Kesher Talk

Jews in odd places: Cuba: The Jewish Week finds Passover practiced in the socialist dictatorship:

Community seders were held this year on the first night of the holiday in [eight] Cuban cities, including Havana, where the capital’s three extant synagogues sponsored their own.

The seders are a sign of Cuban Jewry’s increasing vibrancy. Another sign: Many of those attending the seders, possibly half, according to many estimates, are recent converts to Judaism.

Whatever the actual figure, Cuba probably has the highest percentage of Jews by choice of any community in the world. Some have Jewish roots and are returning to the community.

They are the faces you see at the seders and Chanukah celebrations, at lectures and Hebrew school lessons, and Shabbat and High Holy Days services. And each year you see more of them, more Jews openly wearing Magen Davids, more young people becoming bar and bat mitzvah, more teens taking part in the kesher group that visits the elderly and disabled.

They come to Jewish activities, they say, to spend time with fellow Jews. Cynics say they are attracted by the food served at communal affairs or by the possibility of immigrating to Israel.

Rabbi Dana Kaplan, a Miami-based educator and writer who has made several trips to Cuba, says Judaism fills a spiritual void for many Jews who see their land’s socialism-communism as a failure.

posted by William @ 4/28/2004 09:00:04 AM  

The Swiss giveth and the Swiss taketh away. Apparently even the 67 armistice lines aren't "legal" enough for the Swiss government.

Zurich (JTA) — Switzerland boycotted a ceremony honoring a Swiss citizen who saved Jews during World War II because it was held in a Jerusalem neighborhood that came into Israeli hands during the 1967 Six-Day War. The Swiss ambassador to Israel was ordered to stay away from Monday’s ceremony in Pisgat Zeev honoring Paul Grueninger.

However:

Twenty Swiss teachers arrived Tuesday for the inauguration of a street named for Grueninger after learning from the Jerusalem Post that the Swiss government had instructed its ambassador to boycott the ceremony.

posted by Judith @ 4/27/2004 10:03:24 AM  

Jews & the GOP: Appreciating Dubya: Marcus J. Goldman describes the U.S. President as "the one man with the courage to destroy our would-be annihilators."

posted by William @ 4/27/2004 09:16:44 AM  

Free Jewish E-cards: Israel-store.com offers free e-cards for Jewish holidays and occasions.

posted by William @ 4/27/2004 09:00:54 AM  

Jewish Heritage Week: President Bush has proclaimed April 23 to May 2, 2003, as Jewish Heritage Week.

posted by William @ 4/26/2004 02:32:48 PM  

Jews in odd places: Texas: Not just there, but looking to become Governor? Oi, this guy is embarassing:

Eccentric American country singer and writer Kinky Friedman has announced he will stand for George W Bush's old job as Texas governor in 2006.

The man behind the Texas Jewboys band and such best-selling crime novels as Kill Two Birds and Get Stoned is set to run as an independent candidate. While his policies are as yet unclear, Mr Friedman has pledged to "not kiss babies [but] their mothers". Asked why he is standing, he replies: "Why the hell not?"

The cigar-smoking country singer says he wants to "fight the wussification of the state of Texas".

... Correspondents say it remains to be seen how far the unconventional image of the composer of They Ain't Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore and author of Elvis, Jesus & Coca Cola will appeal to traditional voting lobbies in Texas such as Christian groups.

But Mr Friedman says he has little fear that his electoral ambitions will ever be affected by scandal, the bane of many an American politician's career.

"There are no skeletons in my closet," he says. "They are all bleaching on a beach somewhere."

(PS. Judith, as a native Texan, is used to Kinky Friedman. In fact, he was her summer camp counselor many centuries ago.)

posted by William @ 4/26/2004 08:41:22 AM  

Slightly less wacky than Vannunu. it is often amusing to watch political events move faster than ideology can keep up:

Some 500 members of the left-leaning Tikkun Community, whose "teach-in to Congress for Middle East peace" has changed shape because of dramatic developments in the region, will be in town next week.

Rabbi Michael Lerner, the group's leader and editor of the magazine that provided its name, said that more than 200 Capitol Hill meetings have been scheduled. "Our main theme is that we want to help people understand why the Bush-Sharon axis of occupation is not good for Israel and not good for the United States," Rabbi Lerner said in an interview. Last week's Washington summit between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and President Bush has "given the meeting a new urgency," Rabbi Lerner said.

Initially the Tikkun activists planned to focus on winning congressional support for last year's informal "Geneva accords," a shadow peace agreement worked out by former Israeli and Palestinian government officials. But Palestinian participants in the Geneva process said President Bush, by acknowledging that "realities on the ground" mean Israel will not have to return to its original borders, has effectively killed that plan. That has thrown the Tikkun conference into disarray.

"Does this summit mean Geneva is irrelevant?" Rabbi Lerner said. "That's one of the issues we will be dealing with next week." Increasingly, he said, peace activists are giving up on the idea of a two-state solution and arguing instead that democracy and demography should be allowed to run their course - something Rabbi Lerner conceded would mean the end of a Jewish state.

Emphasis mine. This is the first time I have heard Lerner accept the rhetoric of a one-state solution. Always previously he could be counted on to mount a strong defense of Israel's right to exist, no matter how left-wing his analyses or proposed solutions. Now the strain of trying to fit current events into his ideology has completely collapsed his integrity. (And by the way, Michael, the answer to your first question is "Duh.")

The group will focus also on what Rabbi Lerner said is Sharon's unwillingness to help Palestinian moderates, which has just reinforced groups like Hamas.

1) What Palestinian moderates? (I know, I know, Sari Nusseibeh blah blah blah. I mean moderates that have a snowball's chance in the Negev of influencing the PA. 2) Reinforced groups like Hamas? Well, who cares about Hamas? Our Bay Area boychik knows who the real threat is:

And Rabbi Lerner said the Washington meeting will challenge the new alliance between pro-Israel groups and Evangelical Christians who support far-right causes in Israel. "The Christian Zionists are the very same people who are circulating and popularizing the biggest piece of anti-Semitic propaganda we've seen since the defeat of Hitler," he said, referring to Mel Gibson's controversial movie The Passion of the Christ. "This presents a clear and present danger to the survival of the Jewish people worldwide," Rabbi Lerner said. "Yet our Jewish leaders are not challenging these groups and are making alliances with them."

For heavens sake. I've posted a lot of negative pixels about that movie, but even I can tell who our real enemies are. (My main concern about any anti-semitism stirred up by The Passion is the synergistic effect it can have on already existing bigotries. Like Egyptian TV series about the Protocols and blood libels.) Lerner used to be wrong about almost everything, but I had some respect for his attempt to maintain a (albeit far-left) Zionist position as his fellow politicos slid slowly off the deep end. Now that he has been absorbed by the A.N.S.W.E.R. Borg, he is wrong about everything. Sad.

posted by Judith @ 4/25/2004 09:06:17 PM  

Exchange program. This is pretty nifty: The Scholar Rescue Fund.

Ahmed Subhy Mansour was a scholar at Cairo's venerated Al-Azhar University. He studied the history of dictatorship in Islam and the place of death and paradise in the Koran. But some aspect of his research did not go over well with the authorities, and in 1987 he was fired from his position and jailed for two months. Since then he has searched for a place to continue his work and his life, particularly after a number of newspapers accused him of upholding Zionism, a crime punishable by death in Egypt. After 15 years of wandering, last year he finally found a new home — as a research fellow at Harvard University.

The match was made through the Scholar Rescue Fund, started two years ago by the Institute of International Education. Since it was created, the rescue fund has enabled Mansour and 44 other scholars to escape persecution in their home countries, and — just as importantly for many of them — to continue their scholarly work with a position at an American university. At Harvard, for example, Mansour has pushed ahead with the creation of a center for studying and reforming the Wahabi influence on Islamic institutions in America.

. . . During the 1930s and 1940s, the institute's Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars helped bring more than 330 scholars, most of them Jewish, from Nazi Germany to the United States, including such luminaries as philosopher Martin Buber, physicist Enrico Fermi and novelist Thomas Mann. Descendents of several of those earlier scholars, along with families of other Jewish refugees, gathered recently at the Park Avenue apartment of Jewish philanthropist Patti Kenner to raise money to help revive the rescue program. . . .

Charles notes the latest bit of America-hating at the easily mocked DU. I suggest an exchange program; if the DUmmies really hate it here, they can move to Iran and Pakistan, and threatened scholars can come here.

posted by Judith @ 4/25/2004 07:37:48 PM  

Yom yom. YomHa-Zikkaron. Yom Ha-Atzmaut.

posted by Judith @ 4/25/2004 07:19:35 PM