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From the Archives | Fighting the Ministry of Amnesia

Ilya Vovshin

Aaron Krikheli immersed himself in recording the history and culture of Georgia’s Jews just as the powers that be set about obliterating Jewish identity throughout the Soviet Union. One man’s struggle against officially mandated amnesia...

ColumnsIssue 61 | May 2022

Portrait of a People | A Dream Finally Come True

Naomi Samuel

Naomi Samuel The LashGouache25 x 17.5 cmTbilisi, 1939Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi Shalom Koboshvili1876–1941 Historic Realism Solomon (Shalom) Koboshvili was born to a poor Jewish family in Akhaltsikhe, Georgia. Hoping to raise a scholar, his parents...

ColumnsIssue 61 | May 2022

Designing a New Jew – Birobidzhan

Ber Kotlerman

In 1928, the Soviets chose to establish an autonomous Jewish region east of Chinese Manchuria, with the city of Birobidzhan as its capital. As in the other Jewish homeland under construction at much the same...

20th centuryarchitectureArticlesIssue 60 | February 2022Russia

Rivers of Poetry – Uri Zvi Greenberg

Akiva Goldstein

Few have been as versatile or lived lives as varied as Uri Zvi Greenberg. A revolutionary, anarchist poet who foresaw both the Arab massacre of Jews in 1929 and the Holocaust, Greenberg wandered between past,...

20th centuryArticlesIssue 60 | February 2022Jerusalem DayLand of IsraelLiterature and CultureWritersZionism

Rabbinic But Different – Dura-Europos Synagogue

Haggai Misgav

The people and animals in the Dura-Europos murals might reflect a community’s disregard for rabbinic strictures but can’t be seen as evidence of non-rabbinic Judaism in third-century Syria Haggai Misgav Since its discovery in 1932,...

ArtArticlesIssue 60 | February 2022JudaismRoman EmpireSyria

Imperial Synagogue – Dura-Europos Synagogue

Haggai Olshanetsky

Once upon a time in southeastern Syria, the Roman and Sassanid-Persian empires battled over a city nestled among the dunes. Its ruins revealed a synagogue with some of the most exquisite murals ever seen. Who...

ArtArticlesIssue 60 | February 2022JudaismRoman EmpireSyria

From the Archives | From Morocco to Amsterdam

Yochai Ben-Ghedalia

The memoir of an anonymous scholar features miracles, mishaps, and multiple wives as his thirst for Jewish learning drives him from home Yochai Ben-Ghedalia Highly Respected Professor, This copy, which I made in my student...

ColumnsIssue 59 | November 2021

Portrait of a People | A Fleeting Guest

Naomi Samuel

Naomi Samuel Jewish Wedding in MoroccoOil on canvas140 x 105 cmParis, 1839Louvres Museum, Paris Eugène Delacroix1798–1863 OrientalismRomantic Western depictions of everyday life in the Near East, beginning largely with Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt and the...

ColumnsIssue 59 | November 2021

Quick Looks at Books

Sara Jo Ben-Zvi

Medicine: From Biblical Canaan to Modern Israel | Cities of Splendour in the Shaping of Sephardi History | Memorable Sephardi Voices | Contextualizing Jewish Temples Sara Jo Ben-Zvi Medicine: From Biblical Canaan to Modern Israel...

ColumnsIssue 59 | November 2021

Tale of a Trail | Khirbet Bak, Mount Meron

Tamar HaYardeni

Israel Bak wasn’t one to give up. The first printer in Ottoman Palestine, he also established an agricultural village on Mount Meron in a series of none-too-successful pioneering endeavors Tamar HaYardeni Where To? Khirbet Bak,...

19th centuryColumnsentrepreneursIssue 59 | November 2021Lag B'OmerLand of IsraelZionism

Uphill Battle – Temple Mount: Modern Jewish Attitudes

Dotan Goren

Today most Jews visiting the Temple Mount are religious and of a certain stripe, but when the site opened to non-Muslims in the mid-19th century, it was generally secular Jewish tourists who seized the opportunity...

ArticlesIssue 61 | May 2022

Issues

From the Archives | Fighting the Ministry of Amnesia