September 15, 2012

Mumbai. Yes, exotic more than you can imagine. And in the middle of the city there is a huge synagogue. It is blue and as exotic as the whole city.

– Where are you from? – Poland. – Aaaa, Holand, The Netherlands! -No, Poland. – Aaaa, Poland! After the standard conversation with a police officer we just learn that we cannot enter the synagogue. – Come back tomorrow, sir. So we are coming back the next day. The air is humid and smells of everything. The same police officer is around and welcomes us with a wide smile. – Now open, please go. It is hard to call his look into our bags as a security control, but apparently the area is safe.

The synagogue seems to be under constant construction or constant demolition. Workers are walking around, doing pretty much nothing. The walls are covered with some kind of clay in some parts. In some places there is only a bit of shaded paint. The building sits proudly and looks at the small buildings around. It is cut from the outside only to some extent. The noise from outside is very present and it is pointless to look for relief here. It is hard to imagine any celebration taking place here. The whole space is cut into small parts with bamboo scaffold. Not really used, but omnipresent in India.

Talking to anyone here does not help much – apart from the fact that taking pictures relates to a payment of 200Rs there is not much that we can learn from the staff. We head towards an information board. What a surprise! “The Famous Madonna Visits The Synagogue”. “The Famous Madonna” is obviously a pop singer who paid visit to the building. Some twenty faded pictures show the whole event in details. Any information about the synagogue or the local community? Not really.

Finally we learn from our guide that the building was constructed in the 19th century and painted in stunning blue that is visible up to today. The building was to commemorate Elias David Sasson, a businessman trading with India. The synagogue is built of bricks and Cooria stone. This is all what can be found for now, but the inquiry is in progress…

*This article has been sent from an internet cafe in Mysore, where the tiles are crazily yellow, krishnas are looking at the computer users and the boss of the place watches Bollywood movies. Greetings from India 🙂

ps. You can find more synagogue photos here : http://jewrnalism.com/jewrnalism-gallery/journeys?page=2#category

It’s Rosh HaShana Eve 5773 and I’m stuck in a dusky rainy city in the Northern Germany. Yesterday I got in touch with the local rabbi again, checked the prayer times and received a shiny wall calendar for the upcoming Jewish year. The rainy Jewish New Year’s Eve is on my mind.

Naming the holiday ‘the New Year’ instead of using it’s common Hebrew name puts it on a different level for me. An admired milestone of the Jewish tradition and the Jewish calendar turns to a clear and familiar image, year’s major event, the starting and the ending point. 2012 and 5773 suddenly start to look as two crucial points on two equally important scales.

Yet for me it was always like that. I got to a Jewish highschool when I was seven, where I suddenly realized that I have to let one more New Year to my calendar. Eating apples with honey in October and finding presents under the Christmas tree in January meant twice as much fun and didn’t contradict each other at all. Since then I was regularly updated. All I knew is that the Hebrew month of Tishrei starts somewhere between September and October and there is a Jewish community there to remind me when exactly is the festival. And Tishrei meant a holiday spirit in the air, just like our own rainy humid Jewish Christmas (though during my early schools years the real Christmas didn’t settle in the post-Soviet region yet and all ‘Christmas spirit’ responsibilities were carried out by the December 31st).

This was a period of an unimagined harmony between Judaism and Christianity, grounded on honest secularity. Christmas tree was a well-established tradition exclusively related to the New Year’s Eve and totally disconnected from Christmas by the Soviet regime. It gained a new, progressive, universal and secular image. Rosh HaShana alongside with other major holidays was a first hesitant attempt to get a feeling of how our grandparents used to live and to find some old and new friends.

Rosh HaShana is a high time to sum up the last year, but please allow me to refer back to the last decade. We became more independent, more self-aware, more heritage-aware, more progressive, more green. We started to live in two calendar years, in two traditions – the universal and the Jewish one. Last but not least – it’s been almost a decade now since my family bought a Christmas tree last.

Being inspired by the synagogue notes of my colleague Pavel Pustelnik, I feel obliged to add this story to the beautiful collection.

Celle makes you fall in love with Germany. Seems like there was no war in the town – over 400 beautiful fachwerk houses form a truly medieval city center; what surrounds it mostly comes from the pre-war times as well. It’s a true candy town from the old German fairy tales. So is the oldest remaining synagogue in Germany. As synagogues should not necessarily stand out from the town’s landscape, the temple in Celle is just another medieval fachwerk house from the outside. And just a normal European synagogue from inside – two pictures are hard to match. The synagogue is rarely used, but hosts a decent Jewish museum with a number of permanent and temporary exhibitions. The museum banner is the only thing to help one identify the building from the narrow street. Indeed, the town belongs to the different world, where the synagogues are carefully turned to freshly renovated museums, and as for the Jews – maybe they just all returned to Israel, being deeply attached to the wonderful town of Celle and tight connection to their historic motherland?

Bergen Belsen concentration camp located just 30 minutes drive from Cellle was aimed to ruin this lollipop fantasy. A bus took me through the sunny meadows of the German region of Lower Saxony right to the gloomy walls of the concentration camp memorial. But the fairy tale could not end there. The concentration camp has disappeared. There was nothing in the old forest, except for the documentation center built some ten years ago. Nothing has remained. Walk through this forest and you won’t find a single brick remained from the murder machine. Nothing at all, but the opened doors of the memorial.

Last week my congregation “>Call Your Zeyde“.  The video was a hit, with more than 27,000 views as of this morning, it has been reposted by the Reform Movement, the Jewish Telegraph Agency and was featured on the front page of A Tale of Two Videos Read More »