The AJW’s Wayback Machine has been set for 1939. Click on the link below to see who had guests for the weekend, who got engaged and who was born (PDF might take a few seconds to load): AJW Social page 2.10.39
By CNAAN LIPHSHIZ
PRAIA, Cape Verde (JTA) — A Portuguese rabbi and a Moroccan diplomat stood shoulder to shoulder in a Catholic cemetery here while 200 mourners howled in grief as they buried a resident of this island off the western coast of Africa.
The foreigners had come to Cape Verde’s main cemetery earlier this month not to bury a local, but for the rededication of 10 gravestones of Moroccan Jews — members of an extinct community whose roots trace to the 1860s.
With virtually no practicing Jews on Cape Verde today, the cemeteries had fallen into neglect. Now a Washington-based nonprofit is spearheading their restoration.
The Cape Verde Jewish Heritage Project has a board stuffed with prominent Jewish Washingtonians, but its funding comes almost entirely from one man: King Mohammed VI of Morocco. According to the group’s U.S. tax filings, the king was the organization’s sole donor in 2011 and 2012, giving $100,000 each year.
Andre Azoulay, a senior Jewish adviser to the king and a member of the project’s advisory board, told JTA that the effort is reflective of the king’s “deep commitment” to preserving Jewish heritage in Morocco and elsewhere. But even if, as some speculate, it is motivated by a desire to attract tourists and curry favor with American Jews, the king’s drive clearly sets Morocco apart from other Middle Eastern countries where Jewish sites have faced increasing threats under new Islamist governments.
“This is all part of a strong push from His Majesty the King that started three, four years ago, when we saw cemeteries have become vulnerable because of lacking care by all of us,” Azoulay told JTA.
Abdellah Boutadghart (right) of the Moroccan embassy in Senegal, and Rabbi Eliezer Di Martino of Lisbon at the main cemetery in Praia for the burial of a Cape Verde resident on May 2. (Photo: Cnaan Liphshiz)
(JTA) — There is “mounting evidence” that the Boston Marathon bombers were involved in the unsolved murder of three men in suburban Boston.
Police officials said that some crime scene forensic evidence was a match to Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the two brothers who are alleged to have set off two explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon last month, ABC News reported over the weekend.
The officials also said records of cell phones used by the brothers put them in the area of the murders on that date.
Three men — Brendan Mess, Rafael Teken and Erik Weissman — were found dead in September 2011 in an apartment several miles from the campus of Brandeis University in the Boston suburb of Waltham.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev knew Mess well but did not attend his funeral despite once referring to him as his “best friend,” and participating in boxing and martial arts training together.
You can celebrate your high school or college grad with a notice in the American Jewish World’s May 24 “Honoring Our Graduates” special section.
We need to have your photo (high-resolution color or B&W head shot) and copy by Tuesday, May 14.
You can find the details HERE.
To advertise in this special section, contact Mordecai Specktor at 952.259.5234 or e-mail: editor [at] ajwnews [dot] com
By DORIS RUBENSTEIN
The vast majority of you reading this article today, like me, had grandparents or great-grandparents who came to America during the Great Migration from Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1920. The vast majority of them came from what was designated “the Pale of Settlement,” a swath of the western part of Catherine the Great’s Russian Empire, established in the late 18th century.
Our ancestors were from there, but they were not of there; always segregated, always victims of discrimination, they were seen as “the other” even when they were the majority in a town.
Just before the Great Migration, an amazing technological advance was made in communication: photography. Most Americans are familiar with early photography, thanks to the photojournalism of Matthew Brady during the Civil War. Those black-and-white stills captured with raw emotion the truth of the people and the battles that forged our country today.
Perhaps inspired by Brady’s work — or perhaps not — a group of Jewish photographers at the end of the 19th and very early 20th centuries broke away from the shtetl enough to step back and take photographic images, capturing both the physical settings where Jews lived in the Pale and the emotions resulting from the conditions of those who lived there by choice or by necessity.
The work of these photographers is currently on display in an exhibit titled Jewish Life in the Russian Empire: Photographs from the Museum of Ethnography, St. Petersburg, Russia, which is on display at The Museum of Russian Art (TMORA) in South Minneapolis.
This archival photo reproduction of A. Zavadsky’s Jewish Orchestra of Ballroom Music, Poltava Province, 1901, is part of the exhibit Jewish Life in the Russian Empire. Loan arranged by the Russian American Foundation, New York, and The Museum of Russian Art, Minneapolis. (Photo: From the collection of The Museum of Ethnography, St. Petersburg, Russia)
By MORDECAI SPECKTOR
Hava nagila, hava nagila (Let us rejoice, let us rejoice) / Hava nagila ve-nismecha (Let us rejoice and be glad)
Hava neranena, hava neranena (Let us sing, let us sing) / Hava neranena ve-nismecha (Let us sing and be glad)
Uru, uru achim (Awake, awake, brothers) / Uru achim be-lev sameach! (Awake, brothers, with a joyful heart!)
As surely as the Federation will call for an annual donation, every Jewish wedding reception and Bar/Bat Mitzva celebration involves a rendition of “Hava Nagila” and dancing the hora.
But did you know that two families are still contending over which of their ancestors composed the most famous Jewish song? And are you aware of the fact that country music star Glen Campbell recorded an instrumental version of “Hava Nagila” on the B-side of his Oscar-nominated single for the movie True Grit?
These and other questions are examined by a host of scholars and musical stars in Hava Nagila (The Movie), a greatly entertaining 73-minute documentary, which will have its regional premiere on Thursday, May 23 at the Riverview Theater in Minneapolis. The event will feature a Q&A after the screening with the film’s director, Roberta Grossman, and live music by Eisner’s Klezmorim.
I’m thinking that they may play “Hava Nagila.” Hora dancing could break out.
Director Roberta Grossman (Photo: Robert Zuckerman)
(Editor’s Note: The last three paragraphs of this editorial were inadvertently omitted in the May 10 print edition. The full text follows.)
Popular political commentator and comedian Jon Stewart turned to the issue of Syria on The Daily Show last week. Specifically, he took aim at some Republican senators who are urging the United States to provide more support for the rebels fighting the regime of dictator Bashar Assad.
“We begin tonight’s comedy program in the Middle East,” said Stewart, introducing the segment with a map of the region projected behind him.
Stewart played clips of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., scoring the Obama administration’s lack of action, in the face of 70,000 Syrian civilians killed by the Assad regime over the past two years. In another video clip, Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., declares, “We have never let something like that happen before.”
“Thank you,” Stewart says sarcastically, regarding the remarks by the gentleman from Georgia. “Well, obviously except for, you know, Rwanda, and Darfur, and Bosnia, and Cambodia — point taken. We as America have never let something like that happen before — in Syria, with this particular Assad.”
As for Graham’s suggestion that the U.S. should arm the “right” rebels and not Islamist extremists trying to bring down the Assad government, Stewart gets in a dig at one of the NRA’s favorites in Congress: “Maybe we can do background checks.”
Dick Bancroft began photographing American Indians in 1971, and became one of the key visual documentarians of the American Indian Movement (AIM), which began as a street patrol against police brutality in Minneapolis and gained global press attention and popularity in the 1970s.
Bancroft, who lives in Sunfish Lake and is a board member of Minnesota Jewish Media, LLC, the parent company of the American Jewish World, has published a collection of his photographs of AIM activities, We Are Still Here: A Photographic History of the American Indian Movement (Borealis Books). The attractive, large-format volume includes informative text by Laura Waterman Wittstock. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú Tum wrote the foreword.
An exhibit of Bancroft’s photos, I’m Not Your Indian Anymore, will be on display at All My Relations Gallery, 1414 E. Franklin Ave., Minneapolis, and an opening reception will take place 6 p.m. Friday, May 10. Also, photos from We Are Still Here will be displayed at Mill City Museum, 704 S. 2nd St., Minneapolis, through Sept. 1. An opening reception for the exhibit will be held 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday, May 16.
John Fire Lame Deer, a Mineconju-Lakota spiritual leader who was born on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. (Photo: Dick Bancroft, from We Are Still Here)
Reviewed by NEAL GENDLER
A bittersweet joy, the first novel by Miriam Karmel is a perfect-pitch account of living on after a very full life — youth, marriage, child-rearing and social activities — has become the past.
Esther Lustig is 85, widowed, with adult children who became less than she’d hoped. She has downsized from Chicago’s northern suburbs to a city apartment, her world shrinking similarly. She’s healthy enough to live on her own — with some adjustments, of course, such as Velcro-closing shoes because her bent, stiff fingers can no longer tie laces.
Esther isn’t filled with self-pity, just awareness of her limitations and of how others see her. She appreciates that her medical-researcher son-in-law doesn’t talk down to her, “though lately, more and more people do just that, as if age has shrouded her in stupidity,” Karmel writes.
As daily events remind her of them, we learn of Esther’s previous decades, which illustrate a familiar generational progression: Yiddish-speaking immigrant parents whose children go into business and raise families in suburbia, and that generation’s children becoming professionals who drift from religion and tradition.
That Karmel, who is younger than 85, could capture so well the inner life of the old is a tribute to her powers of observation and empathy. That she could express this life with such clarity and wit is a tribute to her writing skill, for Being Esther is anything but a dirge. It is a delight.
© 2009 American Jewish World.
