We were driving southward through Israel’s Shephelah region when our guide pulled the van over to the shoulder and drew our attention to a ridge of hills to the right of us and a roughly parallel ridge to the left. We were south of Beit Shemesh on the road to Beit Guvrin, near the Ha-Ela…
Born about 1620 in Ostrog, Volynia, Rabbi Nathan Hanover and his family were among the countless Jews in Ukraine and eastern Poland whose lives were disrupted by the Chmielnicki massacres of 1648 and the intermittent attacks that continued for years afterwards. Hanover travelled extensively over the region of devastation, speaking with many affected people and…
From the earliest days of Hebrew printing to the present, Jewish readers have found great favor in literary accounts of Jewish travellers, especially those who, like the famed 12th-century Benjamin of Tudela, provided first-hand descriptions of the holy city of Jerusalem. One of the acknowledged classics of the genre is Travail in an Arab Land,…
Manuel Mordecai Noah, an American Jew born in Philadelphia in 1785, did much world travelling in his day — he visited Europe numerous times and was the US consul to Tunis — but it is perhaps the tale surrounding his travels from New York City to the upper reaches of New York State in 1825…
Merida, a city of 41,000 inhabitants in the Spanish province of Estremadura, boasts the most spectacular Roman ruins in Spain and an outstanding museum in which many impressive ancient treasures are housed. One’s introduction to the National Museum of Roman Art in Merida is the town itself. Merida was founded in 25 BC and named…
Yesterday, A Memoir of a Russian Jewish Family is a lovely reminiscence by Miriam Shomer Zunser, the American daughter of Yiddish novelist Nochim-Mayer Shaikevitsch. It was originally published in 1939 and a second edition, edited by Zunser’s granddaughter Emily Wortis Leider, was printed by Harper & Row in 1978. Zunser’s unself-conscious narrative focuses on various…
The first time Sam Gruber stepped inside the Tempel Synagogue in Krakow, Poland, he was “incredibly moved” by what he saw. Considered the lone surviving example of the great 19th-century synagogues of Poland, the sumptuously decorated Moorish-Gothic structure had been built as a Reform synagogue in 1862. It had been enlarged in 1892 and again…
Torontonian Rose Friedman, who arrived in Canada from the Russian province of “White Russia” (Belarus) in 1908, celebrated her 100th birthday at two parties in mid-July (2005), one at the home of a granddaughter and the other at the Apotex Centre where she is a resident. Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin and Ontario Premier Dalton…
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…
Dan Bahat, a leading Israeli archaeologist, is in the midst of an extended stint as visiting lecturer at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto (this piece was written in 2004; we’re fortunate to have him still in Toronto in 2011). The former chief archaeologist of Jerusalem and senior lecturer at Bar-Ilan University, Bahat…
