The Reliable Narrator

From theory to reality

2012-03-07T12:26:00.000-05:00

Reading obituaries over the years, I often wondered how I would face a terminal illness. It was purely theoretical, of course, as I weighed that against the pro’s and con’s of dying suddenly in a plane crash.

In mid-August 2011, I had a chest x-ray for heart attack symptoms. My heart was fine, but an x-ray revealed a mass in my chest. A CT scan confirmed something in my mediastinum, the space between my lungs. In the next few days, as I went from pulmonologist to thoracic surgeon to radiologist and from scan to scan to biopsy, the news got worse. By mid-September I had a diagnosis of Stage 3 non-smoker’s lung cancer. The doctors I saw were in general agreement that surgery was extremely risky, if not impossible, because it appeared to be entangled in nerves and blood vessels. So I began chemotherapy.

At the same time, my oncologist at George Washington University Hospital encouraged me to see a specialist at Johns Hopkins, and in mid-October, I did that. He confirmed the chemo cocktail I was taking, and he suggested that if the chemotherapy seemed to be effective – to be determined by a scan after my second treatment – there was a surgeon at Hopkins whose opinion I should seek.

Friends shared with me in these early weeks the positive stories of people they knew who had survived – or are surviving – various kinds of cancer. Some of them told me more than I wanted to hear, though I knew their intentions were good. Because it was widely known that my husband and I were scheduled to spend five months serving the congregations in Milan and Florence that we had served the previous year, we shared widely with family and friends the reason we were not returning to Italy.

For the most part, we retreated. My treatments were on two days every three weeks, and for a few days after, I would be extremely fatigued. We avoided crowds, saw a few friends, and relied heavily on Gmail and Netflix. We spent a lot of time in doctors’ offices.

Primarily, I tried to cope with my new reality. Now I had limited time, according both to the doctors and the weight of statistics for this kind of cancer, and my once-abstract question would be answered: How would I respond?

The lung oncologist at Johns Hopkins had told me to “acknowledge the statistics and then set them aside” because each case is different, and I was a “healthy 64-year-old woman with cancer.” All my doctors advised me not to rely on the internet for accurate information.

At the time of my diagnosis, I was devastated, of course. There is no imagining – or forgetting – the feelings I had when the young E.R. doctor sat down and said, “We need to talk.” I read as much as I could, bit by bit, of Rabbi Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People. My immediate assumption was that I was not a good person, that I must have done something wrong to deserve this punishment. No, I hadn’t smoked (everyone’s first question). I asked myself over and over, “Why don’t bad things happen to bad people like terrorists and dictators?”

I had to accept that my having cancer was something I could not control. Nor could I control the doctors’ schedules nor the time that elapsed between having a test and learning the results of the test. I could be treated, but I couldn’t control whether the treatment would be effective.

Early on, I recognized the value of Kushner’s message: what matters is not the amount of time one has but what one does with that time. I didn’t want to waste it. The projects that mattered to me were my writing, my genealogical research, and the appropriate disposition of my possessions. My bucket list was not traveling – though there are plenty of places I would like to visit – but rather controlling my legacy.

In many ways, I am the self-appointed keeper of our family stories and history. I must write them down to pass them on. And in the last few years, I had given away the possessions of my in-laws, my parents, and my aunt, making literally thousands of decisions about treasures and junk. I wanted not just to spare my family this chore; I wanted to make my own decisions about photos, papers, jewelry, purses, scarves.

My other resolution was to try as best we could to live as if I did not have cancer. In a way, in part I believe because I was asymptomatic, I was in denial, but I also recognized that I did not want to immerse myself in the world of cancer. In addition to staying off the internet, I did not seek out any groups. I really didn’t want to hear from strangers; I spoke to friends who are survivors who had valuable lessons to teach me. After a few minutes of talking about me, I always tried to turn conversations in other directions.

In November we learned that the tumor had shrunk significantly. I applied to see the surgeon at Hopkins – a process not unlike applying to an Ivy League college – and was accepted, not just to see him but to be operated on by him. Eventually, I completed five chemo treatments and had my surgery on January 24.

When the doctors removed the upper lobe of my right lung, the tumor came out with it. It had not been attached to my chest wall, despite its appearance on the various scans. The only affected lymph gland the surgeon could find was in the part of my lung that he removed. The procedure the doctors used was VATS (Video-Assisted Thoracic Surgery), during which a camera and a knife were inserted under my right arm through small incisions. This less invasive method, plus the fact that I was in good health otherwise, meant that my recovery has been relative rapid. Though not painless, it has been remarkably easy.

I face five years of scans: five years of the kind of nervousness and waiting that were telescoped into five intensive months. I remember how apprehensive I was the night before my needle biopsy, then my first chemotherapy treatment, then the night before my brain MRI, then the night before my surgery. It did get easier, for me.

Many friends have asked if I am angry that the doctors were initially negative about my prospects. I am someone who lives by Mel Brooks’s lyrics from The Twelve Chairs: “Hope for the best, expect the worst.” Having heard the worst news at the beginning, the relief is palatable. Having been given hopes that turned out to be false would have been as devastating as the original diagnosis.

In addition to being declared “disease-free,” much that is positive has come out of my experiences thus far. Over the weeks, as people learned about my illness, they sent messages that demonstrated how much they cared for me or – if they didn’t know me very well – how much they cared for our family. I knew that the Mi Sheberach prayer was being said for my recovery in synagogues around the world, and that my non-Jewish friends and neighbors were praying for me in their churches.

I did get a lot accomplished in terms of my long-term goals, though there is still much to do. My article about searching for the truth about my great-grandfather is about to be published as a “success story” on the website JewishGen.org. I blogged about my maternal grandfather’s family, early Iowa merchants. I have organized most of my published and unpublished materials into a meaningful format. I have cleared out file drawers and begun to donate photographs and papers to the Chicago Jewish Historical Society, the American Jewish Archives, the Indiana State Historical Society, and other repositories. I’ve used a portion of my collection of postcards to thank people who sent me cards and jokes. There is still much to do, but at least I have begun.

Bad person, good person; smoker, non-smoker; radon, backyard electrical transformer; good genes, bad genes. Cancer is unpredictable and controllable only within limits. There is a seemingly endless variety of cancers. Everyone responds differently to treatment. Because I have been a seriously hardcore control freak, this was perhaps the most difficult challenge to me. I could not explain or control my cancer, but I can control how I respond to it. I hope I won't need reminding.

A Remnant of Jews in Tama County, Iowa

2011-11-20T21:04:00.000-05:00

Michael J. Bell, in “True Israelites of America” (Annals of Iowa 53, 2, Spring 1994), comments that well into the 1850s almost all the permanent Jewish settlers in Iowa were peddlers who traveled through the state: “Those early Jews who came to Iowa were among the first generation of American entrepreneurs. For the young Jewish businessman, a small store in the right community offered the opportunity for a Jewish immigrant to link himself to the rising prosperity of 19^th-century American and to develop a sense (however limited) of individual power and independence.”

In addition to Louis, A.I., and Zachariah Solomon, at least two other Sime men followed this path to integration if not prosperity. Louis joined his sons, Max and Simon, in Des Moines in 1889 for two years where they operated “Sime Bros Clothing and gents furnishing goods” in the city center.

Max Sime

In October 1892, the two brothers opened yet another store in Denison, Iowa, in the southwest corner of the state, which they ran for eight years. Shortly after they opened their store, prairie fires – a frequent occurrence – swept the nearby countryside. In an act of charity, the Simes donated clothing to the victims; in 1893, they donated 5 percent “of All Cash Sales” in December “to be distributed among the deserving poor and needy in Denison Township.”

Simon Sime

Max especially became active in the life of the town. He was an officer in the local whist chapter (a popular card game that had a national organization) and a charter member both of the Order of the Eastern Star and the International Order of Odd Fellows. His wife and daughter also were founders of the Order of Eastern Star. The brothers had a float in Denison’s July 4^th parade.

In March 1900, Max became a member of Denison’s city council, but in May of the same year the business failed and the brothers declared bankruptcy. Both brothers ended up in the clothing business – working for others – in Chicago, where they both died, Simon in 1932 and Max in 1945, after being struck and killed by an automobile.

The only early Sime settler who prospered in Iowa was my great-grandfather, Abraham Isaac Sime (“A.I.”). After working in his brother Louis’s business and moving around like his brothers and cousins from one small Iowa town to another, he established Sime’s Clothing Store in 1896 in Toledo, at the corner of Broadway and High Streets, where Louis had originally had his store on the main square.

608 Broadway

He and his wife owned a big white house at 608 Broadway, and they had three sons and a daughter. A.I. was active in many civic organizations, and when he died of tuberculosis in 1923, his obituary was the lead story on the front page of the Toledo Chronicle.


Hyman, 2nd from left, at Northwestern

His oldest son, Hyman – my grandfather – left Toledo to study pharmacy at Northwestern University and received a PhG (pharmaceutical graduate) in 1904.

With his first paycheck, Hyman bought his parents a Tiffany lamp to hang over their dining room table. He worked as a pharmacist in Dayton and Clutier, Iowa, as well as Wayne, Nebraska, before settling in Chicago, where he married my grandmother, Mary Drapekin, in 1913. By 1918, he had his own drugstore, which he maintained till the Depression when – family legend has it – he gave away too many medications to people who never paid for them. From then on, he was a druggist in someone else’s store.

Sampson Sime

The second son, Sampson, went to Iowa State University and became a civil engineer, settling eventually in Kansas City.

A.I. and Lena’s only daughter was “Little Sarah,” who started working in a Toledo bank in 1916 and retired in 1965 from her position as assistant cashier of the State Bank of Toledo; it was clear to all of us that she ran the bank! Sarah lived with her youngest brother Zelic in the big family house on Broadway. In 1921, Zelic became a partner in his father’s business and ran it until his death in 1949. Sarah sold the business in 1962 and died in 1972 in a nursing home in Gladbrook, 20 miles away.


Sarah and Zelic

When I was a little girl in Chicago and St. Paul, we would take a summer driving trip to Toledo. The Sime house was on a double lot, and Aunt Sarah, who collected rain water in a barrel to wash her waist-length hair, grew all kinds of vegetables. When we would arrive, there were always many rituals. First, she would call the operator on the crank telephone in the kitchen so the news could be relayed to others in town. Then we would go into the vegetable garden and pick peas to shell. Then I would go up Broadway to visit Sarah’s best friend, Estelle Born, and pick up a little red wagon she would lend me. In the evenings we would go to band concerts on the Courthouse Square, and when we got back in the dark, we would go into the garden to listen to the corn grow.

On a “roots road trip” we took about three years ago, my husband and I drove across Iowa, beginning in Denison, and followed Route 30, the old Lincoln Highway, which runs through the center of the state, to Toledo. The countryside is still beautiful, with rolling hills and fertile fields.

Sime's Corner, Toledo Iowa

The towns, not so quaint. Town squares and downtowns are full of empty storefronts, many of which were remodeled in the 1970s and 1980s with unattractive siding (like A.I. and Zelic’s store, now an insurance office).

Iowa is still drawing new immigrants, just as it did 140 years ago. A.G. Sulzberger wrote in the New York Times (November 14, 2011) on the front page about towns in Kansas where “Hispanics are arriving in numbers large enough to offset or even exceed the decline in the white population in many place.”

Of the towns in Iowa where Simes and Solomons lived, Denison in particular reflects a similar influx; the 2010 census counted 42.1% of the population as Hispanic. Denison is home to three major animal-processing plants: beef, chicken, and pigs’ blood. The stores on its main street, where the Sime brothers sold men’s clothing, now feature dresses for La Quinceañera. Fine old Victorian-era homes shelter multiple tenants.

1994

2009

The only visible remnant of the Sime family of central Iowa is an old barn with a fading sign just a few miles outside of Toledo.

The Simes and Solomons of Central Iowa

2011-10-25T22:40:00.001-04:00

Driving across central Iowa, it’s easy to imagine the countryside when Louis Sime opened his men’s clothing store on the town square of Toledo, Iowa, on April 10, 1877.

Tama County had been in existence for 34 years. Toledo, the county seat, had been founded in 1853, and the stately county courthouse (now listed on the National Register of Historic Sites) in the center of the town square had been completed in 1866.

The land surrounding the two towns was richly agricultural. An 1875 history of the county lists wheat, corn, oats, barley, rye, buckwheat, potatoes, cabbage, timber, and meadows: “The various tame grasses grow in Tama soil as if by magic. There is but little labor needed in raising it and the remuneration is good.”

Many of Iowa’s early settlers were drawn by the railroads, whose representatives went to Bohemia and other parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire offering an acre of land to hard workers who would come to build the railroad.

Clearly, the farmers and the railroadmen needed clothes. The Simes and the Solomons, two intertwined Jewish families that lived in the twin towns of Toledo and Tama City, arrived to meet their needs.

Louis Sime and his wife, Deborah (Dora) Levinson had come to central Iowa most recently from Wisconsin, where all five of his children had been born. His partner in the Toledo business was Zachariah Solomon. Louis was 37; Zach only 23. Zachariah Solomon’s younger brother, George, was married to Louis’s younger sister, known in the family as “Big Sarah.”

In addition to Sarah, Louis had two other siblings, Leah and Abraham I. (“A.I.”), my great-grandfather. When Leah died in childbirth after the birth of her second daughter in New York, her older daughter Sarah (Sadie) went to live with A.I. in Toledo; the new baby, Rachel, was placed in a New York orphan asylum but eventually she, too, moved in with her mother’s family in Toledo. Both left in their teens for Chicago, where they met husbands and remained.

Rachel (Rae) and Sarah (Sadie) Goldstein

A.I. followed Louis from Milwaukee to Iowa, becoming a clerk in the establishment of Sime & Solomon when it opened. Two years later, in 1879, Zachariah Solomon went into business for himself in Tama City, and remained a clothing merchant there till 1914, when his business failed. He moved to Chicago, where he worked as a clothing salesman at The Fair, and died in 1922.

Louis had even less success in the clothing business . . . or perhaps he had trouble staying in one place. In 1881, he had relocated to Gladbrook,and in 1885, he was back on the High Street in Toledo. He subsequently lived in Belle Plaine, Des Moines, De Witt, and Denison before he moved to Chicago, where he was working as a “laborer” in the clothing business in 1900.

In Toledo in July 1882, when George Solomon married “Big Sarah,” A.I. married his childhood sweetheart, Lena, from “Lebova”: probably Liubavas, Lithuania, based on other information. This is when facts get tangled. Their marriage certificate says her name was Ziman, but her husband’s obituary says her maiden name was Jeruslinsky, and her own obituary says her maiden name was Vatelsky. Leah’s first husband had the last name Simon, and when A.I. and Hyman and Leah’s father died, their mother also married a man whose last name was Simon. A.I. had a half-brother, Morris Simon, who was killed in “the Moro insurgency” in 1905 in the Philippines. The coincidences are too great to be coincidences; the families must have known each other and been interwoven in the towns they left behind.

Lena Ziman had arrived about a year before her marriage with – family legend has it – a tag around her neck that said “Toledo, Iowa.” In fact, the records of the ship she took from Hamburg, the Uranus, note that her destination is “Toledo,” and she was already listed as “Lena Sime.” Nevertheless, they were officially married a year later by Rabbi David Davidson, a Reform rabbi serving Congregation B'nai Jeshurun in Des Moines, Iowa.

A.I. and Lena Sime ca. 1922

I remember stories of trips to Des Moines for kosher meat, but how my grandfather’s family lived a Jewish life in Toledo never really entered my childhood consciousness. Simon Glazer, in The Jews of Iowa (1904), divided the Jews of Des Moines into eastsiders, mostly Orthodox, who came from the Suwalki region – where I believe the Simes came from – and westsiders, mostly Reform, who established B’nai Jeshurun. Among their family photos was a “rabbi card” of Rav Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor of Kovna obviously copied by a Des Moines photographer.

Nevertheless, when the Simes and Solomons needed a life-cycle event, from a wedding to a funeral, they sought out Reform synagogues and Reform rabbis.

To be continued . . .

Morpurgos and More in Trieste

2011-06-07T15:52:00.000-04:00

At the end of our trip through Dalmatia last year, I contracted a combo of bronchitis and pleurisy, and by the time I made my way to an E.R. and some very strong antibiotics, time had moved on. Finally editing and organizing my photos last week compelled me to write about experiences that particularly linger in my mind.

Our modus operandi in our travels, as usual, was to spend a few days in a city and try to see it through the eyes of the Jews who live or had lived there. In Trieste, that is relatively easy. The great synagogue, extremely well preserved, is outside the historic center of the city. The grand sanctuary – with an organ – suggests the size of the Ashkenazic congregation in 1912, when the building was completed: about 5,000. A small congregation of mostly North African Jews has a Sephardic Shabbat Service in a side chapel. There is separate seating, but all on one level, and all the little girls in front of me turned around with wide eyes and stared when I loudly sang Adon Olam at the end of the service.

The scale of the synagogue contrasts with that of the remaining fragment of the Jewish ghetto near the port. “Ghetto” is an Italian word that described the area, originally, where the Jews of Venice lived; Trieste’s ghetto was created in the late 17th-early 18th centuries.

Trieste has a small but interesting Museo della Comunità Ebraica di Trieste Carlo e Vera Wagner. It recounts the story of the ancient community as well as the history and fate of the community in the 19th and 20th centuries, when about 4 million Jews passed through the city on their way to the U.S., South America, and Palestine.

Trieste also was our introduction to the Morpurgo family. The name apparently is a variation on Marburg, which in turn is the German version of the city, Maribor, in Slovenia. One member of the family, Giuseppe Lazzano Morpurgo, moved from Gorizia, Italy, to Trieste. In 1831 he founded the Generali insurance company, which is now being challenged, poignantly and ironically, by Holocaust survivors to make good on their parents’ and grandparents’ policies (New York Times, June 2, 2011).

Two other Morpurgos, brothers Carlo Marco and Giacomo, left their apartment to the city of Trieste; it is now the Morpurgo Municipal Museum. We encountered the name again in Split: Lucciano Morpurgo, a poet and publisher; Vittorio Morpurgo, who headed the Jewish community; and Vid Morpurgo, who founded a bookstore that just celebrated its 150th anniversary. The many, many branches of the family include the stepfather of War Horse author Michael Morpurgo.

Two famous Italian Jewish writers are celebrated in Trieste. Italo Svevo, whose real name was Aron Ettore Schmitz, wrote novels, plays, and short stories; he was a friend of James Joyce and is widely considered to be the model for Leopold Bloom. Umberto Saba (born Umberto Poli) wrote novels and poetry. Svevo died in 1928; Saba survived World War II by moving around Italy (in one year he moved 11 times).

One day we took a city bus to an industrial area on the edge of Trieste to visit La Risiera di San Sabba, a former rice-processing factory that the Nazis began to convert to a prison camp in September 1943. At first it was used for captured Italian soldiers, then as a transit camp for deportees to Germany and Poland, primarily Auschwitz-Birkenau. By early 1944, partisans, political prisoners, homosexuals and Jews – including 700 from Trieste – were being interned and executed as well as dying from the conditions. By April 1944, thanks to Erwin Lambert – whose designs for gas chambers and ovens also were realized at Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor – bodies were being cremated on the site. On April 29, 1945, the fleeing Germans dynamited the crematorium and its chimney.

On our day at La Risiera, we were two of perhaps a dozen people there. The factory was declared a national monument of Italy in 1965, well before Holocaust memorials and museums began to proliferate elsewhere. In 1966, Trieste-born architect Romano Boico won a competition to turn La Risiera into a memorial and museum. His conception, completed in 1975, is stunning. Stark concrete entrance walls guide the visitor into the center of the factory, which he described as an “open-air nondenominational basilica.” Down the center runs a sunken line of steel that demarcates the absent crematorium. Other parts of the factory house a Museum of the Resistance that traces the German domination of the area as well as their ultimate defeat and trials for their war crimes.

By the time the Germans occupied Italy, about 2,000 Jews lived in Trieste, the rest having either left Italy or gone into hiding; after the war, according to some sources, about 600 and now numbers less than 1,000. As in so many communities, the Jews left behind both physical and intellectual evidence of their presence but not many Jews.

Sliding backward

2011-05-15T11:51:00.000-04:00

Nearly four months have passed since we left Milan, and we are still adjusting. Our days and evenings have been filled with errands, chores, and deferred maintenance of ourselves and our house. We’ve had to replace our glasses, our refrigerator, and our tires. We had to catch up on some of the Academy Award films that hadn’t yet come to Italy in English before we left, and most importantly reconnect with many friends and relatives in Washington and Chicago.

“How does it feel to be back? Do you miss Milan? Are you experiencing ‘culture shock’?” Those are the questions we are asked most frequently. Our answers are pretty much the same as you would expect: Most of the time it feels good to be back. Yes, we miss many aspects of our daily lives in Milan.

The “culture shock,” on the one hand, is not so much as it was when we returned from two months in the UK in the summers of 2000 or 1979. The reason for that is the internet . . . globalization . . . everything lumped together as “modern communications.” We were never really out of touch with our Washington lives. As we worked at home in the late morning, we streamed “Morning Edition” and in the evenings, “All Things Considered.” I practiced my Italian by reading Corriere della Sera every day, but I filled in my gaps by checking the New York Times or Washington Post on line. I could even keep up with my New Yorker by downloading it to our Kindle.

This past week, however, I did experience huge culture shock. We took our usual Amtrak regional train from New York to Washington. It took 3-1/2 hours, and we were on time for a change. The ride was bumpy and so jerky that I couldn’t take a sip of water without getting splashed in the face. What a contrast to our many trips between Milan and Florence a few months ago: a smooth ride that took 1-3/4 hours to go only 30 miles less for about $20 less.

Italy has its share of infrastructure problems, but the U.S. is falling behind so many other countries in so many ways. Since we have returned, we have watched and listened to the continuing statistics on unemployment and services here being cut; this morning's paper describes Amtrak's problems. Most seriously, the holes in our safety net are getting larger, and we have only ourselves to blame as our country slips back in time.

Arrivederci, Milano

2011-01-30T13:24:00.000-05:00

“No matter how well you think you know someone,” my mother used to say, “You don’t really know them till you’ve lived with them for 24 hours.”

So we’ve had the opportunity to get to know this country of charming people, great food and wine, and artistic creativity in many, many ways, some of them not so charming.

Espresso. I am not a chronic coffee drinker. My routine for most of my adult life has been a half-cup of my homemade brew (black) for breakfast, another half-cup mid-morning, and a full cup with lunch. I didn’t discriminate, and when my young coworkers went out every morning for a Starbucks, I was happy to drink the coffee in our office kitchen. After dinner: a little decaf, also black. Here I have found myself growing increasingly fond of the Italian habit: a normali (one shot of espresso) or caffe doppia (two shots) with a packet of brown sugar (canna). We are fortunate to have 20 steps from our front entrance a gelateria that has been featured in the papers for its Sicilian cannoli. They are good, but resistible. Dropping down there for a coffee around 11 after we pick up a newspaper, however, is not.

Similarly, I have never been a sweets eater, but I have never seen as many attractive and delicious dolci as I have in Italy. Perhaps it is because Italian sweets are not so sweet. Every holiday has its unique pastries (e.g. panettone for Christmas, deep-fried or baked chiacchieri for Carnival); every city has its specialty (Bergamo’s polenta e osei); and each pasticceria tries to outdo its neighbor.

Public transportation. Except for last week’s strike of Milan transport workers, public transportation is remarkably easy to use and accessible. For three days we rented a car with friends to show them the area around Lake Como; otherwise, for six months, we have depended on trains, buses, and our feet. No complaints.

Small specialized shops. We quickly learned that you have to know where to go to get what you want. A panificio has bread and fresh pasta but not many dolci: cakes, biscotti, and other dessert items. A pasticceria (see above) has everything sweet you could possibly dream of plus, usually, a place to eat it with a cup of espresso . . . but not much bread. A farmacia has prescription medicine, toothpaste, some over-the-counter medications like aspirin, skin creams, gluten-free foods, and petroleum jelly; a supermercato has toothpaste has toothpaste and cosmetics, and so on. It can drive you crazy. Or you begin to appreciate the fact that people really know their merchandise.

Flower stands on almost every corner. They cheer you as you walk by and mark the changing seasons even if you don’t buy anything.

Produce. I’ve written before about the joys of going to the produce markets. The proliferation of varieties of fruits and vegetables always available is truly overwhelming. Good things to eat come from all over Italy, all over Europe, and all around the Mediterranean. It is fresh and inexpensive. While it’s common for Americans traveling in Europe to complain about high prices, the fact is that we can buy produce for a fraction of what it costs in a farmers market at home.

Primi piatti. Consequently, pasta and risotto dishes are also inexpensive. Risotto with porcini mushrooms, a first course in thousands of neighborhood ristoranti, costs 6-7 €, or about $8. In Washington, such risotto might appear on the menu of an upscale restaurant and cost $15-20.

That’s the good news.

In the wake of more disgusting disclosures about the not-so-private life of Italy’s premier, Silvio Berlusconi, I ask myself yet again how and why the general population supports and even adores him. One expatriate suggests that the Italian view is: “You are born. You die. You might as well have the best time in between that you can.” Berlusconi embodies that attitude and is admired for really knowing how to have a good time.

Rachel Donadio, writing in last Sunday’s New York Times, gives what I think is the most accurate analysis I’ve seen yet: “Italy is a survival culture, steeped in that most time-honored survival mechanism: fatalistic resignation.” That explains a lot of what we’ve observed.

* why we rarely see a young person offering an older person a seat on a bus or tram.

* the short hours that businesses are open, the long mid-morning coffee and prosecco breaks, the two-hour lunches, and the famous happy hours (“aperitivi”).

* why people park their cars in every inch of space: on sidewalks, in crosswalks, in the middle of the street, and in other people’s driveways.

* dog poop, everywhere, and almost exclusively on the sidewalk. While it is a law in Milan and elsewhere, only in Bergamo have we seen a sign that you are required to clean up after your dog.

This is not a third-world country. Milan justifiably calls itself the “design capital of the world.” Yet Italy is in 80th place in the World Bank’s “Ease of doing business” survey, down four places from 2010. A friend told us it took five weeks from the day he bought a new car to the day he could drive it home: that’s how long it took to switch his insurance from his old car.

In today’s Washington Post, Nina Burleigh notes, “[Berlusconi’s] attitude toward women is the official version of the national norm in Italy, which ranked 74th out of 134 countries . . . in the World Economic Forum's 2010 global index of gender equality."

The “national norm” includes an obsession with one’s looks and clothes. I have never seen so many parrucchieri (places to get your hair done) for women and men, plus barber shops for men. Street markets and commercial areas, always packed with buyers loaded down with shopping bags, respond within hours to the latest fashion trend. Fur coats abound. The newspapers and television commercials focus almost exclusively on “the beautiful people,” and never mention anyone – in any context – without noting their age.

We have had a wonderful time, we’ve made new friends and, yes, eaten a lot of delicious food. We’ve appreciated anew the pleasures of small personalized shops, neighborhood bakeries, and walking. We look forward to returning home and, eventually, to returning to Italy. As we pack our bags, we stand with one foot in each culture, and each enhances our appreciation of the other.

Debbie Friedman: A Tapestry of Memories

2011-01-13T08:12:00.000-05:00

If you have traveled to Italy or fantasized about traveling to Italy, you picture sunshine, fields of sunflowers, a lazy lunch in the shade of a leafy pergola with a glass of wine, a plate of pasta, and a bunch of lavender on your table.

If you have spent winter in Northern Italy, however, the picture in your mind’s eye is foggy. It is raining hard, or misting. Your shoes are wet and the cuffs of your pants are wet. Your umbrella is dripping all over you and the person next to you. You are cold, chilled to the bone; your toes and fingers are freezing, no matter what you do.

We have now endured seven consecutive cold rainy days. They do not offer a hope of a green spring (though that is their inevitable result). We work around them, running our errands and visiting friends and going to museums, but they make it hard to get up in the morning.

Especially the last few days, when the illness and then death of Debbie Friedman and the shootings in Arizona surround us like the fog and the chilling rain.

I cannot say I grew up with Debbie Friedman, but I certainly grew into Reform Judaism with her. I cannot claim friendship or even a personal acquaintance, but she and her music meant so much to me. She represented the openness of Reform Judaism to new ways of praying and exploring and understanding how people relate to one another and to God. I grew up in Orthodox and Conservative synagogues, and I never attended a Jewish camp until I worked at one when I was in graduate school. I was an instant convert.

Eventually, I married a man who had known Debbie from early days at Olin-Sang-Ruby Camp; many years later, I envied our son, who took a class with her when he was a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

Up close, I was in wonder at her humility; awed by her sensitivity and vitality; worried about her delicate condition. From afar, she filled a room, controlled a hall, kept us holding our breaths and singing at the top of our voices. I often thought in those moments that I could understand what it felt like to encounter Hildegard of Bingen or Joan of Arc. She would have laughed.

The eulogies at her funeral emphasized all those human qualities. The overriding metaphor was the tapestry of memory. Debbie wove that tapestry, and we are all threads. And even as we are threads, we all have our own tapestries of memories. For some, Debbie herself is a part of those memories; for others, it is her music that makes the cloth.

Two Views of Tykocin

2010-12-30T06:01:00.000-05:00

My father’s cousin, Morris Biales, was raised in the town of Tykocin (“Tiktin,” in Yiddish). He emigrated at age 13, became a vice president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and died in 1997 at age 100. He lived longer into my adulthood that anyone else in that generation of my father’s family.

Tykocin, about 105 miles northeast of Warsaw and 45 miles from the Russian border, was the town where almost everyone in my father’s extended family lived and left around 1900. In the Pale of Settlement, it was part of the lands that were contested by the Russians, the Prussians, and the Austrians.

In a 1994 oral history, Morris Biales described the relationship between Jews and Gentiles: “In Tiktin, we lived in peace with the goyim.” He recounted his memory of the annual Kol Nidre service. Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Tiktin’s Jews would mow the cemetery, carry the clippings into the synagogue, and spread the sweet-smelling grass on the dirt floor. Then everyone – including the non-Jewish town officials – would stand side-by-side and listen to the beautiful chanting of the chazzan.

Tykocin is visited today by thousands of young Jews from the U.S., Israel, and South Africa who go on the “March of the Living” and other programs designed to nurture a love of Israel. Tykocin’s great synagogue, a beautiful baroque structure built in 1642, remains much as it was: prayers are painted on the walls because not everyone had a prayerbook.

It is a destination today, however, for a different reason. In September 1939, the German Army invaded Poland and captured the land around Tykocin; a few weeks later they passed it into Soviet hands. In June 1941, the Germans invaded again and encouraged the non-Jewish residents of the town to loot the Jews’ property and give it to the Germans.

On August 25, 1941, the Germans ordered the Jews to gather at the market square for resettlement in a nearby ghetto. Instead 3,000 men, women, and children were taken to a forest, forced to dig their own mass graves, and then executed by SS firing squads. The Tykocin massacre was the first of many that the Germans were to repeat in other area towns.

The March of the Living visit to Tykocin is preceded by a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The narrative of these teen trips is that Poland was a killing ground and Israel, where they go after Poland, is the land where the Jewish people was reborn out of the ashes.

This is not my narrative, and it is the reason I have been involved with the Forum for Dialogue Among Nations. The Forum has had some success in arranging opportunities for Jewish and Polish teenagers to engage in dialogue about their shared history, but it’s not a high priority for those bringing groups to Poland, because it is not in their narrative.

The Forum’s Schools for Dialogue program that I described in a previous blog at least can help Poland’s teenagers – and their parents and friends and relatives and fellow townspeople – grow in understanding. Learning in depth about the role of Jews in their communities will help them become educated and compassionate citizens of the world.

Why should we care?

Poland’s economy is growing: it was the only member of the European Union to avoid the recent recession. Poland’s college and high school students are part of a global workforce that will be encountering others and shaping their communities wherever they settle. Poland is a democracy and an important strategic partner of the United States and Western governments. Poland is a loyal supporter and partner of Israel.

Based on the narrative of my family, I believe that it is possible for Jewish and Polish people to stand together and listen to beautiful music. It happened in Tykocin. It has been happening for 20 years in Krakow at the Jewish Cultural Festival. With the help of the Forum for Dialogue Among Nations, it can happen throughout Poland.

Snow on Sunflowers

2010-12-20T11:14:00.000-05:00

Those who have been to sun-washed Tuscany, close your eyes. You see the sunflowers, the fields of lavender, the grape arbor where you had lunch. You wandered around Florence, drinking in the art and savoring the gelato and were so grateful to return at the end of the day to your air-conditioned room.

I know that when I say we are spending one weekend a month in Florence while we are living here in Italy, that’s what you’re thinking.

Change your mind’s eye instead to Chicago in January.

Imagine that your train gets into the station and there is chaos. One hundred smokers are lined up waiting for taxis that do not appear. All the city buses have gathered at the station with their LED signs blinking “Fuori Servizio” (out of service). All flights are canceled.

The wind is whipping in your face. The snow is falling at a rate of more than one inch an hour. It started as rain mixed with snow; then everything froze. You have no choice but to tramp carefully through the slush and ice for the two miles to your hotel with your luggage. Between stopping to wipe your nose, clean your glasses, and re-up the balance on your cellphone, it takes you 75 minutes.

There is not a plow to be seen, nor a shovel. People are cleaning their windshields with index cards. Restaurant owners are fighting the snow with cookie sheets. The cobblestone streets are filled with 4” of slush. Abandoned cars, motorcycles, and tourist buses on all the bridges have paralyzed traffic. The road to Sienna is closed. Later you learn that in beautiful sunwashed Tuscany, people spent 20 hours in their cars waiting to be rescued.

So when “Biggest snow since 1985 blasts Florence, Italy,” mio marito and I felt fortunate that our hotel was in walking distance, that our room was warm, and that we had dry clothes. Unfortunately, congregants who lived out of town couldn’t get in, and congregants who lived in town couldn’t get around. Most of the museums and even the churches closed. The restaurants were open. After all, this is Italy.

I'm Jewish? Now what?

2010-12-15T08:04:00.000-05:00

The opportunities I had to meet with young Polish Jews were highlights of my recent trip to Poland with the Forum for Dialogue Among Nations.

On our first full day of meetings, we met with Karina Sokolowska-Folwarczny, Country Director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. (Karina is married to Andrzej, who directs the Forum; they met after both were involved with their respective organizations.)

The “Joint,” as it is known, is the primary funder of many of the Jewish communal activities in Poland, as it is in the FSU and many other areas. In addition to supporting traditional programs – primarily social services and kosher kitchens that provide meals for elderly and needy Jews – it also helps the growing community of young Poles who are discovering and/or want to learn about their Jewish backgrounds.

Karina herself is an example. She grew up knowing she was Jewish; her grandparents had met in camps and returned to the German area of Poland. During the Communist era – from the end of World War II until 1989 – Judaism became an underground religion like others. In college in the 1990s she joined a Jewish student organization, and that was the beginning of her public identification.

How many other Jews are there in Poland?

No one knows for sure. Michael Shudrich, the chief rabbi of Poland, with whom we also met, notes that 350,000 were left in Poland at the end of the Second World War, and 5,000 are now registered with the community.

On its website, the Joint estimates 12,000. Karina Sokolowska-Folwarczny told us that an organization of “hidden children” now numbers 1,000+. In addition, Sochnut, the Jewish Agency, sponsors an annual trip to Israel for Polish youth between the ages 18-26. For 7-8 years, two trips each year have taken 60 young people who have had to prove a connection to Judaism.

The phenomenon of “hidden children” was fascinating to our group. Deathbed confessions by people now in their 60s and 70s are common. There are many versions of very similar stories.

An elderly person – more often a woman, because girls were easier to hide and “pass” – was adopted by a non-Jewish family, and raised as a Catholic but told at some point she was born Jewish.
Even with that knowledge, the person either continued to practice Catholicism because it was their religion or – in the face of Communist anti-Semitism – hid their roots from their spouses and children.

In addition to the descendants of hidden children are Poles whose ancestors survived because they themselves hid or disguised or denied their Jewish roots.

Yale Reisner, a researcher at Warsaw’s Jewish Historical Institute, also spoke to us of this phenomenon. On the average of once a week someone calls or comes to the Institute with a similar story. “My mother has only a few months to live, and last week she told me that her parents were Jews.” They want to know what to do next.

Some Poles make the discovery themselves and then confront their relatives; this was the case of a young journalist who found his family’s unique name and town on the popular Jewish genealogical website, www.JewishGen.org while he was browsing the Internet late one night.

(This is not only a Polish phenomenon. Last week, we spent five days in Brussels as guests of the International Jewish Center, Belgium’s only English-speaking Liberal Jewish community and a member of the World Union for Progressive Judaism. At the Jewish Museum of Belgium, we learned about the constantly increasing number of Belgians who learn late in life that their parent was one of the enfants caches.)

We met that young Polish journalist who found his family on the Web not because of his past, however, but because of the choice he has made about his future: to live a Jewish life in Krakow. Much of that active life is focused around the Centrum Spoleczności Żydowskiej w Krakowie, the Jewish Community Centre of Krakow, in Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter. Dedicated in 2008 by Prince Charles, the Centre is directed by incredibly energetic New Yorker Jonathan Ornstein, who also has become a permanent resident.

A few blocks away, at the Żydowskie Muzeum Galicja – the Jewish Museum of Galicia – our guide was an educational specialist from Nashville, a young Jewish woman whose father I know, coincidentally. She too plans to stay in Poland.

We met many, many other Jews like these, from Poland and other countries, who are building active communities in Warsaw, Krakow, and Lodz. Poland’s annual Limmud – an annual adult education program that has been spreading throughout Europe from country to country for 30 years – attracted 640 eager learners to Warsaw in November.

An American expatriate I met in Brussels commented, “When you live in the U.S., you tend to think of everything in Europe in terms of past history. When you live in Europe, you realize that history is part of your life every day.”

And this is the message of the Forum for Dialogue Among Nations. Our history as Jews, and/or as Poles, is very much a part of today. How we respond has the power to shape tomorrow.

* * *

As I write, Garrison Keillor is telling me that today is the 151^st anniversary of the birth of Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof, inventor and advocate of the use of the international language Esperanto. He died in Warsaw on April 14, 1917. I photographed his grave when we were in Warsaw’s Jewish cemetery.

A Venetian Giorno del Ringraziamento

2010-12-05T12:43:00.001-05:00

Several months ago, when we knew we would be in Milan for Thanksgiving, we invited friends from London to visit us for the holiday. They countered with a suggestion that the four of us meet in Venice. Why not?

So we made our plans to stay at a hotel near Piazza San Marco that was included in their package. I didn’t expect to find turkey and all the sides, but I did discover a restaurant named Osteria La Zucca – “The Pumpkin” – where I thought Thanksgiving dinner would be an interesting experience.

A few weeks ago, I began to read in the paper about flooding in the Veneto – the Italian region where Venice is located – and that’s when I learned about alta acqua, “high water.”

I should have learned more. While it was a pleasure to be in Venice when relatively few other tourists were there, the high waters did impact us. When I asked at the hotel desk on the first afternoon if alta acqua was coming soon, he said that if we returned to the hotel by 10:30 p.m., we’d be fine. About 10, we walked to Piazza San Marco and found it filling up like a formerly empty swimming pool.

The next morning, when we assumed the waters would have receded, we instead found our way blocked in several directions by standing sewer water that was as much as 8” deep in places, depending on the pitch of the sidewalk.

What we also didn’t know was that the time of alta acqua changes daily. Our friends were leaving on Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, around 2 p.m. We took a long walk in the morning and stopped on the sunny shore for a snack.

On the way back to our hotel so our friends could pick up their luggage, we had to walk on the gangplanks that the city sets up for people to make their way over the water. When the gangplanks came to an end, however, our path was blocked by deep water. I led everyone back and tried another route: also blocked.

Finally our friend, claiming she had been raised in a boarding school where conditions were far worse, gave me her shoes and long coat (it was quite cold), and waded through water up to her knees; about 10 minutes later she returned with the luggage in hand.

At that moment, two other Englishwomen on their way out of town offered our friends their waders. If you don’t want to buy boots, Venetians will sell you bright blue plastic bags with soles. Thus our friends could reach the quay where their water taxi would take them to the airport.

We continued our sightseeing and had dinner without confronting any more acqua alta that day. On Friday morning, the concierge assured us that if we left our hotel by 10 a.m. we would be fine. When the siren went off about 9:20 a.m., however, we headed immediately to the train station. My caution was not in vain: water around the hotel was already about 2” deep, and it was raining. We had a long wait at the train station (no benches) but we felt like lucky refugees when we finally got on the warm dry train and headed west toward the snow-capped Dolomites on our way back to Milan.

The meal

We knew that La Zucca emphasized local fresh vegetables, and we were not disappointed. The highlights were two primi piatti: tagliatelle with gorgonzola and pistachios, and divine roasted artichoke hearts; and the contorni: leeks baked with a crispy parmesan crust, an eggplant and pepper flan; and the dolce: pear mousse with chocolate sauce. Though we were in the first seating, the lamb chops were gone, so I ate my first guinea fowl and decided I prefer roasted turkey, and not just for Thanksgiving.

A Week in Poland Is Not Enough

2010-11-30T06:48:00.001-05:00

For nearly ten years, I have been involved with Forum for Dialogue Among Nations, an NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) founded by Andrzej Folwarczny, a former member of the Polish parliament, to promote Polish-Jewish relations.

Andrzej, who is not Jewish, is painfully aware that many Jews blame Poland more than Germany for the Holocaust. Much of his adult life has been devoted not only to demonstrating this blame is not justified, but also to encouraging both Jews and Poles to understand that the histories of the two peoples are inextricably intertwined. This is my belief: that contemporary and recent Jewish history cannot be understood without an understanding of the history of the Polish people, and vice versa.

My involvement enabled me this month to spend a full week in Poland as a guest of the Forum and Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. While I went knowing that my personal narrative had shaped my positive feelings, I wanted also to understand the negative feelings on both sides as well as what I could do about them.

I was not disappointed. Our six days were packed with presentations by government officials and academics; we met over lunch and dinner with young Poles – Jews and non-Jews – who have chosen to make their lives in Poland. We examined the history – what several scholars referred to as “the two narratives” – and we looked to the future.

One of the high points of my week in Poland was a visit to the regional high school in Chęciny, a participant in the Forum’s impressive “School of Dialogue” program.

Chęciny was a shtetl town before World War II: in 1939 Jews represented about 60% of the population, but now there are no more. As a School of Dialogue, administrators and a team of teachers from the school – as well as the regional officer responsible for education – have made a commitment to educate their students about Jewish life in Chęciny. The implications of this commitment are wide and deep.

The Forum initiated its program in Warsaw schools and selected university students to be prepared as trainers. The trainers go to cooperating schools to work with teachers and one class of teenagers who explore the Jewish roots of their town. A school must agree to devote four full days of classroom time to research and study; at the end, students make a presentation to their families, classmates, and town officials.

In Chęciny, as in most towns, the students have produced a “walking tour” of the former Jewish sites in the town as well as profiles of people who lived there. Reality demands that they also research what happened to the Jews of their community in the 20th century and before. In the cemetery, they found a 13^th-century stone that predates the earliest records of Jews in the town.

Chęciny has gone beyond that: in addition to an annual three-day festival of Jewish culture, the high school has a relationship with a high school in Israel and students and teachers had visited two weeks earlier, so the Israeli flag still was flying.

Town leaders want to turn the former synagogue, used by the Russians as a stable but now a community center, into a Jewish museum and cultural center.

“Propaganda,” you may be saying. Nevertheless, the evidence is that dialogue is always more effective than no dialogue!

The required research includes asking one’s parents and grandparents about their personal histories relative to the Jewish community. Parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents of today’s 16-year-olds were born during the 1945-1989 period of Soviet rule of Poland, an era marked by official anti-Semitic policies.

This 44-year Russian occupation of Poland is just one of the facts that shape the Polish narrative.

Another is that when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939 they captured and killed 20,000 Polish intellectuals.
The Soviets “finished” the job at Katyn, a massacre for which the Russian parliament just took responsibility a few days ago.
Hitler’s plan for the Polish non-Jews – leaderless and mostly uneducated peasants – was to create a slave labor force of untermenschen (sub-humans).
More officially designated “Righteous Gentiles” are from Poland than any other country in Europe.

While Jews were killed primarily by the Germans, the Polish people accept and share responsibility. Their atonement has taken many forms over the years, both public and private. Studying the Holocaust is part of the required curriculum; cities and towns have given land and erected memorials; countless exchange programs, including the Forum, have been funded by the government.

The issue of reparations remains unresolved largely, the Poles maintain, because decisions made by the post-War Soviet government complicated the issue.

The implications of the School of Dialogue program are huge. As Polish students learn about the contribution of Jews to their own communities, their participation reshapes their communities for now and for tomorrow. “Never again” is not an abstract promise. School of Dialogue – with the Forum’s ambitious goal of expanding the program throughout the country – will ensure a future of mutual understanding.

Are there Jews in Poland to benefit? Read my next installment!

"Living Reform" in Italy

2010-11-13T16:35:00.000-05:00

While Reform Judaism in the US prides itself on inclusivity, the Orthodox community in Italy is tightly exclusionary. The impact on individuals is the saddest part of this story.

In some Italian cities, only children of “community” members are allowed to attend Jewish educational programs. Decisions about “who is a Jew” in Italy – after a long history of inclusion and acceptance – have become as restrictive and repressive as those in Israel. Unless one can provide several generations of ketubot to prove one’s mother was Jewish, one will likely be rejected. People who have been members of the community for years would not be accepted if they applied today. How many of us have our great-great grandmother’s ketubah from Poland or Lithuania?

Two weeks ago a student from California found her way to Shabbat services at Shir Chadash, the Progressive congregation in Florence. A member since childhood of an Orthodox synagogue, she had gone on Kol Nidre to the Great Synagogue in Florence only to be turned away flatly and told no one who was not a member of the “community” was allowed to attend.

A few weeks ago, I sent an email to the main synagogue in Milan, inquiring about the times of Shabbat services. I never received a response. Last Saturday morning, we went anyway. The security agents outside the building didn’t bother me; in fact, in contrast to the grilling we’ve gone through in other cities, it was nothing.

What did bother me – us – was that once inside the building, there was no sign, no person to tell us where to go, how to enter the sanctuary, which of several doors to walk through. We had been at the synagogue in September for the European Day of Jewish Culture, but we hadn’t come in the same entrance, and it was confusing.

I knew women had to sit upstairs, so I headed there. In the balcony, I saw no prayerbooks. A few women were scattered around, mostly in pairs, and they all stared at me. No one came over. Finally I went over to one woman who was studying a prayerbook and asked her where they were kept; she pointed vaguely to the other side of the balcony.

We left after an hour. There were about 80 people there by the time we left, at the end of the rabbi’s sermon: about 40 men and 40 women. No one greeted us, no one said “Shabbat shalom” till some teenagers, running into the building as we left, mumbled it to Fred.

Not only is the community unwelcoming. This past summer, a Chabad rabbi in Milan publicly made the outrageous and totally unfounded charge that Progressive congregation Lev Chadash had served lobster at its seder. As the battle raged in the Italian media – which couldn’t quite grasp what was happening – he finally retracted his charges around Yom Kippur, but refused to apologize for his preposterous claims.

“We are Orthodox in our traditions,” one member of an old Italian family told me, “but Reform in our daily lives.” Not really. Such thinking unfortunately reflects a gross misunderstanding of Reform Judaism.

If the Jews of Italy were truly “living Reform,” they would comprehend and embrace the idea that there is more than one way to be Jewish.

If the Jews of Italy were truly “living Reform,” they would be concerned about the disenfranchisement of other Jews in their midst.

If the Jews of Italy were truly “living Reform,” they would advocate for religious equality of all Jews: men and women, Ashkenazic and Sephardic, rabbis and lay people.

If the Jews of Italy were truly “living Reform,” they would welcome the non-Jews in their midst, whether married to Jews or seeking a path to spiritual fulfillment through Judaism.

If the Jews of Italy were truly “living Reform,” they would demand religious freedom and cultural pluralism for all Jews.

If the Jews of Italy were truly “living Reform,” they would acknowledge that through community they will strengthen one another.

“Schwer tzu zein a yid.” – It's not easy to be a Jew. To be a Reform Jew in Italy is to struggle daily with invisibility.

A Community Divided Against Itself

2010-11-11T05:48:00.001-05:00

My husband and I are at the halfway point in our five months of volunteer service to two of the three Progressive Jewish communities in Italy: Congregazione Beth Shalom in Milan and Shir Hadash in Florence. We have visited Lev Chadash, here in Milan, also a member of the World Union for Progressive Judaism (WUPJ). And WUPJ is also trying to grow a group in Rome.

Both congregations we serve are made up of a mix of U.S. and British expatriates and native Italians. Both congregations include Jews married to non-Jews and Jews-by-choice, many of whom grew up in Italian Catholic families. Both function, with difficulty, on the edge of the recognized Jewish communities in their cities.

About 50,000 Jews lived in Italy in 1933; 40,000 survived the war. The European Jewish Congress now estimates the Italian Jewish population to be about 30,000, including a large number of Libyan Jews who came to Italy in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Holocaust is very much a current issue for today’s Jewish community. Last week, RAI-TV, a state-sponsored channel, showed a docudrama, “Under the Roman Sky,” portraying Pope Pius XII as responsible for saving 10,000 Jews. Rome's Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni described the series as "junk.

At the same time, there is intense interest in Jewish thought, philosophy, history. Hardly a day goes by that the Corriere della Sera doesn’t have an article on – to paraphrase Saul Bellow – the Hart, Shaffner, & Marx of contemporary Israeli writers: David Grossman, Amos Oz, or A.B. Yehoshua. In fact, yesterday’s Corriere features the new book of Bellow’s letters on its front page, and today’s paper includes a long feature article about I.B. Singer’s The Family Moskat; you don’t find that kind of coverage in The New York Times.

The issue that threatens the community the most is not anti-semitism. Nor is it intermarriage, which now exceeds 50 percent; nor is it the declining birthrate.

Rather – as Ruth Ellen Gruber wrote in an excellent article this past June – it is “a lack of pluralism and increased Orthodox rigidity in the official community” that is alienating and turning people away.

I have written before about the state of Reform/Progressive Judaism in various countries. Italy is typical of other European countries. All citizens have the option to pay a “religious tax” that is then credited to their own religious community, which they designate. For Jews who are considered part of the “official” Jewish community, these revenues are then returned to the Jewish community via the UCEI (unione delle comunità ebraiche Italiane). The problem is that the UCEI, though its mission statement claims that it represents the Jews of Italy, doesn’t recognize nor accept all of them.

No money goes to the Progressive congregations in Florence or Milan. These congregations must shoulder their entire financial burden themselves. They are not listed on the communities’ websites of Jewish organizations. They spend much of their energy trying to let people know they exist. The Internet has helped a bit, but the vast majority of Italian Jews know nothing about Progressive or Reform Judaism. (To be continued.)

A View from the Top

2010-10-27T12:42:00.001-04:00

Before moving to Milan, we had seen some snapshots of the views from our windows but I was worried how I would adapt because I’ve spent most of my adult life in green and leafy urban areas.

Of course, I’ve not spent my days with views of the Alps or Milan’s magnificent Duomo, and I needn’t have been concerned about the trees either. While many Milan streets do not have trees or grass, ours has both. The most populous tree is the magnificent plane; its leaves turn yellow and then brown but don't fall off so rapidly.

Our 7th floor apartment is in a predominantly residential neighborhood in a block of apartment buildings. Exceptions:

* on our side of the wide avenue is a gelateria/bakery/bar/snack shop and barber/hairdresser on the ground floor of the building next door

* across the street is a yellow-brick building that takes up an entire city block and is – so far as we can tell – the Milan headquarters of the Italian air force!

Between us and this well-fortified building covered with some pretty fancy electronics is a double row of chestnut trees that reach at least to our 5th floor. The park-like esplanade down the center of the street is primarily for dog-walking, a popular Milan activity, and for parking.

The balcony on the back of the apartment faces southwest (the center of town and the Duomo) and offers hints not only of the trees on other streets, but a special view of a neighbor’s balcony garden, a very common sight here in Milan.

And sunsets . . .

In the fall, mio marito and I typically take a day in the rural parts of Maryland and Virginia to see the fall colors. This year, friends joined us and we delighted in the change of seasons at Lake Como instead: not so many jack o’lanterns but the change of seasons is beautiful in its own way.

Perche? Perche.

2010-10-19T05:50:00.003-04:00

Our apartment in Milan is on the top floor of a seven-story building near Piazza Novelli, a traffic circle – or round-about – about a three-mile walk from the Duomo, the center of Milan’s concentric circles.

When we arrived in August, half of the Piazza was under construction; the street is torn up and Jersey barriers re-route traffic in both directions around the other side of the circle. A huge crane is in the center of the piazza. High fences obstructed our view, so we couldn’t really understand what was happening. Some days the noise of construction started at 7 A.M.; other days the silence led us to believe nothing was happening.

In front of our building, we noticed a sign that was easy to translate: “Work in Piazza Novelli will cause traffic problems from 9/9/2006 to 1/28/09.”

Since it was already 9/15/10, we laughed when we saw the sign, and a few days later, I photographed it.

Perhaps I was photographed in turn by the closed-circuit cameras, because in yet a few more days, we noticed another sign that had been officially altered: “Diversions caused by work from 9/9/2006 until ... the work is finished.”

Two days after that, the Jersey barriers were completely reconfigured. The first half of the roadway around the plaza is still fenced in and mostly inaccessible, and it appears that work is about to begin on the other half of the roadway.

We have learned from neighbors that a 250-space parking lot has been constructed under the Piazza, which will be a great boon to the neighborhood, where people cram cars everywhere, including on the broad sidewalks.

When will it be finished? When it’s finished!

Last Friday night, about 7:30, huge pieces of machinery arrived and men started to repave the street in front of our building. We suspected this was about to happen because we saw that the next block had been paved the night before, plus “no parking” signs had been tied to all the posts. Nevertheless, it was a bit of a surprise because our street didn’t need repaving, which was pointed out by a letter to the editor the next morning in the Corriere della Sera.

An American who has lived here for 30 years told me that his favorite word in Italian is perche. Perche means both “why?” and “because.” One can have an entire conversation using only this word. Perche? Perche.

To market, to market, to market

2010-10-13T16:03:00.000-04:00

Our professoressa at Casa Italiana, where we studied Italian before coming to Milan, taught us about “il mercato rionale,” the local neighborhood market. A Roman, she wasn’t sure if Milan had such markets and, if it did, they surely weren’t as good as Roman ones!

So we were delighted to discover that within two miles of our apartment are at least three local markets on three different days of the week. On Mondays, the biggest of the three fills four blocks of a wide street that is closed for the day, plus it spreads its tendrils onto three perpendicular side streets. Most of the stalls sell clothing, from underwear and socks to coats, dresses, purses, scarves and – at this time of the year – sweaters of every shape, size, and color imaginable. The fruit and vegetable vendors are on the side streets, and here and there housewares, tablecloths and curtains, a woodcarver one week. Other than the produce, about 75% of the items are produced in China, including many of the sweaters.

On Tuesdays, two blocks to the west of our apartment, il mercato rionale is devoted to food, with a little clothing, flowers, housewares, and jewelry thrown in. That street is not closed to traffic, but the stalls line both sides of a wide sidewalk on one side of the street.

This is “our” market, and as is the custom, we have found “our” vendor: a lovely woman, patient with my stumbling Italian, whose selection is outstanding. Surely I cannot be faulted, knowing the word for “tomato,” that I do not know the word for cherry tomato, and what we call “Roma” tomatoes (not what they are called here), and all the six different types of tomatoes she has available one week.

And being able to call a tomato by its right name is important, because here – unlike at home – the custom is not to pick your own produce. That is, you stand in line near the scale, you tell the vendor what you want, they get it and bag it and weigh it, and then you tell them the next item. “Our” vendor is patient enough to follow me around the stand so I can point to the item whose name I cannot remember. I’ve also learned the hard way to be very specific about quantity. Mio marito and I can eat 4 tomatoes before they spoil, but not a kilo!

Our market is a neighborhood market, not on the tourist circuit. This past weekend while in Florence we visited Sant’ Ambrogio, which includes a kosher butcher and some stands with extraordinary displays of produce.

At some of D.C.’s markets, vendors are limited to selling only what they grow, but in Italy, the world is the limit so while most of the produce is from one part of Italy or another, there are pomegranates from Israel and dates from Morocco.

The third market we stumbled on one Thursday. I was frustrated because I wanted to prepare chicken with tarragon, dragoncello, and in two supermarkets and three specialty food stores, we had drawn a blank look. As we passed through this street market, I spotted a woman selling literally dozens of teas and spices, including dragoncello. We call this “the market we don’t go to” because unfortunately the produce vendors are very aggressive, following us down the row with their wares and urging us to buy from them.

The first two weeks, we overbought; I felt like I was spending every minute preparing and cooking produce. Worse, I didn’t want to eat out, knowing that food was waiting at home in our small refrigerator!

Now I’ve become more savvy. While I’ve described only a couple of special meals on this blog, we’ve sampled some other restaurants as well, including two Chinese (much more delicate than in the U.S.) and a fine Indian one. A couple of times we’ve picked up pizzas, which are incredibly inexpensive and delicious, and eaten them at home with our own salad.

Probably five days a week, we eat lunch at home, listening to NPR’s “Morning Edition” on WAMU, one of our D.C. public radio stations, over our laptop. And at least five nights a week we prepare our own dinners: pasta with vegetables, salads, chicken breasts – just like home – but with more olives and fresher cheeses.

The Treasures of Casale Monferrato

2010-10-04T08:51:00.002-04:00

Last week we had the great pleasure of visiting the Piedmontese town of Casale Monferrato, about 75 miles from Milan.

“Casale,” as it’s called locally, was on our list of “must-see’s,” but it’s relatively difficult to reach without a car, so we were delighted when we were invited to go for the day with friends. The occasion was the 90th anniversary of Keren Hayesod, which was being marked by the “Keren” chapter of Torino with a guided tour of Casale’s synagogue during Sukkot.

(Keren Hayesod is the Hebrew name – used internationally – for what we in the U.S. know as the United Jewish Appeal. Internationally, “Keren” almost exclusively raises funds for Israel; the UJA serves as an umbrella organization in the U.S. that raises money both for Israel and for local programs.)

The Jewish community of Casale dates back to the 15th century; the Encyclopedia Judaica says the first Jews arrived in the 1430s, though other sources says the community was established when the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492.

Only two Jewish families remain in Casale, though at its height, the community numbered more than 1,000. We had the pleasure of being given a guided tour of the synagogue, built in 1592, by Adriana Ottolenghi. She and her husband Dr. Giorgio Ottolenghi, as well as a representative of the other family, were on hand to greet visitors, as apparently they are on most Sundays, special groups notwithstanding, when dozens of tourists visit the synagogue and its museum.

Many people consider the synagogue to be the most beautiful in Europe. Finer photos of it than I could ever take, as well as more information about the Casale Jewish community, are at http://www.casalebraica.org/ENG/MainHome/MainHome.html. Rabbi Louis Kaplan has written a fine essay about his 2000 visit to the synagogue and includes a history of the Jewish community; you can read it at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0411/is_1_49/ai_61887406/.

The highly embellished Baroque interior is a stark contrast to the nondescript exterior. In accordance with the rules of many European towns and villages, the Jews were allowed to build a synagogue so long as no one knew it was there. The building was not to be distinguished from the outside, nor could music or praying be heard by passersby. That was centuries ago. Today, interestingly, everyone whom we asked for directions sent us the wrong way, not purposely but because they themselves didn’t seem to know how to get there. Even the official tourist information signs were unclear.

The website of the community does not show the charming courtyard where the sukkah appropriately stood next to a pomegranate tree loaded with fruit. On the pavement, the motif was bees, givers of sweetness and light, appropriate to Sukkot as well as other holidays.

Nor does the website do justice to what Mrs. Ottolenghi led us to in the basement of the synagogue complex: dozens of the most creative and picturesque modern Chanukiyot we have ever seen. About 40 were on display out of a collection of more than 100 owned by the community/synagogue/museum. They are about to make their first trip together away from Casale, to the Musee d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaisme in Paris (http://www.mahj.org/en/index.php).

You can see a few of these extraordinary menorahs at http://www.casalebraica.org/ENG/Museums/MusLights/AboutMusLights.html.
They were created by both Jewish and non-Jewish artists out of every material, from BIC pens to sterno cans to silver, crystal, brass, acrylic, film: every possible medium that could represent the unlimited imaginations of the artists. My personal favorite, fashioned from gold-plated wire and wax by Jessica R. Carroll of Rome, replicates the bee motif of the synagogue’s courtyard. Her father, sculptor Robert Carroll, a native of Wisconsin, has carved an eight-branch menorah of olivewood with a brass shamash mounted on an Italian granite base. Celebrate Chanukah early by visiting the website!

* * *
The meal

A day in Piedmont must include, our friends assured us, a typical Piedmontese Sunday lunch, which it was our pleasure to share at Osteria Amarotto in Casale Monferrato. They should know! David and Carol Ross, retired U.S. foreign service officers, operate Sophisticated Italy, helping travelers get to know the best of Italy, and they are among the founders of our Milan congregation.

Mio marito and our friends took the prix-fixe menu, which began with a “white meat paté” of chicken and veal; I tasted some and it was superb. That was followed by a small vegetable tart; then tagliatelle in a too-salty broth; then bollito misto. This last dish – a mélange of cuts of beef and veal – boiled together, was served from a rolling cart with several sauces.

I went the à la carte route because I wanted lamb chops, which were tiny and fragrant, and I wanted to try the peperoni bagna cauda after our friends described “bagna cauda” as a hot sauce of olive oil and garlic. Unfortunately they forgot the third major ingredient: anchovies. Mio marito liked it very much, and I was happy with his tartine de verdure. (Lest I seem a picky eater . . . it’s just fish, in most forms, for which I’ve never developed a taste.)

Dessert was two kinds of cake, also akin to patés: one chocolate, one nougat. Heavenly.

Our friends chose a lovely red wine, and for once I drank in mid-day, but only a few sips. I did not want to be sleepy for either the synagogue tour or the promised stop at a cashmere outlet on the way home.

From Milan at last

2010-09-25T08:37:00.001-04:00

Last year for our 36th anniversary, mio marito (my husband) and I took White’s Ferry across the Potomac, visited a winery for a tasting, hit the Leesburg Prime Outlets, and had a so-so dinner at a restaurant in a converted bank.

This year, we rode a packed rush-hour bus to Stazione Centrale di Milano and 30 minutes later by train we were in Pavia, a town of 75,000 about 25 miles south of Milan.

Pavia has gone through multiple incarnations since its founding in pre-Roman times.

Like the Tuscan town of San Gimignano, Pavia is known for its towers. These towers are not attached to buildings but are freestanding and were built by individual families as assertions of power and wealth. At some point, more than a hundred existed; now, three dominate the campus of the University of Pavia. On March 17, 1989, the tower next to Pavia’s Duomo suddenly collapsed, killing four people and rendering the Duomo unsafe for habitation. It is now partially remodeled, but the tower will not be rebuilt.

Interspersed among the towers are several churches that we visited, each more fascinating than the next.

+ The Duomo, partially restored, is only half a church for now, wide and shallow with a temporary wall completely blocking 2/3 of the nave, the transept, and all the other parts of the building.

+ S. Maria Incoronata di Canepanova, built about 1500 on the site of a miraculous vision of Mary, contains oil paintings of eight heroines from the Hebrew bible.

+ Chiesa di San Francesco, a stark medieval church started in 1228, two years after the death of St. Francis of Assisi, with its interesting though faded frescoes everywhere, towers and brickwork.

+ The Basilica di San Teodoro, with its magnificent mural of the patron saint of Pavia on what is essentially a pictographic map of the city as it was about 1525 with the remaining towers still identifiable in 2010.

San Teodoro is near the River Ticino in the center of what was once the fishermen’s living area, and the Jewish ghetto backs on to the church. Rabbi Moses da Pavia lived there during the 11th Century, but the community was at its height at the end of the 15th Century. On several occasions, the Jews were ordered to leave the entire Milanese territory but always managed to delay their expulsion; in 1597, their time ran out.

According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, “The governor then gave the Jews two months in which to depart. He obliged the poor to leave first, giving them an escort of soldiers and 5,000 florins in gold for the expenses of the journey. The majority left the province of Milan after Easter, and the remainder after Pentecost. But two Jewish families were left in Cremona, Lodi, and Alessandria; in Pavia not one Jew remained.”

+ Finally, we visited San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro, a huge basilica named for the gold leaf that formerly covered its ceiling (a “sky of gold”). San Pietro houses the remains of St. Augustine in a magnificent intricately carved marble altarpiece that is the focal point of attention, and the remains of Boethius in a reliquary in the crypt below the altar.

Both of these early Christian philosophers preoccupied me as a graduate student some 40 years ago. Their writings were the centerpiece of a course I took in medieval literature at the University of Cincinnati with Elizabeth Armstrong, who made all these works alive and (most important in those days, “relevant”). In that crypt I thought about how far we were from the Leesburg outlets and how close I was to what moved me.

* * *

“Tell us about the food,” my correspondents plead.

Our special meal that evening was back in Milan, about a mile from our apartment, at Alla Cucina Economica, a slow-food trattoria near the supermercato we visit every Friday. What we hadn’t noticed is that the theme of the restaurant is Barbie. On each table a Barbie doll sits in a soup bowl with a flower; there were various Barbie environments scattered about the dining room; the bathroom had a pile of bloody Barbies!

Like many small restaurants here, this one had only two choices for antipasti, primi (pasta course) and two for secondi (main course). Unfortunately, the two choices for secondi were pork and octopus; fortunately, the octopus had all been consumed by the lunch crowd and replaced by salmon.

Unfortunately, I am not a fish lover and will eat salmon only under conditions of great hunger and/or at a public dinner. Fred was thrilled with the salmon, which he preceded with a dish of barley in some incredibly rich cheese cream sauce; the chef left off the salami garnish.

I took the high-cholesterol vegetarian road, an extraordinary route. My antipasto was a small slice of onion and cheese quiche: surely the best I’ve ever eaten. My main course was risotto with parmesan and a drizzle of balsamic extract.

For dessert, we shared a white chocolate pane cotta. There are people who go from place to place comparing pane cotta; we had never tried it and were swept away by our first taste.

Austin M. Wright, Wayne C. Booth, and the reliable narrator

2010-06-15T12:47:00.000-04:00

Dr. Wright (I could never comfortably call him “Austin”) gave me – and any other students who paid attention – nothing less than a way to look at life, not only literature. His method encouraged inquisitiveness and especially critical thinking, and he showed us, rather than told us, how to enter a narrative from any number of points to determine what exactly was the point – or, rather, points. In a way, he spoiled me, ruined forever my ability to look superficially or non-analytically at a short story, a novel, a movie, a play . . . or life.

The stories we tell help us understand and share our lives. We choose our stories, or they choose us. Then we choose the words to describe what we feel and what we think. Our audience matters. When a friend dies, what we say to the family is shaped by whether we are saying it privately or publishing on the Internet. When we listen to others, we judge not only their choice of words but who they are: what we know of them in as many dimensions as we can access. Can we trust their narration?

Dr. Wright’s undergraduate courses at the University of Cincinnati focused on 20th century literature, primarily by American writers. Our judgment was not to be whether they were “good” or “bad” or “interesting” or “boring.” Rather:
• Were they internally consistent?
• Did character, action, setting, dialogue fit together?
• What did they know and when did they know it (a popular question in those Watergate days)?
• Who was telling the story?
• Were the readers getting the whole story?
• Were there elements of the story that made us question or accept what the storyteller was saying?

Later, I came to understand that Dr. Wright’s approach reflected the application of theories of the “Chicago School” of literary criticism. While a graduate student at the University of Chicago after World War II, he taught at Wright Junior College (my father’s alma mater). Wayne Booth taught at Chicago from 1947 to 1950, left, and returned later. In 1961, Wright published The American Short Story in the Twenties; Booth published his landmark The Rhetoric of Fiction, in which he laid out his vision of the relationship between a text and its reader, including the concept of the reliable narrator.

Years later, I joined the administrative staff of the University of Chicago moving, as I noted to Dr. Wright, from one UC to another. My primary responsibility was describing the financial needs of various academic units. I met Wayne Booth, among many others, as I listened to their stories and chose words to shape compelling narratives. That circle of my life closed but has never ended.

Parashat Emor: Who Will Bless the Priests?

2010-05-27T11:18:00.001-04:00

My husband, a Reform rabbi, is retiring after 25 years as senior rabbi of Temple Sinai in Washington. Upon the occasion of his retirement (!), the synagogue’s chapter of Women of Reform Judaism invited me to speak for Sisterhood Shabbat. Here is what I said:

When Sisterhood graciously invited me to speak tonight – and I thank you all for this opportunity – it was pretty clear to me that this week’s Torah portion, Emor, part of the Holiness Code, as it is called, has special relevance for me this Shabbat.

This is because Emor spells out certain rules for the priest and his relationship to his family. And it emphasizes that the community’s expectations for the priest are expectations for his family as well. Significantly, it demonstrates that there are two standards: one for the priest and his family, and a different one for everyone else in the community. The punishment for a priest’s daughter who loses her virginity before marriage is a fiery death, because she brings dishonor on the priest. The conventional death for a woman who commits a sexual indiscretion is just plain old stoning.

The priesthood ended when the Temple was destroyed, and rabbis became our teachers and community leaders. A vestige of the special role of priests, however, was and is that rabbis are viewed – and view themselves – as “symbolic exemplars,” in the words of psychologist and rabbi, Jack Bloom, in his 2002 book, The Rabbi as Symbolic Exemplar: By the Power Invested in Me.

As leaders, they retain some semblance of specialness – holiness – if you will.

Most Jews, whether they are affiliated with a congregation or not – unless they are totally hostile to Judaism and the Jewish community – respect rabbis (or at least they should). Most rabbis, in turn, conduct themselves in ways that earn the respect of the community (or at least they should).

This isn’t something I thought much about as I was growing up, and I never thought about rabbis’ families, until I was part of one. Shortly before I married Fred 36 years ago, we attended a rabbis’ meeting in Atlanta, where the only activities for rabbis’ wives were shopping and a tea and tour of Atlanta.

It was 1973. My former roommate, Sally Priesand, had been ordained but was not married. There were no other women rabbis. It was a million years ago!

Dissatisfied with what I perceived to be a stereotyped program, I urged the Central Conference of American Rabbis to introduce substantive options. In true organizational fashion, the rabbis said, “You want it? You do it.” Fortunately, the sympathetic executive vice president of the CCAR, the late Rabbi Joe Glaser, gave me a little budget and some clerical help.

I surveyed the wives; the results were enthusiastic, and we were off! The first program included Dr. Helen Glueck, a renowned research physician – incidentally married to the president of Hebrew Union College – who talked about Jewish genetic diseases.

It also included several panels of wives speaking frankly about issues that troubled them: from congregants’ unrealistic expectations to rabbis’ lack of time off. We had tapped a deep and overflowing well, and rabbis skipped their own sessions and came to ours.

Wisely, the CCAR established a Task Force on Rabbinic Family Relationships, a hotline, and other resources to help rabbis and their families deal with what so many clearly felt were heavy burdens.

Society evolved, and the Jewish community evolved. It took a longer time and a lot more pain than I can reflect in these few minutes. Most strikingly, as more women entered the rabbinate and the cantorate, the emphasis shifted in many ways. The women rabbis made more of a point of carving out time for their families, and their husbands made it clear they were not going to be judged by the same standards as were rabbis’ wives.

The effect was that finally most congregants became more sensitive to the demands on both female and male rabbis, and in most situations, the concept of judging a rabbi by the behavior of the rabbi’s spouse – or partner – or children – became verboten.

Despite the dramatic changes that women rabbis brought to the profession and the congregations, however, I must report to you that rabbis and their families continue to feel external and internal pressure.

The pressure remains because over the centuries, what has not changed is that we – you and I – set high standards for rabbis, and rabbis set high standards for themselves. Some people want them to be God, or at least God-like. (Some rabbis think they are God, but I would not have married – or reared – one of those!)

We want rabbis to be able to heal us when we are sick, forgive us when we make a terrible error, save our marriage, reconcile us with our children. Though we know on some level they cannot perform miracles, we are disappointed when they do not.

We want them to be without blemish, like the priests in Emor. When a rabbi is less than honest, or deceptive, or engages in behaviors that are ethically or morally wrong – or even a little sketchy – we feel ashamed and betrayed. The stain on them justifiably feels like a stain on us.

There are other expectations, however, that are less dramatic and perhaps a little more common. Let me give you an example.

A couple of years after we moved to Washington, when David was about 7 years old, I took him and two friends to a children’s play at Glen Echo on a Saturday morning and afterward, to lunch at McDonald’s. While I was sitting there having lunch with the children, a woman from our neighborhood came in. “The rebbetzin is eating at McDonald’s on Shabbat!” she announced to the entire restaurant.

“Everybody has to eat somewhere,” I said.

The fact that she, a Conservative Jew, was at McDonald’s on Shabbat was not the issue for her, of course. She clearly expected our family to be different – more observant and holier, perhaps – than hers.

Early in our marriage, I recognized that I would need to find a way to navigate this “holiness gap.”

How do you live a daily life that is exemplary in the significant ways while ensuring that you and your spouse and your family are seen as normal human beings, accessible and approachable and worthy of being good friends?

Some say it cannot be done, but I’ve always believed it can, and Fred and I have been so fortunate to have Essie and the late Gene Lipman as our own examples and predecessors.

First and foremost, it requires a thick skin and a sense of humor.

I also believe that Emor begins to show us a way to bridge this “holiness gap.”

In his Introduction to Leviticus in our Plaut Torah Commentary, Bernard Bamberger comments on the evolution of the role of the priests in Leviticus and in Deuteronomy. Originally, priestly obligations and responsibilities – sacrifices and sanctifying – that is, giving a blessing – were entirely in the hands of the priests.

The Torah, however, is aimed at everyone: the priestly laws are not “professional secrets.” Rather, carrying out the responsibilities incumbent upon priests is an obligation of all the people. While some of God’s instructions in Emor are directed to Aaron, others are directed to all the Israelites.

Explains Bamberger, “The concept of a complete Torah, which all may study who have the will to do so, expresses a new democratic spirit (644).”

The Torah tells us, Bamberger says, and Emor emphasizes, that we are all capable of holiness; we are all responsible for meeting the same high standards – making the same ethical and moral choices – that once were exclusively the obligation of the priests.

A message of Emor, then, is that every individual has the potential to be holy. One attains holiness not by birth – as the priests did – but by engaging in acts of personal and social righteousness. Each of us has the power to be exemplary Jews and human beings and to engage in holy acts.

In other words: we can be the kind of people that we hope and want and expect our rabbis to be:

• We can be students of Torah, not necessarily experts but seekers of meaning and value in our texts.

• We can build a better world by giving ourselves, and our time, to individuals and programs that need us.

• We can always speak positively and never harshly of one another. We can be patient with those who tax our patience, who interrupt us, who cut us off, who don’t listen.

• We can forgive those who find fault with us.

• We can look for and find the good in every person; approach all with an open mind and an open heart and respond to all with compassion.

• We can focus on people’s talents and strengths and help them utilize their abilities for the good of the community.

• We can appreciate the work that people do and the risks they take on our behalf, and show our appreciation.

• We can help others heal by being present for them in times of illness, in times of loss, in times of terror and the darkest nights of the soul.

• We can lead by encouraging and helping others to join us on our sacred journey.

If we can fulfill these mitzvot, as we expect our rabbis and our cantors and their families to fulfill them, then we can bless one another. AMEN.

Reflections on Argentina and its Jews

2010-04-27T14:18:00.000-04:00

Part I

One day before the beginning of the blizzards of 2010, we returned from three weeks in Argentina, our first encounter with South America; in fact, we had never been anywhere south of the U.S. border.

Jews have been in Argentina in significant numbers at least since the 1850s. Prior to that, some Sephardic Jews – including Conversos (secret Jews) – had come from Spain. The great influx of European Jews began around 1860, when huge numbers made their way from the Pale of Settlement to various ports around the world. Today, the estimates of Jews in all of Argentina range from 150,000- 200,000, or even as high as 250,000, but most agree that all but about 20,000 live in Buenos Aires. There is no religious census in Argentina as there is in some European countries.

The oldest congregation in the country, La Congregación Israelita de la República Argentina, is affiliated with the World Union for Progressive Judaism [WUPJ] (www.judaica.org.ar/sitio/sitio.html). We attended Services there on two Shabbat evenings. Centrally located, its grand building is featured in every guidebook and includes a small but interesting museum recounting the history of the Jews in Argentina, including more than 800 early settlers who became gauchos (cowboys) and established ranches throughout the countryside where many still farm the fertile land and raise . . . Argentine beef!

The congregation has two rabbis, a cantor, and a very full program of activities, from a large religious school to social action initiatives to holiday celebrations. The Shabbat prayerbook of La Congregación Israelita carries the logo of the WUPJ, and its Shabbat Service includes Debbie Friedman’s arrangement of “Mi Shebeirach,” as well as many other liturgical settings familiar to U.S. synagogue attendees.

In the late 1950s, the congregation invited Conservative Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer from the U.S. to serve the congregation. In addition to revitalizing his own congregation and spinning off others in suburban Buenos Aires, he established a seminary that prepares community leaders – rabbis, cantors, educators – for all of Central and South America. A social justice activist who worked against the “Dirty War” and tried to save many of the Disappeared, Meyer eventually returned to the U.S. and became the guiding spirit and spiritual leader of B’nai Jeshurun on the Upper West Side of New York, today’s thriving “BJ.”

Two other sites that many Jewish travelers to Buenos Aires typically visit are AMIA, the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina; and the former site of the Israeli Embassy, now a memorial park.

AMIA is a multi-purpose center for the Jewish community. In July 1994, a truck loaded with explosives drove into the building. The building was destroyed, 85 people died, and more 300 were injured. A new building erected on the same site is highly secure, with the familiar Jersey barricades outside, guards, double walls and metal detectors. Tourists must be cleared in advance of a visit, usually with a group, to view the exhibits and artwork in the building. On the street, 85 trees planted on several blocks through the neighborhood of Once, the equivalent of New York’s Lower East Side in its hey-day, are reminders of each of the dead.

No one ever has been convicted of the bombing of AMIA, nor has anyone been held responsible for the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, when 29 people died and more than 240 were wounded, most of them children in a nearby Catholic school.

While they particularly affected the Jewish community, these two incidents occupy a significant place in recent Argentine history. Members of the Jewish community with whom we spoke do not regard them as examples of anti-Semitism directly targeting them but rather as manifestations of larger international issues being played out in a country where – for many complicated political and historical reasons – justice may never be fully served.

While there have been no convictions, these cases are not closed but very much alive. Many see the two bombings as reprises of the Dirty War, which continues to echo throughout the society. While we were in Argentina, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner implied that the adopted children of the owners of Argentina’s largest media group, critics of Kirchner and her husband (the previous president of Argentina), may have been stolen from their families. Jews were disproportionately represented among the victims of the Dirty War, an issue that Nathan Englander dealt with in The Ministry of Special Cases.

At the Museo de la Shoá, many aspects of Argentina’s complicated history vis à vis its Jewish citizens are highlighted. Jews played an important role in helping the young country develop its great wealth, and they were well-respected and participated fully. While Peron had Nazi sympathies and at the least allowed – if not encouraged – Nazis to settle in Argentina, he also established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1949. Subsequent presidents – following the Dirty War – had good relations with the Jewish community. President Saul Menem ordered the release of files that revealed Argentina’s role in harboring Nazis, a move that some see as the trigger for the bombings in 1992 and 1994.

Part II

Shortly before we traveled to Argentina, we were delighted to discover that Madi, whom we’ve known for many years, lives in Buenos Aires, and owns BA Cultural Concierge (baculturalconcierge.com). Among other treats, Madi arranged for us to spend a half day with Elvira, an Argentinean Jew whose family originally came from Syria. Elvira offers Jewish tours with a socially responsible focus and helps visitors find volunteer community service opportunities and internships (andatravel.com.ar/en/responsible-trips-around-argentina).

Elvira, whose parents operate a children’s clothing store in Once, took us to the synagogue her grandparents had founded and to kosher bakeries, and she pointed out the only kosher McDonald’s outside Israel. Most importantly, she arranged for us to meet with Betina Rosental, who works with the Refuot Community Medicine Bank of the Fundación Tzedaká (www.tzedaka.org.ar/en/). Fundación Tzedaká was founded in 1991 to serve the neediest members of the Jewish community.

Elvira explained that from the earliest days of the Jewish community in Argentina, in the 1880s, until the 1990s, when Argentina’s economy began to collapse, Argentine Jews had sent millions of dollars overseas to communities in Palestine, Israel, and elsewhere. After nearly a century, became the recipients of aid from other countries, as about 50,000 people slipped out of the middle class and below the poverty line.

The Medicine Bank, one of the Fundación’s many initiatives, provides prescription and over-the-counter medications to these Jews who live below the poverty line. While medical care in Argentina is provided by the state, medications are not. Pharmaceutical companies and doctors contribute medications, and the Bank collects and purchases others; through a network of professional social workers, pharmacists, and dozens of volunteers, prescriptions are filled and delivered throughout the country both for chronic conditions and emergency care. The model program is being copied by the local Catholic community on a more limited basis; it has been copied by the Jewish community in Uruguay, and shortly after our visit, a major international foundation was arriving to study the initiative with the possibility of replicating it even more widely.

The Fundación is housed in one of many Jewish community centers throughout Buenos Aires. Elvira explained that these are the real social centers for the Jewish communities, with fitness centers; lectures and concerts like the one we had attended at AMIA; and dances, sports teams, camping programs and Zionist activities for children and young adults.

Synagogues in Buenos Aires do not have dues-paying members. Families pay school fees to the private Jewish day schools that are affiliated with the synagogues. Synagogue budgets depend on charges for b’nai mitzvot and weddings, plus High Holy Day “appeals.” Funerals are handled through AMIA.

Our tour with Elvira ended at the Catedral Metropolitana de Buenos Aires, the main Catholic church directly across from the Plaza de Mayo, where some relatives of the Disappeared still walk every Thursday. (The original mothers’ group has been replaced by people with other agendas, which caused a schism among the founders; the Thursday we were there, signs focused on the dangers of drugs.)

The cathedral contains the first memorial to Jewish victims of the Holocaust erected in a Catholic church, according to its designers, and also marks the bombings of the Israel Embassy in Buenos Aires and AMIA. Located on the wall in the side chapel of the Virgin of Lujan, it is next to the tomb of the late cardinal of Argentina, Antonio Quarracino. Cardinal Quarracino commissioned and arranged for the mural but died before its dedication. The mural contains torn and partially burned pages of Jewish books rescued from concentration camps, ghettoes, the Embassy of Israel, and AMIA. We found it very moving. Elvira explained that she ends her Jewish tours there because she wants visitors to return home with the understanding that the Jews of Argentina have lived side-by-side with non-Jews in peace and safety for more than 100 years.