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Be'chol Lashon Newsletter • April 2008
Be'chol Lashon, a program of the Institute for Jewish & Community Research, seeks to grow and strengthen the Jewish people through racial, ethnic, and cultural inclusiveness.
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EVENTS
PACT: Support Group for LBGTQ Adoptive Parents
May 3, 17, 31, June 14, 28, and July 12
Saturdays, 2-4pm
The group will meet 6X - once every other week
San Francisco LGBT Community Center
1800 Market Street, San Francisco
Pact, an Adoption Alliance, is excited to introduce a six session LGBTQ parent support group designed to discuss issues and strategies relevant to race, ethnicity, culture, adoption and parenting. Each session will offer LGBTQ parents an opportunity to explore their feelings about transracial adoptive parenting in safe and nurturing setting with a focus on developmentally appropriate approaches to their family's issues.
For more information, contact Martha@Pactadopt.org or 510-243-9460
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Be'chol Lashon at Israel in the Gardens
Sunday, June 1, 2008
11am - 5pm
Yerba Buena Gardens
San Francisco
Be'chol Lashon is delighted to feature children's crafts and entertainment at Israel in the Gardens 2008 at Yerba Buena Gardens. Join the West African inspired drum circle, create Latino papel picado or Asian block printing. Appropriate for all ages!
Be a Be'chol Lashon volunteer! Contact Esther@JewishResearch.org or 415-386-2604 for more information.
Abayudaya Jews of Uganda
Update
We are delighted to update you on the progress of the Abyudaya Community Health and Development Plan, which provides essential life-saving services to adults and children throughout the region.
Water project continues to bring clean water to the Abayudaya communities and their neighbors.
For more information, click here.
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We welcome your participation in the Be'chol Lashon Newsletter!
The Be'chol Lashon Newsletter is reaching more and more people every month. Please send us information about events in your community or articles of interest that relate to Jewish diversity.
Please e-mail newsletter submissions to Esther Fishman, Esther@JewishResearch.org.
Submissions are subject to editing for content, clarity and style.
Special thanks to all the contributors who make the newsletter interesting and informative.
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 A Seder with a Syrian Flavor
By Bonny Wolf, April 16, 2008, NPR
When my mother was a child in the 1920s, her great aunts once held a formal Passover Seder. The women wore long gowns and the men tuxedos. Celebrating the Jews' liberation from slavery in Egypt, they felt, was worth getting dressed up for. Of all Jewish holidays, Passover includes the most formal, multi-course meal. Tables are set with the best linens, the china is taken out of quilted storage cases and the silver is polished. Fresh flowers make the table look like a spring garden. I've always loved the Seder table but found the food lackluster. Let's be honest, gefilte fish is homely, even with its dashing side of beet-enhanced horseradish. And cakes made with matzo meal never look or taste like the real thing.
Listen to the audio and read the recipes here.
Read On...
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 People of the Book
By Jonathan Yardley, January 2, 2008, WashintonPost.com
The good news is that this new novel by the author of March, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2006, is intelligent, thoughtful, gracefully written and original. Brooks has built upon her experience as a correspondent in Bosnia for the Wall Street Journal to construct a story around a book -- small, rare and very old -- and the people into whose hands it had fallen over five centuries, people who "had known unbearable stress: pogrom, Inquisition, exile, genocide, war."
Read On...
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The Right Fit: A Plethora of Haggadot
By Juliet Laidos, March 23, 2007, Forward.com
Arthur Miller once said that "Jews are very impatient with doing the same thing over and over again. It's gotta be different!" The Jewish playwright's observation seems particularly apt when applied to Passover - for, on the night that is different from all other nights, Jews fulfilling the vehigadeta mitzvah can choose from nearly 3,500 versions of the Haggadah. Read On...
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 Add a Touch of Egypt to your Seder Table with Old Family Recipes
By Joseph Abdel Wahed, March 23, 2007, JewishSF.com
As an Egyptian Jewish refugee, I celebrate Passover with special meaning. Passover is a time to commemorate the Jews' liberation from slavery in Egypt in 1300 B.C. and return to freedom in Israel. At my family's seders in Cairo in the 1940s, we felt as if we represented the enduring memory of that exodus. Little did we know we would soon experience our own exodus from Egypt as a result of racism and oppression. Read On...
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 Congressional Vote Seen as Victory for Jewish Refugees
By Elliot Resnick, April 9, 2008, The Jewish Press
Responding to lobbying efforts over the past several years, the U.S. Congress last Tuesday passed House Resolution 185, which declares that any enduring Middle East agreement must address the issue of the 850,000 Jewish refugees who fled Arab lands since Israel's founding in 1948. It further states that any U.S. resolution referring to the Palestinian refugee problem "must also include a similarly explicit reference to the resolution of the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries."Read On...
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 Castro Quits, But His Policies Remain
By Larry Luxner, February 19, 2008, JTA
Fidel Castro's announcement this week that he'll step down after 49 years as president of Cuba may be cause for celebration in South Florida -- but Cuban exiles here say precious little will change for the few Jews remaining on the island. Read On...
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 Chief Rabbi Amar: We Have Done Ethiopian Jewry a Grievous Wrong
By Tani Goldstein, March 18, 2008, YNet
Chief Sephardi Rabbi Shlomo Amar said Monday during a joint meeting with the Knesset's Internal Affairs and Environment Committee that "the State of Israel, the Chief Rabbinate included, has done Ethiopia's Jews a grievous wrong. "We are all culpable, and we are all to blame for not bringing Ethiopia's Jewry home with the rest of the Jewish people," said Rabbi Amar, following a heated debate concerning governmental policy towards Ethiopian immigrants. "No amount of heartfelt words can change that fact." Read On...
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Sparks of Holiness, Rekindled
By Chana Afik, April 2008, Aish.com
Descendants of forced converts of the Inquisition are rediscovering Judaism.
One bright spring day, the Inquisitors of Mexico caught Diego in the marketplace, hiding three matzos under his hat. In their torture chambers, he denied he was Jewish, insisting that unleavened bread placed under one's hat was a known cure for chronic headaches. Meanwhile, the local spies of the Inquisition, like their counterparts in Spain and Portugal, continued combing the marketplace, looking for anyone displaying a particular interest in purchasing bitter herbs or celery (used by many Spanish Jews as karpas) that day. Read On...
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 Family Matters: Such Good Thieves
By Ruth Behar, February 2008, Moment Magazine
A unique inheritance bequeaths a sense of strength and belonging to a scholarly descendant of Cuban Jews who came to America.
When I was coming of age in New York in the early 1970s, my Cuban Jewish immigrant family was still struggling to make ends meet. Practical people who sold fabric, envelopes and shoes, they were very concerned about my dreamy-eyed ways. Read On...
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 Matzah Sushi
By Francesca Biller-Safran, April 2008, InterfaithFamily.org
I had a joyous childhood, and an incredibly inspiring one as well, as a Japanese-Russian-Jewish girl growing up in Southern California during the 1970s. My life as a child was a colorful adventure filled with curious fascination and optimism, with everything intriguing and nothing mundane. I had my share of Omega-3s for decades before it became a health trend, with a bounty of fresh lox and bagels one day and whole salmons prepared Japanese-style the next. Read On...
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 Wandering Jews No More? Indian Jews In U.S. Struggle For Unity, Acceptance
By Ita Yankovich, February 15, 2008, Jewish Press
India, a predominantly Hindu country of more than a billion people, is home to approximately 5,000 Jews. While the country historically has been friendly to Jews, the lure of Israel, coupled with economic factors, has prompted many Jews to emigrate.
Read On...
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 Bound by Family Ties
By Rabindranath Maharaj, March 13, 2008, WashingtonPost.com
THE KONKANS
By Tony D'Souza
Harcourt. 308 pp. $25
Writers like Bharati Mukherjee and Jamaica Kincaid have long been exploring the fragmented identities of immigrants who move toward their versions of the American dream but gaze back longingly at their homelands. In the books written by second-generation Americans, there are subtle shifts to this dichotomy, most noticeably an acknowledgment of the benefits of multiple identities in an increasingly globalized environment. Although these authors express a wistful curiosity about the lives of parents and grandparents, their writing is frequently less melancholic, a benefit, perhaps, of lighter baggage.
Read On...
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 Singing the Songs of Ancient Indian Jews
By Sam Taute, April 7, 2008, Diamondbackonline.com
The lyrics were sung in an ancient language, unintelligible to the crowd, but those on hand to witness the performance by the Nirit Singers of Israel found themselves clapping in unison to the beat of the music.
The Nirit Singers were part of a panel of experts that convened in the Stamp Student Union on Sunday to present and discuss the folk songs of the Cochini Jews, a small, ancient community that lived in India for 2,000 years before migrating to Israel in the 1950s. Read On...
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 Jew Town's Disappearing Community
By Ines Ehrlich, March 16, 2008, Israel Jewish Scene
Our tour of Kerala, in the southern part of India, brought us to Fort Cochin. Since ancient times Kerala has been the center of the Indian spice trade where Greeks, Romans, Jews, Arabs and Chinese vied for its trade. According to legend, the first Jews arrived here in 70CE, just after the destruction of the second Temple.
The Maharaja of Travancore and Cochin gave shelter to the Jewish community here after the Moorish Arabs attacked them in 1524 due to their trade monopoly. They were given an area right opposite the Maharajah's palace, which subsequently became known as Jew Town. It was here, at the end of a narrow cobbled road that they built the Pardesi synagogue in 1568. Read On...
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 Music, Religion Create Cultural Crossroads for Joshua Nelson
By Geoff Gehman, April 13, 2008, Morningcall.com
It's late Friday afternoon, and Joshua Nelson is juggling a telephone interview with preparations for the Shabbat. The black Jew and singing pianist is playing short gospel versions of Hebrew hymns and klezmer versions of Negro spirituals.
A half-dozen times he stops to take calls from relatives reminding him to bring the right wine and challah to that night's Shabbos dinner. Read On...
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 Picturing Today's Conversos
By Eli Rosenblatt, April 2, 2008, Forward.com
In northern New Mexico's Sandoval County, there is a tombstone of a World War II veteran in a cemetery nestled in the desert brush. The name of the man, who was born in 1921 and died in 1980, is Adonay P. Gutierrez, and it is engraved on the stone below a cross. Nine different Native American communities reside in the surrounding counties, and even if cemetery visitors see his cross before his name, this lone Jew lies among them. Read On...
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 Ethiopia to Broadway, via Jerusalem
By Justin Rudzki, April 10, 2008, Israel21C
In 1985, 10-year-old Yossi Vasser and his family set out on foot from the Ethiopian village of Uzava. The perilous 700-kilometer journey that ensued took them through the harsh Sudanese desert and eventually on to their spiritual home - Jerusalem.
Fast forward some 23 years and Vasser - now an articulate, seasoned actor in his early 30s - is again preparing for departure: this time he and an ensemble of Ethiopian Israeli actors are traveling to North America to bring a moving account of that courageous journey, One of a Kind - AndArgay, to the stage in both the US and Canada. Read On...
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