Passover is a holiday of remembrance, a time to recall and retell the story of the deliverance of the Jewish people from generations of Egyptian bondage. But there is also a different kind of remembering that takes place each Passover, in which memory is personal, not scripted. We spontaneously recall, often vividly, the many different seders we have attended over the years, both as a child and as an adult.Â
\”The Golden Land: The Story of Jewish Immigration to America\” by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin (Harmony Books, $29.95).
Rabbi Joseph Telushkin begins this clever, coffee-table tome by noting that only three days after Spain\’s pious rulers, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, expelled their 200,000 Jewish subjects in 1492 for no reason other than their stubborn insistence on worshipping God, Columbus set sail for India. However, Columbus and his three ships and crew (90 members, five of whom were Marannos, or secret Jews) arrived in the New World, part of which, the United States, \”would come to house the largest, most prosperous and most successful Jewish community in Diaspora history.\”
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