— French authorities allocated approximately half a million dollars toward the preservation of what is believed to be Europe’s oldest known Jewish building. Restoration works are to begin in October to save the damaged parts of the Sublime House, which some historians believe was the seat of a 12-century yeshiva – a Jewish religious seminary — in…
This past March, three weeks before she passed away, my bubbe, Charlotte Friend, celebrated her ninety-ninth birthday. On that day, as on every other birthday she’d had over the last twenty or so years, she received several phone calls from her Russian friends — women (and a few men) to whom she had taught English…
WALTHAM, Mass. (JTA) – When Jonathan Sarna was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 1999 at the age of 44, it changed his life. Already a highly regarded historian at Brandeis University, Sarna was in the midst of writing his seminal study of American Jewish history when he realized with alarm that he might never finish…
Walk along Lenox Avenue in the heart of Harlem on a Sunday morning, pass the Mt. Olivet Church and you’ll hear the gospel choir singing passionately, worshippers and gospel-lovers streaming into the church in their Sunday best. But look up, toward the top of the towering Grecian columns, and you’ll find Stars of David. Built…
David Cesarani, the great British historian of the Holocaust and Anglo Jewry, has died at the age of 58, London’s Jewish Chronicle reports. The London Times columnist David Aaronovitch described him as “a man of luminous intelligence and splendid academic achievement.” Cesarani — as a research professor in History at Royal Holloway, University of London…
A three-alarm fire that destroyed a historic synagogue in New Jersey appears to be accidental after a preliminary investigation. The fire on Friday at the Polie Zedek synagogue in New Brunswick, New Jersey, left only the shell of the building and destroyed everything inside, according to local reports. One of the Torah scrolls was saved…
● The Third Reich in History and Memory By Richard J. Evans Oxford University Press, 496 pages, $29.95 However deranged his deeds, Adolf Hitler was not certifiably mad. The German people did not voluntarily embrace the dictator, but acquiesced in his rule only after a campaign of terror that silenced or sidelined the political opposition….
I teach Jewish history in North Carolina, a land haunted by Jesus Christ. It is a land where the present is the biblical past. It is a land where the Second Coming is apparently coming any moment now. It is a land where devout Christians are eager to share the good news. It is a…
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