Bar Mitzvah on the Fly
How to cope when war reroutes your family simcha from Israel to Italy.
Opinion | Searching for a Shul in Lisbon
“Travel is enriched when you connect with local Jewish life.”
At JC3, Judaism Blossoms Among the Expats of San Miguel
Much like the Mexican town in which it’s located, JC3 is freewheeling, nonconformist and unabashedly unaffiliated.
Beshert | Not a Chain Restaurant
In the early 1960s, when I was about 10 or so, I was in the backseat of our family car driving somewhere in upstate New...
Beshert | The Brother Who Opened My Path—and My World
My big brother, Jerry Rose, was my beshert, He was eleven years older than me. I adored him. He was my idol and my mentor....
Tracing Morocco’s Jewish Past
While most of Morocco’s quarter of a million Jews emigrated to Israel, Europe and the U.S., 2,500 remain today. Traces of their deep-rooted culture stretch from the Mediterranean to the Sahara, a less-traveled region steeped in Jewish history.
Beshert | Once Upon a Time in Montevideo…
I met my husband in a hotel lobby in Montevideo, Uruguay on my 27th birthday. We were browsing the lobby stores because the hotel’s only...
On the Island of Rhodes, Marking 75 Years Since the Jewish Deportation
On the island of Rhodes, a community that existed in the old town for 2,300 years was nearly wiped out in a single day: July 23, 1944.
A Guide to Sand Synagogues
Today, there are only five sand synagogues remaining in the world, three of them in the Caribbean.
A Gold Rush Synagogue Hangs On Down Under
More than a century and a half has passed since the gold rush created the booming Australian city of Ballarat, 70 miles inland from Melbourne. The gold is long gone, but the worshippers who sit shoulder to shoulder in the pews of Shearith Yisroel seem determined to live up to their synagogue’s name: “Remnant of Israel.”
Rediscovering and Restoring Cape Verde’s Jewish Heritage
Four large and heavy commemorative bronze plaques wait in storage at the Praia airport in Cape Verde, an archipelago of ten tiny islands 300 miles off the coast of Senegal in West Africa.
Curacao, the Island That Brought Jews to the Americas
It’s hard to imagine that at one time, this tiny island, so far from the cobblestone streets of Portugal, the canals of Amsterdam and the shtetls of Eastern Europe, had the largest Jewish population in the Americas.