Less than an hour’s drive east of Vienna, in the low-lying Austrian province of the Burgenland, are a series of towns of special interest to Jewish travellers. These are the once-famous “Siebengemeinden,” the seven noteworthy Jewish communities of Eisenstadt, Mattersdorf, Deutschkreutz, Lackenbach, Kobersdorf, Frauenkirchen and Kittsee. The largest and most significant is Eisenstadt, the provincial…
Category: Travel
Travel: Edison Museum & the sleepy hamlet of Vienna
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Six kilometers above the northeastern shore of Lake Erie, the sleepy hamlet of Vienna, Ont. boasts a strong but little-known connection with the family of Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), the legendary American inventor, who might have been born on Canadian soil but for a quirk of history and fate. Four generations of Edisons lived in…
Travel: London’s Dorchester Hotel is fit for royalty
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Situated a short walk from Buckingham Palace in the posh neighborhood of Mayfair, London’s deluxe Dorchester Hotel has had a long and distinguished association with royalty, British and otherwise. In the summer of 1947, some five years before the British Princess Elizabeth was coronated as Queen, her engagement to Prince Philip was announced at a…
A city museum worthy of Jerusalem
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“Whoever did not see Jerusalem in all her glory never saw a beautiful city.” — Babylonian Talmud, Succah 51, B. Situated in the historic Citadel beside the monumental Jaffa Gate, the Museum of the City of Jerusalem tells the extraordinary story of the city’s long and checkered past. One of the most popular sites in…
Hear Mormon Tabernacle Choir in Salt Lake City
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Beneath the giant dome of the Mormon Tabernacle, the harmonious voices of the famous Mormon Tabernacle Choir rise into the air, melding sweetly. Whether it’s a Biblical hymn or a medley from The Music Man, each selection sung by the 330-member choir reverberates with a rare purity in this hallowed hall. Established in 1847, the…
Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Hotel
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“Harpo Marx, having played a mute in all his films, was probably the most articulate of all the Marx brothers,” declares Barbara McGurn as we sit in the Oak Room of New York’s famed Algonquin Hotel, awaiting the entrance of cabaret performer K.T. Sullivan. The next moment McGurn, who is equal parts literary scholar and…
The Jews of Curacao
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Jewish passengers on Caribbean cruises often become excited after their ship docks at Curacao, the little stringbean-shaped isle 63 km off the coast of Venezuela, when they discover that the island is home to a Jewish community with roots that go back nearly 400 years. A rugged and hilly outcropping, Curacao is part of the…
L.A.’s thought-provoking Museum of Tolerance
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Imagine for a moment that you’re in southern California, having a meal at a diner. Inside, the radio is tuned to a local shock-jock who is spouting a combustible mix of racial diatribes against blacks and immigrants. As these acrimonious attitudes defile the air, a heated argument breaks out between two strangers at separate tables.…
Incident in Marrakech
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In 1786 the Italian Jewish scholar Samuel Romanelli (1757 1817) boarded a ship at Gibraltar expecting it to carry him eventually to his home in Mantua. The vessel stopped at several Moroccan ports, however, and Romanelli went ashore and innocently became entangled in some legal trouble. Consequently his passport was confiscated and, to his immense chagrin, his intended brief…
German ‘fairy tale roads’ . . . and a medieval synagogue
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Rising from a knoll deep in a Hessian forest, Schloss Sababurg is ringed by a distinctive old hedge of brambles, through which the Grimm Brothers were forced, nearly two centuries ago, to cut a path in order to reach the castle, which was then a noble ruin. (The castle dates from the 14th, the brambles…
