “You,” two men…
In the sultry darkness of a summer night, a tall, skinny figure with close-cropped hair and a purple T-shirt threaded through a beer garden during Krakow’s Jewish Culture Festival, the annual nine-day extravaganza of performance, exhibition, debate and intensive interaction that for a quarter of a century now has been a catalyst of Krakow’s Jewish…
Driving west on I-10 out of New Orleans, you plunge almost immediately into a world made more of water than of land. First you cross the Bonnet Carre Spillway, which channels overflowing river water into Lake Pontchartrain. Later, in Baton Rouge, you rattle 175 feet above the Mississippi on a rickety cantilever bridge. And then,…
My older brother just left on a trip to Europe. When I say Europe, I don’t mean one or two European countries. I mean he bought a one-way ticket to London with a bus ticket the next day to Belgium and he doesn’t plan to stop traveling until he runs out of money or fun….
Leon Elnekave, the affable leader of the dwindling Jewish community of Bursa, Turkey’s old Ottoman capital, met my wife and me on a narrow, cobbled lane and unlocked the black wrought iron gate to the 500-year-old Gerush Synagogue. As he led us into the landscaped courtyard, my wife, Sallie, suddenly began to cry. “I don’t…
When Jodi Ettenberg quit her job as a New York lawyer to travel around the world and chronicle her journey on a blog called Legal Nomads, she thought she was going on a year-long trip. That was four years ago. Since then, traveling and experiencing places through food has become her passion and vocation. She…
Pavel Fried was born in the village of Třebíč, Czechoslovakia, in 1930. Fried lived a middle-class Jewish life; he was in the midst of preparations for his bar mitzvah when his family was deported to Terezin. In the camp, he told interviewers from the Vienna-based oral history project Centropa, he had a secret ceremony. Pavel…
Airport “pat-downs” have been the set-up for too many jokes to count. But the much-ridiculed security measures have also provided the inspiration for a new series of paintings by the Israeli-born, Brooklyn-based artist Tirtzah Bassel, 33. In “TSA Chapel,” featured at the 14th Street Y’s LABA Festival — the event begins tomorrow, and runs through…
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