Features
PRAIA, Cape Verde — A Portuguese rabbi and a Moroccan diplomat stood shoulder to shoulder in a Catholic cemetery here while 200 mourners howled in grief as they buried a resident of this island off the western coast of Africa.
The foreigners had come to Cape Verde’s main cemetery earlier this month not to bury a local, but for the rededication of 10 gravestones of Moroccan Jews — members of an extinct community whose roots trace to the 1860s.
With virtually no practicing Jews on Cape Verde today, the cemeteries had fallen into neglect. Now a Washington-based nonprofit is spearheading their restoration.
The Cape Verde Jewish Heritage Project has a board stuffed with prominent Jewish Washingtonians, but its funding comes almost entirely from one man — King Mohammed VI of Morocco.
DU’s Prof. Arthur Gilbert, whose demeanor and attire evoke Zorba the Greek, interrupts the early morning quiet at the Merage and Allon Hillel Center with a sustained chuckle — the first of many.
Freely acknowledging that the images he’s assembled here are the antithesis of amusing, Gilbert justifies his upbeat mood.
“I don’t have the right to be depressed,” he says. “I haven’t earned it.”
“Children in the Holocaust: The Fine Art Print Collection of Arthur Gilbert,” which...
PORTLAND, Ore. — Jessica Bettelheim, a business ethics lecturer at Portland State University and a young Jewish mother, has little time to spare on weekends.
Like other professionals her age, she’s busy bonding with her husband and four-year-old daughter, meeting friends at one of Portland’s many fine restaurants or gardening, a favorite pastime in this verdant metropolis known as the City of Roses.
So when Bettelheim received an email from the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland last ...
NEW YORK — With the summer travel season fast approaching, providers of Israel programs for teenagers are bracing themselves for what several say could be a season of historically low travel in a year unaffected by major security concerns.
Over the past decade, Israel travel among those aged 13 to 18 has seen a dramatic falloff.
Though exact figures are difficult to come by, leaders of several leading North American teen programs say they have seen drops of 30% to 50% in participation in the...
MEMPHIS — Cantor Ricky Kampf descends from the bimah, adjusts his prayer shawl and strides up the aisle, cutting through the cavernous sanctuary to greet the familiar out-of-towner.
“Y’all here for the shindig?” Kampf says at the Baron Hirsch Synagogue here as he grasps the hand of Paul Goldenberg, the burly former cop who runs the Secure Community Network, the security arm of the national Jewish community.
The shindig in question is a Ku Klux Klan rally planned for later that day, Mar...