jewishsideblog

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…In the fall of 1928, the Republican Herbert Hoover ran against the Democrat Al Smith, a flamboyant former New York governor who had the effrontery to be Catholic and a son of immigrants. Hoover was too cautious to bash Catholics himself, but his Protestant supporters — ministers, politicians, journalists — had no such qualms.

The wrath of the antipapists soon poured out on immigrants in general, including Jews. Jews made up 10 percent of all Europeans who came to the United States between 1880 and the early 1920s. They were ripe for the scapegoating. Henry Ford, America’s most eminent anti-Semite, had been publishing the conspiracy-mongering “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in his newspaper for years. Its editorials had called Jews “the conscious enemies of all that Anglo-Saxons mean by civilization.” The anti-Smith faction couldn’t hold the Jews responsible for the Catholic candidate, but they could point out that Jews were part of “the incoming mob,” as Berenson puts it. The Ku Klux Klan, in the ascendant during the early 1920s but losing membership by 1928, saw in the Smith-Hoover race a chance to revive its fortunes, and piled on.

In the middle of all this, 4-year-old Barbara Griffiths walked into the woods outside Massena, a village in upstate New York, and didn’t walk out. The police and firefighters organized a search. It went on all night. At some point, someone proposed a theory: Jews had kidnapped and slaughtered little Barbara to use her blood in their rituals. By dawn, town officials and hundreds of villagers had concluded that that was the correct explanation.

That day, which happened to be the day before Yom Kippur, the mayor and a state trooper summoned the local rabbi. According to the rabbi’s notes, they asked: “Have you a holiday tomorrow?” and “Could you inform me if your people in the old country are offering human sacrifices on a holiday?”

So there it was: the blood libel, the 800-year-old slander that still had the power to spark pogroms. Jews were accused of killing Christian children and draining their blood, either to drink as wine or to bake into matzo, the unleavened bread eaten on Passover.

What was singular about this turn of events was that the belief in Jewish ritual infanticide had always been a European psychosis. American anti-Semitism was nasty, but the blood libel seems never before to have figured into its rhetoric.

…In 1928, the town had only 20 Jewish families. What it had in abundance were immigrants of other ethnicities. Over the previous 60 years, Massena had gone from a tiny farm community to an industrial center dominated by the Aluminum Company of America, or Alcoa. Alcoa recruited workers at Ellis Island and in Canada. By 1930, nearly 30 percent of Massena’s population was foreign-born. Seventy percent of those foreigners were Canadian, and half the Canadians spoke French. Quebec was the region in North America best versed in the blood libel, which had already occasioned anti-Jewish violence in Montreal and Quebec City. Perhaps, Berenson speculates, a French-speaking Canadian started the rumor.

But even if a Québécois laborer brought the libel to Massena, why did it find such ready acceptance? The answer may have to do with the K.K.K.’s decision to re-emerge for the presidential race. (It should be said of Berenson’s explanations that they rely heavily on circumstantial evidence.) A contemporary observer remembered that Massena was awash in fliers advertising Klan meetings. Locals showed up at them in the hundreds. Crosses were burned. Word around town was that a lot of those active in the search for Barbara belonged to the Klan, though Berenson admits that there’s no way to gauge the truth of this.

A little more than 24 hours after Barbara disappeared, she stumbled out of the woods, unharmed. She’d gotten lost. By then, however, a member of Massena’s Jewish community had contacted Jewish organizations in New York and Washington, and they had alerted the press. The story went national, and the media paid attention for about a week. The blood libel apparently never resurfaced in America.

But in the nine decades since, it has resurfaced in plenty of other places, and it is still resurfacing. In 2005, members of the Russian Parliament signed an open letter urging that Jewish organizations be banned on the grounds that they are “anti-Christian” and “inhumane” and practice ritual murder. In 2017, a commission of the Russian Orthodox Church investigated the assassinations of Czar Nicholas II and his family and several members concluded that they had been Jewish ritual murders. Over the past two decades, the classic elements of the gruesome myth have been reported as fact in the Egyptian press, on Hamas television and in Iran. So far in this century, the blood libel has unleashed no pogroms. But Berenson’s book reminds us that what seems inconceivable is nonetheless possible.

[jewishsideblog]

Expressive Elul Writing Prompts

For anyone who wants to try and write a little this Elul, I jotted down some ideas. These are not in any order and are really just some things I threw together quickly in case people wanted to write but can’t get going on their own. A lot are slightly repetitive or cover the same content because I like approaching things from different angles. Feel free to add any good ones that you come up with!

What do you wish was different about yourself? When you imagine your own idealized version of yourself, what is different?

When was the last time that you did something that you were really proud of?

What does it mean to you to be called upon? How is it different to be held to a high standard by a parent, teacher, partner or Hashem?

What do you regret most from the past year? With this distance, what would you do differently?

What does forgiveness mean to you? What does it mean to forgive someone you love, or to ask for forgiveness from someone you love?

Are there people that you feel you need to ask forgiveness from? What is stopping you?

Are there people that you feel that you need to forgive? What is stopping you?

What role does procrastination play in your life? What role should it play?

What feeling is most acute right now? What currently brings you the most joy and the most pain?

What do you fear most right now? What would a bad year look like to you?

What are you hoping for this year? What would does your good and sweet new year look like?

Who or what do you feel distant from right now? What changes could you make to feel more connected?

What does it mean to you to be alienated from the Divine? Does it mean anything to you right now? What makes you feel closer to or farther from the Divine?

What does it mean to be grateful to have reached this season? What are you grateful to have experienced?

Update the poem Eishet Chayil so that it speaks to you personally? This can function either as inspiration or as a reflection of your current good deeds, so long as it feels relevant to you.

Have you inspired anyone this year? If someone you loved behaved like you, would you be proud?

Write a letter to your role model telling them what you respect about them and how they have made you a better person. You don’t need to send the letter to them, but you can if you feel comfortable with that.

How have you paid tribute to your loved ones? Are you satisfied with how you have honored them?

. What does it mean to ask for collective forgiveness in the Viduy? What does it mean to be responsible for each other?

Draw a large circle leaving room to write words inside and around the outside of the circle. Inside, write positive traits that you have, the moments when you acted right the first time and anything else that you are proud to take with you into the next year. Outside, write down things that you do that hold you back from being better, names of people who you would like to forgive, and other things that you would like to leave behind and not take into the new year.

Write a list of all of the pressing, negative feelings that you have. Write down grudges, fears and bad memories. Make sure to be clear and expressive. Now, burn it, tear it into pieces and throw it into a river, bury it or crumple it up and throw it away. Whatever will feel like letting it go.

Write an apology letter to someone you care for who has died or that you otherwise can’t apologize to. Consider bringing it to their grave or another place that reminds you of them, if possible.

What does it mean to apologize to Hashem? Why do we ask for Divine forgiveness?

Do you like thinking about Hashem as a Judge? As a Parent? What metaphor (if any) are you most comfortable with during the High Holy Days?

What does it mean to have a good year written? In what ways is your future affected by how good of a person you are?

Write a letter to Hashem. It can be an apology, thanks or anything else that you feel the need to share.

How comfortable are you with lying? Are your feelings and actions aligned?

Find a calm place and listen to the sounds around you. What do you hear? What does it mean to listen to yourself? To listen to the Shofar?

What does it mean to give tzedakah? How does charity/justice affect the way you like your life?

What does teshuva mean? What would you like to return to?

Write an apology to yourself, and then respond to it. Do you forgive yourself for the lack of trust? For speaking badly about yourself? How can you do better next year?

[jewishsideblog]

Jewish symbolic motifs, carved into the pediment of the Roman-era synagogue at Capernaum. From top left, going clockwise: an urn with grapes; the magen Dawid (star of David); a pair of pomegranates; and Solomon’s five-pointed star (the “Seal of Solomon”).

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I don’t think I’ve posted these before, but here are a few photos from my visit to the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme (Museum of Jewish Art and History) in Paris last January! They have a really amazing collection, especially art (lots of Chagalls!). Interesting exhibit on Alfred Dreyfus, and a beautiful painted sukkah from late 19th century Austria/southern Germany:

As we were leaving, a class of little ones, no older than six or seven, came in for a tour. They were in love with the unbelievably detailed, miniature wooden models of European (mostly Polish) synagogues, created by students at l’ORT shortly after WWII (so was I tbh).

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Lehakat Sfataim - Mama

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“Not everybody went like sheep, as people say,” he comments. He tells me of his wartime life with pride and spirit, but also as if he were answering some kind of unspoken reproach, as if the victims should be ashamed of their defenselessness. This is a problem many Jews struggled with after the Holocaust. I myself remember discussions with my Haifa uncle, Pinio or Pinchas Rottenberg, who left for Palestine before the war. I was furious that he could consider it unworthy that people go to their death without resisting, holding their mother or child in an embrace.

Anna Bikont, “The Crime and the Silence, Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne”  (via ruby-dreams)

[jewishsideblog]

Packing shipment of matzah (matzos) for the Jewish men of the 77th division of the A.E.F. for Passover. The 77th division was made up of New York City draftees and was predominantly Irish, Italian, Polish, and Jewish. 1919.

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Felshtin hot oysgezen vi a sharbn – Felshtin looked like a skull.

A map of Felshtin (today Hwardijśke) drawn by Note Kozlovsky. In 1919 Felshtin was struck by a violent pogrom. The map/ drawing was published in felshtiner yizker-bukh (Felshtin: zamlbukh tsum ondenk fun di felshtiner kedoyshim, ed. I. Boym, New York 1937).

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Jewish community of Finland. Photographs by Dina Kantor.

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I made a פסח meme

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Jewish refugees from Algeria arrested by the British in Haifa. July, 1947

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the stunning spanish synagogue of prague, built in 1868.

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For 900 years there has been a small Jewish community on India’s Malabar coast, living at peace with their Hindu, Muslim and Christian neighbors. It’s been a model of interfaith tolerance. But, as Fred de Sam Lazaro reports, the community has dwindled since the state of Israel was established and now one of the last Jewish survivors, who maintains the synagogue, says he plans to leave in a few years – for Israel.

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jewish items decorated with the ottoman crescent and star.

1. 1915 ketubah from tekirdag 2. a spice tower 3. tallit from istanbul 4. 1893 ketubah from haifa

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A decorated sukkah at the Judah Hyam synagogue in New Dehli, India.

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Shabbat Shalom!

[jewishsideblog]

book of psalms in an arabic tanakh from egypt, 1584