February 17, 2010

Peter Wollstein lived in the Shanghai Ghetto when he celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1947. But now, looking back more than six decades later, he says he is unhappy with his Chinese simcha.\n\n“I memorized a couple of prayers, and that was about it,” said Wollstein, whose family fled Nazi Germany prior to the start of the Holocaust. “It wasn’t very demanding.”\n\nWollstein, 75, has become more deeply involved in Jewish life in recent years, and his cursory bar mitzvah in China has inspired him to go back and give it another try. Last year, after the High Holy Days, he joined a class to study for a second, more authentic experience.

Activists in Los Angeles, Geneva and Jerusalem demonstrated last week in support of a Palestinian petition to the United Nations aimed at preventing the Simon Wiesenthal Center from building a Museum of Tolerance on what activists say is part of a medieval Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem.

Sixty families who say they have relatives buried in the Mamilla cemetery signed the petition asking the U.N.’s High Commissioner on Human Rights to investigate the issue. A decision by the U.N. would not carry any legal authority to overturn a 2008 ruling by Israel’s Supreme Court green-lighting the project.

Thirty-five Korean ministers and professors visited the Los Angeles Jewish community last week, sitting in on high school Torah classes, attending morning prayers, joining a Shabbat meal and studying Jewish texts with local rabbis.