One speaker characterized the Berlin Jewish community as \”a piece of the mosaic that makes up our history\” and emphasized the importance to the city of today\’s Jewish community, which numbers approximately 30,000.
For Israeli violinist Miri Ben-Ari, doing the unexpected is standard fodder; so it should come as no surprise that her new single, \”Symphony of Brotherhood\” (featuring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.\’s \”I Have a Dream\” speech weaving in and out of an extended string solo) topped the charts just one month after its radio release.
I\’ll admit to a bit of initial wariness about a bus tour through Inglewood, Lennox and Hawthorne, sponsored a couple of Sundays ago by the Progressive Jewish Alliance (PJA). The three communities just east of LAX have poverty and crime rates far exceeding the averages in L.A. County. But the 90 people who boarded the two buses at the Westside Jewish Community Center were not interested in casual sightseeing.
My first instinct in any new city is to mingle. I like to walk the streets, stop into ordinary shops — grocery stores and electronic shops, not just the Judaica stores or Dead Sea skin care outlets for tourists. I like to take public transportation.
Tonight is a Yiddish service, Zol Zahn Shabbes — literally, we should have Shabbat — and it\’s happening at Beth Chayim Chadashim (BCC), founded in 1972 as the world\’s first synagogue for lesbian and gay Jews.
It sounds like the set-up for a politically incorrect joke: Did you hear the one about the journalist who began his journey in the Buddha\’s footsteps in Poland? But what was I doing in Oswiecim, in the southwest corner of Poland? It might make more sense knowing the German name by which Oswiecim is better recognized: Auschwitz.
More than 80 studio executives, producers, directors, lawyers, agents, distributors and rabbis all enjoyed a Shabbat dinner together in the south of France. For some, Shabbat was a new experience. For others, a weekly ritual. Still for others, it was simply another networking event.
Like many baby-boomers today, I sometimes feel older than Keith Richards up a palm tree. So when Irv and Eddie, my better elders, invite me to go out with them, I tag along, if only to combat creepy self-pity.
Here it is: 5,000 years after Moses wandered the Sinai, his people have finally found a home in Reseda, no less, at the Jewish Home for the Aging, the largest continuing residential care facility for the elderly in the Western United States. Yet while these Jews are no longer wandering, they are today wondering when the big simchah begins.
Amid the celebrities and paparazzi crowding the Cannes Film Festival last week, Katriel Schory roamed the bustling boulevard Croisette like a proud parent. \”Israeli cinema has never had such a presence here,\” Schory, director of the Israel Film Fund, said via the cell phone that seems attached to his ear.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.