By Rabbi Capers Shmuel Funnye, December 2007, Beth Shalom B'nai Zaken E.H.C., Chicago, IL
Monday December 10, 2007 was a watershed day for the Israelite community in the Unites States. My wife Rabbinit Miriam and I attended a reception at the White House in honor of Chanukah. I was very surprised when I received a call from Jeremy Katz, the White House Deputy-Chief-of-Staff for Jewish affairs. We talked about my attending a private meeting with President Bush. In light of the fact that December was Human Rights Month, President Bush wanted to conduct a panel discussion on religious oppression.
The President wanted to hear stories from different Jewish leaders who had suffered religious oppression in their native countries. After three conversations with Mr. Jeremy Katz, he understood that I was not from Ethiopia. The name of the congregation is Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation. Ethiopia is apart of the name of several congregations of African American Jews. For the Black Jewish community, Ethiopia represents a distinct part of our heritage as Jews, therefore it is apart of our name. He explained that President Bush and his advisors, wanted immigrants to the United States at the private meeting. However, Jeremy invited Miriam and me to the Chanukah reception that took place that evening. About two-hundred and fifty guest attended the affair.
Rabbinit and I stayed about one block from the White House and the weather in Washington, D.C. was fantastic. When we arrived for the reception, we saw Rabbi and Rabbinit Manny Vinas, from New York, along with our beloved brother, Rabbi Gershom Simozu, from Uganda. It was at that time that I learned that my two colleagues, Rabbi Gershom and Rabbi Vinas, were at the White House for the private meeting with President Bush. I must say that I was filled pride to learn that two of my colleagues from the Be’Chol Lashon Think Tank, under the leadership of my good friend Dr. Gary Tobin, had the opportunity to meet personally with the President of the United States.
As invited guests, we had the opportunity to have our pictures taken with President and Mrs. Bush. The evening was truly a memorable one, which Mary and I will never forget.
I do not know if this is the first time that members of the Israelite community, were invited to the White House. Nevertheless, I felt the presence of Chief Rabbis Matthew and Levy, Rabbi Abihu Reuben, and all of the men and women that came before me, as I walked through the doors of the White House.
By Ben Harris, December 31, 2007, JTA
Rabbi Capers Funnye, spiritual leader of Beth Shalom B'nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation in Chicago, wants you to know that he likes gefilte fish - a lot.
"I love it," he told JTA in a recent interview. "I love lox. I love borscht. Some of my congregants don't even know what borscht is."
Funnye's congregants are predominantly African Americans from the South Side of Chicago, so perhaps that's no surprise. But while gefilte fish won't be debuting anytime soon at the kiddush at Beth Shalom, the rabbi is bringing his congregants closer to the broader Chicago Jewish community in ways most of his African American rabbinical colleagues have not yet dared.
"I have made it my point, on a personal level, to involve myself in the Jewish community," Funnye said. "I've worked for Jewish organizations. I've graduated from Jewish institutions. My children went to Jewish day school."
Just a few weeks ago, he attended the White House Chanukah party.
"It's important for me, on a very personal level, for my children and for other Jews, to see Judaism is beyond any racial group," Funnye said.
Black Jewish congregations - most prefer to be called "Hebrews" or "Israelites" - have existed in the United States since the first decades of the 20th century, but they generally have remained apart from the broader Jewish community.
In part, the divide is a legacy of segregation that still separates black and white churches, as well as synagogues. It also stems from what Gary Tobin, president of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, describes as the Jewish community's "obsessively silly" preoccupation with who qualifies as a Jew.
"I think Jews, having been rejected, persecuted and discriminated against all these centuries, have incorporated a kind of self-criticism and overbearing concern with who's in and who's out," Tobin said. "It's kind of an internalized oppression at this point. While it's a legitimate concern, Jews have become obsessed with it. You don't find Catholics, Episcopalians and Muslims spending the amount of time Jews do deciding who's a real Muslim and who's a real Catholic."
The problem is exacerbated by the belief, central to the black Jewish narrative, that the original Jews were Africans. Like other African Americans who have embraced non-Christian faiths, black Jews see in Judaism a means to recapture a heritage denied them by the slave trade - a fact that likely explains their great affinity for the story of Exodus. As a result, some are reluctant to undergo conversion or otherwise take steps that might promote greater acceptance by the white Ashkenazi majority for fear it would undermine their claims to be of Jewish descent.
"We are people that are coming back into the knowledge of who we are," said Moshe Ben Yisrael, the Chicago synagogue's president, who everyone refers to as Elder Moshe. "We are finding out something about our identity. We identify with the God of the Tanach, of Israel."
Funnye is one of the few Jews, black or white, working actively to bridge the racial divide among Jews. He is believed to be the only black rabbi in the country to serve on his local board of rabbis, and he cooperates with a number of Jewish communal institutions, including Tobin's institute, where he is a research associate. He encourages exchanges between his congregation and mainstream synagogues in Chicago's northern suburbs.
Funnye was ordained at the Israelite Rabbinical Academy in New York, where all such black Israelite rabbis are trained. "What's interesting about Capers is that he bridges the world between white, normative mainstream Judaism in the United States," Tobin said. "He's unique, which is unfortunate."
Funnye's acceptance by the broader Jewish community was made possible in part by his willingness to undergo a formal conversion - or "reversion" as he likes to say - with a mixed rabbinic court of Orthodox and Conservative rabbis in 1985.
All newcomers to Beth Shalom are required to do the same, including immersion in a mikvah and, for men, a ritual drawing of blood to symbolize the covenant. For men who are not circumcised, Funnye makes them undergo the full procedure, conducted under anesthetic with the assistance of an Orthodox urologist. He estimates that he has converted 40 members of his congregation.
"If they came here to this congregation under my leadership and under my tutelage, then they had to go through the 'standard halachic precepts' for one to be a Jew," Funnye said. "But that does not diminish our understanding that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were Jews of color."
Though it's been two decades since Funnye first participated formally in a mainstream Jewish organization, the memory still causes him to stretch out in his chair, throw his head back and let out a hearty belly laugh. "I wasn't invited to the first Jewish-African American conclaves," Funnye recalled. "Until one Protestant, very prominent minister, back in the 80s, made an accusation about the Jews being racist and using black people. And one rabbi said, 'Oh no. We have black Jews!'"
Services at Beth Shalom would be familiar to any shul-goer. The full Torah portion is read in Hebrew from a scroll. Prayers are chanted mostly in English from the Artscroll Siddur, a widely used Orthodox prayerbook.
Men and women sit separately, but there is no physical barrier, or mechitzah, between them. After services, Funnye blesses the wine and bread in Hebrew before digging into a lunch of chicken, turkey and spaghetti.
But the congregation also maintains traditions uniquely their own that are deeply colored by the African-American experience. After the Torah service, a Gospel-style choir takes the stage and - accompanied by a CD and live drums and guitar - performs several numbers, including "Lift Every Voice," also known as the "Black National Anthem." Men greet each other by grasping at the elbow and bringing their heads together three times, symbolic of the three forefathers. Some wear pendants with maps of Africa around their necks.
When associate rabbi Joshua Salter - also ordained at the Israelite Rabbinical Academy in New York - stood to "bring the message" at a recent service, he strutted around the stage like a Baptist preacher, delivering his lines in a call-and-response style while congregants cried out "Teach" and "Hallelujah."
When he finished, Salter gave a "shout out" to members of the congregation who were sick.
Later in the afternoon, in one of the synagogue classrooms, Elder Moshe delivered a rambling talk on current events, covering topics as diverse as racial violence in Louisiana and the prospects for reconciliation on the Korean peninsula. His politics, which included harsh words for the Bush administration, were presented as lessons stemming from the Bible.
quot;Our Judaism is not the Judaism of just nodding and waving and going along with the program," Elder Moshe said afterwards. "Our thing is: We are provoked to think. It says we should be a light unto the nations, right? That's the way we look on it. So how can we be a light if we going right along locked in lockstep with a system that is bent on destruction of God's people?"
Funnye was raised in the African Methodist Episcopal church. Many of his congregants also were raised as Christians and tell broadly similar stories of having felt disconnected from their faith until stumbling upon Judaism.
Bruce Carey, a social worker who commutes to Beth Shalom from Gary, Ind., said Christianity never made sense to him as a child but Judaism helped reconnect him with his African identity.
James Brazelton, who "reverted" with his wife and daughter and took on the name Yahath Ben Yahudah, said his spiritual awakening occurred while watching "The Ten Commandments," the classic dramatization of the Exodus story by Cecil B. DeMille. "It overwhelmed me with fear," Brazelton said of the film.
Dinah Levi, who grew up Baptist and had a bat mitzvah at 56, said she's always struck when she meets Ashkenazi Jews who can't believe there are black Jews.
"They're always surprised," Levi said, "and they should not be."
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. Click here for the newest update.
The Abayudaya Executive Committee, the democratically elected community council, requested that Be’chol Lashon serve as the clearinghouse for long range planning and fundraising efforts on behalf of the Jewish community of Uganda. All funds raised for the Abayudaya Community Health and Development Plan have been matched dollar-for-dollar by a challenge grant, as will all additional donations. This inspirational project is becoming a reality through your generosity. To donate,
click here.
African American Art & Culture Complex
762 Fulton @ Webster, San Francisco -- Parking Avaliable
Free Holiday Event
On March 16 from 1-4pm, at the African American Art & Culture Complex in San Francisco, Be’cho Lashon will host a family Purim Festival celebrating the diversity of the Bay Area with costumes, food, games, and holiday traditions from around the world including West African Drumming and Dancing, Chinese Lion Dancing, Capoeira/ Brazilian martial arts and the Pact Multicultural Book Fair. Although a Jewish holiday, the Purim themes of courage and triumph are universal.
Sunday, February 17th, 1pm
JCC Manhattan
The JCC in Manhattan, 334 Amsterdam Ave. at 76th St
Join Romiel Daniel, president of the Indian-Jewish Congregation of USA, as he takes the audience step-by-step through an enactment of the Indian-Jewish wedding. You’ll discover the unique aspects of this life-cycle event which includes special blessings and the Eliyahu Hanavi ceremony, a uniquely Indian Jewish ritual performed on special occasions. The evening will include a display of photographs of Indian synagogues and mikvaot (ritual baths), music, and a festive kosher vegetarian Indian meal. Come in traditional Indian dress, if you like, and don’t miss this exciting opportunity!
$20.00 - Member, $25.00 - Non-Member. Includes a Kosher Indian Vegetarian Meal
For more information, click here.
January 31st, 10am - Noon
Traveling Jewish Theatre, San Francisco
470 Florida Street (between 17th and Mariposa)
Dead Mother or Shirley Not All in Vain by David Greenspan
In this post-modern farce, Harold got away with impersonating his dead mother once and now he has to do it again, and again, and again. But in the hands of celebrated New York playwright David Greenspan, this comic situation runs through bad marriage, bad acting, Greek myth, and the circles of Hell, bending genders and theatrical reality along the way in a savagely funny, sharp and haunting 90 minute romp through the confusing layers of identity and family. Directed by Tony Kelly. A Co-Production with Thick Description.
Contact Jennifer Terk directly at 415-522-0786 x306 for a discounted price of $15!
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
December 19, 2007, The Economist
Numbers mean power, which is why counting people is so controversial
“GO, NUMBER Israel from Beersheba even to Dan; and bring the number of them to me, that I may know it.” It was not the first census described in the Bible, nor the last, nor yet the most renowned. But for reasons that are obscure, King David's order to Joab, the commander of his army, went against God's will and both men knew it. The count was carried out all the same, and was followed by a heavy punishment: 70,000 Israelites died of the plague before the Lord relented and accepted burnt offerings as a token of David's repentance.
Taking a census thus came to be known as the sin of David, and was long regarded as best avoided. In 1634 Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony estimated the local population rather than counting it exactly, telling a correspondent: “David's example stickes somewhat with us.” And when a Census Bill was debated in Britain in 1753, Matthew Ridley, the member of Parliament (MP) for Newcastle, gave a speech saying that there was among the people “such a violent spirit of opposition to this Bill, that if it be passed into a law, there is a great reason to fear, they will in many places oppose the execution of it in riotous manner.”
But nobody needed David's dreadful example to persuade them that censuses were a bad idea. From the point of view of those being enumerated, nothing good could come of being counted. The usual reasons for wanting the numbers were war and taxes. From the sovereign's point of view, such information was crucial: the decision to go to war could be taken only once it was known how many men could be conscripted and how much money levied. So the results were highly sensitive, and an enemy country's numbers would be useful when deciding whether attacking it was prudent, and conquering it worthwhile. The results of a Swedish census in the mid-1700s appear to have been made a state secret because of such fears.
But at the same time men were becoming enamoured of numbers and taking to counting as a way of answering pressing questions of their own. Following the London plague of 1603, weekly Bills of Mortality began to be published, listing all the deaths in the city and, from 1629, their causes. According to John Graunt, whose 90-page book interpreting and drawing conclusions from these bills is generally regarded as the earliest statistical analysis, they were used by the rich to “judge of the necessity of their removall” and by tradesmen to “conjecture what doings they were like to have”. And in 1731 Benjamin Franklin published in the Pennsylvania Gazette, the newspaper he edited at the time, an account of all the ships that entered and left the big northern colonial ports, together with their destinations, so that the reader could “Make some Judgment of the different Share each Colony possesses of the several Branches of Trade”.
It was revolution that renewed the impetus for rulers to count their people. The American war of independence brought a new nation into being, and it was not only one that was made up of separate states, each keen to get full credit for its relative size, but also one whose population was on the move. In order to decide how many representatives each state should send to the new Congress, there was only one thing for it: their populations would have to be counted, and that count would have to be repeated regularly.
America's first census was carried out in 1790, and it was groundbreaking in many ways. It was the first to be mandated in any country's constitution. It was also the occasion for America's first presidential veto, exercised by George Washington on the advice of Thomas Jefferson, whom he had asked to examine the proposals for sharing out congressional seats between the states. Jefferson—a man so fond of enumeration that he once wrote to a friend that he had “ten and one-half grandchildren, and two and three-fourths great-grandchildren”, and that “these fractions will ere long become units”—criticised them for being unclear about how this “apportionment” was to be carried out. He advised Washington that a completely unambiguous method should be chosen and enshrined in legislation.
They want to know what?
The fact that this thriving new nation counted its citizens without provoking divine retribution may have given courage to other Christian countries. Over the following decade Denmark, England, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden all instigated regular censuses of their own.
People started finding the sorts of patterns in the resulting data—life expectancies, crime rates, causes of death, and the mix of religions and races—that are now part of our familiar mental furniture. In the 1800s, for instance, two French statisticians, André Michel Guerry and Adolphe Quetelet, analysed the tables of crimes against individuals and property that had recently started to be published. They were astonished by the hitherto-unsuspected regularities they found. Guerry was particularly struck by the fact that the method by which someone committed suicide could be predicted from his age. The author of an English commentary on his work described his findings thus: “The young hang themselves; arrived at a maturer age they usually blow out their brains; as they get old they recur again to the juvenile practice of suspension.”
Quetelet was equally amazed by the regularity with which the various types of crime were committed. “We can enumerate in advance”, he wrote, “how many individuals will stain their hands in the blood of their fellows, how many will be forgers, how many will be poisoners, almost as we can enumerate in advance the births and deaths that should occur.” Such regularities, he claimed, left no role for free will in human affairs. “Society prepares the crime”, he wrote in 1832, “and the guilty person is only the instrument.”
Opposition to this line of thinking came from Charles Dickens, who loathed all arguments based on numbers and averages, charging that they were used to legitimise indifference to other people's suffering. His strongest broadside against those who thought that counting people was a good way to answer social questions came in his novel “Hard Times”. When Tom, the hard-hearted Gradgrind's son, is found to be a thief, he uses his father's statistical determinism to shrug off responsibility. “So many people, out of so many, will be dishonest. I have heard you talk, a hundred times, of its being a law. How can I help laws? You have comforted others with such things, father. Comfort yourself!”
The future, though, belonged to those like another ardent social reformer, Dickens's near-contemporary, Florence Nightingale (see article). Best remembered for nursing wounded soldiers in the Crimean war, her sanitary reforms were based on meticulous records of hospital admissions, illnesses, treatments and outcomes. Rather than painting moving pen-portraits of soldiers left to rot on stinking, louse-ridden pallets in a hospital built on an open sewer—as Dickens would no doubt have done—she used death rates to campaign, successfully, for change.
Nowadays, a census is part of the standard equipment of a functioning state. In 1995 the UN called for all member nations to hold a census in the following decade. Yet counting people remains a sensitive business for two reasons, connected with the ambiguous character of government. Where government is oppressive, people want to keep out of censuses, lest information they provide is misused. Where government provides, people want to be in censuses, and to boost their numbers, in order to claim a larger share of the goodies.
Include me out
History offers good reason for worrying about the misuse of information. The Nazis used population records to round up Jews into concentration camps. As a result, Germans are still prickly about being counted. When in the 1980s their government added new questions to the census, there was a public outcry and the constitutional court struck it down on the grounds that it conflicted with a “fundamental right to informational self-determination”. Although the country is planning a census in 2011—its first since reunification—it will not be a full count, but only a sample. Respondents' surnames will be deleted as soon as possible and all data that could identify an individual will be erased once statisticians have finished with them. Questions on race and religion will not be included.
Fears that the data might be used for purposes other than the declared ones may have undermined China's most recent census in 2000. This involved 6m enumerators visiting around 350m households in just ten days. They asked some rather personal questions, such as “How much did you pay for your home?” and “How often do you wash?” But it was the standard ones about the number of residents in each household and their sex and age that provoked the most anxiety. The government wanted to find out whether the country's gender imbalance was primarily due to the abortion and infanticide of females, or whether many of the missing girls were in fact alive and being concealed. To encourage parents to register over-quota children, it reduced the penalties for anyone found to have flouted the one-child law. Some also contend that large numbers of peasants who migrated illegally to the big cities will have hidden from the enumerators, and that there may be as many as 100m uncounted Chinese on top of the 1.3 billion the census found.
It isn't just oppressive governments that misuse information. In early 2007 researchers found proof of what had long been suspected: that during the second world war the American census bureau had played a part in the internment of Japanese-Americans by passing some of their names and addresses to the secret service.
Other people's money
In autocracies, people try to keep out of censuses. In democracies, by contrast, they want to be in them, for censuses mean numbers, and numbers mean money and power. The American census, for example, determines how around $200 billion a year of federal funds is shared out, for everything from education and welfare to highways. Such rich pickings mean that censuses are well worth fighting over.
Although Jefferson ensured the American states could not squabble about the formula used for apportionment, he could not have predicted the partisan rows about how to deal with undercounting. No census counts everyone, and the uncounted are not drawn uniformly from all walks of life. The poor, the homeless, immigrants and ethnic minorities are missed more often. The 1990 census is thought to have missed one native American in eight.
The statisticians' solution is to follow each census with a quality check, surveying representative areas to create a picture of those overlooked in the full count and correcting the figures accordingly. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in light of the profile of those most likely to be missed, Democrats find the intellectual arguments in favour of such adjustment more compelling than Republicans do. Before the census in 2000, the Supreme Court ruled that sampling-adjusted figures could not be used for apportioning congressional seats. But the row over whether they should be used to share out cash raged until 2001, when the census bureau finally declared the raw figures good enough to stand unaltered.
In Britain the 2001 census was corrected using such sampling techniques, but some areas still complain that they are being undercounted. In the decade between censuses, the national statistical office updates the figures with estimates of external and internal migration. Some towns with lots of foreigners are convinced that large chunks of their population are being overlooked, losing them millions of pounds of government money. The MP for Slough, a town to the west of London full of Poles, poetically told Parliament in January that the increasing “amount of shit that goes through our local sewers” was evidence that her constituency was being sold short.
Some groups are begging to be counted because they hope to prove their importance and increase their influence with government. Church leaders in Britain were gratified when the 2001 census, the first to ask about religion, found that 70% of the population identified themselves as Christian. They reckoned this was a large enough majority to justify their religion's special place in state-run education. Whether the figures bear the weight that has been put on them is, however, questionable. Church attendance figures suggest that few of these self-identified Christians attend services more than once a year, or indeed at all. And the irreverence with which some respondents treated the question can be judged by the 390,000 people—0.7% of the population—who answered it by claiming to be Jedi.
Some groups are begging to be counted to prove their importance and increase their influence
Dashed hopes of gaining a higher profile caused despondency among gay and lesbian groups when it was decided not to add a question about sexual orientation to Britain's next census, to be held in 2011. Government statisticians were keen, but they were stymied by the difficulties of phrasing a question that would neither offend people nor leave them in the dark about what was being asked. They were mindful of the reaction to a question on self-perceived sexual identity in a recent survey by the Metropolitan Police. The most common query it provoked from respondents was: “What's heterosexuality?”
That British gays wanted to stand up and be counted says much for national tolerance. It is hard to imagine the same happening in Nigeria. There, the dispute is about who will get the oil money. The country has not had an uncontested census since gaining its independence in 1960. Civil war and poorly trained enumerators have been formidable obstacles to a reliable count. The most recent census, in 2006, omitted questions about religion and tribe following demands from leaders in the largely Muslim north. Christians in the south, who believe they have been undercounted in the past, threatened a boycott unless the questions were asked. The census found 140m people: 75m in the oil-poor north and 65m in the revenue-poor south. Politicians in the north endorsed the figures; those in the south did not.
In India, the arguments are not about money, but about a different sort of resource: the jobs and university places handed out under the government's affirmative-action programme. Many dalits, or untouchables, have tried to escape the discrimination they face in Hinduism by converting to Christianity or Islam. But this means no longer being eligible for the programme—a restriction on religious freedom, say some, and indeed court challenges are wending their way through the system. Rather than being neutral in this dispute, the census form took sides by allowing respondents to indicate their caste as dalit only if they claimed to be Hindu, Sikh or Buddhist.
The shakier the state, the fiercer the rows about censuses, for numbers affect how power is distributed. In Iraqi Kurdistan, for instance, a census due to happen in 2007 was delayed. It was intended to correct figures distorted by Saddam Hussein's “Arabisation” programme, which forced many Kurds to leave and others to declare themselves Arab. If and when an Iraqi census happens, it will not only give a truer picture of the ethnic mix in a contested region, but will also have consequences for billions of dollars in oil revenues.
Lebanon has not held a census since 1932, when it counted the number of adherents to various religions in order to share out power under a system known as confessionalism. Since that time its demography has changed and the politically favoured Christians are now believed to be in a minority. Plenty of powerful people are keen to keep that quiet, so the prospects for a new official count are dim.
Counting can be even more dangerous than being counted. In 1936 Stalin told his officials that the following year's census would find a total population of 170m—a figure that took no account of his slaughter of millions in famines and purges. But the enumerators found only 162m people, and also revealed other unwelcome facts, including that nearly half the population of this avowedly atheist country was religious. So Stalin denounced the count as a “wrecker's census” and had the census takers either imprisoned or shot. A new count in 1939 came up with a similar total, but this time officials wisely classified the results and gave Stalin his figure of 170m.
That Stalin insisted on this charade is a backhanded testimony to the way counting introduces people to themselves. “The interest and significance of the census for the community lie in this,” wrote Leo Tolstoy of the Moscow census of 1882: “that it furnishes it with a mirror into which, willy nilly, the whole community, and each one of us, gaze.” The faces that look back can surprise us still.
By Amir Mizroch, December 25, 2007, Jerusalem Post
The Jewish Agency is working hard to bring bring all of Iran's remaining 25,000 Jews to Israel, an official told The Jerusalem Post as 40 immigrants landed at Ben-Gurion International Airport on Tuesday afternoon.
Tuesday's arrival is the largest-ever single group of Iranian immigrants brought by the agency to start new lives in a country that their now-former president has vowed to wipe off the face of the earth.
The Jews of Iran were "starting to feel the earth burn beneath their feet" in a growing atmosphere of anti-Semitism, said Yossi Shraga, director of Middle East immigration at the Jewish Agency.
The media has not been allowed to publish the name of a third country from which the immigrants arrived at the airport, nor the delicate and complex process by which the group was gathered and processed for aliya.
Nor have their names been released for publication.
Many Iranian Jews left Iran in a steady stream after the fall of the Shah in 1979. Before that year's Islamic Revolution, there were approximately 125,000 Jews in Iran. Many of the well-to-do Iranian Jews who left Iran settled in Los Angeles, and a small percentage came to Israel. But in 2006, a total of 65 Iranian Jews came to Israel. This year, 200 new immigrants have arrived, not including Tuesday's group.
An estimated 25,000 Jews remain in Iran, most of them living in Teheran, Isfahan and Shiraz. Teheran has the largest Jewish community, comprising some 15,000 people. Each Iranian oleh will receive a $10,000 gift from the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews upon entering Israel, in addition to the usual basket of immigration benefits provided by the Immigrant Absorption Ministry. The money, part of a campaign launched by IFCJ President Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, will be given to each individual, and was, for some of the new immigrants, a deciding factor in making the decision to leave Iran and settle in Israel.
Iranians who choose to leave Iran can appoint legal custodians to manage their assets, but if they don't, their assets are transferred to the state. However, according to sources familiar with their immigration process, the 40 new arrivals - 10 families and three singles, mostly from a middle to lower-middle financial bracket - have not appointed any such custodian. Some will lose those assets entirely.
The new immigrants were taken to an absorption center Beersheba, where they will stay until they are ready to move out. Most of them are "traditional" when it comes to religious observance and keep kosher. "The Jewish Agency has spared no expense in bringing the Jews of Iran and will work to bring the rest of them to Israel. The atmosphere in Iran has done the work for us. Anti-Semitism in Iran is growing from day to day. This is in total contrast to what the leaders of the Iranian Jewish community are saying. Jewish schools have been shut down; a ban has been ordered on the learning and teaching of the Hebrew language," Shraga told the Post. "This is not the place where they want to live. Through the Jewish Agency, I hope we can bring them all."
Several families waiting in the arrival hall of the airport for the immigrants hotly contested Shraga's statement. They claimed there was no ban on studying Hebrew in Iran, and that Jewish schools have not been forced to shut down.
The Post also contacted the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which said that there has been no discernible rise in anti-Semitism in the Iranian media, although they could not comment on what was happening on the ground in the Islamic Republic.
While Israel and Iran have no diplomatic relations, the Iranian authorities have not tried to stop Iranian Jews from leaving the country. According to well-informed sources, imposing a travel or immigration ban on Iran's remaining 25,000 Jews would not be in the interests of the Iranian government, which is trying to show the rest of the world that despite its problems with the US and Israel, there is a humane regime in Teheran that treats its Jewish minority well.
Similarly, the Iranian authorities, fully cognizant of the latest group of 40 Jewish emigrants, can point to the relatively small number and say that the vast majority of the country's Jews have chosen to stay. However, not all of the Iranian expat community or those still residing in Iran are happy about the slow trickle of Jews to Israel; some say this phenomenon endangers Jews who choose to stay in Iran.
An Iranian Jew who immigrated to Israel six years ago, however, said that families continued to communicate with each other by phone without too many problems. From Israel, one can dial directly to Iran, and from within Iran, many families are using VoIP technology to communicate with their relatives in Israel via the Internet.
The immigrant, who preferred to remain anonymous, said Persian Jews in Israel and in Iran didn't converse in Hebrew over the phone. He added that he believed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was serious when he said Israel would be wiped off the map, and that most Iranian Jews also probably thought he was serious, but that neither he nor they expected this threat to become a reality. "Ahmadinejad is a puppet. There are more extreme people in the regime, and they are capable of anything. They want power, and they're working to get nuclear power, but Ahmadinejad doesn't scare us - we believe him, but he doesn't scare us. They are a cunning regime. They show the world that they are anti-American and anti-Israeli because they profit politically from it," he said.
"Ninety percent of the Iranian people, even though they are exposed to anti-Israel incitement and propaganda, have no real problem with Israel and the Jews," the Iranian-Israeli said.
Shraga told the Post that the Jewish Agency, after a series of internal deliberations, had decided to publicize Tuesday's arrival in the hope that it would help other Iranian Jews to make aliya. He would not, however, go into details on how the actual decision was taken.
After several hours of delay while the new immigrants were processed at the airport by the Immigrant Absorption Ministry and handed their immigrant IDs and money, the group made its way through the gates of the arrival hall at the airport to the dozens of ululating and ecstatic family members who awaited their arrival.
Personal moments of hugs and kisses, some 20 years in the making, were shattered by the flashes of dozens of press cameras. One young lady waited for her grandfather to be reunited with her father in front of all the cameras, instead of rushing over to them. Sobbing, she said, "I am not one for the cameras."
Once the camera crews moved on to the next family of immigrants, the young lady moved to her grandfather, took him by the arm away from the commotion, hugged him and sobbed in his arms. A woman by the name of Ala, who was waiting to greet family, lamented the lengthy wait imposed by the absorption process at the airport.
"After 20 years, I have to wait three hours. When I made aliya 20 years ago, they let us off the plane straight away and let us kiss our families," she told the Post.
Avraham Dayan, who had waited 11 years to be reunited with his son, finally ran toward him, embraced his head and said the Shema Israel. With tears in his eyes and a trembling voice, Dayan told the Post that he hadn't eaten or drunk anything all day. Avraham, who made aliya 11 years ago, was in jail in Iran until 14 years ago. During the Iran-Iraq war, the young Jews from his town did not want to join the army, and many of them fled the country.
"I didn't know that the authorities were listening to my phone, and they came to arrest me. They said I was a friend of [Menachem] Begin, that I was a Zionist, and they threw me in jail. I bribed my way out of jail, bribed my way to an Iranian passport and left Iran," he said.
It took Dayan's son 11 years to leave because his passport had been confiscated when he, too, had refused to serve in the Iranian army. Dayan said his son had then successfully bribed his way to a new passport and had finally been able to leave Iran.
According to Jewish Agency officials, all Iranian passports read: "The bearer of this passport cannot travel to occupied Palestine." An agency official told the Post that the new immigrants were still in possession of these.
The possibility that the Iranian regime may have also tried to plant spies among the immigrant group has been discounted by authorities, sources say, as each member of the group was known and has undergone a vetting process. "It's not such a naïve operation," a source told the Post.
By Tal Abbady, December 7, 2007, Sen-Sentinal.com
Jewish community leaders from Mexico, Central and South America convened in Hollywood on Thursday for a four-day workshop to discuss the concerns of Latin America's 450,000 Jews.
Organized by the Latino and Latin American Institute of the American Jewish Committee, the private workshop at the Crowne Plaza Hotel is designed to provide participants with ways to strengthen their leadership and political influence in countries where criticism of Israel's policies often runs high.
The event comes on the heels of a Dec. 2 police raid of the Colegio Hebraica, a private Jewish school in Caracas, Venezuela. Authorities were allegedly looking for weapons but found none. A similar raid took place in 2004, alarming a community that sees itself threatened by President Hugo Chavez' close ties with Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The forum also follows Iran's successful bid in recent months to reopen embassies in Chile and Nicaragua, of concern to Jewish leaders wary of Iran's ties to Latin America since the 1994 bombing of the Asociacin Mutual Israelita Argentina (or AMIA) building in Buenos Aires. The attack killed 85 people and injured hundreds.
In October 2006, prosecutors formally charged the Iranian government and the group Hezbollah with carrying out the attack. Sunday, the lead prosecutor in the case, Alberto Nisman, will address the Hollywood workshop.
Participating countries include Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Ecuador and Brazil.
Dina Siegel Vann, director of the AJC's Latino and Latin American Institute, said participants will share strategies to build up their political lobbies in countries where political interest groups often determine what laws get passed. The purpose, Siegel Vann said, is to help unify Latin America's Jewish communities and create a strategic vision for the region.
"These communities are small minorities in their societies, but they are influential," she said. "Many of them exist in democracies with profound gaps. We want to teach them to be at the table when decisions are made."
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Abstract (Document Summary)
The forum also follows Iran's successful bid in recent months to reopen embassies in Chile and Nicaragua, of concern to Jewish leaders wary of Iran's ties to Latin America since the 1994 bombing of the Asociacin Mutual Israelita Argentina (or AMIA) building in Buenos Aires. The attack killed 85 people and injured hundreds.
By Jennifer Siegel, December 19, 2007, Forward.com
A rural community described as “far away from everywhere,” Cairo, Ill., boasts 40 churches, 40 blocks and fewer than 4,000 people — and as of earlier this month, it also has 55 brand-new Jews.
Dozens of Cairo’s residents — all African American and ranging from toddler to senior citizen — visited a mikveh in Memphis, Tenn., on December 9 and took the plunge into conversion. It was the culmination of an 18-month spiritual journey that has brought a number of Reform and Conservative Jews into common cause with a group of spiritual seekers from a town that is predominantly black and poor.
“It was incredible. Who would have thought that rabbis in St. Louis and Memphis would increase the number of Jews of color in America appreciably?” said Rabbi Micah Greenstein, who attended the conversion ceremonies and serves as the spiritual leader of Temple Israel, a Reform congregation in Memphis. “Judaism saved my life,” one of the converts told Greenstein. “That’s the first time in 100 converts that I’ve ever heard that,” the rabbi said.
The conversion odyssey, which was first reported on by Memphis’s Commercial Appeal newspaper, began in Cairo roughly four or five years ago, when a now 39-year-old computer repairman named Phillip Matthews grew disaffected with the Baptist faith in which he was raised and became interested in Judaism. Described as having a magnetic personality by several rabbis involved in the Cairo conversions, Matthews quickly found himself at the center of a study circle that involved an extended network of friends and family — including, by his estimation, 17 or 18 relatives, among them his mother, siblings, nieces and nephews — who ultimately converted to Judaism along with him.
“[Judaism is the] oldest and most reliable religion on the planet,” Matthews said in an interview with the Forward, explaining his initial interest. “We were the type of people, we didn’t just want to read what was in the book; we wanted to live out what we were reading.”
By sometime in 2006, Matthews had begun “teaching Torah study” and decided, along with more than 30 others, that he wanted to study toward conversion, according to Rabbi Lynn Goldstein, a Reform rabbi in St. Louis who mentored the Cairo group extensively.
“I got a phone call from Phillip, and he basically said, ‘I’d like to study to convert to Judaism,’” Goldstein recalled. “[They] came to this as a group, as a whole group of people who had been meeting for many years, studying the Torah, and observing the Sabbath.”
Although Cairo is roughly 170 miles south of St. Louis — a trip that takes two-and-a-half to three hours by car — Goldstein was the closest rabbi who volunteered to work with Matthews’s group. And so, the Cairo cohort began a series of arduous weekly journeys to study with her up in St. Louis, where the group members sat on folding chairs filling nearly every available space in her living room. At first, the caravan of adults and children made weekly treks up to St. Louis to study with Goldstein for two to three hours Wednesday evenings. Later, the group switched to meeting every other Sunday, all day.
“By the grace of the father in heaven, we had no accidents going up and down the highway for 18 months,” Matthews said of the long journeys.
Ordained at New York’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 1987, Goldstein took the group on a number of field trips as part of the training, including to a kosher butcher and the St. Louis Holocaust museum. During her living room teaching sessions, young and old studied together, with her two young daughters leading separate educational games in the basement for the younger children. In total, the cohort of 55 converts included 11 children under the age of 13.
In Goldstein’s view, a turning point for the group came last April, when congregants at the synagogue where she maintains a part-time pulpit, Reform Congregation Beth Jacob in Carbondale, Ill., welcomed the members at a community service and the Cairo folks surprised everyone with a gospel-style arrangement of the Shema prayer.
“[Phillip said,] ‘You’re going to have to trust me,’ and then they started bringing in a keyboard and all sorts of stuff,” Goldstein recalled. “Everybody had their arms on each other and was swaying.”
Both Goldstein and Matthews said that members of the Cairo group felt genuinely embraced by members of the Carbondale congregation, many of whom are professors and professionals who work at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
It was the mikveh ceremony itself that became the group’s final hurdle. While Goldstein recruited a number of Reform and Conservative rabbis in St. Louis to serve on the three-member batei din, or religious courts, needed to approve the candidates as ready for conversion, she was not able to arrange for the group to use St. Louis’s community mikveh, for reasons she declined to explain. Ultimately, the conversions were held at the Conservative Beth Sholom Synagogue in Memphis.
In Matthews’s view, rising to meet challenges is part of the essential message of Judaism.
“When you read the Bible, when you read the Old Testament, and you see all the things that the ancestors of old endured, you see what it is to have endured,” Matthews said.
Mordecai Miller, a Conservative St. Louis rabbi who helped authorize a number of the conversations, said he was impressed by the converts’ sincerity. “Did they have a halachic consciousness?” he asked. “The truth is that they do. And sadly, there are many Jews who do not have that sense of being commanded.”
On the weekends when there are no services or when the group can’t make the hour trek to Carbondale, Matthews said everyone observes the Sabbath together in Cairo. And as time goes on, he is hopeful that more members of his community will turn toward Judaism.
“Our job as a newly converted Jew is to show the people that there is a better way of life,” Matthews said. “Right now, we’re just taking a simple message to our people: If you’re seeking, what you’re seeking for you’ll find, and if you’re looking for truth, I believe in my heart that Judaism is a better option.”
If, at times, Matthews’s spiritual rhetoric still seems somewhat borrowed from Christianity, Goldstein argues that it is all part of the journey.
“Doesn’t everyone who comes to Judaism have their own understanding of what it is?” she said.
By Shoshana Kordova, January 2008, World Jewish Digest
Monique Apatow, a black Jewish woman, was walking down a street in her Jerusalem neighborhood of Givat Shaul with an Ethiopian friend and their children last year when a group of ultra-Orthodox boys threw stones at the two families and shouted "kushi!" - a word that in Israel bears the connotation of "a racist white American calling an African-American a nigger," as Apatow puts it.
Apatow, 38, contacted the mother of one of the boys to let her know what happened and warned that she planned to defend herself in the future. But for all her assertiveness, Apatow has stopped walking down the street where the attack took place and was planning to move to a different neighborhood with her two daughters, ages 10 and 3.
"I'm used to standing out, I stand out everywhere I go," says Apatow, who moved from California to Jerusalem in 2002 with her now ex-husband. "People have an idea of what a Jew is supposed to look like." And to judge by the reactions she gets, Apatow does not fit that preconceived notion.
In many ways, Apatow's external appearance precisely fits the traditional description of the modestly dressed Orthodox woman. On a sweltering summer day, she is wearing a purple and white long-skirted, long-sleeved ensemble and matching head scarf. But if the epithets - and more weighty objects - thrown at Apatow are any indication, some of her neighbors appear to consider skin color more significant than religious practice.
Apatow is hardly the only black American Jew to have moved from the goldeneh medinah to the land of milk and honey. Some of them - like Apatow, who was raised in New York in a Jamaican Jewish family that traces its roots to Ethiopia - have identified as Jews their entire lives, while others have converted to Judaism. Some have experienced blatant racism at the hands of their fellow Jews or had their Jewishness repeatedly questioned, while others are rarely, if ever, compelled to confront intolerance. But all fail, to varying degrees, to conform to the stereotypical Jewish look that to a large extent continues to pervade popular opinion.
"To be Jewish and not white is to fall outside the notion of who is a Jew held by most Americans, Jewish or not," writes Gary Tobin, Diane Tobin and Scott Rubin in their 2005 book "In Every Tongue: The Racial & Ethnic Diversity of the Jewish People."
But all is not as monochromatic as it may appear. In some cases, "black" and "Jewish" are not the signifiers of two distinct and occasionally clashing groups, but rather two components of a single person's identity.
African Americans make up approximately 1 percent of the American Jewish population, while Asians, Latinos, other non-whites and those of mixed race make up an estimated 6.3 percent of the population, according to "In Every Tongue." The numbers are based on a 2000 National Jewish Population Survey and a 2002 study by the Institute for Jewish & Community Research in San Francisco, which Gary Tobin heads.
In Israel, where the ingathering of the exiles is a daily occurrence, about 40 percent of the Jewish population is either "nonwhite" or comes from the Middle East, North Africa or the Spanish-Portuguese exile, says Tobin - including the 154,000 Ethiopians who comprise 2.7 percent of Israel's Jewish population, according to 2005 data from Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics. "Jews, both here in North America but also in Israel, are far more diverse than people recognize," Tobin says.
All the same, black American Jews who move to Israel may find themselves facing a double rejection - first being marginalized and then ignored.
"Throughout U.S. history, 'us' has been defined against blacks," says Aziza Khazoom, an assistant professor in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's sociology department. "Black has been defined as the main 'other.'"
Some blacks in Israel may be relieved to move to a society where that rift no longer plays a central role. However, they may find that they have become an overlooked element of the Jewish community once they move to Israel, where, says Khazoom, "black Jews are sort of invisible." She says that's because instead of being split along a black-white line as in the United States, Israeli society is divided along an East-West line in which Easterners - Arabs and, to a lesser extent, Jews of Mideastern or North African descent - become the primary "other," leaving blacks to fall between the cracks.
For instance, while the word "minorities" is often used in the United States as a euphemism for blacks and Hispanics, the Hebrew equivalent in Israel refers to the Arabs who live in the country. The political discourse in both countries is also remarkably similar: in both cases, advocates for minority rights regularly complain of institutional racism and a paucity of opportunities for high-level achievement.
In the Jewish world, the Mizrahi-Ashkenazi fault line, which was most strongly felt when large waves of Mizrahi immigrants poured into the country in the early days of the state, continues to run beneath Israeli society. America's inner cities are Israel's "development towns," code words for largely Mizrahi low-income areas. And while Americans are used to thinking of race primarily along black-white lines, in Israel "racist" is an imprecation regularly hurled by Arabs at Jews and by Mizrahim at Ashkenazim.
Some African-American Jews say they prefer being black in an Israel that tends to ignore blackness to being black in an America saddled with a history of slavery and burdened by the racial divide.
"Here it's not like in America," says Shifra, the daughter of Caribbean immigrants to Chicago, where she grew up in a devout evangelical home and underwent an Orthodox conversion after college. "In America I felt a little embarrassed," she says from her Jerusalem living room as she alternates between holding one of her 3-year-old twin girls and her 1-year-old son. "When someone sees me [there], they see me as a black person, not as a Jew. If they see me walking with a siddur [prayer book], they're like, 'What's she doing?' I felt self-conscious."
But that doesn't mean it's been smooth sailing in the Holy Land. The 35-yearold Shifra (who insists that her real name not be used because of the sensitivity of the subject) has had to contend with wide-eyed looks of shock when her white American husband - a scribe in a dark beard and black velvet kippa - brings home people who were not expecting to encounter a black wife and three mixed-race children. Shifra and her husband have also come up against an unforeseen difficulty: they are having a hard time finding books for the kids that feature both Jewish content and illustrations of characters who aren't all white. But most of all, Shifra fears that her children could be ostracized in school for the color of their skin.
For all the challenges that some non-white Jews in Israel face, others say they have encountered nothing but goodwill.
Ahuvah Gray, who gives her age as "over 50," is the author of My Sister the Jew, an account of her transition from Baptist minister in Chicago and Los Angeles to Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. Speaking from a chair stationed below the plain wooden Star of David hanging on the white wall of her living room, Gray, who is black, says the worst prejudice she has seen in her world travels - first as a Christian and then as a Jew - has been in the United States. However, Gray says she has not had a single negative race-related experience in the 13 years she has been living in Israel.
Although Shifra and Gray see black-white relations as being easier to deal with in Israel than the United States, Asian Jews sometimes face difficulties in Israel that wouldn't necessarily have cropped up elsewhere. For instance, some people with Asian features are regularly mistaken for foreign workers living in Israel on a temporary basis.
Whether or not non-white Jews are subjected to rude comments or curious stares, their very presence may help change the way those around them think about what Jews look like.
Shifra's husband, for instance, says he feels privileged to be widening "people's conceptions of what's Jewish," just by exposing them to his own family.
Apatow, meanwhile, tells of an Israeli cabdriver she provided with an impromptu education. "He saw my hair is covered and I look tzanua [modest], and he said, 'You're Jewish? And your mother?'" recounts Apatow. "And I said, 'You know, there are Jews who look like me in the world.' He said, 'I'm sorry, I didn't know.'" "I don't even know what to call it - it's ignorance, it's arrogance, it's lack of education, it's something really big missing in the worldview of Jewry," says Apatow. "Sometimes I look at it like maybe it's my job to teach them - we are the pioneers."
By Heather Subba, January 2008, InterfaithFamily.com
My husband and I fell in love in the spring of 2004. We were taking quick cover from an outburst of afternoon rain on Devon Avenue in Chicago. It is ironic that we fell in love on this particular street. Devon Avenue mixes our heritages and demonstrates the inevitability of change in a fast-paced modern world. My father grew up on Devon when it was largely a Jewish Orthodox community. Today, most Jewish-owned businesses have been replaced by Indian-owned shops and restaurants.
Whenever I go to Devon, I remember falling in love with my husband. I also feel strangely at home in one place where both of our cultures meet. This is where my husband introduced me to dosas, giant Indian style crepes filled with potatoes and exotic spices. In return for his introduction to the dosa, I took my husband to one of the few remaining Jewish-owned bakeries on the street. There, we buy mildly sweet mandel bread dipped in kosher chocolate by the pound. The spicy aftertaste of a delicious dosa swiftly fades with one bite into a chewy piece of mandel bread.
While we could not negotiate the uncontrollable nature of love, we could communicate through food. Food is an integral part of both Jewish and Nepali culture. For me, the thought of potato latkes frying in a pool of oil or a salty mound of gefilte fish accompanied by spicy red horseradish conjures up a million memories. For my husband, the sweet fragrance of Darjeeling tea brewing and fluffy white grains of basmati rice steaming does the same thing. We can only understand the depth and meaning of one another's memories by sharing the myriad tastes each of our cultures has to offer. Sharing these experiences also leads us to create new shared tastes and memories.
Shortly after I started dating my husband, he invited me over to his apartment. At the time, his roommate's mother was visiting from Bangladesh. She dutifully cooked each meal for my husband and his roommate every day. I remember how the smell of Indian cooking overwhelmed me as I walked to his apartment. It was pungent enough to transport me to the streets of India, where I imagined the sun hovering over millions of people all breathing in the mixture of turmeric, curry and pepper.
After an awkward introduction at his apartment, in which I felt like a foreigner, my eyes scanned the luxurious spread. There were multi-colored morsels of saffron briyani rice, tender bits of curry lamb, yellow dusted turmeric grilled chicken, soft naan bread the length of one of my outstretched arms, and stir-fried golden potatoes mixed with bits of black spices I had never seen or smelled before. Although daunting, I managed to finish everything on my plate. Afterward, we all went to a movie and I remember smelling a strong and distinctly Indian odor in our row at the theater. I felt strange to discover that it was me who smelled differently. Curry attacked every one of my pores, emerging for everyone around me to discover.
That evening marked the beginning of my journey to understand my husband and his culture. To impress him and to signal that I was serious about learning his culture, I bought the most important book of our relationship. It was not about the history of Nepal or a study of his language. It is a 1,000-page Indian/Nepalese cookbook. I was determined to master how to prepare the dishes that reminded him of home.
Learning how to cook Indian and Nepali food took a great amount of effort and a serious investment in spices. I made frequent trips to Devon Avenue to shop exclusively in Indian grocery stores. While I thought I was taking a journey to discover my husband, I also learned a great deal about myself. I had to adjust to a smell in my house that seemed foreign to my own upbringing. I also sacrificed some of the dishes I was raised with to prepare a new style of dishes for my husband. Yet, as I was discovering the sweet and sour essence of mango pickle relish on my basmati rice, my husband was traveling to the suburbs of Chicago to begin his own culinary journey.
As the autumn leaves fell during the first September of our relationship, he feasted on granny's matzah ball soup. It pleasantly warmed his stomach with comfort. Unfortunately, his taste buds rejected the tough texture of meaty brisket. He also found sweet noodle kugel to be an oddity as a side dish. He could only commit to eating it as a dessert. As the snow dusted the slippery streets of Chicago in December, he feasted on latkes, which were a little too heavily fried for his taste. As the flowers bloomed again in the spring, my husband sampled deli trays and Sunday morning lox and bagels. He, too, had learned to appreciate the tastes of another culture
As I step off the slow elevator each night after work, I find myself impatient to reach the door to my apartment. As I fumble with my keys, my anticipation builds to see my husband and to begin our nightly cooking ritual. As I turn the round key to our apartment door, the fragrance of daal, a type of Indian/Nepali lentil soup, mysteriously mixes its exotic scent with the lonely hallway. Once safely inside our apartment, I lovingly marry white jasmine rice to a roasted chicken, the same kind of chicken that bubby, my great-grandmother, might have tenderly prepared.
While we both eat the same food, we have different ways of eating. My husband eats with his hands when we incorporate any Nepali food into our dinner. I often drink spicy chai, or milk tea, with dinner and he always drinks it afterward. He still eats his Jewish kugel as a dessert and I eat mine as a sweet side dish. We are able to successfully retain the customs and traditions we were raised with by layering the past with our current values: common understanding, mutual respect, and honor.
As our relationship has matured, so has our ability to be proud of who we are independently with an added appreciation of the unique entity we form together. Tolerance and acceptance are not unlike experimentation. While I love Jewish food, I am also inspired by mixing it with my husband's Nepalese dishes. Combining our cultures has shown me that change and new formations of ritual do not have to negate heritage or tradition. Sometimes, as in my case, the combination of different experiences equals the perfect recipe.
By Ivan Watson, January 3, 2008, NPR.org
Lana was a teenager when her family made a clandestine journey from Kurdistan to Israel. It was 1994, and Saddam Hussein had recently lost control of northern Iraq. Rival Kurdish militias were battling each other to fill the power vacuum. In a closely guarded emigration, Lana's family — and a dozen other Kurdish families of Jewish origin — traveled over land to neighboring Turkey in a trip organized and financed by Israel.
Iraq's ancient Jewish community has virtually disappeared, a casualty of the conflict that continues to divide the Middle East. For the last 50 years, Iraq and Israel have been sworn enemies, part of the broader Arab-Israeli conflict. Most of the ancient Jewish community in Iraq emigrated en masse in 1951. But unlike their Arab counterparts, Iraqi Kurds tend to be less suspicious of their former Jewish neighbors. And some Jewish Kurds have begun making discreet return visits to Kurdistan.
Accepting Their Neighbors
Now Lana, 28, is a citizen of Israel who speaks Hebrew and Kurdish fluently. Last year, she returned for the first time since her emigration to live in Kurdistan with her new husband, Hano, an Iraqi Muslim Kurd. The couple asked that their full names not be used for fear of reprisal.
"I didn't think twice about marrying a Jewish woman," Hano said. "My parents always told me stories about how much they liked their old Jewish neighbors."
Unlike the Arab majority in central and southern Iraq, the Kurds of northern Iraq don't see Jews or Israel as enemies. In the 1960s and 70s, Israel's Mossad intelligence agency provided equipment and training to Kurdish rebels who were battling the government in Baghdad. To this day, locals call a neighborhood of old sagging brick houses in the Kurdish city of Suleymaniyah, Jewlakan.
A Cautious Return
In the former Jewish quarter of Suleymaniyah, Haji Abdullah Salah, an old Kurdish shopkeeper, says it was a sad day when almost all the Jews left town.
"The government ordered them to leave at that time, and they shouldn't take anything except their own clothes," Haji Abdullah recalls. He says that the last Jew in Jewlakan was a man they called Shalomo, who stayed behind long after the other Jews had left. Locals say Shalomo died in Suleymaniyah a few years ago.
Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, a small number of Kurdish Jews has been making discreet return visits from Israel to the land of their birth. Kak Ziad Aga, 71, says a Jewish classmate from his childhood recently got a warm welcome during a return visit to the Kurdish town of Koya Sinjak. It had been 50 years since he'd seen his classmate.
Ziad Aga says he doesn't see any problem in allowing Kurdish Jews to come back to Kurdistan, but the subject is extremely sensitive for the Kurdish authorities, who are frequently accused by Arab media and Iraqi insurgent groups of collaborating with Israel. The Kurdish leadership denies the charges.
Despite the difficult history for Kurdish Jews, Lana says she's proud of her mixed heritage. "Above all, I consider myself a Kurd," she says. "An Israeli Kurd."
Listen now: NPR.org
By Rachel Nolan, January 2, 2008, Forward.com
While most of the towns in central Portugal are suffering through difficult economic times, this small village northeast of Lisbon is enjoying a revival: The past decade has seen the construction of a luxury hotel and a museum, and tourism is booming.
The cause? Jews.
Conversos, to be exact. Belmonte, a town of 3,600, is home to some 300 descendants of Jews who survived the Inquisition by practicing their religion in secret — the only sizable community of these “secret Jews” to remain on the Iberian Peninsula. Until the 1990s, the Belmonte conversos kept their history to themselves. But since warily emerging from secrecy, the Jews here have generated a small local economy in one of the most economically depressed regions of Western Europe — one that is benefiting Jew and non-Jew alike.
“We are so happy to have work,” said Ana Maria Monteirineho, who, along with fellow Catholic Maria de Coneceição Mendes, found new employment with a sewing collective that opened in 2004 in the town center. One of the collective’s tasks is embroidering “shalom” onto lavender sachets to be sold at the new Jewish Museum. “[The tourists] come for the museum,” she said. “They come to see the Jews.”
Indeed, companies that specialize in Jewish tourism are noting that Belmonte is an easy sell. For starters, interest in Jewish Portugal in general has been growing. Functioning synagogues in Lisbon and Porto that mostly serve Eastern European immigrants are seeing more visitors. And last year, a Roman Catholic priest in Porto knocked down a false wall to find vestiges of a pre-Inquisition synagogue while renovating his home. But Belmonte is special. It seems to offer more than Lisbon and Toledo, both of which are full of Jewish history but empty of actual Jews, not to mention that a discovery of another community of crypto-Jews is unlikely to happen anywhere else, ever again.
Distinctive Belmonte has attracted international funds, including enough from one French donor to build the small but magnificent synagogue in 1997. And then there is the large Jewish Museum, which has seen more than 14,000 visitors since its opening in 2005. The museum guestbook shows that Portuguese, Israeli and American tourists are the most common, but there have also been visitors from places as far away as Mozambique, Montenegro and Japan.
Abilio Henriques, the 68-year-old elected president of the Jewish community, now spends Sunday afternoons collecting entrance fees and directing visitors into the wood-and-velvet interior of his local synagogue.
“Kippah for men, none for women,” Henriques explains as people walk in.
Henriques’s aunt, Ana Marão, 72, sews Stars of David on the challah covers and tablecloths that she crochets for a living. “Now, the symbol is fine, but earlier…” Marão said as she drew her hand across her throat.
It was this fear that kept Marão’s ancestors from practicing their Judaism. Sephardic Jews are thought to have inhabited Portugal since 10 BCE. The earliest relic of Jewish life in Belmonte is an inscribed granite reliquary dated to 1297 from the town’s first synagogue. But in 1497, King Manuel I ordered Portuguese Jews to convert to Catholicism or flee. Many Jews opted to maintain their religion in secret, leading to such rituals as submerging Sabbath candles in clay jars, according to local historian David Canelo.
Even after the Inquisition officially ended in 1821, local Jews kept their rites secret.
“It was a matter of tradition,” said University of California, Los Angeles’s Eduardo Mayone Dias, professor emeritus, who has written about Belmonte. “That had been their only method of survival. The fear of Inquisition and of outside influence was very real.”
This finally began to change in 1994, when a representative from the converso community invited a rabbi from Israel to officially convert a group in Belmonte. They emerged from secrecy partly because of increased openness across Portugal after the 1974 bloodless transition to democracy from António Salazar’s dictatorship, and partly because they desired contact with other Jewish communities. In addition, footage of conversos in Belmonte in a French documentary called “The Last Marranos,” released in 1990, heralded the first wave of tourists.
The broader success that the tourists have brought is evident: Where other towns in rural Portugal are plagued with empty lots, Belmonte is ringed with a crop of new houses, and construction is still under way. The streets are clean, and the town park, lined with miniature orange trees, is well groomed.
“People want to come because this is the only really Jewish part of Portugal,” said Cristina Brito, director of Lisbon-based Mourisca Tours. Brito’s company is one of a number that have sprung up to meet the demand for organized trips to visit Belmonte. One brochure urges visitors to try “Inquisition-defeating sausage,” a local recipe in which chicken is substituted for pork.
This is a stark change from 500 years of secrecy, and not all local Jews enjoy being the object of scrutiny. Visitors trying to enter the synagogue during services are often redirected to the museum. Indeed, a number of Jewish families steer clear of both the synagogue and the tourist industry, practicing the way their ancestors did, with women leading ceremonies at home. Belmonte has seen a cycle of rabbis from Israel and Brazil, none of whom stays for more than a few years. Some attribute this to the difficulty of reconciling modern Jewish practices with those of Belmonte, developed in isolation for centuries.
“I am one of the only Jews who invites strangers into my home,” said Marão, whose family was among the first to convert. “They are still afraid. I don’t know what of.”
By Waveney Ann Moore, December 8, 2007, St. Petersburg Times
Jews have endured government-sanctioned persecution throughout history, with Spain, Portugal, Russia and Germany among the centuries' most recent examples. Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights, commemorates a victory over such persecution. Jews will light the menorah for eight consecutive nights to celebrate the victory in 165 B.C. over their Syrian-Greek oppressors.
quot;Hanukkah represents one of the darkest moments in Jewish history, the first time a government Assyrian Greeks under Antiochus IV attempted to extinguish the Jewish faith, an event that would be repeated many times in coming centuries under many governments," said Palm Harbor resident Joy Katzen-Guthrie.
There have been exceptions to this pattern, she said, and China has been a striking one. Often scolded for violating human rights, the country has welcomed Jews since ancient times, said Katzen-Guthrie. "The presence of Jews in China represents one of the brightest relationships in Jewish history, as the Sung Dynasty invited Jews as equals to settle in the kingdom ... as port cities such as Harbin and Shanghai offered refuge to tens of thousands of Jews fleeing persecution from the pograms of Eastern Europe, the Russian Revolution and the Nazi massacres," Katzen-Guthrie said in an e-mail this week.
Katzen-Guthrie will lead her sixth Jewish heritage tour to China next March. The trip will take in Beijing, Xi'an, Suzhou and Shanghai and is being offered through Temple Beth-El in St. Petersburg. One doesn't have to be Jewish to go on the tour, Katzen-Guthrie said, adding that non-Jews have enjoyed learning about China's Jewish history and attending Sabbath services in the Communist country. "It adds an additional facet to China," she said. Besides the traditional tourist sites, the tour will include visits to two former synagogues and the Hongkou Ghetto in Shanghai. The group also will meet and worship with China's Jewish community in Beijing and Shanghai and eat at Dini's, a Kosher restaurant in Beijing.
Lewis Sperber, who moved to China in 1994, owns the kosher restaurant with his wife, Maggie, who is Chinese and converted to Judaism. "Two years ago, I didn't think that the demand existed. Today, the demand is building, not only with the business traveler and tours, but also the local people's interest in the Jewish people and our culture. Presently, about 30 percent of those dining at Dini's are local Chinese," Sperber said in an e-mail from Beijing. "We have been able to find most of the products in China, but do have to bring many from the U.S. - hot dogs, balsamic vinegar, nondairy topping, chicken consomme, baking chocolate, and others."
Katzen-Guthrie said the Chinese show a keen interest in Judaism, admire Jewish people and appreciate a shared emphasis on education, ancestors, history and helping others. Before and during World War II, she said, China welcomed Jews - "stateless refugees" - escaping from Germany and countries where the Nazis had revoked their citizenship. Shanghai was an important destination and at one time had what is believed to be about 25,000 Jewish residents. "If they could get out of Europe, they needed no visa to enter Shanghai," said Katzen-Guthrie, 49, who lectures at Eckerd College's Elderhostel and the University of South Florida's and Eckerd's Osher institutes on popular and historical American music and Jewish history.
Evidence points to Jews' building a synagogue in Kaifeng, a remote area in north central China in 1163, she said. Descendants live there, though they no longer practice the faith. "Emotionally, these people still consider themselves Jews and honor Judaism in the same way they honor Chinese ancestors," Katzen-Guthrie said.
These days, there is a Reconstructionist Jewish community that has been in Beijing since the 1980s. In 2001, the Chabad movement, an Orthodox group, established a center in the city and now runs a Hebrew Day School with almost 40 students, said Sperber, whose two sons are enrolled there.
It's not difficult to be an observant Jew in Beijing, he said. "Surprisingly, the community is never wanting for kosher items, whether it is matzah for Passover or chocolate gelt for Hanukkah," he said. "In April, the rabbi koshered the kitchen at the Renaissance Hotel, and 300 people enjoyed a kosher Seder. This community has also had the distinction of lighting the first menorah on the Great Wall (in December 2005)." Katzen-Guthrie said the two Jewish communities in Beijing serve travelers, residents - temporary and permanent - and a growing number of Jewish students. There are also Jewish communities in Shanghai and Hong Kong, she said.
Ephrat Zmar, October 21, 2007, Maariv, www.nrg.co.il. Translation by Dennis Ybarra.
Good tidings for Israeli backpackers: A special replica of the Wall (Kotel) will be set up in New Delhi. In exchange, the Indians will provide a replica of a Hindu temple for Jerusalem.
If you plan to be part of the tens of thousands of Israelis who visit the Indian subcontinent annually, you will soon discover in the capital, New Delhi, something very familiar from home. In an unusual cultural-religious cooperation between New Delhi and the Israeli capital a model of the Western Wall and the Temple Mount will be erected.
The model, which is almost identical including the famous request notes, will be prepared by municipality of Jerusalem and will be transferred soon to the Indians. At the same the Indians will transfer to Jerusalem a model of a traditional Hindu temple of the kind that can be found on every corner in India.
The Hindu temples are known as colorful places and every day millions of believers bring with them offerings and incense to the different gods. “The Religious Exchange Program” is a joint initiative of Jerusalem mayor Uri Lupolianski and the mayor of New Delhi, Arti Mahara, together with the American Jewish Congress.
Mahara was a guest this week of Lupiolianski in the framework of a conference of mayors who came to Jerusalem from all over the world. Both came to the conclusion that the model of the Wall (Kotel) in the Indian capital can be a point of interest for the millions who live in the city as well as a rest stop for thousands of Israeli backpackers. “The reputation of Israelis in Delhi is improving,” said Mahara. “We already hear less about problematic occurrences and I believe that every gesture and every positive step, like this initiative, can help the ties between the countries.”
About the idea itself said New Delhi’s mayor, “I think the idea discussed is beautiful and positive. When you stroll around in Jerusalem you get a good feeling in seeing the expression of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. It’s wonderful and causes an atmosphere of peace. Hinduism is a way of life where there is a place for everyone in society, that they have a happy life and a peaceful balance.”
By Staff, December 17, 2007, The Telegraph, Calcutta India
Shillong, Dec. 16: From Israel with love, Bollywood ishtyle.
Meghalaya’s capital was host to a musical performance of a different kind when a 25-member Israeli troupe performed here late last night to mark the 60th year of Independence of both India and Israel.
Titled “Namaste Israel”, the show was a blend of folk music and modern dance forms of both Israel and India, hosted at the State Central Library. But it was the Bollywood song and dance numbers which was a big draw for the packed crowd.
The motto of the performance was to spread amity. “There is no other means than music and dance which can foster ties between both countries,” a troupe member said.
The troupe really brought the house down with an energetic performance to the vintage Bollywood number from Teesri Manzil — Aaja, aaja, main hoon pyar tera....” It also sang patriotic songs of both countries.
Before the show, the Israelis had an interaction with local cultural troupes at Jeebon Roy Memorial Welfare Institute. Khasi, Jaintia and Garo dance forms were presented.
“It was a different experience for all of us from Israel to come to this part of the country and understand the culture,” manager of the troupe, David Nigrekar, said.
The name “Namaste Israel” was coined to highlight India-Israel affinity, David added. The troupe comprises mostly Jews of Indian origin.
David’s parents are Jews from Mumbai who moved to Israel 45 years ago.
“This is also an occasion for us to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Independence of both the countries and also the 15 years of Indo-Israel diplomatic relations,” said Sharon, a member of the group.
The artistes of the troupe are very familiar with Hindi songs and dances.
“I know how to sing Hindi songs including Mehbooba Mehbooba and Satyam Shivam Sundaram as we used to watch a lot of Hindi films,” said Valery Perez, singer of the group.
Valery, who usually sings Hebrew songs during the show, said she has been associated with the troupe for the past 20 years.
The troupe performed in Delhi on December 13 and will wind up the tour with a performance in Mumbai on December 18.
Supported by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, the troupe presented a variety of shows, depicting the culture of Israel, the contribution of the Indian community to Israeli culture and the strong ties between the two countries.
“Namaste Israel”, founded by David Nigerkar, is aiming to enrich Israeli culture with the diversity of Indian music, song and dance. The troupe is quite popular among the Indian community in Israel.
The folk dance performed by the group reveals the diversity of the people of Israel and their cultural roots and heritage. The dance combines elements from the Arabic Debke, Hasidic dance (a form of dance in Israel), Yemenite steps, Polish Polka dance and others.
By Fabiola Santiago, January 6, 2008, MiamiHerlad.com
In the late 1990s, Miami photographer Randi Sidman-Moore was on a trip to Israel and Jordan with the Greater Miami Jewish Federation when she lost her spot in the crowded media bus.
Call it divine intervention.
Sidman-Moore ended up in a bus loaded with Cuban Jews from Miami -- a twist of fate that launched her on a journey into a unique culture and a years-long project to document one of South Florida's lesser-known communities.
"They had me in tears they were so funny," the photojournalist recalls. ``The other Jews were so quiet, but they were having this party on the bus. They embraced me and took me under their wing. They were having the time of their life, and they introduced me to the whole subculture."
Sidman-Moore says she knew immediately that she wanted to explore the lives of Cuban Jews, to tell in photographs the story of what makes them different from other Jews, and different from other Cubans.
The results of her work can be viewed at the Miami Beach Regional Library through Feb. 13 in the photo exhibit Lox with Black Beans and Rice: A Portrait of Cuban-Jewish Life. There's also an upcoming book collaboration with Ruth Behar, a University of Michigan anthropologist who is teaching a course on Cuban Jews at the University of Miami this semester.
"Cuban Jews, like any bicultural group, have a foot in each culture," says Behar, author of An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba ($29.95, Rutgers University Press). “The mix is unique because they are part of two communities that have an intense diasporic consciousness. As Cubans they are part of a promised island, and as Jews they are part of the promised Israel where they choose not to live.”
Sidman-Moore's large-scale photographs, accompanied by brief oral histories of her subjects, offer an intimate view of Miami's Cuban Jewish community through births and brises, family life and holidays, work and worship.
"I had no idea that there were so many Cuban Jews," says Sidman-Moore, who grew up in New York, studied photography at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and at Studio Art Centers International in Florence, Italy, and lives in South Miami.
Statistics for Cuban Jews in South Florida, however, are hard to come by, pointing to the need for research, Behar says.
"I assume that there are about 10,000 Cuban Jews in the United States as a whole," Behar says. ``I'm guessing at this number. There were approximately 15,000 Jews in Cuba before the Revolution and the majority left in the early 1960s. Since many in the grandparent generation have died, I'm assuming the number can't be that high."
Sidman-Moore's photographic project took five years to complete, and she funded it with grants from the Palm Beach Community Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and Florida Atlantic University, which first exhibited the photographs. (Her work also has appeared in Elle, Life, Time, Cosmopolitan, Ocean Drive and The Miami Herald).
STRIKING PORTRAITS
In Lox with Black Beans, some well-known Cuban Jews are featured in striking portraits: Painter Baruj Salinas in his studio; George Feldenkreis, chairman and CEO of Perry Ellis International, at his beach estate; television personality Mauricio Zeilic at work.
But it is in the ordinary everyday moments, captured in 24 x 36 lambda prints and mounted by hand on high quality Plexiglas, that the strongest narrative unfolds.
There's Carmen Rodríguez, born to a Cuban father and a mother who is a Jewish New Yorker, raised Catholic but now a Jew. There's Ori Meneses, a black Cuban who converted to Judaism, and Mariano Moshe Otero, a former Evangelical minister who became an Orthodox Jew after learning that his grandmother was Jewish.
There's Cuba-born Nellie Egozi, who along with the traditional Seder plate, prepares Sephardic dishes she learned from her Turkish parents, including albondigas, ground meatballs that non-Jewish Cubans also love.
"What makes Cuban Jews different from other Cubans is that they have ancestral ties to cities, towns and villages in Poland, Russia and Turkey, though Sephardic Jews, like other Cubans, also have ties to Spain," Behar explains. "Their ancestors spoke Yiddish and Ladino. They lost relatives in the Holocaust. They lived through a double diaspora that was traumatic -- the grandparent generation left Europe on the eve of the Second World War or during the war, and then the parent generation had to leave Cuba after Castro came to power."
The ties to Judaism give Cuban Jews not only a religious difference, but a connection to another ritual calendar and to dietary laws that prohibit pork, which is a central part of the Cuban diet, Behar notes.
ASSERTING IDENTITY
But they have found ways to assert their identity by tropicalizing traditional Jewish foods.
"My mother makes guayabahumentaschen for the holiday of Purim," Behar says.
Cuban Jews form part of the world Jewish community, and like other Jews in diverse locations, they found ways to integrate into Cuban life while also maintaining the traditions and customs that kept them separate, Behar says.
Her father, a Sephardic Cuban Jew, went to the memorial service for Celia Cruz in New York ``because he felt connected to her as a cubano."
"What makes Cuban Jews in South Florida different from other Jews is that they feel a strong tie to Cuba and Cuban memory, to Cuban food and Cuban customs, and to the Spanish language," Behar says. 'They can identify with other cubanos and with latinos in a way that American Jews cannot. They feel comfortable among latinos. They don't view latinos as `other' in the way that Americans, including American Jews, so often do."
But who is a Cuban Jew -- or a "Jewban," as many call themselves -- is becoming harder to define.
"For how many generations can one be a Cuban Jew?" Behar asks. ``Is my son Gabriel, born in Michigan, also a Cuban Jew because I am? Or is he now an American Jew or a latino?"
For more photos, click here.
By Ruchira Paul, November 26, 2007, the Accidental Blogger
Secrecy and Deceit
By David Gitlitz, University of New Mexico Press, $32.95
Order your copy here
Secrecy and Deceit is a detailed chronicle of Crypto Judaism in Spain, Portugal and their colonies in Latin America . David Gitlitz's voluminous book - 600+ footnoted pages, is a meticulous account (much of it gleaned from Inquisition records)that traces the history of Iberian Jews between 1238 to 1992.
A funny story I remember my childhood family physician telling us, went as follows:
"In a tribal area of India (where most Christian missionaries preached the gospel and still do), an entire village had converted to Christianity after persistent prodding and promises of cash and clothing. The villagers showed up every Sunday at the church in another nearby village and ostensibly did what they were expected to do as newly minted Christians. Some months later, the missionary came to check on the new converts in their own village and found to his horror that the villagers in their homes were going about their old ways, blithely performing Hindu rituals of offering food, flowers and lighting lamps at the shrine of the domestic deity. He asked with some indignation, "Why are you still indulging in heathenish ways? Didn't you all become Christians?" The villagers replied, with some puzzlement, "So what if we became Christians? Does that mean we've lost our faith?"
Amin Maalouf would have extracted a whole chapter out of this exchange! The attitude of the Crypto Jews of Spain and Portugal was a bit like the villagers above except that their defiance was fraught with the risk of persecution and death. The pressure on the Jewish citizens to convert to Christianity, while common in most of Europe, was particularly acute in devout Catholic kingdoms like Spain and Portugal. A vital part of the urban commercial sector and advisers to kings and noblemen, Iberian Jews were held in high regard for their capabilities and education. But their prosperity and Jewish faith made them objects of suspicion, envy and contempt at the same time. Unable to withstand the pressures of being the perennial "other" of society, many Jews did in fact "voluntarily" convert for reasons that ranged from expediency, fear, the wish to belong and even out of a genuine conviction that Christ indeed was the Messiah of the Jews and hence Christianity was the logical culmination of what Judaism had taught and promised them. Voluntary conversion however soon gave way to coercion and intimidation that included curtailed civil rights and freedoms, extortion of cash and property, general humiliation in public places, ghettoizing, relentless proselytizing, imprisonment and even death. The only place where Spanish Jews were relatively free of religious persecution was in the mostly southern Andalusian regions under Islamic rule.
Soon after Ferdinand and Isabella re-conquered all of Spain, the notorious Spanish Inquisition was established. Under the rules of the Inquisition, all non-Christians were banished from Spain. Many chose to leave. Those who remained or were unable to leave had no choice but to convert to Christianity. The Inquisition had jurisdiction over all Christians but its focus was mostly directed toward ensuring the orthodoxy of the new converts (Jews and Muslims) who were known as Conversos or by the derogatory term Marranos. The zealots of the Inquisition installed spies to keep an eye on the new converts' way of life in the privacy of their own homes - whether they reverted to their heretic ways when no one was watching. The spies were among anyone the converts came in contact with - neighbors, merchants, co-workers, domestic servants and even their own Converso relatives. Since many had converted under duress and not out of conviction, there indeed were lapses. They continued to practice the old faith in secret, sometimes subverting the tenets of the new religion to fit their old beliefs, thus making them crypto practitioners of their ancestral faith while leading a Christian life in public. (The history of Portuguese Crypto Jews is similar but followed a slightly different time line)
For the Jewish Conversos, some of the tell tale signs of Crypto Judaism that the spies looked for were:
* Cleaning, bathing, wearing nice clothes on Saturdays
* Lighting a candle on Friday nights in a secret place (basement, inside a clay pot or closet) not visible from outside
* Fasting on Jewish high holidays, avoiding leavened bread at Passover
* Sweeping toward the center of a room rather than toward the door
* Separating utensils for milk and meat
* Circumcision of male children in secret
* Avoiding pork and not eating fish on Fridays
* Praying while facing a wall
The guilt and sadness of having to hide what they really believed took their toll on some new converts. The private rejection of the public lie sometimes expressed itself in the form of regret, apology, frustration and anger. For example, before entering the church many Crypto Jews would mutter a prayer which essentially said, "Lord, forgive me for what I am about to do inside. I do not worship sticks or stones nor do I see divinity in bread or wine. I believe only in the laws of Moses." At other times, the reluctant Converso would just try to avoid Christian worship by faking illness on Sundays and other holy days. But equally often the practice took the form of outright denunciation of and derision for the central tenets of the new faith in private surroundings, among other Crypto Judaizers. The derision occasionally went beyond mere words and translated into actual desecration or mockery of Christian holy symbols - among them, the cross and Catholic statuary and icons. All this was quite naturally to be expected from a reluctant group of converts on whom Christianity had been forced under the threat of death, expulsion and extreme privation. What I found surprising however, was the fact that the Virgin Mary was the target of more vicious abuse than Jesus himself. The mockery of Mary, quite naturally always centered around the Christian belief in her virginity and the divine nature of her conception. One form of showing disrespect towards Mary consisted of throwing figs or making the sign of the fig at her statue or painting.
Secrecy and Deceit is a register of the persecution of Crypto Jews under the draconian reach of the Inquisition. In a gargantuan enterprise, names, dates, nature of infractions and punishments are meticulously researched and recorded by the author. Within those details lie the history of the Iberian Jews and Christians and their uneasy co-existence. In his introduction to Gitlitz's book, Ilan Stavans sums up the essence of Crypto-Judaism as follows:
David Gitlitz’s encyclopedic volume is a tour through the palace thus described by Diderot in Jacques Le Fataliste et son Maitre: a magisterial citadel—from the French locution citadelle: “a city within a city”—made of tortuous alleyways, where no passerby ever finds his way across.
The palace, of course, is a metaphor for the identity of crypto-Jews. Gitlitz offers a detailed catalogue of their manners: their hygiene, their birth customs, their liturgical rituals, their sexual interaction, their dietary laws and superstitions. These manners have been passed along from one generation to the next, with a sole purpose is mind: the concealment of truth. Their dishonesty isn’t reprehensible; instead, it is a strategy of survival. For these crypto-Jews, the reader is made to understand, are consummate actors; on the surface they appear to be average citizens, but really they are part of a clandestine club that enables them to exist in a parallel universe. The degree of furtiveness varies from generation to generation. It isn’t improbable, for instance, that for some of its members the club might be so secret an entity they might not be aware of their membership in it. In any case, for them Hamlet’s question, “To be or not to be?,” is turned, unapologetically, into an affirmation: “To be and not to be.”
By Danielle Berrin, November 30, 2007, JewishJournal.com
"Any time you have a community that is erased, it's a tragedy not only for the community but for humanity." The opening line from the documentary "The Last Jews of Libya" begins a nostalgic visit to an ill-fated community of 25,000 people living between the Mediterranean Sea and North African desert at the dawn of World War II.
It's a story we know too well -- pious, successful and family-oriented Jews living in coexistence with their neighbors suddenly become targets of racial hatred and are ultimately expelled or destroyed. Once in the United States, the immigrants struggle to find their place within an American Jewish life rooted firmly in Eastern European culture.
Told through the experiences of the Roumani family, the film, which airs Dec. 3 on the Sundance Channel, was inspired by a providential accident.
Following the death of their mother, Elise Tammam Roumani, director Vivienne Roumani-Denn and her brother discovered her memoirs, handwritten on legal paper, stuffed under her bed.
"It was really indescribable. Her presence became alive again but with a gift of all her life -- our lives, as if she were anticipating her first grandchild's question years later," Roumani-Denn said.
Isabella Rossellini narrates the story as Roumani, recount
