We are delighted to update you on the progress of the Abayudaya Community Health and Development Plan that provides essential life-saving services to adults and children throughout the region. This project promotes peace and cooperation among Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Uganda. Click here for the newest update.

The Abayudaya Executive Committee, the democratically elected community council, requested that Be'chol Lashon serve as the clearinghouse for long range planning and fundraising efforts on behalf of the Jewish community of Uganda. All funds raised for the Abayudaya Community Health and Development Plan have been matched dollar-for-dollar by a challenge grant, as will all additional donations. This inspirational project is becoming a reality through your generosity. To donate, click here.

Bay Area Be'chol Lashon Retreat

Just Posted! For program schedule, click here
November 9th-11th
Walker Creek Ranch
Petaluma, CA

You are invited to the 4th Annual Bay Area Be'chol Lashon Retreat for ethnically and racially diverse Jews, families, and friends at Walker Creek Ranch. Click here for the complete schedule!

The weekend features Rhythm Village founder, Gabe Harris and Naby Bangoura, a native of Guinea, West Africa, who will be leading both drum and dance workshops for children and adults. We welcome back Rabbis-in-Residence, Rabbi Capers Funnye, Beth Shalom Bnai Zaken, Chicago, and Rabbi Lisa Edwards, Beth Chayim Chadashim, LA. It is an opportunity to learn together, celebrate our Judaism, and continue to strengthen our growing community.

The weekend package of lodging, vegetarian meals, sports, workshops and drumming is all inclusive! Click here for more information or contact Esther Fishman, 415-386-2604. Space is limited!

Join Be'chol Lashon at: Your Journey to Judaism

Your Journey to Judaism: A Community Wide Havdallah Program
Saturday, November 17th, 6-8pm
Congregation Sha'ar Zahav
16th & Dolores, San Francisco, CA
Free

Workshops will be lead by Sha'ar Zahav community leaders, Rabbi Angel, Reeben ZEllman, Andrew Ramer and Karen Segal. Specialists from Be'chol Lashon, Jimena, Mosaic, Nehirim, and Project Welcome will be presenting as well. This event geared towards adults, familiites and children open to everyone!

For more information, contact Rebecca Weiner, 415-861-6932, Rebecca@shaarzahav.org

JCCSF Jewish Bookfest: Featuring Sophie Judah and Melanie Kaye

November 4th, 12:45-2pm
Jewish Community Center, San Francisco
3200 California Street
Free

The JCC Bookfest is featuring two very special authors on Nov 4th, at 12:45pm

Sophie Judah
Dropped from Heaven
Judah's fiction debut is about everyday life within the little-known Jewish community of Bene-Israel in India, over the course of more than a century. Born in India in 1949, she immigrated to Israel in 1973.

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz
The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism
Kaye/Kantrowitz exposes and challenges the common assumptions about who and what Jews are, by presenting in their own voices Jews of color from the Iberian Peninsula, Asia and Africa.

For more information, click here.

Book Release: Rabbi Kohn's, Emerging Jewish: Surviving the Conversion Process with Your Ideals and Relationships Intact

November 8th, 8-9pm
San Francisco JCC
3200 California Street
San Francisco, CA 94118

& November 29th, 7:30-8:30pm
Congregation Netivot Shalom
1316 University Ave
Berkeley, CA 94702

Have you ever thought about converting to Judaism? Are you in the process, newly Jewish (Mazal Tov!), or an old hand? Make sure you remain joyous in your choice with the help of Rabbi Daniel Kohn, whose new book provides crucial information about the emotional and social impediments and even opposition that converts to Judaism may encounter on their spiritual path. Join him for a seminar, discussion and book signing to learn about ways to keep your enthusiasm, excitement, and commitment to Judaism and the Jewish people undiminished.

SF Mothers Circle at Sherith Israel

Fridays, 10:30am-12:30pm, twice a month
Congregation Sherith Israel
2266 California Street
San Francisco, CA 94115
Free

Congregation Sherith Israel, a Reform temple in SF will be hosting The Mothers Circle, a national program specifically designed for unaffiliated non-Jewish women raising Jewish children wthin the context of an interfaith relationship. The class will provide an introduction to Jewish rituals, prectices and ethics with an emphasis on childrearing.

For more information contact Carrie Rice, 415-346-1720, ext 18, CRice@SherithIsrael.org

Nazi Bed Covers Withdrawn after Indian Jewish Protest

Posted October 3, 2007, Agence France-Presse, Inquirer.net

MUMBAI--A new line of bedspreads called the "NAZI Collection" will be withdrawn from stores after India's tiny Jewish community protested, a furnishings dealer said.

The brochure of the collection featured swastikas and its promoters said that NAZI stood for "New Arrival Zone of India."

The dealer apologized for the "obnoxious name" and agreed to withdraw the line in a letter this week to the Indian Jewish Federation, the body said in a letter received Tuesday evening.

Last year, a restaurant in Mumbai -- home to around 5,000 of the total 6,000 Jews in India -- changed its name from "Hitler's Cross" following similar complaints.

Distribution of Nets Splits Malaria Fighters

By Reuben Kyama & Donald McNeil, October 9, 2007, NYTimes.com

Veronica Njeri, 45, says she has ''never healed'' since losing two of her six children to malaria 20 years ago, and she still feels vulnerable. While her oldest are adults or teenagers, and have presumably built up immunity to the disease, she worries about her youngest, Anthony, who is 4.

But since hundreds of free mosquito nets came to Maendeleo, her rice-farming village in west-central Kenya, ''malaria epidemics have become rare,'' she said happily, even though the village sits amid stagnant paddies where swarms of mosquitoes breed.

Villages like Maendeleo are at the center of a debate that has split malaria fighters: how to distribute mosquito nets. Recently, Dr. Arata Kochi, the blunt new director of the World Health Organization's malaria program, declared that as far as he was concerned, ''the debate is at an end.'' Virtually the only way to get the nets to poor people, he said, is to hand out millions free.

In doing so, Dr. Kochi turned his back on an alternative long favored by the Clinton and Bush administrations -- distribution by so-called social marketing, in which mosquito nets are sold through local shops at low, subsidized prices -- $1 or so for an insecticide-impregnated net that costs $5 to $7 from the maker -- with donors underwriting the losses and paying consultants to come up with brand names and advertise the nets. ''The time for social marketing of bed nets in a big way is over,'' Dr. Kochi said in an interview. ''It can become a supplemental strategy for urban areas and middle-income countries.''

Two years ago, social marketing was at the heart of a scandal when it was revealed that the United States Agency for International Development, or USAid, which distributes foreign aid, was spending 95 percent of its malaria budget on consultants and 5 percent on goods like nets, drugs and insecticide. Under attack from several senators championing the fight against malaria, the agency later announced that it would spend at least half its budget on goods.

Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, called the new W.H.O. policy ''a great move,'' adding, ''We knew social marketing doesn't work.''

In practice, nothing much had been working. In 2000, a world health conference in Abuja, Nigeria, set a goal: by 2005, 60 percent of African children would be sleeping under nets. By 2005, only 3 percent were.

The theory behind social marketing, which is also used to distribute condoms and oral rehydration salts, is that the poor see more value in brand-name goods they pay for than handouts they get free, and that the trade creates small entrepreneurs.The usual comparison made is to Coca-Cola, which reaches Africa's remotest corners. But Dr. Kochi rejected that model, saying, ''I'm not sure whether the poorest of the poor actually drink Coca-Cola.''

He argues that the insecticide-filled nets, when used by 80 percent or more of a village, create a barrier that kills or drives off mosquitoes, protecting everyone in the area, including those without nets. Individual nets tended to just drive mosquitoes next door, to bite someone else. As such, he said, nets ought to be treated as a public good, like the measles or polio vaccines, which the world does not charge the poor for.

Free net distributions are usually done in a week or two, by armies of workers who are paid a few dollars a day by the Red Cross or health ministry to cover a country or other large region. Distributions have been tried in Sierra Leone, Niger, Togo and elsewhere, sometimes in conjunction with measles shots or deworming drugs.

The new model is beginning to prevail but has not completely swept the field. Some donors still use some social marketing. Unicef, the world's largest buyer of nets, distributed 25 million last year, of which 92 percent were given away, said its medical director, Dr. Peter Salama. The main American program, the President's Malaria Initiative, plans to hand out more than 15 million nets by 2008, of which about 75 percent will be free, said its coordinator, Rear Adm. Tim Ziemer.

In June, Admiral Ziemer and the first lady, Laura Bush, who has made malaria her crusade, helped hand out 500,000 free nets in Mozambique and Zambia. Social marketing may be useful during gaps between mass distributions, said Trent Ruebush, a malaria expert at the initiative and USAid. The best insecticide-filled nets last three to five years, but babies will be born in that time, or new families will move into an area. ''We feel it is one of various effective ways to go,'' Dr. Ruebush said.

Experiences in Kenya played a large part in persuading the W.H.O. to change its policy, said Dr. Peter Olumese, a medical officer in the agency's malaria program. Maendeleo, a village of about 140 mud-walled shacks with tin roofs, was part of a five-year study of 40 health districts. When it started in 2002, the only nets were those for sale in small shops, Dr. Olumese said, and only about 7 percent of people had them.

Social marketing was introduced by Population Services International, a large aid contractor. That increased coverage to about 21 percent by early 2006. Then, late last year, the health ministry got a big grant from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria that allowed it to hand out 3.4 million free nets in two weeks. Coverage rose to 67 percent, and distribution became more equitable. Under social marketing, Dr. Olumese said, the ''richest of the poor'' had 38 percent coverage, while the ''poorest of the poor'' -- like Maendeleo's rice farmers -- had only 15 percent. After the handouts, they were about equal.

Deaths of children dropped 44 percent. It also turned out to be cheaper, Dr. Olumese said. With consultant fees, transportation, advertising and shipping, social marketing added about $10 to the cost of each net beyond the $5 to $7 that Danish or Japanese makers charged. But even with payments to volunteers, the added cost of free distribution was only about $1.25 per net. ''There has been a paradigm shift,'' Dr. Olumese said. ''We need to use the momentum we have right now.''

Between the giveaways, he said, nets should be handed out free to all pregnant women and mothers who visit health clinics. Some women struggle to afford even the 10 cents per child cost of identity cards that let them visit clinics. ''Asking a mother to make a decision to feed her child or buy a net is not fair,'' he said.

In Maendeleo, a village elder, Benson Gacu, confirmed that price was a major impediment. ''Our people are poor, and very few could afford to buy a mosquito net even for 50 shillings,'' or about 75 cents, he said. ''We are happy that the nets are free.'' Francis Mureithi, a local shopkeeper, said he still had some 50-shilling nets for sale because the government had given free ones only to families with children under 5. But, Mr. Mureithi noted, sales of malaria pills were way down.

Arab Jews - an Oxymoron

By Judd Robert Rothstein, September 19, 2007, The Cornell Daily Sun

Nora Choueriri ’10’s recent op-ed, “Christian Arabs — An Oxymoron?” (Sept. 17) inspired me to write about another forgotten group — the Arab Jews. Choueriri’s call to remember that Arabs come in all faiths is welcomed in a world where being an Arab and Muslim is incorrectly and unfairly linked.

Jewish roots in countries such as Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Morocco and every Arab country in between reach back thousands of years, predating the founding of Christianity and Islam. During the golden era of Arab civilization, Arab Jews made immeasurable contributions in science, medicine, philosophy, and poetry. The most famous Arab Jew was the twelfth century Abu Imram Mussa bin Maimun ibn Abdallah al-Qurtubi (Maimonides), whose contributions to medicine, philosophy and poetry are still glorified. His epic work Dalalat al-Ha’irin (The Guide for the Perplexed) is still studied not only in universities throughout the Arab world but all over the globe. Contributions by Abu al-Fadl ibn Hasda to government, Ibn Gabriol (Avicebron) to poetry and Al- Farj Yaqub bin Yusuf in the founding of Al-Azhar University have made permanent marks on the Arab cultural, intellectual and political landscape.

There was a time when over one-third of Baghdad was Jewish, when the Shabbat songs of Damascus’s Harat al-Yahud (Jewish quarter) subdued the muezzin evening call to prayer and when the songs of two brothers, Salah and Daoud Al-Kuwaiti, Jews and the fathers of modern Arabic music, could be heard in every Arab home. Many Arab Jews contributed to the founding of modern Arab states and actively fought for the liberation of their countries from Western domination. Yaqub Sanu was one of the fathers of Egyptian nationalism. Sassoon Eskell, member of the Iraqi parliament and former Iraqi Minister of Finance, was instrumental in liberating Iraq from colonial domination.

On the eve of the Second World War, there were nearly a million Arab Jews. Most Arab Jews were expelled and ethnically cleansed from their various homelands in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Within a few years, most Arab Jews found themselves in squalid and overcrowded refugee camps, known as Maabaraot, in the newly formed State of Israel. Hundreds of thousands of others sought refuge in England, France, the United States, and throughout South America. In the United States, the most notable Arab Jewish community exists in Brooklyn, New York where some 40,000 proud Arabic speaking Syrian and Egyptian Jews now live. Only a few thousand Arab Jews currently reside in the Arab world. Those who remain, most notably in Morocco, Yemen and Bahrain (the latter of which has an elderly Jewish member of parliament named Ebrahim Daoud Nonoo) are the relics of a once vibrant, dynamic and now mostly forgotten Arab-Jewish civilization.

Many Americans associate the Middle-East with images of terrorism, war, ethnic cleansing and the conflicts in Iraq, Sudan, Lebanon, and between Israel and its neighbors. These images bombard our daily lives, and more importantly, shape the perspective of how we view the Arab world. The existence of Arab Jews and Christians is a constant reminder of the diversity, complexities and paradoxes which make up the modern Middle-East. The stories of these communities have been eclipsed by the aura of disorder which now engulfs the region. However, amidst this chaos are the stories of many civilizations made up of dramatic and dynamic stories of human beings which ought not to be lost through the sands of time

Growing up Latino & Jewish

By Debra Cho, October 5, 2007, The Brandeis Hoot

As part of the University's Hispanic Heritage Month events, ¡AHORA! and Hillel co-sponsored "LATINOS: Different Colors, Flavors and Religions" on Tuesday to explore how religion, specifically Judaism, functions within the Latino community.

¡AHORA! President Meredyth Gonzalez and Hillel President Yael Bronstein took turns asking a panel of students, including former Student Union President Alison Schwartzbaum, Orly Wapinski and Sasha Parets. The questions covered topics, such as identity, heritage, image and the experience of growing up Jewish and Latina.

Each panelist shared a different life experience with the audience. Schwartzbaum shared her story on how it was to grow up being Jewish and being half Cuban.

For her, growing up “Jewban” was always a part of her identity. Schwartzbaum attended a predominantly Latino school in Miami while being raised in an upper middle class family. In her high school being Latina also meant being part of the majority.

When she arrived at Brandeis her concept of image was challenged because people would usually be shocked to hear she was Latina. As a child Spanish was her first language and while she might have lost a little of the language along the way, she said that students were often shocked to hear Alison speak in Spanish.

A striking part of the presentation was when Schwartzbaum was asked “how she plans to raise her children” she simply responded by saying she doesn’t know quite yet but, a large part of her identity and culture lies within her family.

Wapinski was born in Monte Rey, Mexico where the Jewish community is quite small. She said that for her, being of Jewish and Mexican descent is not a separation of culture, but instead a mixture of both.

After coming to Brandeis, Wapinski connected to her heritage by recognizing that she did not have to choose between her Jewish heritage and her Mexican background. For Wapinski, her two sides are so deeply fused together that being Jewish and Mexican is what she is.

Wapinski shared how Mexicans in general are very patriotic people and the dedication she has for her home is also the same dedication she has for her religion. In her home they have a synagogue and they have Shabbat dinners but, within each she will feel a mixture of both being Mexican and Jewish.

The final panelist, Sasha Parets also grew up in Miami, Florida where she struggled with balancing what she deemed to be her two separate lives: her Cuban heritage and her Jewish religion. For Parets, the greatest battle in being Jewish and Cuban is the struggle with each side. Growing up she felt the need to simultaneously please both sides.

Even now, at Brandeis, she continues to try to strike a happy balance between both sides of her family, instead of creating this separation between both sides. She often finds herself missing many aspects of her Cuban home life she shared with the audience about how she had to get this specific type of coffee that she simply could not find on this campus.

Following a question-and-answer session with the panelists, it was the audience's chance to speak. Those who attended were split into discussion groups in which to discuss their reactions to the panelist's experiences.

The Latino Comedy Fest on will be the next Hispanic Heritage Month campus event will be the Latino Comedy Fest on October 10 at 8 p.m. in the Hassenfeld Conference Center. Co-sponsored by ¡AHORA! and the Roman Studies Department, the Latino Comedy Fest will feature comedian Alba Sanchez.

Nicaraguan Jews get Torah

Posted on JTA, September 6, 2007, JTA.org

Nicaraguan Jews have a Torah for the first time in nearly 30 years.

A new Torah scroll was sent to the country in August, replacing the one that left the country for Costa Rica after a fire ravaged the country’s only synagogue in 1978 and the leftist Sandinista Revolution the following year forced the country's Jewish community into exile.

The damaged synagogue was expropriated in the 1980s and now is a funeral home. Since the Sandinistas lost the 1990 elections, Jews have been trickling back to the country. Nicaragua’s Jewish community today numbers about 60 people.

Chana Sorhegan of New Jersey donated the scroll, which will be kept in the home of a Sabbath-observant community member, since the community has no permanent meeting place or synagogue. The Torah is to be welcomed in a celebratory ceremony following the High Holy Days, community president Eduardo Translateur said.

Translateur said the Torah's arrival is a major step toward rebuilding Nicaraguan Jewry. “The Torah was brought here last week and it is very beautiful,” he told JTA. “Slowly, slowly we are moving forward.”

Madrijim School Trains Argenitne Jews

By Florencia Arbiser, September 19, 2007, JTA.org

The Madrijim School in Buenos Aires is both a place for young Jews to learn about teaching Jewish culture and a way to keep teens off dangerous streets.

It was getting late on a recent Wednesday night, but a group of Jewish teenagers stayed huddled in a fifth-floor office here practicing their Hebrew in between bites of cookies. Next door, another group danced to thumping Israeli music, moving around a room decorated with maps of Israel and Hebrew stickers.

There were no notebooks to be seen, and the insouciant jeans-clad teenagers practicing Hebrew sat with their legs draped over chairs, blowing bubble-gum balloons, but this actually was a training session for new teachers. “Let’s focus on the Rosh Hashanah concepts of initiation and renewal,” called out Jessica Rozenbaum, head of the Madrijim School -- pronounced “madrichim,” the Hebrew word for counselors -- at the Hebraica Jewish Center.

Some 100 teenagers -- 15- and 16-year old males and females -- are enrolled in an informal two-year educational program at the school to learn how to become recreational Jewish teachers. The teens will become the educators for some 1,400 children aged 18 months to 16 years who attend weekly activities at Hebraica’s two locations in downtown Buenos Aires and in the northern suburb of Pilar. “Unlike several of my Madrijim School classmates, I do not attend a Jewish school," said Daniel, 16. "To me this Jewish education is much needed. I transmit the meaning of Judaism to my non-Jewish friends.”

For many of the students, the Madrijim School has become a place to put their youthful energy to good use rather than hanging out at night on the street drinking beer or lounging at home watching TV, says Patricio Samet, director of Hebraica’s youth department. The school’s demanding attendance mandate -- Wednesday evenings and all day Saturday -- requires teenagers to optimize their schedule. Some skip outings Friday nights to make time for the program.

Given Buenos Aires’ skyrocketing crime rates, parents are glad their children are spending time in a safe, Jewish place rather than on the dangerous streets. “On Wednesdays I finish school at 4 p.m., and until 7 p.m. -- when the Madrijim School class starts -- I study at the Hebraica library or coffee shop,” said Carla, 16. “We end late at night -- at 9:30 p.m. -- but we commute on the subway in a big group. "My parents don’t love the fact that I commute at night in Buenos Aires, but they got used to it. And I can’t stay at home forever even though our country has become more and more dangerous.”

Carlos Kleiner, Hebraica’s general secretary, says Madrijim is much more than an afterschool program. “Hebraica is a hotbed for Jewish leadership,” Kleiner told JTA. “We educate young professionals that end up directing Jewish institutions throughout the country and worldwide.” The idea, Samet said, is to develop creative ways to transmit Jewish culture. Samet says the school tries to do so in a “healthy and amusing way,” and graduates often get their first job working in a Jewish setting.

Hebraica, an 80-year-old Jewish social, cultural and athletic institution, also runs interfaith arts projects, city cultural programs and inter-institutional Jewish programs. The organization has 12,000 members.

More Hispanic Jews are Finding a Home in South Florida

By Ana Veciana-Suarez, September 12, 2007, MiamiHerald.com

For David Saltoff, who has searched for his religious roots across 40 years and two continents, the start of Rosh Hashana at sunset today signifies more than the beginning of a new year, even more than an introduction to the 10-day period of reflection that culminates in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

As a child in Ecuador, Saltoff attended Catholic school and sometimes celebrated Christmas with a tree. ''I didn't even know I was Jewish,'' he says. ''No one ever said a word to me.'' But now, as he celebrates the Jewish holy days for the first time, his long spiritual journey may end at last.

For Saltoff and other recently arrived Latin American Jews, this year's High Holy Days will offer something precious: a new religious identity in a new land. And as they welcome the year 5768 with the blast of the shofar, they will help stamp their influence on a religious community sure to become more Hispanic and perhaps more observant because of their presence.

South Florida long has been a natural destination for Latin American Jews fleeing political turmoil and anti-Semitism. Many had once vacationed here; others wanted to be near family members and friends. They're attracted by the area's Hispanic culture, to be sure, but they also cherish its religious freedom.

''You can express your Judaism more openly than in Latin America,'' says Graciela Chemerinsky, case manager for the Latin American Migration Project (LAMP) of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, an aid program that has helped 1,600 families since 2001.

About 113,300 Jews live in Miami-Dade County, according to a 2004 study by Ira Sheskin, director of the University of Miami's Jewish Demography Project. Broward has 212,000.

Though Miami-Dade County's Jewish population has decreased by 18 percent since 1994 as more elderly retirees settle in Broward and Palm Beach, the percentage of Latin Americans inches upward.

''Now you can go to The Chosen,'' Sheskin says of a popular Kendall Judaica store, ''and get a Haggadah for Passover in Spanish. You didn't see that 10, 20 years ago.'' Temples offer Sabbath services in Spanish and provide scholarships to Jewish schools.

Although Sheskin lacks population figures for Broward's Hispanic Jews, he says they tend to reflect the larger Hispanic population: more established and assimilated, second generation.

But, he says, regardless of whether the new arrivals settle in Weston or Kendall, they attend synagogue and enroll their children in Jewish schools more frequently and join Jewish community centers in larger numbers.

They're younger, too: 33 is the median age for Hispanic Jews, contrasted with 51 for non-Hispanics.

Thirty-one percent of Miami-Dade's Jews are foreign born, according to Sheskin's study, the highest proportion among 45 U.S. Jewish communities. About 9,500 -- just under 9 percent -- identified themselves as Hispanic in 2004, almost double 1994 levels.

Kaifeng Jews Help Art Dealer Finish Four-Decade Trip to China

By Barbara Koh, September 11, 2007, Bloomberg.com

Gallery owner Norman Tolman's debut collection in Shanghai brings to mind one of those travel quizzes that tease with an unidentified photo and ask, ``Where are we?''

One painting shows a towering gate with a Chinese idiom declaring the city blessed by the nation and heaven. In the crowd below are men wearing Jewish yarmulkes atop their queues, the traditional imperial braided ponytails. Another depicts a synagogue at Rosh Hashanah, the congregation in long robes and white shawls, the rabbi reading from the Torah. Carved mahogany screens and a Chinese incense burner complete the scene.

The exhibit of 21 paintings takes us to Kaifeng, along the Yellow River 375 miles southwest of Beijing, starting around the 11th century. Jewish merchants from Persia traveling the Silk Road passed through the city, capital of the Song Dynasty (960-1279).

Some stayed. They built a synagogue in 1163 and took Chinese surnames. At its peak around the 1600s, Kaifeng's Jewish population was about 5,000. Then, isolation, intermarriage, war, poverty and floods decimated the community and culture. Today, only a few hundred Kaifeng residents (who look Chinese) identify themselves as Jewish. They have little knowledge of Judaism and its traditions.

Kaifeng's Jewish history motivated Tolman to commission Yin Xin, a Chinese native based in Paris, to illustrate the ancient community. ``I may be known as the guy who dared to tell Chinese they're Jews, and the Jews, they're Chinese,'' said Tolman, 71, in an interview at the Shanghai exhibition. He has displayed the acrylic paintings at his galleries in New York, and Tokyo, where he lives.

Chance Remark

Tolman first heard of Kaifeng's Jews while studying Mandarin and Asian linguistics at the University of California in Berkeley. A professor mentioned them in class and Tolman, who is not Jewish, read up on the subject out of curiosity.

After earning a master's degree, he headed to China. During a short stop in Tokyo, Tolman said he was waylaid by Japanese art. He opened his first gallery in 1972, specializing in modern Japanese graphics, and expanded into publishing.

About six years ago, itching to do something new, Tolman visited China and decided to try business there. He brought Japanese prints to art fairs in China and last year arranged a small exhibit in Tokyo of contemporary Chinese artists.

To launch the Tolman Collection in Shanghai, the art dealer said he wanted something ``I thought no one else knew about.'' He remembered Kaifeng's Jewry. Tolman had previously bought several of Yin's depictions of Han Chinese and ethnic minorities in pre- 1949 China, before Communist rule, so he asked Yin to paint the historic Jews.

Chinese Bar Mitzvah

Yin did research at the Musee d'art et d'histoire du Judaisme in Paris. Besides portraying actual people, he recreated a meeting between Jews and the Chinese emperor, a Jewish school and an 18th- century bar mitzvah. The artist's prevalent browns and grays add somberness and almost palpable weight to his subjects, reminiscent of Van Gogh's ``The Potato Eaters.''

In the background of some of the paintings, Yin has added footnotes in red, Chinese characters. For instance, one says that the woman hidden in a dark robe and white scarf and holding a red rose was widowed on her wedding date 45 years ago.

Tolman is a latecomer to China's gallery scene, which has expanded dramatically in the past few years, fueled by soaring prices of Chinese contemporary art. He joins other foreign-owned galleries in the city such as Gallery Leda Fletcher, Msg.art, Art Scene China and ShanghART, which has a solo show of Liang Shaoji works until Oct. 15. Tolman said he's not worried about arriving late, nor that his gallery is removed from Moganshan and the other art districts.

Art Fair

His opening in Shanghai coincided with SH Contemporary, the city's latest attempt to develop a top international art fair, which ran last week. Aside from the Kaifeng Jews, Tolman will show what he knows best -- Japanese art, ``in a place where Japanese aren't supposed to be beloved,'' he said.

``The Chinese shouldn't hate it because of the people who made it,'' said Tolman, adding that he wants to ``take nationality out of art.'' Tolman plans to bring works by young Thai, Vietnamese and Korean artists to his Shanghai space.``I want Shanghai people to be more international,'' he said. ``We're supposed to be educating, teaching people.''

``The Story of the Kaifeng Jews,'' Tolman Collection, Shanghai, Villa A, Ruijin Hotel, 118 Ruijin Second Road, through Sept. 16. Contact +86-21-5466-1002 or http://www.tolmantokyo.com .

For more photos, click here.

Cairene Dream

By Jessie Graham, September 28, 2007, Nextbook.org

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World
by Lucette Lagnado

Lucette Lagnado was only six years old when she left Cairo with her family. It was 1963, seven years after Gamal Abdel Nasser had begun to nationalize Egyptian businesses and to force out the country's once-thriving Jewish community, along with other supposed foreign influences. Leon Lagnado, Lucette's father, already in his 60s by then and in ill health, had been a debonair merchant and stockbroker, who strutted through Cairo wearing immaculate white suits. He had clung to his beloved city for as long as he could. As the Lagnado family boarded the boat to France they were forced to sign a document promising never to return.

Lagnado's memoir, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, is as much about her father's love affair with the city as it is about one family's painful exile from the Middle East. Lagnado resurrects a cosmopolitan Cairo that managed to be "both old-fashioned and libertine"—where her father attended services every morning, even if he'd spent the night gambling and dancing with his mistresses (one was said to be the legendary Egyptian singer Om Kalsoum.) In Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where the family ultimately landed after a brief stop in Paris, Leon Lagnado was reduced to selling fake French ties on subway trains and in the stations, mourning for his lost community, never fully accepting that the family could never go home.

Lagnado, an investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, is the author of Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz.

This book focuses more on your family, less on the political shifts that led to their expulsion from Egypt. The narrative is tightly focused, first in your apartment in Cairo, and then in Bensonhurst. Was that a conscious choice not to dwell on the politics?

There had to be a kind of an emotional truth to the book and a little girl of five and six—no matter how precocious—doesn't understand politics. She doesn't understand the bigger context. What a little child can understand is emotional turmoil. So I wanted to write about the exile, but I wanted to do it very much in the terms of a child and any child, even if they're in privileged America, their world is small—it's their house, their garden, whatever. Well, in Cairo, I didn't have a garden, I had a balcony, and an alleyway. To me, it was very precious. I would spend hours on the balcony holding my cat Pouspous. I was completely charmed by the life below. Sometimes there would be joyous celebrations, tents put up for engagements. And sometimes they were for sad and lugubrious occasions, there would be rugs brought in and there would be cries and mourning sounds. I liked my little alleyway.

It was a mixed neighborhood.

That was what was wonderful about life in the Middle East for Jews. There was an old ghetto but most of the Jews lived outside the ghetto—like my family did. As far as I know it was utterly and completely harmonious. The synagogues were mixed in with mosques; we were mixed in with Muslims.

Your father would often take you along with him on his jaunts around Cairo. He took you to the bar at the Nile Hilton, where he did business, to Groppi's café where he'd buy you sweets.

My father was impassioned by the city. It was like he owned that city, and he spoke beautiful English. The Jews of Egypt, the educated classes, spoke multiple languages. What was most neat about my father is that he was able to totally deal with the Brits, but he was also able to develop a relationship—when he sold olive oil—with simple merchants on the street. It was a magical world. I am obsessed with the bar in the Nile Hilton. It was swank, and then the pebbled garden of Groppi's where you sat outdoors and had Chantilly cream.

Your family stayed in Cairo after many Jews had already left.

A lot of people left after 56, after the Suez War, because there were ousters of the Brits and the French, and some of the Jews had British and French passports. There was a lot of fear, but I don't think the government was heavyhanded. My father loved Egypt. He didn't want to go. He was a broker, always negotiating, and thought he could maneuver his way out of the situation. Eventually, my father accepted that we needed to leave, so he tells everybody, "Leave. Go to Israel. I will find you there." The plan was that we were going to go to Israel, and he was going to rejoin his brothers and sister.

But you didn't go to Israel, why not?

We come from a Syrian family where the sons are like gods. My oldest brother and my other brother really wanted to go to America. There was a real passion for American culture in Egypt.

How did you end up in Bensonhurst?

It was sort of a faux Cairo when we moved there. These ten sleepy little blocks of prefab houses. I can conjure no glamour about life in Bensonhurst, but all those refugees from the Levant were there. We tried to have what we had before. Little groceries opened up with Middle Eastern food.

But then this Jewish neighborhood became Italian, and your family didn't want to leave their home.

When we got there, the Syrian Jews were moving to Ocean Parkway. We didn't want to move again. When we had a hope and a prayer of being with our kind we let it slip away, and we ended up alone again. Even the other day, I invited a friend of mine from the Syrian community to my book launch. She had read my book and she said to me, "The problem is you're an outsider. You're not really a part of the community. You left." And I'm thinking, "I'm an outsider? My family, we're Lagnados. We were the Rabbis of Aleppo! I'm not an outsider."

Why did she see you that way?

Because you can't leave the community and I didn't marry a Syrian Jew.

I would imagine it would be a bit difficult to approach this memoir with André Aciman's Out of Egypt already out there as the definitive memoir about Jews in Egypt.

For eight or nine years I wanted to write this book, and every time I would tell people, they would say, "But you know, there's André Aciman." It made me crazy. First of all, I love André. But then I think about the lost worlds of the Jews of Eastern Europe and Europe. How many writers did it take to recreate the little shtetls? We start with I.B. Singer and then we go on into the modern, new generation. And yet, we had equally magical, quirky, special, soulful, extraordinary worlds in the Middle East. The Jews of Iraq. The Jews of Iran. The Jews of Algeria. The Jews of Morocco. The Jews of Tunisia. We were this unbelievably cultured place. Why can't we produce a body of literature? And why haven't we?

Was it in part because the European narrative of exile and the Holocaust came first? Perhaps there was no room for another narrative?

We've all been consumed by the Holocaust, by the evisceration, disappearance, and destruction of the communities of Europe. In the same way, we should be concerned and consumed by the Palestinian refugee narrative, where there was and is a lot of suffering. But the idea that there was, as you put it, no room for another one. I actually found myself talking to a colleague when I dared to use the term "cultural holocaust" for the exile of Jews from the Middle East. She is a Jewish reporter, Orthodox. She said to me, "Well, forgive me, but you weren't wiped out, you weren't slaughtered." And I said, "No we weren't. But communities were wiped out culturally." To me that's a tragedy. My first book was about the Holocaust. I was totally consumed. But until recently, the Arab-Jewish refugees weren't a story. It wasn't even a graceful term, "Arabic Jews." To me it was an extraordinary accomplishment when recently I stood in front of my synagogue and said, "I was a refugee from Egypt." It's sort of like saying, "I'm an alcoholic."

Why?

From the first days I came to America, my mother whispered, "Don't say you're from Egypt." Egypt was this backward, primitive country. I had to be the Parisian schoolgirl. I could play the part, "My name is Lucette. I'm from France." I didn't out and out say I was born in France. I would say I'm from France, and that was technically true.

The social worker that managed your family's case here saw your father as very backward.

They wanted to make sure that you're assimilated. And then you get a man like my father, and he doesn't want to assimilate. So I have these single-spaced notes by the social worker from the New York Association for New Americans and she records him telling her, "We are Arab, madam. We are Arab, madam." My father loved Muslims. He loved Egyptians. He felt at one with them.

That's quite a contrast to Aciman's family. His family was Sephardic and they were always trying to distinguish themselves from the Arabs in their midst—to distinguish even between Syrian and Egyptian Jews. Your family didn't seem to have such an identity crisis in Egypt.

My parents were really religious. My father may have been a boulevardier, a womanizer, a sinner, a pleasure seeker, and a gambler, but come morning, he was in shul. Faith was a significant issue as I approached this work; I'm not sure it is for André.

You were able to go back to Cairo in 2005, with the permission of the Egyptian government. One of the things that surprised you was that after all this time, you felt at home there.

I am an angst-ridden person, and I felt angst-free in Egypt—it seems bizarre. I would look at the Nile, and how calm it was, and I thought the people were awfully nice. If I had my own way, I'd sit with everybody and say, "Now wait a minute, wait! It worked 60 years ago, you know? We got along fine. Why, why can't we redo that?"

What did older Egyptians say about the Jews who had left?

They never talked about missing Jews, but they all had memories. It was almost like in Germany, where I did reporting for my other book, where they say, "I knew a Jewish family." In Egypt it was at a more human level. I spoke with our former neighbor. The old woman said, "I liked your mother. She was very sweet to children." That was the nicest part about it. We weren't Yehudi. We were simply neighbors and then we had to leave. They were probably bewildered, as bewildered as anybody.

How did you come to the title, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit?

My father died in January 1993 after a very long illness. Just after he died, I went to a Moroccan synagogue in the East 70s. I was totally broken, and this old woman comes over to me after services, and she says, "Are you the daughter of Leon Lagnado?" And I said, "Yeah." And she says, "You know, I knew your father as a young girl in Cairo. He would come to my house and he always wore white. He always wore white sharkskin." That was an amazing moment. She and I became unbelievable friends. I found her this supremely comforting figure. I started going to shul, would sit next to her, and always ask the same question, almost like a child, "Tell me about the white sharkskin."