At 5 p.m. on the last Wednesday in March, Michael Bolla, a New York real estate developer, stood inside Israel Wholesale & Retail Judaica on the Lower East Side, glancing over tables cluttered with Hebrew prayerbooks and Bibles, spice boxes and candlesticks. The store had thrived on this block of Essex Street, between Hester and…
Crossposted from Samuel Gruber’s Jewish Art & Monuments For the past year I’ve been curator of the Plastics Collection at Syracuse University, and while I have not given up my research and activism vis-a-vis Jewish art and architecture, I have launched into to a new work area. Usually, I just split my interests — plastics…
Crossposted from Samuel Gruber’s Jewish Art & Monuments Bar-Ilan University professor Ilia Rodov has written an important and useful article on medieval Torah Arks, especially those tall tower types, well known from representations in many illuminated medieval manuscripts. The article, “Tower-like Torah Arks, the Tower of Strength and the Architecture of the Messianic Temple,” was…
Does the Coen Brothers’ “True Grit” draw on ancient Indo-European myth? Forward contributor Zackary Sholem Berger translates two poems, “My Pedigree” by Moyshe Nadir and “Herring Barrels” by Dvoyre Fogel, in the latest issue of Eleven Eleven. Israeli musician Avi Avital has become the first mandolinist to be nominated for a Grammy award in the…
Sotheby’s New York sale of important Judaica, an annual event featuring ceremonial metalwork, manuscripts and printed books, takes place this year on December 15. Leading the auction are a pair of Italian-made silver Torah finials belonging to Sha’ar HaShamayim, the Great Synagogue of Gibraltar. Other items such as 15th-century Torah scroll from Poland are also…
There’s a happy ending for a kosher-food melodrama that played out in West Hartford, Conn., this week. After the local Waldbaum’s was sold by owner A&P to an outfit called Big Y Supermarkets, local news outlets reported that Big Y might jettison kosher food from the rechristened store. “Waldbaum’s Closing Creates Concerns About Kosher in…
Performing even the most mundane ritual can be calming — grinding coffee, scooping it into a filter, pouring water into the coffeemaker, turning the pot on — over time, the actions becomes so familiar that the objects pass through your hands unnoticed. Though they can come to seem as commonplace as a coffee pot, when…
Since Bernard Madoff’s December arrest, victims of his Ponzi scheme have been selling off not only their real estate and their jewelry, but also their Judaica, according to a New York-based auctioneer. Jonathan Greenstein, whose eponymous company auctions off “rare antique and artisan Judaica” told The New York Post’s Page Six that Jewish artifacts that…
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