Shimon Peres

A Sinagoga Portuguesa de Amsterdão

Chatufim

Iom HaTzmaut

Iom HaZikaron

As 4 Perguntas

"Mah Nishtana"

The Italian Synagogue

(Jerusalem)

Profeta

"O Profeta Amos" de Gustave Doré

Tema do filme "Schindler's List" de John Williams

Interpretação de Itzhak Perlman

Ilya Schor

"Kaballah"

"Ha Lachma Anya" (Pão da Aflição)

Cantor Moshe Oysher

Bagels

"The Prophets" de A.J. Heschel

Ketubah

Veneza (1684)

"Go Down, Moses" de Paul Robeson

"When Israel was in Egypt's land,
Let my people go!
Oppressed so hard they could not stand,
Let my people go!
Go down, Moses,
way down in Egypt's land,
tell old Pharao
to let my people go!

"Thus spoke the Lord", bold Moses said,
Let my people go!
"If not I'll smite your first-born dead!"
Let my people go!
Go down, Moses,
way down in Egypt's land,
tell old Pharao
to let my people go!"

Solomon Schechter

Alfred Stieglitz

"The Steerage" (1907)

Moisés

"Victory O Lord!"de John Everett Millais

Iom HaShoah

Kotel

Capitão Barros Basto

Anti-semitismo

(2011)

Felix Nussbaum

"The Prisoner"(1940)

Eliezer Berkovits

Anne Frank

A entrada secreta para o anexo

ArtScroll

Annie Leibovitz

(Arnold Schwarzenegger)

Árvores

"Amendoeiras" de Van Gogh

Shechitah

Anne Frank

O quarto de Anne Frank (que partilhava com o Sr. Dussel)

"Der Judenstaat" de Theodor Herzl

(1896)

"Is the Bible a Work of Philosophy?"

Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and Yoram Hazony

Haredim

Baal Shem Tov

  A sinagoga de Baal Shem Tov em Medzhybizh (1915) 

Einstein

Gabinete de Einstein em Princeton (1955)

Diário de Anne Frank

(Para a Ana)

Sinagoga de Liverpool

(Princes Road Synagogue)

Jonas

 

Avivah Zornberg on the Book of Jonah

Temple Mount

Cemitério Judaico de Praga

(Para o Luís!)

Kristallnacht

View of the interior of the Essenweinstrasse synagogue in Nuremberg 

following its destruction during Kristallnacht

Annie Leibovitz

(Winona Ryder)

Israel

"Va Pensiero" ("Nabucco" de Verdi)

Sinagoga Kadoorie Mekor Haim

(Porto)

Ilya Schor

Maurice Sendak

(1981)

Sucot

Árvores

Cedros no Japão

Samuel Bak

"The Sheen" (1995)

Ilya Schor

Torah Crown

Detail: The Sacrifice of Isaac

(Pierced and engraved silver, c. early 1950s, c. 12 inches high)

Praga

Sinagoga Jobar

 A Sinagoga Jobar situa-se perto de Damasco, Síria.

Com quase 2000 anos, é uma das sinagogas mais antigas do mundo.

Foi parcialmente destruída nas últimas semanas, bombardeada pelo governo sírio.

"42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe"

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/sunday-review/the-holocaust-just-got-more-shocking.html?ref=ericlichtblau

The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking

By ERIC LICHTBLAU,  NEW YORK TIMES

Published: March 1, 2013

THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.

What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington.

“The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought,” Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said in an interview after learning of the new data.

“We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was,” he said, “but the numbers are unbelievable.”

The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel.

Auschwitz and a handful of other concentration camps have come to symbolize the Nazi killing machine in the public consciousness. Likewise, the Nazi system for imprisoning Jewish families in hometown ghettos has become associated with a single site — the Warsaw Ghetto, famous for the 1943 uprising. But these sites, infamous though they are, represent only a minuscule fraction of the entire German network, the new research makes painfully clear.

The maps the researchers have created to identify the camps and ghettos turn wide sections of wartime Europe into black clusters of death, torture and slavery — centered in Germany and Poland, but reaching in all directions.

The lead editors on the project, Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, estimate that 15 million to 20 million people died or were imprisoned in the sites that they have identified as part of a multivolume encyclopedia. (The Holocaust museum has published the first two, with five more planned by 2025.)

The existence of many individual camps and ghettos was previously known only on a fragmented, region-by-region basis. But the researchers, using data from some 400 contributors, have been documenting the entire scale for the first time, studying where they were located, how they were run, and what their purpose was.

The brutal experience of Henry Greenbaum, an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor who lives outside Washington, typifies the wide range of Nazi sites.

When Mr. Greenbaum, a volunteer at the Holocaust museum, tells visitors today about his wartime odyssey, listeners inevitably focus on his confinement of months at Auschwitz, the most notorious of all the camps.

But the images of the other camps where the Nazis imprisoned him are ingrained in his memory as deeply as the concentration camp number — A188991 — tattooed on his left forearm.

In an interview, he ticked off the locations in rapid fire, the details still vivid.

First came the Starachowice ghetto in his hometown in Poland, where the Germans herded his family and other local Jews in 1940, when he was just 12.

Next came a slave labor camp with six-foot-high fences outside the town, where he and a sister were moved while the rest of the family was sent to die at Treblinka. After his regular work shift at a factory, the Germans would force him and other prisoners to dig trenches that were used for dumping the bodies of victims. He was sent to Auschwitz, then removed to work at a chemical manufacturing plant in Poland known as Buna Monowitz, where he and some 50 other prisoners who had been held at the main camp at Auschwitz were taken to manufacture rubber and synthetic oil. And last was another slave labor camp at Flossenbürg, near the Czech border, where food was so scarce that the weight on his 5-foot-8-inch frame fell away to less than 100 pounds.

By the age of 17, Mr. Greenbaum had been enslaved in five camps in five years, and was on his way to a sixth, when American soldiers freed him in 1945. “Nobody even knows about these places,” Mr. Greenbaum said. “Everything should be documented. That’s very important. We try to tell the youngsters so that they know, and they’ll remember.”

The research could have legal implications as well by helping a small number of survivors document their continuing claims over unpaid insurance policies, looted property, seized land and other financial matters.

“HOW many claims have been rejected because the victims were in a camp that we didn’t even know about?” asked Sam Dubbin, a Florida lawyer who represents a group of survivors who are seeking to bring claims against European insurance companies.

Dr. Megargee, the lead researcher, said the project was changing the understanding among Holocaust scholars of how the camps and ghettos evolved.

As early as 1933, at the start of Hitler’s reign, the Third Reich established about 110 camps specifically designed to imprison some 10,000 political opponents and others, the researchers found. As Germany invaded and began occupying European neighbors, the use of camps and ghettos was expanded to confine and sometimes kill not only Jews but also homosexuals, Gypsies, Poles, Russians and many other ethnic groups in Eastern Europe. The camps and ghettos varied enormously in their mission, organization and size, depending on the Nazis’ needs, the researchers have found.

The biggest site identified is the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, which held about 500,000 people at its height. But as few as a dozen prisoners worked at one of the smallest camps, the München-Schwabing site in Germany. Small groups of prisoners were sent there from the Dachau concentration camp under armed guard. They were reportedly whipped and ordered to do manual labor at the home of a fervent Nazi patron known as “Sister Pia,” cleaning her house, tending her garden and even building children’s toys for her.

When the research began in 2000, Dr. Megargee said he expected to find perhaps 7,000 Nazi camps and ghettos, based on postwar estimates. But the numbers kept climbing — first to 11,500, then 20,000, then 30,000, and now 42,500.

The numbers astound: 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing forced abortions, “Germanizing” prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers.

In Berlin alone, researchers have documented some 3,000 camps and so-called Jew houses, while Hamburg held 1,300 sites.

Dr. Dean, a co-researcher, said the findings left no doubt in his mind that many German citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must have known about the widespread existence of the Nazi camps at the time.

“You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,” he said. “They were everywhere.”

Eric Lichtblau is a reporter for The New York Times in Washington and a visiting fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Biluim

1880's

Tiberias

(1890)

Sucot

McDonald's

(Buenos Aires)

Sinagoga Kadoorie Mekor Haim

(Porto)

Sinagoga Kadoorie Mekor Haim

The Portuguese Phoenix by  Kevin Zdiara 

(Jewish Ideas Daily: http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/6026/features/the-portuguese-phoenix/)

PORTO, Portugal—Most tourists visit this northern Portuguese city of Porto to enjoy a glass of the world-famous port wine and stroll through the picturesque historic quarters near the Douro River.  They stay a day or two, then head south to Lisbon or the beaches.  There is not much evidence of a Jewish community.  Indeed, Portugal’s 3,000 Jews are little more than a drop in the bucket compared to the large community that lived here during the 14th and 15th centuries.  In Porto there are still signs of this long-gone Jewish history.  In a small alley in the Vitória neighborhood there are stone steps that the locals still call Escadas da Esnoga, the synagogue steps.  Parts of a 16th-century secret synagogue were recently discovered on the Rua de São Miguel.  Still, these are artifacts, not contemporary Jewish reality.

But a remarkable rebirth is occurring just a short drive west, half-way between the city’s center and the Atlantic coast.  There, hidden between mansions on the side street of Rua Guerra Junqueiro, is one of the most impressive signs of contemporary Judaism on the Iberian Peninsula: the Kadoorie Mekor Haim (“Fountain of Life”) synagogue, which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary.  The building, framed by huge palm trees, is 160 feet wide and 65 feet high.  And while its exterior gives the impression of a majestic yet opaque place, the interior contains a beautiful, open 2,300-square-foot prayer room. Pink marble pillars, golden letters, wooden benches and floors, and colorful wall tiles create an atmosphere both Mediterranean and solemn.

To understand the significance of the 75th anniversary celebration, one must understand the circumstances in which Mekor Haim was built and dedicated.

The synagogue was largely the work of Porto Jewish leader Artur Carlos Barros Basto.  He was born a Christian but learned as a child that his family were cristãos novos, “new Christians,” descendants of Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity.  He underwent a formal conversion to Judaism and in 1923 began his obra de resgate, or “work of rescue,” as he called his efforts to bring “new Christians” back to the Jewish religion of their ancestors.  He had great success, recovering dozens, if not hundreds of individuals.

Barros Basto imagined a great future for Portugal’s Jews and made it his mission to build a synagogue that would represent Judaism’s glory and greatness.  He worked tirelessly to realize his plan, securing financial help from Jews in England, the Netherlands, and France.  With this money he bought the land on which the synagogue stands.  On June 30, 1929, wearing his Portuguese captain’s uniform, he laid the foundation stone for Mekor Haim, burying a parchment in the earth bearing a prayer that God “bless this work, strengthen it, and let a torrent of the light of truth emanate from this fountain.”

The groundbreaking was closely followed in many European Jewish communities.  One of the first reactions came from Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who contributed 500 pounds toward the construction.  A donation from David de Sola Pool’s Shearith Israel congregation of New York enabled Barros Basto to open an Institute of Jewish Theology in Porto, where he taught Hebrew, liturgy, theology, and sacred history to former “new Christians.”  But it was financial assistance from Lawrence and Horace Kadoorie that allowed Barros Basto to finish his project.  In 1933 the two brothers donated 2,000 pounds in the name of their father, Shanghai millionaire Sir Elly Kadoorie, and their late mother Laura, who was of Portuguese origin.  Later that year, Elly and Lawrence actually visited Porto, causing a sensation with their Rolls Royce.  Porto’s Jewish community immortalized the donors by naming the synagogue Kadoorie Mekor Haim.

The synagogue was dedicated on January 13, 1938, at the height of Portugal’s Jewish renaissance.  Jewish notables came from many European countries to celebrate a miracle.  For them, the Kadoorie Mekor Haim synagogue in Porto symbolized a Jewish will to survive and to thrive: 500 years after the Inquisition had destroyed Jewish life in Portugal, a new Jewish house of worship was opening on the Iberian Peninsula.

The dignitaries knew little of what would follow—or, indeed, what had already happened.  The world was five years into the Nazi regime in Germany, and violent anti-Semitism was resurgent throughout Europe.  In 1937, Barros Basto had been convicted of a criminal offense in a trial that was later shown to have anti-Semitic origins.  The 1938 synagogue dedication should have been one of the greatest days of his life, but the trial had devastated him.  His reputation and charisma were lost, and the entire Porto Jewish community was shaken.

More troubles followed.  The year before Barros Basto bought the land for the synagogue, Porto’s German community, which had historically close ties to the port wine industry, had bought a plot of land just a few feet away in order to build a German school.  In later years, stones were thrown from the school into the synagogue.  Finally a row of trees was planted between the two buildings—so that the German schoolchildren, as the school board explained it, would not have to look at a Jewish house of worship.

Porto’s Jewish community steadily fell apart, victim to Barros Basto’s conviction and the regime of Fascist leader António de Oliveira Salazar.  Little more than a decade after Mekor Haim’s dedication, the community was gone.  In the 1950s the synagogue’s doors were closed.  They would remain so for three decades.

This would have been a sad ending for a synagogue called the “fountain of life.”  But in 1984, two Israelis looking for a place to celebrate Shabbat rediscovered the synagogue and began working to fill Kadoorie Mekor Haim with life again.  The synagogue was re-opened and has remained in use.  Struggling with difficulties and challenges, the community has shown a strong will to maintain Kadoorie Mekor Haim as the symbol of Jewish life that Barros Basto intended it to be.  After years of searching for the right spiritual guidance, the young Jewish community in Porto has found an Argentinean rabbi, Daniel Litvak.

In the last decade, the number of Jews in Portugal has tripled.  At the 75th anniversary celebration, the synagogue was filled to the brim with young and hopeful faces.  The Kadoorie Mekkor Haim synagogue is the center of a living, inquiring Portuguese Judaism.  Almost a century after Barros Basto’s “work of rescue,” it is not merely a Jewish house of worship but, once again, the symbol of Jewish resilience, faith, and conviction.

Kevin Zdiara is a freelance writer, frequent contributor to the German blog The Axis of Good, and a Ph.D. student in philosophy at the Max Weber Center for Cultural and Social Studies in Erfurt, Germany.

Yale: "Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible)"

5. "Critical Approaches to the Bible: Introduction to Genesis 12-50"

(Professor Christine Hayes)

Weegee