In Kabul’s only synagogue, Afghan merchants open up shop
(An Afghan woman clad in burqa and her daughter walks past a restaurant built inside part of the only synagogue building in Kabul, June 1, 2011/Omar Sobhani)
A lattice of corrugated iron Star of Davids marks Afghanistan’s only working synagogue, a white-washed, two-storey building tucked into a sidestreet in the centre of Kabul. Kebabs, carpets and flowers are served and sold on the ground floor of the synagogue, which has been transformed into businesses over the last 18 months by the country’s sole remaining Jew, who lives upstairs in a small pink room.
Cafe manager Sayed Ahmad is unfazed by his small cafe’s history, where Kabul’s hundreds-strong Jewish community once gathered for prayers. Most fled to Israel and the United States amid the Soviet invasion of 1979. “Some of my customers know this is the synagogue and know about the Jew upstairs, but they don’t care and neither do I,” Ahmad told Reuters in his cafe, where bearded men on purple cushions puff on water pipes and eat traditional Afghan food.
The firebrand anti-Semitism found in some other Muslim countries, often fuelled by anti-Israeli sentiment, seems noticeably absent among ordinary Afghans. “I pray my way and he prays his way. I see him as a friend, someone to spend time with,” Ahmad said of his landlord, sitting beside large black and silver wall-hangings depicting Mecca.
Zebulon Simentov, who chose to stay behind when his wife and children emigrated to Israel, has been known to conduct services in the upstairs of the synagogue for visiting Jews even though he is not a rabbi.
Now living alone in the synagogue, the 52 year-old says the building has become too hard to maintain. “This place is big and I need money,” he told Reuters as he adjusted his pyjama-like shalwar kameez, traditional clothing for men in the region.
Delhi’s last ten Jewish families guard an ancient heritage
In the capital of one of the world’s most religiously-diverse countries, a rabbi who has never been ordained bends ancient customs, ensuring New Delhi’s ten Jewish families a place to worship. Unlike most synagogues, there is no separation of men and women as Jewish-born worshippers, converts and followers of other faiths chant Psalms in perfect Hebrew, with doors thrown open to all. The service leader never asks attendees what religion they follow, and envisions his daughter becoming India’s first female rabbi.
“Being a small community, we cannot be so rigid, so orthodox,” says Ezekiel Isaac Malekar, honorary secretary of the synagogue whose unpaid job of thirty years has overlooked religious convention to keep this tiny group together. “Our openness, our liberal approach is what allows us to survive. For reading the Torah, you must require ten men, a minyan. But I made radical changes, because why should we discriminate between women and men? I count the women.”
In the small Judah Hyam Synagogue, tucked between one of the city’s most popular markets and most expensive hotels, the tight community, as inconspicuous as the small black plaque outside, gathers every Friday to bring in Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath.
Tunisian unrest may dampen annual Jewish celebration on Djerba island
Jewish pilgrims may not be able to hold their usual celebrations at one of Africa’s oldest synagogues this year because of renewed security concerns in Tunisia where the site is based.
Thousands of pilgrims travel each May to the El Ghriba synagogue on the island of Djerba to mark a holiday which follows Passover. They usually hold a vibrant festival filled with music and pageantry. But this year celebrations will be muted because of continued unrest in the country following the overthrow of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in January.
“It’s true that we have cancelled all the celebrations planned for this year but the pilgrimage will still take place next Friday at the synagogue,” organiser Perez Trabelsi told Reuters. “People that usually come are scared this year,” he said, saying he expected only a few hundred people.
A government source said the pilgrimage would be cancelled completely.
El Ghriba was the site of an al Qaeda attack in 2002 which killed 21 people. Another synagogue was set on fire by arsonists in the Tunisian city of Ghabes in February.
Mainly Muslim Tunisia has one of the largest Jewish communities in North Africa but until recently attacks have been rare.
via Tunisian unrest may dampen Jewish celebration, by Tarek Amara.
Germany opens first Reform synagogue since WW2
Germany opened its first new Reform synagogue since the Holocaust on Sunday, marking a major step in the revival of Reform Judaism, which traces its roots to the country. The synagogue in the northern city of Hameln was built on the foundation of its predecessor, which was destroyed by the Nazis during the “Kristallnacht” pogrom in 1938. The congregation received financial backing for the synagogue primarily from local and state government.
“It’s incredible that, after the Shoah, in Germany a synagogue could be built with money that came from German political organizations,” the congregation’s president Rachel Dohme told Reuters. The city’s reform congregation was founded in 1997 and has some 200 members, the majority of which are from the former Soviet Union.
Reform, or liberal, Judaism was pioneered in Germany by Israel Jacobson two centuries ago.
Read the full story by Eric Kelsey here.
Amid row with Israel, Turkish officials attend Istanbul Holocaust Day
In a rare show of unity with Istanbul’s dwindling Jewish community, government officials attended the country’s first official commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the anniversary of the 1945 liberation of Nazi concentration camps.
“For generations in Istanbul, we have lived together with love, tolerance, fraternity and without discrimination, and we are extremely determined to continue living this way,” Istanbul Governor Avni Mutlu said before lighting a candle with Chief Rabbi Isak Haleva at Neve Shalom Synagogue on January 27. Neve Shalom was one of two temples targeted in a 2003 bomb attack in Istanbul that was blamed on al Qaeda. Twenty-one Muslims and six Jews were killed, and hundreds more were wounded.
Turkish Jews, whose numbers have dwindled to about 18,000 in a country of almost 74 million Muslims, have in recent years again felt under threat as relations between Israel and Turkey, each other’s closest allies in the Middle East until recently, have deteriorated.
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, a devout Muslim, castigated the Israeli government in early 2009 for its incursion into the Gaza Strip. Relations hit a nadir on May 31, when nine pro-Palestinian Turkish activists bringing aid to Gaza were killed by Israeli commandoes during a raid of their ship, the Mavi Marmara, in international waters.
Erdogan has condemned anti-Semitism and said he differentiates between Turkey’s Jews and Israeli policies. Still, both episodes kicked off popular anti-Israeli protests in Turkey that frightened Turkish Jews already fretful about their survival in a city that had served as a safe haven for centuries.
“At times of tension, as we saw with the Mavi Marmara incident, some Jews have concerns about their personal security, and in general many wonder what will happen in 20 years with the strain they feel just from their dwindling numbers,” said Louis Fishman, an expert on Turkish religious minorities at Brooklyn College in New York. Hundreds have quietly left for Israel in the last decade in an unofficial migration, he added.
Most Istanbul Jews are descendants of Sephardim who fled the Spanish Inquisition in 1492. During World War Two, when 6 million European Jews were killed in the Holocaust, Turkish diplomats helped rescue a few thousand expatriate Turkish Jews, and neutral Turkey offered safe passage to several thousand others.
Germany ordains first female rabbi since Holocaust
Germany ordained its first female rabbi since the Holocaust on Thursday, marking a major step in the reintegration of Jews into modern German life.
In the glare of international media, Alina Treiger followed in the footsteps of Regina Jonas, who in 1935 was the first female to be appointed a rabbi in Germany. Jonas, from Berlin, was murdered by the Nazis in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland in 1944.
The Ukrainian-born Treiger said she was thrilled to be ordained, at a ceremony at a synagogue in Berlin, with President Christian Wulff and hundreds of people in attendance, two centuries after the birth of Liberal Judaism in Germany.
“It’s a really exciting day for me. It’s not normal for a woman to be a rabbi and I didn’t know it was even possible when I was younger,” she told German television ZDF. “I’m just happy to be able to share this day with so many people.”
Germany’s Jewish community has grown quickly since the collapse of the former Soviet Union, which prompted an influx of Jews to the country, fuelling a need for more rabbis. Only a handful of Jews remained in Germany after the war, but today the population is believed to be around 200,000. Before Hitler took power in 1933, there were as many as 570,000.
GUESTVIEW: U.S. synagogues, churches collect similar donation amounts differently
Which costs more: belonging to a synagogue, or belonging to a church?
A survey conducted by the Forward has found that Jewish and Christian religious institutions appear to raise about the same amount per member, despite the fact that church giving is voluntary and synagogues charge membership dues.
The more than 20 churches and synagogues surveyed by the Forward represent a sampling from a variety of denominations in six cities across America. While there are significant regional and denominational differences, an examination of the aggregate data indicates that the amount raised per individual member is very similar between synagogues and churches. But the level of participation is quite different: While synagogues require roughly the same amount of dues from each of their members, church giving does not appear to be so evenly distributed.
Take Ahavath Achim, a Conservative Jewish synagogue in Atlanta, and Church of the Heavenly Rest, an Episcopal church in Manhattan. The two congregations are broadly comparable: Both serve slightly more than 1,000 middle- and upper-middle class households, have a multimillion-dollar endowment, employ about a dozen people and operate on an annual budget of $2.7 million.
Both draw around half their income from regular fees paid by members. But, like virtually all American churches, Heavenly Rest does not charge dues. Like most synagogues, Ahavath Achim does.
(Click on graphic for larger view)
Visiting synagogues is not getting easier for Pope Benedict
Visiting synagogues is not getting any easier for Pope Benedict.
Today’s meeting with Rome’s Jewish community was the third time he has entered a synagogue, which is a kind of a papal record considering that his predecessor Pope John Paul — probably the first pope to do so since Saint Peter two millennia ago — made only one such visit himself.
His first synagogue visit, in Cologne only months after his 2005 election, was heavy with the symbolism of a German pope visiting Jews in Germany. At one point, the rabbi referred to an elderly woman in the congregation who had a concentration camp number tattooed on her arm. He did this, though, to say that she could not have never imagined back there in Auschwitz that her son — a leader of the Cologne Jewish community present at the ceremony — would one day welcome the pope to a synagogue in Germany. It was tense, but it seemed to be a good start.
Three years later, he got a warm welcome at New York’s Park East Synagogue. Chief Rabbi Arthur Schneier, a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor, thanked God that both of them had made it through the Second World War and seen the Catholic-Jewish reconciliation begun by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. “Your presence here gives us hope and courage for the road we still have to travel together,” he added. Benedict seemed to be getting over the stumbling block of his German background and finding a way to reach out to Jews.
But instead of getting easier, today’s third visit — to the synagogue at Rome’s old Jewish ghetto — turned out to be the most difficult of all. Over 1,000 Roman Jews were deported to Nazi death camps in 1943; only 16 of them survived. The local Jewish community was divided over the visit, with some urging that it be put off after Benedict honoured his wartime predecessor Pope Pius XII last month by moving him closer to sainthood. Pius’s controversial role during the Holocaust — or non-role, as his critics see it, because he did not speak out — is a roadblock on the path of Catholic-Jewish reconciliation. But Benedict seems determined to honour him, and every time he speaks or acts in his favour, the barrier seems to get higher.
Rome’s Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni insisted on going ahead with the visit but Rabbi Giuseppe Laras, head of the Italian Rabbinical Assembly, boycotted it. Citing Benedict’s support for Pius and his decision to lift the excommunication of a Holocaust denying ultra-traditionalist bishop, Laras said ties between Catholic and Jews had “become increasingly weaker during this pontificate.”
Benedict’s visit began a stop at the ghetto monument to Rome’s deported Jews. At the synagogue along the banks of the Tiber, Di Segni and his colleagues greeted the pope and escorted him into the imposing building. Among those attending were a handful of aging concentration camp survivors wearing blue shawls with prisoner’s stripes. They got a long round of applause when they were introduced during the ceremony.
Rome’s chief rabbi says only God can judge Pius XII on Holocaust
Only God can judge whether war-time Pope Pius XII did enough to save Jews and whether he should have spoken out more forcefully against the Holocaust, according to Rome’s Chief Rabbi Riccardo di Segni, who will host Pope Benedict for his first visit to the Italian capital’s synagogue on Sunday.
Speaking to Reuters at his synagogue along the Tiber River, Di Segni criticised a comment by Cardinal Walter Kasper that Pius “followed the will of God as he understood it” and had saved thousands of Jews in Rome and elsewhere. Some Jews have accused Pius, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, of not doing enough to help Jews facing persecution.
“I think that it can be morally dangerous and, religiously speaking, dangerous to say that the will of God is to be silent and not to say a word in front of the suffering of the people,” Di Segni said, speaking in English. “So let us be careful and let us not (look for) a way of absolving people. I think only God may understand if people have done His will righteously, not us.”
Benedict’s visit to the synagogue has been overshadowed by his decision last month to move Pius closer towards sainthood. Jewish groups reacted angrily when he approved a decree recognising Pius’s “heroic virtues.” The two remaining steps to sainthood are beatification and canonisation, which could take many years. Jewish groups had wanted a freeze on the process until more Vatican archives were made available to scholars.
Here is the transcript of my interview with Di Segni:
Q. The pope coming on Sunday to your synagogue has taken on many levels of significance. One is the continuation of the process begun by John Paul. But are you afraid that the visit might be overshadowed by issues surrounding Pius XII?
A. “Each step of dialogue with Christians is very complicated so every day we have to face discussions and polemics and so on. The sensitivity of survivors all around the world is the same the sensitivity that is felt where so we are very conscious of the difficulties of this moment. We have to try to find the right way to go ahead with the process of friendship with Christians and this is the challenge for today. We are absolutely aware that there are difficulties, that the problem absolutely aware that there are difficulties, that the problem of the past, the interpretation of the past, is one of the main difficulties, but we also have the problem of the the main difficulties, but we also have the problem of the future so we all have to understand what is possible to do in this narrow street.”
Papal Infallibility means never having to say “I was wrong”.
After all, if it wasn’t God’s will, you wouldn’t have done it.
And as the only person to know God’s will is God (and you, of course), nobody has the right to say you loused it up.
Because if the Pope could be judged in the same manner he would judge you, the whole system falls apart. Without the acceptance of hypocrisy, no religion could survive.
So as the good Lord once said: “Render unto the chumps their idol”.
Mosque-synagogue twinning drive crosses the Atlantic
An innovative campaign to build grass-roots dialogue between Jews and Muslims in North America has crossed the Atlantic and taken off in Europe. The “Weekend of Twinning of Mosques and Synagogues,” which began last year with about 100 houses of worship in North America, expanded this year to include events in eight European countries. The weekend meetings, which have been taking place in November and December, bring together mosque and synagogue congregations to discuss ways of overcoming anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in their own communities.
To get an idea of how these meetings go, here are reports on twinning events in … New York … New Orleans … Buffalo … Toronto … Minneapolis … Paris …
Rabbi Marc Schneier, president of the New York-based Foundation for Ethnic Understanding who initiated this outreach to Muslims, met with his European partners at a dinner in Paris on Tuesday evening. The twinning drive took off most successfully in France, home to Europe’s largest Muslim and Jewish minorities. The Jewish-Muslim Friendship Society of France (AJMF), whose leader Rabbi Michel Serfaty had already created a Muslim-Jewish network with a “Friendship Bus” that tours France promoting dialogue, brought together 30 synagogues and 30 mosques. There isn’t any comparable network elsewhere in Europe, but several congregations organised similar twinnings this year in Belgium, Britain, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Switzerland.
“At a time when the conventional wisdom says that our two peoples must live in perpetual conflict, Rabbi Serfaty and the AJMF are showing that there is another, much better way,” Schneier said at the dinner hosted by the AMJF. “We are gratified that this is happening not only in France, where conflict between Muslims and Jews has been especially intense, but across North America and Europe as well. In the spirit of Chanukah, let us keep aglow the light of caring and understanding and allow that light to guide the reconciliation and cooperation of Muslims and Jews worldwide, including the Middle East.”
One way that Schneier spread the word about twinning was by inviting 28 European imams and rabbis to visit New York and Washington last summer to see U.S. dialogues in action. That led to their participation in the twinning weekends this year.
Not one to think small, Schneier told me he now wants to expand the program to Australia, South Africa, Argentina and Brazil. “Fourteen million Jews and 1.4 billion Muslims can’t remain in a continuous state of conflict,” he said. Among the grass-roots breakthroughs the twinning drive has brought was the first visit by an imam to a synagogue in Moscow, to attend an event marking the 20th anniversary of Pinchas Goldschmidt as the city’s chief rabbi.
The twinning campaign doesn’t have a set program or style of meeting, Schneier said. “It’s not a cookie-cutter. Each community has its own traditions. But the objective always remains the same — to establish communication.”
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“I pray my way and he prays his way.” If only every religious person in the world thought this way. Moderates would make this world a peaceful place.