\nWhen the Skirball Cultural Center opened in April 1996, its founding president and CEO, Rabbi Uri D. Herscher, didn\’t buy the philosophy \”If you build it, they will come.\”
My worst Passover was my first in Los Angeles, more than half a lifetime ago. I had nowhere to go the first night, and the second night, a college friend took me to an institutional seder that was so sterile and faceless that I went home early and, paraphrasing Scarlett O\’Hara, vowed, \”As God is my witness, I\’ll never go without a seder again.\”
More than 300,000 visitors have thronged the Jewish Museum in Berlin since it opened to the public in February 1999, and more are coming at a clip of 20,000 each month.
A friend told me about a scene he witnessed recently at a delicatessen. There was a woman who apparently was not Jewish standing in line at the bakery counter. When they called her number she pointed to the prune and poppy seed hamantaschen and asked for a dozen.
\”No, you want these,\” said the elderly Jewish woman who was serving her, pointing to the apricot hamantaschen instead.
\”No, I want those,\” the woman reiterated pointing again to the prune and poppy seed variety.
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