Ruth Ellen Gruber
By Ruth Ellen Gruber
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Breaking News Pope Francis Urges Vigilance on Anti-Semitism as Anniversary of Rome Deportations Looms
(JTA) — Pope Francis urged vigilance against any resurgence of anti-Semitism ahead of the 70th anniversary of the deportation of Rome’s Jews to Auschwitz. The pontiff made the warning Friday during a meeting at the Vatican with Italian Jewish leaders, including Riccardo Di Segni, the chief rabbi of Rome. Commemoration of the 1943 deportation, he…
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Culture The Resurrection of Chmielnik
About 15 years ago, when he was in his mid-20s, Piotr Krawczyk had a revelation that changed his life; in many respects it also ended up changing the life of Chmielnik, the sleepy little town in South Central Poland where he lives. “I found a book on the history of Chmielnik, and I read it,”…
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Culture Onward and Upward with Matisyahu in Krakow
In the sultry darkness of a summer night, a tall, skinny figure with close-cropped hair and a purple T-shirt threaded through a beer garden during Krakow’s Jewish Culture Festival, the annual nine-day extravaganza of performance, exhibition, debate and intensive interaction that for a quarter of a century now has been a catalyst of Krakow’s Jewish…
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Food A Taste of the Shtetl at Warsaw’s New Jewish Museum
Making sure food is part of a museum is not an easy task — fresh dishes will perish, plastic ones miss the point. But, at Warsaw’s new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, food, drink and the special Jewish relationship to eating and drinking will be a recurring thread woven throughout the yet to…
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Food Budapest Jewish Cafe Leaves Its Mark After Closing
Visitors to Budapest this summer will be out of luck if they hope to soak up Jewish cool at Siraly, the funky café in the heart of the old inner city Jewish quarter that became famous as the flagship of the city’s alternative Jewish youth scene. Local authorities in the city’s Sixth District closed Siraly…
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Food Stuffed Cabbage From the Polish Border
SEJNY, POLAND — The first time I visited Lithuania in 2006 I was overwhelmed by the extraordinary sensation that I was traveling through a giant Jewish deli that extended across the entire country. Blintzes! Latkes! Sour cream! Herring! Smoked fish! Black bread! And even — on the breakfast buffet of one hotel I stayed in…
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Food Letter from Serbia: Matzo and Kackavalj Cheese
Dragan Jankovic, a slim bespectacled man with a quick smile and thinning hair, is the living local repository of Jewish heritage in Pirot, an ancient market town in southeastern Serbia whose Jewish community was wiped out in the Holocaust. A photo-journalist who long worked for a local newspaper, Jankovic is a devout Christian, but became…
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Food Hungary’s Rachael Ray Does Passover
Rachel Raj is one of the queens of Budapest Jewish cooking. The daughter of a noted rabbi, she authored a food column for a local Jewish magazine, makes guest appearances on TV talk shows, and a few years back anchored a 10-part series on Jewish cuisine on a leading Hungarian food channel. Writing in Saveur,…
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