A history marked by extended periods of prosperity and cultural richness, time and again cut short by violence.

Tracing Jewish History Along the Rhine

NYTimes.com

Hebrew letters inspired the configuration of this synagogue and community center in Mainz, Germany. It was erected in 2010 at the site of the old synagogue destroyed by the Nazis. Credit Benjamin Kilb for The New York Times

Cultured Traveler

By PETER WORTSMAN

In the summer of 1963, when I was 12, my parents, German-speaking Jewish refugees from Vienna, took us children on a boat trip up the Rhine. It was our first time in Germany, the country that had annexed our parents’ native Austria and sent them running for their lives. Family sentiments ran strong: longing spiked with anger, nostalgia with regret. All I really cared about were the castles crowning every slope and the chocolate-covered marzipan. But when we rounded a boulder-strewn bend in the river — “The Lorelei,” the legendary perch of the siren who lured boatmen to their doom — my mother was so moved she leapt up and declaimed, in German: “I don’t know what’s come over me, / That I should be so sad.”

The elderly man seated beside me smiled wistfully and whispered in thickly accented English: “You know vat a minyan is?” I nodded. A minyan, I knew, is the Hebrew word for the quorum of 10 men it takes to engage in public prayer. His was a coded question to sift out fellow Jews floating up the mythic vein of the German identity. And though I did not realize it, “The Lorelei,” the verse my mother had begun to recite, was penned by Heinrich Heine, a native Rhinelander of Jewish descent. And it was not just among the most beloved poems of the German language, but my mother’s hymn to a lost world.

That memory resurfaced last April, almost 50 years later, when my wife and I retraced that childhood journey, from Cologne to Mainz. What we found stirred mixed emotions. Vestiges of Jewish life along the banks of the river recalled a history marked by extended periods of prosperity and cultural richness, time and again cut short by violence. Virtually intertwined with the grape vines that dot the region, scattered tombstones and a few reconstituted sanctuaries tell the story.

There have been Jews in the Rhineland for as long as anybody’s been singing about it. They first sailed down the Rhine along with the Roman army. The earliest written testament to Jewish life in the region is an edict signed in A.D. 321 by Emperor Constantine allowing Jews to be elected to the curia of Cologne.

Traces of the Jewish presence had long been buried under in that city, our point of departure. Leveled by Allied bombs in World War II, Germany’s fourth largest city is a hodgepodge of nondescript ’50s-era functionality and splinters of the past, out of which a great cathedral, a Unesco World Heritage site, rears its twin spires. Construction began in 1248 and didn’t end until 1880. At 516 feet, it was briefly the tallest structure in the world (until the Washington Monument took first place); today, the spectacle of its man-made majesty etched against the sky still takes the breath away. It also contains an arcane reminder of ancient Christian-Jewish relations, tucked away in a dark corner.

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Construction on the Cologne cathedral began in 1248 and didn’t end until 1880. Credit Benjamin Kilb for The New York Times

We took an English-language tour of the interior, admiring, among other wonders, one of the highest Gothic vaulted ceilings in the world, the ornately gilded reliquary holding the supposed bones of the Magi, and Gerhard Richter’s luminescent 11,500-piece stained-glass window in the south transept. But our young guide had no idea of the whereabouts of the object I was after. We finally found it affixed to the north wall, toward the rear of the cathedral: a plaque posted by Archbishop Engelbert II in 1266 establishing in Latin the terms of the so-called Judenprivileg (Jews’ privilege). It literally set in stone medieval Jewry’s subservient status and prescribed perks for so-called Schutzjuden (protected Jews), notably the right to proceed unmolested when burying their dead.

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The original impetus for our trip was a site of grander scale than the plaque: a recently completed archaeological dig that uncovered the foundation of a Carolingian synagogue dating back at least to A.D. 800 and an entire city block of Cologne’s Medieval Jewish community. Discovered and saved from demolition by the archaeologist Otto Doppelfeld in 1953, the dig is still an open pit, partly covered by a tent, in the city’s historic center. When the Archaeological Zone and Jewish Museum, a vast area of approximately 110,000 square feet, opens to the public, visitors will have a privileged peek back at some 1,700 years of intertwined German and Jewish history. Unfortunately, the opening, originally scheduled for 2015, was recently postponed until 2018 — held up by the cost of construction as well as the reticence of some members of the city government to countenance such a massive museum directly in front of the Renaissance city hall.

Though we didn’t have access to the site, we huddled against the fenced-off area, near a street sign that reads Judengasse (Jews’ Alley), peering down into the open pit, trying to decipher the story the stones laid bare.

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Katja Kliemann, an archaeologist, stands inside a mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath, in Cologne. CreditBenjamin Kilb for The New York Times

In its heyday in the mid-14th century, the Jewish community — an important minority of about 1,000 among an overall population of some 40,000 — flourished in the shadow of the cathedral. But in the centuries prior, extended periods of prosperity and peaceful coexistence with their Christian neighbors had been shattered, first by marauding crusaders who in 1096, and again in 1146, whet their blades on Jewish blood before heading for the Holy Land. All hell broke loose yet again in the terrible Black Plague Pogrom of 1349, when Jews, falsely accused of poisoning wells and spreading the disease, fell victim to the fury of mobs.

Evidence of that violent history is reflected in the finds, including heaps of scorched and smashed pottery and fragments of stone tablets with some of the earliest inscriptions in Yiddish, essentially medieval Rhineland German written in Hebrew. Katja Kliemann, an archaeologist involved with the dig, said the profusion of objects and their shattered state demonstrated “both the richness and the fragility of the relationship between Christians and Jews.” (For now, highlights from the dig, including a golden ring, are on rotating display at the underground ruins of the Praetorium, the Roman governor’s palace, around the corner on Kleine Budengasse.)

An eighth-century mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath, within the complex of the future museum, offers another telling clue. To descend its steps is to turn back the clock several centuries. Peering into the basin, where generations of women and men sought ritual cleansing, my wife and I tried to picture their reflected faces. (The mikvah, currently closed to the public, will reopen pending completion of the museum.)

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Boats on the Rhine in the town of Boppard. Credit Benjamin Kilb for The New York Times

The Museum Ludwig nearby, on Heinrich-Böll-Platz, holds another kind of treasure trove, one of the world’s great collections of German Expressionist and other 20th-century modernist paintings, some by Jewish artists, like Ludwig Meidner and the Russian Marc Chagall, all reviled as “degenerate” by the Nazis. The paintings were safely hidden in a bank vault for the duration of the War by Josef Haubrich, a discriminating collector; he later donated them all to the German public “to give them an opportunity to see and contemplate for themselves ... what had been withheld from them” during the dark years of the Third Reich.

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We hopped the train from Cologne to the lovely old river town of Boppard, where we boarded a KD Line boat for a leisurely six-hour cruise up river to Mainz.

The narrow, winding stretch of the river from Boppard to Bingen is particularly picturesque, with castle ruins and terraced vineyards every which way you look. A crisp white grauer burgunder sipped on deck enhanced memories of my mother’s recitation as we piloted past the treacherous Lorelei bend, and the loudspeaker crackled with a tenor singing Heine’s verse set to music by Friedrich Silcher.

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Heiliger Sand Cemetery, just outside Worms, Europe’s oldest Jewish resting place. Credit Benjamin Kilb for The New York Times

Next stop, Mainz. Of the numerous Jewish settlements along the Rhine, those in the three cathedral towns of Mainz, Worms and Speyer collectively comprised an illustrious medieval center of life and learning known as ShUM, an acronym composed of the first letters of the city names in Hebrew. In 2012 the state governments, municipalities and Jewish communities of the ShUM collectively sought inclusion in the list of Unesco World Heritage sites. The application is still pending.

While heavily bombed, Mainz managed through judicious architectural reconstitution to retain a taste of the past. Still, all that’s left of the once rich Jewish heritage are a few tombstones, including one dated 1049 — said to be the oldest known Jewish tombstone in Europe — and a small store of sacred objects at the Mainz State Museum (Landesmuseum).

But echoes linger. “A principio creavit Deus celu et terram,” reads the Latin translation of the opening words of the Old Testament in clear black type on three copies of the Gutenberg Bible, precious tomes held in a dimly lit vault at the Gutenberg Museum, Mainz’s most visited site.

It is Hebrew letters, though, that inspired the abstract configuration of the modern synagogue and community center on Synagogenplatz, erected in 2010 at the site of the old synagogue destroyed by the Nazis. The oddly shaped geometric structure is intended to represent the five letters of the Hebrew word qadushah, or holy. We joined a tour led by Stella Schindler-Siegreich, a leader of the Mainz Jewish community, 900 strong today. I asked her what she thought of the Cologne dig. “Museums are nice,” she allowed, “but Jewish life is more important, or else there’ll be nothing left but an old cemetery.”

While much of Worms, with its clunky, blocklike postwar architecture may lack the charm of Mainz, the town made a concerted effort to reconstruct and showcase remnants of its Jewish past. The old Jewish quarter around its Judengasse retains a haunting allure. Burned down by the Nazis on Kristallnacht, Nov. 9, 1938, the 11th-century synagogue, also known as the Rashi Shul, named for the illustrious Talmudist Shlomo Yitzchaki (a.k.a. Rashi) who studied there, was rebuilt from scratch and consecrated in 1961. A 12th-century ritual bath survives untouched. History also spared the serene Heiliger Sand Cemetery, just outside town, Europe’s oldest Jewish resting place, whose tombstones tilt like the backs of old men.

Our last stop was Speyer, the loveliest of the three ShUM cities, whose reconstructed historic center is ringed with wine taverns. The SchPIRA Museum, on Kleine Pfaffengasse, near the corner of Judengasse, evokes a medieval Jewish courtyard, comprising the surviving eastern wall of a 12th-century synagogue and a monumental ritual bath.

Sipping riesling in the vaulted cellar of the Speyer Ratskeller, the restaurant in the cellar under city hall, I found myself reciting Heine’s verse and mulling in joy and sadness over more than a millennium and a half of history. “A fairy tale from ancient times, / I can’t get it out of my mind...”

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Tracing Jewish History Along the Rhine - NYTimes.com

The First Killings of the Holocaust - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/opinion/the-first-killings-of-the-holocaust.html?pagewanted=1&ref=global The First Killings of the Holocaust On the brisk winter Tuesday of Jan. 20, 1942, 15 Nazi officials assembled at a lakeside villa on the Wannsee near Berlin to deliberate on the “final solution.” This month, the world marks the 70th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, one of the pivotal moments in Holocaust history. It provides an appropriate occasion not only for reflecting on the origins and implications of this horrific event, but also on one particular moment when it could have been prevented and, I would posit, almost was. The extermination of European Jews may have been formally outlined seven decades ago this month, but it began nearly nine years earlier, during Easter Week 1933, a few minutes after five o’clock in the afternoon on Wednesday, April 12, when four Jews — Arthur Kahn, Ernst Goldmann, Rudolf Benario and Erwin Kahn — were executed in precisely that order at a Nazi camp in the obscure Bavarian hamlet of Prittlbach. These four killings framed the constituent parts of the genocidal process formalized at the Wannsee Conference: intentionality, chain-of-command, selection, execution. In the years to come, the process was refined, the numbers expanded monstrously, but the essential elements remained. Even Prittlbach retained its central role. The hamlet was so small that the Nazis named their camp after the neighboring town of Dachau, which had access to a rail line. The boxcars rolled into Dachau, but the victims were marched to Prittlbach. The Konzentrationslager Dachau in Prittlbach became the prototype for Nazi atrocity. It boasted the first crematory oven, the first gas chamber, and, on that sun-splashed spring day in April 1933, the first Jewish victims. A Holocaust survivor once told me, and repeated to many others with equal conviction, that the trail of blood that began in Dachau ultimately led to Auschwitz. But it also almost ended there before it barely began. On that same April evening in 1933, Joseph Hartinger received a call that four men had been shot attempting to flee the recently erected detention facility. As a local prosecutor, it was Hartinger’s job to establish a commission to investigate all deaths resulting from “unnatural causes.” The blood was still damp on the ground when Hartinger arrived. He sensed immediately that something was horrifically wrong. “My reasons were based not only on the physical circumstances but in particular on my assessment of the personalities I encountered in the camp and especially on my evaluation of the nature of the camp commandant Wäckerle, who made a devastating impression on me,” Hartinger recalled. “I also had to include in my deliberations the fact that those who had been shot were all Jews.” When Hartinger reported that a serial killing of Jews had taken place, his superior responded unequivocally: not even the Nazis would do that. The investigation was terminated. But as killings continued to mount, Hartinger persisted. On June 1, 1933, he issued indictments against the camp commandant and three other SS men. It was a brazen act of legal defiance to the regime. Hartinger was not naïve. He knew the Nazi capacity for violence. That evening, he told his wife, “I just signed my own death sentence.” The murder indictments had a surprising impact. The commandant was removed. The killings stopped. Hartinger had hurled a legal wrench into the Nazi bureaucracy and singlehandedly paralyzed its homicidal impulse. For several weeks in the summer of 1933, the killings stalled as Nazi officials attempted to understand the implications of the Hartinger indictments. Solutions were found. The killing was renewed. Miraculously, Hartinger survived. The Nazis had deliberated on murdering him. Instead, he was transferred to another jurisdiction. Recently, I came across the 40-page unpublished memoirs that Hartinger wrote in 1984 shortly before his death at age 91. Along with many technical details already familiar to scholars, Hartinger outlined an extraordinary plan for dismantling the emerging system in the Dachau Concentration Camp. He understood that the Nazi regime, just a few months in power, was still sensitive to international opinion. It was his intention to use the murder indictments to expose publicly the atrocities in Dachau, force the government to evict the SS guards and replace them with trained police or military units familiar with the laws governing the proper detention and treatment of prisoners. It was a seemingly quixotic plan, but Hartinger understood the key decision makers within the government and sought to play them against one another. He almost succeeded. “These were not fantasies,” Hartinger recalls in his memoirs. “As I later learned, there were conversations in exactly this direction except that the ‘good spirits’ did not prevail.” But his indictments confounded the Nazi legal bureaucracy. In the end, the only recourse was to lose them. They were locked in a desk and forgotten. After the war, the abandoned indictments were discovered by a U.S. intelligence unit and returned to German prosecutors who used them to convict the surviving perpetrators. The Hartinger memoirs show us in nuanced detail the political, legal and emotional dynamics that led to the first serial killing of Jews in Nazi Germany. Equally important, they show us that tenuous phase of an emerging genocidal process when intercession could have disrupted and derailed the horrific and now seemingly inevitable outcome. Clearly, no single man could have prevented the Holocaust, except Hitler himself, but had there been more Germans like Hartinger to hold individual Nazis personally accountable for their excesses, including President Paul von Hindenburg, who possessed the constitutional authority to dissolve the Nazi government at will and dismiss Hitler as chancellor, the course of history could have taken a very different turn. The Hartinger memoirs make this fact abundantly clear, preserving for us that ineffable substance of the human soul — faith, hope, fear and courage — that shapes individual decisions and ultimately determines the course of actions, both large and small, that constitute the chain of events we know as history. Hartinger may have lacked the aristocratic bearing of Raul Wallenberg. He certainly possessed neither the charm nor wiles of Oskar Schindler. He was little more than a middle-aged civil servant with a wife and five-year-old child at home. But like these two legendary figures of Holocaust rescue, Joseph Hartinger demonstrated the potential of personal courage, intelligence and determination in a time of collective human failure. He also provides further proof of the transcendent and enduring power of justice. Timothy W. Ryback is author of “The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau” and “Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life.” See the whole story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/opinion/the-first-killings-of-the-holocaust.html?pagewanted=2&ref=global

A Passover Toast to a Kosher Innovator — On Religion - NYTimes.com

April 22, 2011
A Passover Toast to a Rabbi Known for Social Activism, and for Kosher Coca-Cola
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

Rabbi Tuvia Geffen, of blessed memory, was born in Lithuania in 1870 and educated in the renowned Slobodka yeshiva. In the wake of a pogrom, he immigrated to New York in 1903, and seven years later he moved to Atlanta to become the rabbi of Shearith Israel, a tiny and struggling Orthodox congregation meeting in the battered remnant of a Methodist church.

During his early decades at Shearith Israel, Rabbi Geffen established Atlanta’s first Hebrew school and oversaw its ritual bath. He stood by Leo Frank, the Jewish man falsely accused of murdering a young Christian girl, and after Frank’s lynching in 1915, the rabbi urged his congregants not to flee the South in fear.

At Passover in 1925, he spoke eloquently and presciently against Congress for passing immigration restrictions that “have slammed shut the gates of the country before the wanderers, the strangers, and those who walk in darkness from place to place.” As early as 1933, he warned about the Nazi regime in Germany. Long before feminism, he advocated for Orthodox women who were being denied religious divorce decrees by vindictive husbands.

But all those achievements are not why we invoke the name and memory of Rabbi Geffen today, more than 40 years after his death. No, we come to honor his least likely yet most enduring contribution to the Jewish people and his adopted nation: kosher-for-Passover Coca-Cola.

Yes, observant Jews of today, searching supermarket counters for those bottles with the telltale yellow cap bearing the Orthodox Union’s certification, and yes, Coke die-hards of any or no religion who seek out those same bottles for the throwback flavor of cane-sugar Coke, you owe it all to Rabbi Tuvia Geffen.

He of the long beard and wire-rim glasses and Yiddish-inflected English, a man by all outward appearances belonging to the Old World, he was the person who by geographical coincidence and unexpected perspicacity adapted Coca-Cola’s secret formula to make the iconic soft drink kosher in one version for Passover and in another for the rest of the year. To this day, his 1935 rabbinical ruling, known in Hebrew as a teshuva, remains the standard.

That ruling, in turn, did much more than solve a dietary problem. A generation after Frank’s lynching, a decade after Congress barred the Golden Door, amid the early stages of Hitler’s genocide, kosher Coke formed a powerful symbol of American Jewry’s place in the mainstream.

“Rabbi Geffen really got the importance of it,” said Marcie Cohen Ferris, a professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina, who specializes in Jewish life in the South. “You couldn’t live in any better place than the South to get it. To not drink Coca-Cola was certainly to be considered un-American.”

Or look at the interplay of Jews and America from another angle. Rabbi Geffen’s solution to the Coke problem was not to forget the kosher rules and melt into the melting pot. But neither was it to decry the spiritual pollution of modernity in the form of a fizzy drink. A half-century before the era of cultural pluralism, his answer was to have the majority address the distinct needs of a minority.

Jewish Texts Lost in War Are Surfacing in New York

Jewish Texts Lost in War Are Surfacing in New York
NY Times
By SAM DOLNICK
March 7, 2011

In 1932, as the Nazis rose to power in Germany, a Jewish librarian in Frankfurt published a catalog of 15,000 books he had painstakingly collected for decades.

It listed the key texts of a groundbreaking field called the Science of Judaism, in which scholars analyzed the religion’s philosophy and culture as they would study those of ancient Greece or Rome. The school of thought became the foundation for modern Jewish studies around the world.

In the tumult of war, great chunks of the collection vanished. Now, librarians an ocean away have determined that most of the missing titles have been sitting for years on the crowded shelves of the Leo Baeck Institute, a Manhattan center dedicated to preserving German Jewish culture.

The story of how the hundreds of tattered, cloth-bound books with esoteric German titles ended up in New York includes impossible escapes, careful scholarship and some very heavy suitcases. And while the exact trails of many of the volumes remain murky, they wind through book-lined apartments on the Upper West Side, across a 97-year-old woman’s cluttered coffee table and into a library’s cavernous stacks.

For Jewish scholars, the collection of Science of Judaism texts (in German, Wissenschaft des Judentums) is a touchstone marking the emergence of Jewish tradition as a philosophy and culture worthy of academic study.

Cohabitation et tolérance : La singularité et l'exception marocaines exaltées à Londres

Cohabitation et tolérance

La singularité et l'exception marocaines exaltées à Londres

Publié le : 11.11.2010 | 17h26

Le modèle marocain singulier s'impose dans un monde en proie aux turbulences et aux divisions, dixit le président du Musée juif de Londres. La vocation du Maroc en tant que havre de paix et terre de rencontres a été saluée à Londres à l'occasion de l'exposition «Morocco», organisée dans la capitale britannique par le musée juif de Londres en partenariat avec la Moroccan-British Society (MBS), que préside l'ambassadeur du Maroc en Grande-Bretagne, Chrifa Lalla Joumala Alaoui. La cérémonie d'inauguration de cette grandiose manifestation a été l'occasion pour de nombreuses personnalités d'exprimer leur reconnaissance au Royaume, pays qui a su depuis plusieurs siècles donner l'exemple en matière de pluralisme et de cohabitation entre les différentes cultures et religions. «Le Maroc a été, depuis des centaines d'années, un modèle de coexistence entre les adeptes des différentes religions dans un cadre marqué par le respect des valeurs de chaque communauté», a déclaré à la MAP, Lord Young, président du musée juif de Londres et Conseiller du Premier ministre britannique, David Cameron. «Ce modèle marocain singulier s'impose dans un monde en proie aux turbulences et aux divisions», a dit Lord Young, émettant le souhait de voir les autres pays suivre l'exemple de l'exception marocaine. Lord Young a tenu à souligner le rôle important que le Maroc a depuis toujours joué pour la promotion des valeurs de tolérance et pour trouver un règlement juste et durable au conflit du Moyen-Orient. Par ailleurs, Lord Young a exprimé sa gratitude à la MBS pour son partenariat et son soutien pour l'organisation de l'exposition. Rappelant que la MBS œuvre pour le renforcement des relations d'amitié et de coopération privilégiées entre le Maroc et la Grande-Bretagne, il s'est dit convaincu que la grande contribution apportée par la MBS pour la tenue de l'exposition ne manquera pas de renforcer davantage ces relations. La présence des juifs au Maroc date depuis plus de 2.000 ans, a-t-il dit, soulignant que l'exposition «Morocco» offre l'occasion propice pour rendre un hommage appuyé au Maroc, un pays où la cohabitation entre musul Lord Young a également tenu à rendre un vibrant hommage à feu S.M. Mohammed V pour la sollicitude que le défunt Souverain accordait à ses sujets de confession juive. L'exposition de Londres vise à la fois à promouvoir la diversité de la communauté juive et renforcer les relations de dialogue et de coexistence entre les différentes cultures et religions, a-t-il encore dit. Même son de cloche chez Claire Spencer, qui dirige le département Moyen-Orient/Afrique du Nord à l'Institut Royal des Affaires Internationales (Chatham House, basé à Londres), qui a relevé que l'exposition offre l'occasion de mettre en relief la place du Maroc en tant que «référence clef» en matière de relations entre différentes communautés. «Nous sommes ici pour célébrer les aspects et les dimensions culturels du Maroc au Royaume-Uni, loin de toute considération d'ordre idéologique», a-t-elle dit. De son côté, Sydney Assor, membre éminent de la communauté juive marocaine en Grande-Bretagne, a rendu hommage à l'ambassadeur du Maroc en Grande-Bretagne pour les efforts inlassables qu'elle ne cesse de déployer pour la promotion de l'image authentique du Maroc en tant que terre de paix et de rencontres. «C'est grâce à vos efforts que le public britannique aura l'occasion de découvrir la culture juive du Maroc, vieille de plusieurs siècles», a-t-il dit, réitérant l'attachement indéfectible de la communauté juive marocaine à la mère patrie et au glorieux Trône alaouite. L'exposition «Morocco», qui durera jusqu'au 6 mars 2011, représente un véritable voyage dans le temps, mettant en relief la richesse de la civilisation du Maroc et la splendeur de ses valeurs intrinsèques de tolérance et de respect de l'autre. A travers une collection de 74 photographies inédites, prises durant les années 40 et 50 par Elias Harrus, Marocain de confession juive, le visiteur découvre la vie quotidienne des juifs de l'Atlas et du sud du Maroc et leur interaction avec leurs concitoyens musulmans dans un environnement empreint de quiétude et d'enrichissement mutuel. Ces photos sont d'une importance particulière du fait que cette communauté juive a, depuis, virtuellement disparu des montagnes de l'Atlas et du sud du Maroc pour s'installer dans les grandes villes du Royaume ou immigrer à l'étranger, estime la directrice du musée juif, Rickie Burman. L'exposition comprend également des photos captées par Pauline Prior qui a revisité, à la demande du musée juif d'Amsterdam, les mêmes lieux que Harus pour transposer ce qui reste du patrimoine juif au Maroc. Le musée juif expose également des costumes traditionnels portés ou confectionnés par des juifs marocains ainsi qu'une collection de bijoux. A signaler que cet événement phare vient rappeler l'exposition exceptionnelle des textes et des livres saints des trois religions monothéistes, qui s'est tenue du 27 avril au 23 septembre 2007 au siège de la prestigieuse British Library (BL) à Londres. Tenue sous le Haut Patronage de S.M. le Roi Mohammed VI et de S.A.R. le Prince Philip, Duc d'Edimbourg, l'exposition avait réalisé un succès éclatant témoignant ainsi du rôle de premier plan que le Maroc joue dans le rapprochement entre les religions, les civilisations et les cultures. Un tel constat de succès a été souligné dans un rapport élaboré par la BL, qui a noté que l'exposition, a été l'événement le plus réussi jamais organisé par l'institution, attirant plus de 200.000 visiteurs durant cinq mois. Un sondage réalisé par l'Institut Mori a montré qu'une grande majorité des visiteurs de tout âge ont indiqué que cette exposition de portée universelle leur a permis de découvrir les multitudes de valeurs partagées par les trois religions monothéistes: l'Islam, le Christianisme et le Judaïsme. Convergence des civilisations «C'est un Maroc fort de sa diversité culturelle et riche de toutes ses histoires additionnées que l'Angleterre est invitée à découvrir», a déclaré à la MAP André Azoulay, conseiller de S.M. le Roi. «Espace privilégié de convergence des civilisations berbère, arabo-musulmane et juive, le Maroc a su résister aux mirages d'une histoire réécrite en fonction des aléas de l'instant», a dit M. Azoulay après avoir donné lecture du message adressé par S.M. le Roi Mohammed VI, que Dieu l'assiste, aux organisateurs de l'exposition sur le judaïsme marocain, inaugurée mercredi soir au siège du Musée juif de Londres. «Le message de S.M. le Roi donne sa juste mesure à la singularité, à la modernité et à la profondeur des choix faits par le Maroc pour résister aux tentations du repli», a ajouté le conseiller de S.M. le Roi, en mettant en relief la détermination des communautés juives marocaines, où qu'elles se trouvent, pour «afficher, promouvoir et protéger leurs racines marocaines et leur mobilisation effective aux côtés du Maroc». Par MAP

Cohabitation et tolérance : La singularité et l'exception marocaines exaltées à Londres

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The 727 that Vanished | History of Flight | Air & Space Magazine

The 727 that Vanished A case pursued by the FBI, the CIA, the U.S. Departments of State and Homeland Security, CENTCOM, and the sister of Ben Padilla. By Tim Wright Air & Space Magazine, September 01, 2010 Seven years after her brother disappeared from Quatro de Fevereiro International Airport in Angola, Benita Padilla-Kirkland is trying to persuade the FBI to re-open his case. She believes she has the “new information” agents told her they require. But she suspects that the agency already has more information than agents will admit to. Kirkland’s brother, Ben Charles Padilla, a certified flight engineer, aircraft mechanic, and private pilot, disappeared while working in the Angolan capital, Luanda, for Florida-based Aerospace Sales and Leasing. On May 25, 2003, shortly before sunset, Padilla boarded the company’s Boeing 727-223, tail number N844AA. With him was a helper he had recently hired, John Mikel Mutantu, from the Republic of the Congo. The two had been working with Angolan mechanics to return the 727 to flight-ready status so they could reclaim it from a business deal gone bad, but neither could fly it. Mutantu was not a pilot, and Padilla had only a private pilot’s license. A 727 ordinarily requires three trained aircrew. According to press reports, the aircraft began taxiing with no communication between the crew and the tower; maneuvering erratically, it entered a runway without clearance. With its lights off and its transponder not transmitting, 844AA took off to the southwest, and headed out over the Atlantic Ocean. The 727 and the two men have not been seen since. Who was flying 844AA? Had something happened to make Padilla take that desperate chance? Or was someone waiting inside the airplane? Leased to deliver diesel fuel to diamond mines, the 727 carried 10 500-gallon fuel tanks and a few passenger seats in its cabin. Less than two years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the 727’s freakish departure triggered a frantic search by U.S. security organizations for what intelligence sources said could have been a flying bomb. Retired U.S. Marine General Mastin Robeson, commander of U.S. forces in the Horn of Africa when 844AA went missing, says word of the 727 “came up through the intelligence network.” According to Robeson, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) considered moving U.S. fighter aircraft to Djibouti on the Red Sea coast, where the Combined Joint Task Force shares a base with the French military. Robeson continues: “It was never [clear] whether it was stolen for insurance purposes&hellipby the owners, or whether it was stolen with the intent to make it available to unsavory characters, or whether it was a deliberate concerted terrorist attempt. There was speculation of all three.” Speculation that the theft of 844AA posed a terrorist threat ended, though it’s unclear why. Perhaps National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency technicians saw signs of a crash in satellite imagery—debris or an oil slick in the Atlantic, for example—or evidence that a large aircraft had landed on one of a half-dozen unpaved, 8,000-foot runways in the Congo, north of Angola. Agency spokesperson Susan Meisner would not comment, saying that the NGIA was not the lead agency in the case. (A CIA spokesperson also declined comment, as did a spokesperson from the Department of Homeland Security. FBI agents also refused comment, citing national security concerns.) Perhaps the speculation ended more gradually, after weeks without clues or sightings stretched into months. The disturbed hornet’s nest of a global security alert—the searches, bulletins, and interrogations—quieted, and in 2005, the FBI closed its case. I have filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the CIA and FBI and have followed in at least some of the FBI’s footsteps, interviewing the people who flew 844AA to Angola and worked with it there, hoping to understand how a 727 could just disappear. “IT REALLY WAS in beautiful condition,” Keith Irwin says of the airliner he acquired in Miami in February 2002. Irwin, 57, a South African entrepreneur who ran a series of information technology companies and, until 2000, a small tourist airline with flights from South Africa to Mozambique, had come to Miami to pick up a different aircraft altogether. Representing a joint venture with a South African company called Cargo Air Transport Systems, Irwin had arranged to lease a 727 and two flight crews—pilot, first officer, and flight engineer—for a year. The air transport company had signed a contract to supply fuel to diamond mines in Angola, where a long civil war had made transporting goods by road almost impossible. The 727, therefore, was to have been delivered with fuel tanks installed in the cabin. The joint venture was backed by a single investor, who had deposited $450,000 in a U.S. bank. Irwin’s job was to manage the flight operations, but the deal for the airplane fell through. Irwin ended up with fuel tanks and no airplane. That failure stranded six crewmen who had assembled in Miami. “The guys then were desperate for work,” says Irwin. “Most of those guys had not flown in a long time because of the 9/11 story. I said, ‘Look, I can take you on if we can find another aircraft.’ ” And Irwin met Maury Joseph, president of Aerospace Sales and Leasing, Inc. Joseph owned three 727s that had recently been retired by American Airlines. “All three aircraft were almost in mint condition,” says Irwin. “American Airlines had a very good maintenance program.” New deal: Joseph sold 844AA to Irwin for $1 million and change. According to his records, he received a down payment of $125,000, and says he stipulated that the balance be paid within 30 days. He agreed to remove the passenger seats from the cabin and to allow Irwin to take the airliner to Africa. Irwin says he cannot remember the details of the agreement, but recalled it to be a lease arrangement. In any case, the joint venture made only two payments and defaulted. Though the two men now differ over the terms of the contract, they agree on one detail: As a condition of the agreement, Irwin was required to take along one of Joseph’s employees, Mike Gabriel, whose job was to make sure that the deal was concluded. “I gave Mike $10,000 and told him to fly with them,” says Joseph. “Stay with the plane till you get the money, and then come on home, and if not, bring the plane home.” On February 28, 2002, with most of the passenger seats removed and the 10 fuel tanks loaded, 844AA, still in the livery of American Airlines, with a blue stripe down the side and an AA logo fading on its tail, took off for Africa. Because Irwin’s partners had not arranged a landing permit, it took two weeks for the crew to make their way to Quatro de Fevereiro International Airport, where they arrived on March 14. Irwin, who had not worked in Angola before, realized immediately that the deal was in trouble. The company hiring his partners for deliveries, Kuwachi Dundo, was supposed to pay $220,000 when the airplane and crew landed, but instead the company’s representative made excuses. (Irwin lost almost $140,000 in the first deal and had burned through the rest of the $450,000 by March.) The crew endured accommodations in a dismal apartment without electricity or drinkable water, near an open sewer. (Gabriel and Irwin didn’t stay with the crew; they had rented an apartment in the back of a house owned by an Angolan air force general.) The only one of the men not troubled by the circumstances they found in Angola was Mike Gabriel. Gabriel, a dealer in aircraft parts and engines, had spent a considerable amount of time in West Africa, and was accustomed to the AK-47s the men saw everywhere, including stacked up behind the bar of a club they frequented. Most worrisome to the crew was that they were required to surrender their passports on arrival. Irwin explains that Kuwachi needed the passports to obtain Angolan licenses for the pilots and flight engineers. “I was scared to death. I really thought I was going to die,” says Art Powell, one of the flight engineers with the project. Powell had been to Angola before and had spent a year working in Nairobi, Kenya, but this experience was different. He felt intimidated by the people who had hired the crew for the fuel-delivery job. His anxiety was intensified by the presence of a local “helper” who toted an AK-47. The helper was a guard whom Mike Gabriel says he hired because the crew repeatedly voiced concerns about safety. When Kuwachi got wind of the crews’ unrest (several crew members have admitted that they were planning to steal the aircraft to escape to South Africa or return to the States), the company refused to return the passports. Irwin and members of the crew went to the U.S. Embassy; only then were the passports returned. By Angolan regulations, Irwin says, 844AA was controlled by the clients who hired it. Prohibited from flying the aircraft out of the country, Irwin booked airline seats and flew the crew members to South Africa. From there, two of the men immediately flew home to the United States. One says he is still owed $17,000. The other four crewmen, still hoping for the money they’d been promised, stayed on. By April, Irwin was extricating himself from the deal made by Cargo Air Transport Systems and had found a new backer, an Angolan who arranged deliveries for a different client. Irwin and the remaining crew returned to Luanda and began flying the shipments for the new company. Mike Gabriel placed the total number of flights made at 17. “It’s the most dangerous flying in the world,” says a crewman who asked that his name be withheld because he fears for his career. A U.S. Air Force veteran, he likened the deliveries to flying into a combat zone. When they approached the airfields, the crew tried to stay at an altitude above small-arms fire for as long as possible, then spiraled down to land. “I’ve been a [flight deck crew member] for 30 years,” he says. “For me, it was an opportunity to make a couple of bucks... and when everything started falling apart, I probably hung on twice as long as common sense dictated. But I had too much invested at that point to bail out.” Many of the runways, says Mike Gabriel, aren’t paved and aren’t like the ones U.S. crews are accustomed to. “On some, you land uphill, then go downhill, then uphill again,” he says. At one airstrip, the anonymous crewman says, just before 844AA arrived, a 727 flying for a competing company crashed on landing and skidded off the runway. Although the crew survived, he says, some local residents were killed. “We gave [the other flight crew] a lift out of there but not before going over to their airplane and stealing some parts that we needed. That’s when I decided it was time to go home.” Before he left, he says, a “big African showed up with a briefcase full of hundred-dollar bills. It was payday.” Besides paying the crew, the money was supposed to pay off accumulated airport fees and fuel costs. “After that,” the crewman says, “I created a family emergency&hellip. I said, ‘My mother is sick.’ ” He promised he’d return in two weeks and left. “I had no intentions of going back, of course. I didn’t get anywhere near full pay, but I got enough that I could pay my bills and make it not completely worthless.” By the end of April, all of the Americans except Mike Gabriel had left. Irwin hired a local crew and continued to deliver fuel to the mines, but he was ready to leave too. The civil war in Angola had ended. Competition among fuel haulers, Irwin says, had intensified, and he was growing more uncomfortable with the delivery deals. His partners were claiming part ownership of the aircraft, but Maury Joseph had not been paid. Joseph, meanwhile, sent a crew to swap an engine from the 727. Finally, Irwin says, he was being followed—by a local man named Antonio, who, Irwin believes, was working for one of his partners. “I would turn around,” Irwin says, “and spot Antonio watching me from a car.” Irwin began wedging a chair under the door handle of his hotel room “just like you see in the movies.” One night, he heard a key card slide into the slot on the door. The lock released. “I started yelling and whoever it was ran,” he says. The hotel security guards questioned the night clerk and learned that he had accepted a bribe to provide the key card. Irwin left the country the next day and didn’t go back. Maury Joseph fired Mike Gabriel some time that spring. “He kept convincing me that next week, next month…,” Joseph says, referring to the outstanding balance owed on the airplane. In May 2002, the only part of the original 844AA project left at the Luanda airport was 844AA. THE SON OF A FLORIDA MILLWRIGHT, Ben Charles Padilla Jr. was always mechanically gifted, says sister Benita Padilla-Kirkland, and from the time he was a boy, he loved airplanes. In his mid-20s he learned to fly and became certified as an airframe-and-powerplant mechanic. He lived in south Florida with two children, one his own, and a fiancée of 15 years. (Efforts to contact her were unsuccessful.) Though the two weren’t married, Padilla gave her power of attorney in his absence and made her the executor of his estate, according to Padilla-Kirkland, and left her almost everything in his will. “He certainly knew the airplane,” says Maury Joseph. Padilla was a freelancer, who had worked for Joseph on two jobs before traveling to Angola to repossess 844AA. Padilla had worked extensively in Africa. He helped Joseph ferry a 727 to Nigeria for a sale and during the negotiations stayed to explain the aircraft systems. “If you said, ‘Go to Cambodia and do this’ or ‘Go to Indonesia and do this’ or ‘Go to South America and do this’ he would do it. [When in Nigeria] I was with Ben daily for a month or more,” says Joseph. “You become fairly close to somebody when you’re with them day and night.” Joseph trusted him. But another employer formed a different opinion. Jeff Swain, who works near Miami in international aircraft sales and leasing, had hired Padilla in the late 1990s for an airline he was operating in Indonesia—and fired him. “We had certain standards of conduct we expected from flight engineers,” Swain says, adding, when pressed, “He was too involved in chasing the local girls. It was an unstructured environment, and he just went bad.” Swain says that after Padilla was fired, he stayed on in Indonesia for two months and racked up a $10,000 bill that he told the hotel the airline would pay. “We finally had him deported,” says Swain. Padilla once showed Swain a photograph of a woman with small children and told him it was his wife in Mozambique, but Swain says, “I never believed it was real. Ben was always marveling everyone with his bullshit stories.” One of Padilla’s friends also saw a photograph of a wife, but insists that she lived in Tanzania. Another acquaintance was told that Padilla had a wife in Indonesia. Benita Padilla-Kirkland says she’s heard the stories, but believes her brother would have told her if he’d had another family. She doesn’t doubt the relationships, but is convinced that Padilla was helping to support people he’d befriended. “There might have been more than one of those situations,” she says. WHAT IN FEBRUARY 2002 had been a retired airliner in excellent condition had by fall become a junker worth only the price of its engines. And Maury Joseph found a buyer for them: Jeff Swain. Swain says that Irwin and the crews had ruined the airplane. “It would never be of any value again,” he says. “You can’t put water tanks full of fuel in an airplane and expect it to be good. Totally stupid. But it had really good engines on it—maybe 1,000 cycles since new.” In November 2002, Joseph and Ben Padilla flew to Nigeria to deliver a 727, and Joseph hired Padilla to fly to Angola the following April to pay the outstanding fines and hire mechanics to return the 727 to service. “If [the company that contracted for fuel deliveries] wasn’t paying Mr. Irwin, you can assume he wasn’t paying anybody,” says Joseph. “He probably hadn’t paid the fuel bill. He didn’t pay the navigation fees, the landing fees, and certainly wasn’t paying the parking fees at the airport. So all of those became things that we had to resolve and I had to pay all those.” Padilla worked with Air Gemini, a Luanda-based airline that operated a repair station. The return-to-service process was progressing steadily, according to Joseph, and in May 2003, acting as Joseph’s agent, Padilla hired a pilot and copilot from Air Gemini to help him deliver the aircraft to Johannesburg, South Africa, where Joseph was waiting with his new customer. A day or two before the aircraft was to leave Luanda, Padilla made plans with Air Gemini to take the aircraft from the company hangar out to the main runway, where he intended to run the three engines up to full power for a systems check. Late in the morning on May 26, when Joseph and Swain were expecting 844AA to land, Joseph took a call from an Air Gemini employee, who demanded to know why another crew had flown the airplane out of Luanda. “He was kind of hard on me,” Joseph says. After the shock wore off, he telephoned the U.S. Embassy in South Africa to report the disappearance, then called his wife back in Florida to tell her to call the FBI. From Washington, D.C., the Department of State, notified by the U.S. Embassy in Angola, sent a message to every American embassy in Africa: Alert aviation officials that an airliner has been stolen, and call every airport with a runway long enough to handle a 727. For the U.S. government, fraud was one theory that could explain the aircraft’s disappearance. “Part of the intelligence was that the airplane was in a bad state of repair,” says General Robeson. “That was one of the speculations, that it was an insurance fraud situation. You know, ‘Oops, my plane was hijacked/stolen by terrorists and now I can do an insurance claim on it.’ So, that was probably as valid of an explanation when all was said and done as anything. But we just left it as an unknown.” Among intelligence officials, the suspicions of fraud may have been aroused by knowledge of an incident in Maury Joseph’s past. During the 1990s, Joseph was CEO of a cargo airline named Florida West (which later went bankrupt). The Securities and Exchange Commission charged him in a civil case with falsifying financial statements and defrauding investors. The court imposed a fine and barred Joseph from acting as an officer in a publicly held company. But Joseph, when contacted by the FBI, volunteered to take a lie-detector test, and Swain, who was there when Joseph took the call from Air Gemini, is certain that Joseph had nothing to do with the airplane’s disappearance. “Look, nobody was more amazed by this situation than Maury,” Swain says. He describes Joseph as utterly confused by the information that the airplane was gone. The suspicion that Ben Padilla could have played any part in an insurance fraud angers his younger brother. “If anybody would say to me that my brother was involved with this,” says Joe Padilla, his voice tightening, “they’re full of it. ’Cuz I know my brother. He’s not gonna do nothing crooked. I know that for a fact.” He is convinced that more than one person was already on board, waiting, and that they forcibly took the aircraft, and killed Ben and John Mutantu. “I keep hoping against hope that maybe he’s tucked away somewhere,” says Benita Padilla-Kirkland. The new information she passed along to the FBI was a possible sighting of the aircraft, one of many reported over the years. Mike Gabriel believes the airplane crashed in the Atlantic Ocean soon after takeoff. One crew member from the fuel delivery operation thinks the Angolan air force shot it down with a missile. A Luandan pilot says the word there is that the aircraft went north and vanished near Kinshasa, Congo. One of Ben Padilla’s friends says the airplane was disassembled for parts in Bujumbura, Burundi, on Tanzania’s western border. Picking through the fragments of 844AA’s history, I found a story of broken deals, disappointments, and betrayals, but no real clues to the aircraft’s destination that day in 2003. We may never know for sure where it went. It is the largest aircraft ever to have disappeared without a trace. Tim Wright is a writer living in Richmond, Virginia.

© Smithsonian Institution

The 727 that Vanished | History of Flight | Air & Space Magazine

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The MasterBlog: Rosh Hashana Recipes Routed Through Africa - NYTimes.com

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The Clinton-Mezvinsky nuptials took place about two hours before the end of Shabbat.

The Clinton-Mezvinsky nuptials took place about two hours before the end of Shabbat.

July 31, 2010, 5:22pm

Rabbi James Ponet (click to enlarge)

Meet the Rabbi Who Officiated at Chelsea's Wedding

By Gabrielle Birkner

Ponet is Yale’s Jewish chaplain and heads the university’s Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale. Read his bio here. At Yale, he’s taught a seminar on “The Family in Jewish Tradition,” with sexpert and Bintel Brief guest columnist Dr. Ruth Westheimer.The New York Times is reporting that Rabbi James Ponet officiated, alongside Reverend William Shillady, at the Saturday evening wedding of Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky.

He has written about the Hanukkah story for Slate, and, back in 2003, the Forward reported that Ponet was among those who voiced concerns about controversial poet Amiri Baraka’s visit to Yale. During that visit, Baraka offered “evidence” that Israel was forewarned about the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

A Reform rabbi, Ponet received ordinationin 1973 from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

The Clinton-Mezvinsky nuptials took place about two hours before the end of Shabbat.

The MasterBlog: More People Choosing Kosher for Health - Well Blog - NYTimes.com

APRIL 13, 2010, 3:12 PM

More People Choosing Kosher for Health

By KAREN BARROW

Librado Romero/The New York Times Is kosher food safer and healthier food?

An ancient diet has become one of the hottest new food trends.

A growing number of supermarket shoppers are going kosher — not for religious reasons, but because they are convinced the foods are safer and better for health.

Kosher foods, which must meet a number of dietary and processing rules to comply with traditional Jewish law, are the fastest growing ethnic cuisine, reports the market research firm Mintel. Sales of kosher foods reached $12.5 billion in 2008, an increase of 64 percent since 2003.

Reflecting the growing interest, Manischewitz, a major kosher food company, held a kosher cook off last month in Manhattan. It featured five chefs from around the country who prepared dishes with the most traditional of kosher-recipe ingredients: chicken broth.

Four of the chefs do not keep kosher but look for certain kosher products in the supermarket. One of those is Julie DeMatteo, a 68-year-old grandmother from Clementon, N.J., who is not Jewish but regularly shops for kosher foods. She believes they are more closely monitored during their processing and “more consistent in taste,” she said.

According to the market research survey, 62 percent of people who buy kosher foods do so for quality reasons, while 51 percent say they buy kosher for its “general healthfulness.” About one-third say they buy kosher because they think food safety standards are better than with traditional supermarket foods. Only 15 percent of respondents say they buy kosher food because of religious rules. [Ed. MasterBlog's Emphasis]

“We see consumers looking for a convergence of ethics, supervision and quality to general health and wellness,” said David Yale, chief executive of Manischewitz.

Joe Regenstein, a professor of food science at Cornell University who specializes in kosher laws, notes that kosher food restrictions were created for religious reasons, not to produce healthier or safer food. Although some of the kosher laws related to ingredients and preparation may have potential health advantages, there’s no evidence to show that kosher food products are healthier or safer than those from traditional food companies, he said.

But the strict rules for producing and certifying kosher food products may result in closer scrutiny of food safety issues. For instance, independent organizations such as the Orthodox Union are paid by food companies to send trained personnel to factories to ensure that all of the restrictions of kosher laws are met. The extra monitoring typically means that kosher products are produced more slowly than other foods.

In general, kosher food has to be carefully watched throughout its processing and preparation. Grains, packaged vegetables, fruits and similar products are thoroughly inspected for any trace of non-kosher substances like insects. Because kosher laws prohibit the mixing of meat and dairy, all kosher dairy products are processed separately from any meat product. No shellfish is allowed, and all fish, like anything that is kosher, must be processed with utensils that have not been in contact with anything non-kosher.

“The extra eyes and slower speeds probably allow the government inspectors to do a better job,” Dr. Regenstein said. “The fact that a kosher company is meeting a lot of rules and subjected to random inspections is something of real value. Although most consumers don’t really understand it in that detail.”

Certifying a meat as kosher is even more complicated. First, only certain animals are allowed to be eaten: no pigs, rodents or birds of prey, for example. Additionally, every cow, chicken or other animal that is certified as kosher has to be killed and butchered in a particular way.

During this process, called “shechting,” each animal is killed quickly by a trained individual. Some believe this form of butchering is more humane and less painful than traditional slaughterhouse practices. Every butchered animal is closely inspected for signs of disease, and any animal that may have been sick is not used.

Certain non-kosher animal parts, like the tail, the sciatic nerve and some fats generally found in the hindquarters, are separated and sold to non-kosher meat-processing companies. And because all kosher meats are thoroughly salted, they may be less likely to carry E. coli and salmonella, experts say, though no studies have been done to confirm this speculation.

A kosher symbol on a food can also be particularly helpful for those with strict dietary requirements or allergies to a certain food. Kosher foods are a good option for consumers with allergies to shellfish, for example. A vegetarian can buy a kosher product labeled “pareve” and be certain that it contains no trace of milk or meat. Muslims and Seventh Day Adventists, who also follow strict diets, also are regular buyers of kosher foods.

Ultimately, the best part of buying kosher products is that it may help you know what is — and more importantly, what’s not — in your food.

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The MasterBlog: More People Choosing Kosher for Health - Well Blog - NYTimes.com

More People Choosing Kosher for Health - Well Blog - NYTimes.com

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