VOYAGE OF THE VIKINGS

Holland America Rotterdam summer 2018

Excited to be volunteering aboard HAL sailing from Boston to Rotterdam and back!

NEWFOUNDLAND JEWRY

St John's Newfoundland

ST. JOHN’S JEWISH COMMUNITY ONE OF THE OLDEST IN CANADA

By Bill Gladstone - April 10, 2016

Every year before Rosh Hashanah, members of the Jewish community of St. John’s, N.L., travel to nearby Cape Spear, the most easterly point of land on the continent, to conduct a Shacharit morning prayer service while overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, thus becoming the first Jews in North America to greet the new year.

That’s one of numerous points of distinction of this small Jewish community, which today numbers only a few dozen families. The community may never have been large – it peaked at an estimated 75 to 100 families some time in the 1940s or 1950s – but it is certainly one of the oldest in Canada.

The first Jews arrived in Newfoundland in the 1770s. “They were trading for fish and also seal furs and seal oil, which was used in lamps,” said Robin McGrath, author of Salt Fish and Shmattes: History of the Jews of Newfoundland and Labrador from 1770.

Many in the modern community are descended from peddlers and shopkeepers who arrived from Eastern Europe and Russia in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, according to Dr. Douglas Wilansky, who was born in St. John’s in 1929, the son of a Belarusian-born rabbi and his wife who ran Wilansky and Sons Limited. “My father was the rabbi for a period,” he said. “My parents ran the clothing store and my mother also had another store. There were perhaps 10 or 15 Jewish stores in town.”

Like many children of immigrants, Dr. Wilansky left Newfoundland in 1949, the year the former British colony became part of Canada. After graduating from medical school, he became founding chief of medicine (emeritus) at Toronto’s Etobicoke General Hospital, a position from which he recently retired. But he still goes back to St. John’s every year.

As it happens, Claire Frankel-Salama, current president of St. John’s Beth El Synagogue, also has strong connections to Toronto. “I’m a Bathurst Street girl,” she said, despite the fact that she’s lived in St. John’s for 30 years. She’s a lecturer at Memorial University and her husband, Messod Salama, is a full professor.

“When we came here, it was the tail end of a certain era,” she said. “There were a lot of Jewish businesses at one time and there were still some shopkeepers on Water Street. The Holocaust survivors and others who came here after the war sent their kids to universities in Montreal and Toronto, then they followed their kids and left.” (Philip Riteman, a Holocaust survivor who stayed, is a renowned public speaker on the Holocaust who was awarded an honorary PhD by Memorial University several years ago.)

A memorable moment in the community’s history occurred during the 9/11 crisis of 2001. The community went into full service mode to assist the many Jewish passengers who were stranded when their jets were forced to land here and in Gander.

The synagogue has weekly services and was recently the scene of a Purim party and a lively bat mitzvah last August. But the congregation never rebounded after a group splintered away about 10 years ago and formed a separate organization called Chavura.

Representatives of Chabad have also started visiting in recent years and a Chabad-connected rabbi has even been sending small presents on Jewish holidays, including shmurah matzah at Passover. One year the main shipping route from Sidney N.S. and the mainland was blocked when ice prevented the ferries from crossing the strait, Frankel-Salama recalled. “The only matzah we had for that seder was the matzah from Rabbi Gorelik,” she said.

There is a kosher fruit winery on the island, but kosher grape wine must be ordered from Toronto. Kosher beef is hard to come by but a local Sobey’s supermarket imports kosher chicken for the community. “We’ve had struggles moving from Chai to Marvid chicken like everyone else,” Frankel-Salama said. “We eat a lot of fish – the fish here is wonderful.”

The first Jews to the island came from England in the late 18th century, and historian-writer McGrath found a lot about them in the records of the synagogue in Plymouth, England. Simon Solomon, the first Jew in the St. John’s area, was the first postmaster of Newfoundland, she said. “He was also a jeweller and a member of the dissenting church. He came to St. John’s from Devon, England in 1792.”

A retired Eskimologist who spent 25 years living in Baffin Island, McGrath was born and raised in St. John’s, and spoke to The CJN from her current home in Goose Bay, Labrador. Her novel, The Winterhouse, which is salted with the early history of Newfoundland’s Jewish community, won a Canadian Jewish Book Award in 2009.

“As a child growing up, the Jews were extremely important to me and my cultural development,” she said. “I didn’t grow up as a Jew but they were all around me. They were just very interesting, lively, cultured people, adventuresome and cultivated too.”

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GREENLAND JEWRY

One of the newest additions to the Knowles Collection, is the family history of the Jacobi family. This record, which is also part of the collection compiled by Rabbi Malcolm Stern, documents a family from the province of Posen in the late 1700's.

The family begins with Jacob Jacobi who had three children. Grune Jacobi, the oldest, was born in 1790 in Neustadt, Posen and died in 1876 in Charleston, South Carolina. Most of her family like so many others settled in and around the Charleston area, one of the great Jewish communities in pre-civil war America. One of the intriguing things about this family however are the other locations where they settled.

Grune's brother, Neuman Hirsch Jacobi was also born in Neustadt, in 1794. He however moved to Copenhagen, Denmark where he died in 1881.While some of the descendants of Neuman also made their way to Charleston and others American cities, many also stayed in Europe, most in Denmark and some even lived in Greenland. These Jacobi's from Greenland now become the first Jews from that country to be included in the Knowles Collection.

Not many Jews have ever made Greenland their home. Those who visited were for the most part Danes or Germans who had trade with the inhabitants. Greenland, while self governing since 1979, has been a part of Denmark for over 300 years. While few in numbers it is nice to finally have representation from Greenland. Hopefully more will follow.

Posted by W Todd Knowles

Although Greenland has been a part of the Kingdom of Denmark for nearly 300 years and a self-governing overseas part of Denmark since 1979, the Jews of Denmark or other countries never found the urge to settle in this beautiful but yet very harsh and cold part of the habitable world. The article is an account of the rather accidental encounter between Jews and Greenland. We know very little about Jews in Greenland before the 20th century. Jews in Holland and Germany were definitely engaged in the Greenland trade. It is however unlikely that many Jewish seamen visited the Greenland trading posts. In 1930 German-born meteorologist, Fritz Loewe had an extreme encounter with the elements in Greenland as a member of a team of scientists under the leadership of the world-famous geologist Alfred Wegener. Dr. Loewe survived the winter of 1930-31 in an igloo on the Greenland central ice sheet, recovering from the amputation of all of his toes, lost to gangrene. His friend Wegener and some other members of his team lost their lives. Nurse Rita Scheftelowitz' stay in Greenland in 1955-56 was much more pleasant. She was visited by Jewish journalist and globetrotter Alfred Joachim Fischer and his wife in 1955. Jewish life in Greenland has been limited to the activities of the northernmost minjan of the world at the US airforce base in Thule. Sixty-eight Jewish servicemen in Thule gathered for the first time for Seder during Pesach of 1955. This was mainly due to the efforts of Lieutenant Maurice Burk. Today Mr. Burk of Kenner, Lousiana, has a vivid recollection of his stay in the perpetual darkness of Thule, which was lightened up by the celebration of Jewish holidays as well as the visit of Bob Hope and his team of entertainers to the base in December 1955.

ICELAND JEWRY

Iceland Welcomes First Rabbi — As It Considers Ban On Circumcision Cnaan Liphshiz April 8, 2018

(JTA) REYKJAVIK, Iceland

At a windswept harbor of this Nordic capital, a bearded man wearing a black hat dips eating utensils into the icy water while hissing from pain induced by the bitter cold.

Perplexed by the spectacle, a caretaker helpfully offers to let the man and his three companions use a washing basin to clean their dishes instead of precariously bending over the freezing water.

“Thank you, but we need to do it in the sea,” one of the men, 27-year-old Avi Feldman of New York, tells the caretaker. “It’s for religious reasons.”

Iceland's Handful of Jews Keep Faith Alive

Jenna GottliebAugust 4, 2013

Feldman and his companions, a journalist and two relatives who are visiting him here for the holidays, haul the wet dishes back to a car parked at the foot of one of the many snow-capped volcanoes surrounding this gray but picturesque capital city.

The exchange last week was Feldman’s first attempt since registering as a resident of Iceland at explaining to a local a potentially awkward Jewish religious custom: in this case, “tevilat kelim” — immersing utensils acquired from non-Jews to make them kosher.

But it won’t be the last explanation coming from the New York native, who this year became Iceland’s first resident rabbi in documented history. Feldman and his wife, Mushky, and their two small daughters settled in the country as its parliament prepares to vote on a bill that would outlaw nonmedical circumcision of boys.

Measuring his words on the subject, Feldman, a Chabad rabbi, told JTA before his arrival only that he and his wife “hope to bring awareness to local Icelandic people and especially to lawmakers in their decision on rules.” He also said the bill is a “matter of great concern” for those who “value religious freedom.”

According to Feldman, the issue is not rooted in any hostility to Judaism in Iceland.

Hotly opposed by the several hundred Jews and Muslims who live in this Christian nation of 330,000 citizens, the bill has wide support in the parliament and population, according to polls, and is expected to pass when brought to a vote at a date that has yet to be determined.

This is part of the reason that leaders of European Jewry view the bill as a dangerous precedent amid a two-pronged attack on fundamental customs of Judaism and Islam – including circumcision and ritual slaughter of animals, which already is illegal in Iceland. As European nationalists hostile to Islam or Judaism target such customs, so do secularists and progressives who find the rituals intolerably cruel.

In the rest of Europe, the debate about such bans is informed by the continent’s sad history of centuries of virulent anti-Semitism.

“In Iceland there isn’t this awareness” because the country never had more than a few dozen Jews, according to Hannah Jane Cohen, a Jewish-American journalist from New York who moved to Iceland last year. “If you try to explain that the Nazis also banned it, it comes across as exaggerated.”

To Sigal Har-Meshi, an Israel-born mother of three boys who has been living in Iceland for 14 years, “it’s an insult,” she told JTA at a chic café near Reykjavik’s university. “It’s my country telling me and my husband we are not only barbarians, but criminals just because I’m Jewish.”

At the same time, she shares the reservations of many Jewish mothers with regard to circumcision.

“It’s pretty shocking, I don’t feel 100 percent comfortable with it, either,” said Har-Meshi, a successful jeweler who first came to Iceland as a tourist in 1986 and married a local non-Jew. Her teenage sons suffered taunts at school and “don’t feel comfortable showering in public” in a country that had fewer than 20 nonmedical circumcisions of boys since 2007, she added.

Against this backdrop, the arrival of a Chabad rabbi to Iceland is “great news,” said Mike Levin, a Chicago native who is the unofficial leader of the Jewish community of Iceland. Judaism is not among Iceland’s recognized state religions, so there is no way of gaining official status for his community. A group of a few dozen people without a synagogue, they celebrate Jewish holidays and events together at hotels, restaurants, picnics and at each other’s homes.

Some years, community members brought leavened bread to get-togethers on Passover, when the consumption of such food is forbidden, Levin and Har-Meshi recalled. But other events were supervised by visiting rabbis from Chabad, who imposed a strictness that was foreign and unwelcome at this highly secularized community, where the Feldmans are the only observant members.

Unlike the mink whale meat that is sold here in many supermarkets and restaurants, kosher meat is nowhere to be found in Iceland. But it does have world-famous kosher fish, most notably salmon. It was the main course at one of the largest Passover seders in the island nation’s history: a gathering of 100 last week at a local hotel, followed by a second seder for 50 people.

“On a community level, it will give us representation to the outside world,” Levin said of the Feldmans’ arrival. “Recognition. And perhaps also state funding, visibility, a synagogue, a Jewish kindergarten.”

The Feldmans said they are looking into opening a Chabad house and synagogue. In parallel, they are negotiating the import of kosher meat through local distributors. They represent a Hasidic movement with a mission to build Jewish communities in sometimes unlikely places.

Levin, a carpenter in training who recently sold his popular catering firm for offices, said he is also “happy to be relieved” of the duties that come with leading a small Jewish community, with the usual bickering and logistical problems they entail.

A follower of Conservative Judaism with cantorial skills, Levin said he never really sought to become the national leader of a Jewish community.

“But someone had to do it,” he said.

The proposed ban on circumcision, though, risks undoing decades of community building, Levin said.

“It definitely doesn’t feel good. It sends a bad message,” he said.

The leaders of the Jewish communities of four Nordic countries warned in a joint statement that a ban “will guarantee” that no Jewish community is established in Iceland and make it “the only country to ban one of the most central, if not the most central rite in the Jewish tradition in modern times.” The Feb. 13 statement also noted how the Nazis imposed bans on circumcision.

Iceland, however, is hardly the only European country where Jewish circumcision, or milah, and ritual slaughter, or shechitah, are being attacked.

A law banning shechitah passed in the Netherlands in 2011. Tellingly, it was submitted by the ultra-progressive and small Party for the Animals, but it passed thanks to the support of the large and populist Party for Freedom – an anti-Islam movement. Ultimately the law was scrapped by the Dutch Senate. Last year in Belgium, shechitah was banned in two of the country’s three regions with similar alliances.

In Sweden, where progressives have spoken out for years against ritual circumcision, a draft motion against it was submitted to parliament in 2013 by a far-right, anti-Islam party.

Iceland for the first time is seeing the arrival of relatively large numbers of Muslims – asylum seekers and other immigrants, often from the war-torn Middle East.

“This comes with some tensions,” Har-Meshi said.

Still, xenophobia appears to have had a negligible role in Iceland’s bill on circumcision, which lawmakers from four political parties introduced in January. Together, the parties account for 46 percent of the parliament’s 63 seats.

Seeking a prison sentence of up to six years on offenders regardless of where the underage circumcision is performed, the bill equates the practice with female genital mutilation, calling both human rights violations. Circumcision, the bill also says, places subjects at an elevated risk of infection and causes “severe pain.”

“It’s concerning the community in Denmark,” Andrew Baker, the personal representative on combating anti-Semitism for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said in February during a symposium in Vienna on anti-Semitism. “They fear it will set a precedent. Nordic countries will somehow look one to another and it will open the door.”

In Denmark, a petition favoring a milah ban has received 68 percent of its target of 50,000 signatures. Once the target number is reached – organizers have until August to collect signatures — the petition will go up for a vote as a draft resolution in the Danish parliament.

Stopping short of calling the proposed ban in Iceland a form of anti-Semitism, Baker said, “We have acknowledged the kind of public discourse that accompanies these debates” – a reference to an anti-Semitic caricature that appeared in 2013 in a Norwegian paper, among other materials.

Occurring simultaneously with efforts to ban ritual slaughter, the campaigns to ban circumcision in Iceland and Denmark are the latest development in an escalation that occurred in 2012, when a German court in Cologne ruled that ritual circumcision of minors amounted to a criminal act of child abuse. The ruling triggered temporary bans in Austria and Switzerland but was overturned.

Seen in this context, it’s easy to understand why Jewish communities are up in arms over the bill in Iceland, Baker said in an address in Vienna on Feb. 20. He also noted that the audience for his talk outnumbered Iceland’s Jewish population, drawing chuckles.

“So here we are,” he said, “fighting for the protection of an element of religious practice on behalf of frankly a handful of people who may themselves never exercise it.”

NORWAY JEWRY

In search of Yiddishkeit in Norway

Jewish community focuses on education to improve attitudes toward Israel

by Elaine Durbach

NJJN Staff Writer

June 12, 2013

The most common response I received when I told people that I was going to Norway this spring on a trip for Jewish journalists was “Why?” Follow-ups included, “Are there any Jews there?” and, occasionally, “Aren’t they anti-Semitic?”

I had no answers. In truth, those were not far from my initial responses too. The fact is there’s been very little talk of Norway in the American-Jewish community for a long time — and that’s precisely why this trip was organized. It was a joint venture between Joseph Jacobs Advertising, a Jewish-oriented marketing agency, and Innovation Norway, a travel company owned by the Norwegian government.

Naturally, their goal was to encourage tourism. On the May 20-30 journey, I and four other Jewish journalists visited Oslo, Trondheim, Bergen, and the fjord tourist resort of Flam and were treated to as much magnificent scenery, delicious food, and fascinating museums as you could fit into nine days. But Jewish institutions were also on the itinerary, and we had the chance to talk to members of the country’s only two Jewish communities, in Oslo and Trondheim.

In Bergen, we found just one Jew, Tamar Halperin, the Israeli-born pianist wife of a German countertenor performing in the annual music festival. “Am I your live one?” she asked us.

Despite the scarcity of Jews, the trip was both comfortable and intriguing. Just one proviso for would-be visitors: If you keep kosher, bring your own food (more on that in a later article). And it has to be said: The country is well worth a visit, with its ever-present interlinking of land and water, picturesque architecture, and charming people — almost all of whom seem familiar with English and committed to being really pleasant.

The British-born Chabad rabbi we met in Oslo, Rabbi Shaul Wilhelm, told us, “I can walk down a street late at night past a bunch of drunks, totally confident that no one will hurt me — even if they would hurt each other.”

They probably wouldn’t do much of that either. A Jewish Russian drama teacher — who spends months each year training actors in Oslo — whom the rabbi introduced us to said his greatest challenge is to get Norwegian actors to explore conflict or raise their voices at one another. “They just hate doing it,” he declared.

The country has an official commitment to tolerance, but it wasn’t always that way. Jews weren’t legally permitted to live in Norway until the mid-1800s. By the outbreak of World War II, the population stood at around 2,100. Despite some efforts to hide Jews and help them escape to Sweden, the Norwegian police helped the Nazis round up hundreds of Jews. About 800 died in the Holocaust.

Today, the number of affiliated Jews is around 750; the total, including visiting Israelis and others, is believed to be between 1,500 and 2,000. That means that most Norwegians know no Jews and know little about Judaism, though Holocaust education is now part of the school curriculum. Jews on the whole keep a low profile, and a number mentioned efforts to blend into the general population. “My parents insisted I learn to ski — to be like other Norwegians,” one woman said.

Shared values

Education of the general populace is a primary concern of the Jewish organizations, in part to moderate a pervasive highly critical attitude toward Israel. There have been a handful of vandalism attacks against Jewish sites — with anti-Israel sentiment appearing to be the motive — resulting in tight security at all of them.

As it happened, the country’s most prominent Jewish political figure, Jo Benkow, had died the week before we arrived, at the age of 88. On our second day in Oslo there was a massive memorial service for him. In his long career, he was very popular; he led the Conservative Party in parliament and was the speaker from 1985 to 1993. So many dignitaries attended the service, tents had to be erected outside to handle the overflow, and we were told there was no way we could attend.

That morning, we were taken to visit The Jewish Museum, created in what used to be a shul in the eastern part of the city. There were two carefully constructed and very moving exhibitions, one about the Jewish year and its customs and celebrations, the other about the wartime experiences of the community, including Benkow, who fled to Sweden and later served with the Allied forces. Museum director Sidsel Levin said, “He didn’t make an issue of his being Jewish until he retired from parliament. But everyone knew he was Jewish, and it made no difference to his popularity.”

Wilhelm and his wife, now with four children, have been in Norway for 10 years. “We don’t compete with the established community,” he told us. “We try to provide what it isn’t able to provide.” That includes hosting a public seder and other holiday celebrations. Much as they enjoy life in Norway, Wilhelm said, one of the great drawbacks is that they will have to send their children abroad to receive a yeshiva education.

Inevitably, some members of the Ashkenazi, more or less Modern Orthodox, congregation, the Mosaic Religious Community, voiced objections to Wilhelm’s presence and his attempts to attract people to Chabad-sponsored programs. When we visited the one functioning synagogue, a congregant who heard we had met with Wilhelm demanded, “Why doesn’t he go somewhere where there’s no Jewish community and start one there, instead of dividing our little community?”

You could see both sides: The country’s chief rabbi — Danish-born Michael Melchior, a former Knesset member for Meimad — lives in Israel and visits only a few times a year. His son comes more often and conducts services when he does; regular services in Oslo are conducted by a cantor. Wilhelm, on the the other hand, is present full-time and performs a range of rabbinical duties. But they all seemed to share that goal of educating the broader Norwegian population about Judaism and the history of its Jewish community.

At the Resistance Museum in Oslo, celebrating the Norwegian effort to block the Nazis, a display provided by Levin and the museum profiled some of the Jews who fought in the war. Prominently mentioned was the fact that a vastly disproportionate number of Jews served with the Allied effort.

In a nicely ironic touch, the mansion where Norway’s Nazi-sympathizer president, Vidkun Quisling, once lived, there is now a state-financed Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities.

It has a display commemorating the Holocaust and provides office space for researchers. Our guide, a non-Jew academic of Polish extraction, mentioned that his grandfather was Jewish. We were also introduced over lunch to a colleague of his whose recently published study showed anti-Semitism to be lower in Norway than elsewhere in Europe. The talks and concerts at the center, we were told, draw large crowds.

Education is also the goal of Israeli Ambassador Naim Araidi, who happens to be Druze. When he first arrived, he caused a ripple in the media and won fans by having his guests gather in the kitchen while he cooked for them, Golda Meir-style.

The literature professor-turned-diplomat “dished” with us over dinner on our last evening, summing up his impressions of Norwegian society and its commitment to democracy and equality. The Norwegians’ biggest mistake, he said, is their failure to recognize that Israel, more than any other country in the Middle East, shares those values.

“You should encourage Jews to come visit,” he told us. “The more people who come, the more contact people here have with Jews, the better for Israel.”

IRELAND JEWRY

Land of the LepraCohen

JEWISH DUBLIN BY ALAN TIGAY

March 2008 Hadassah Magazine

Jews both real and fictional have indelibly contributed to the warmth, beauty and charm that best describe Ireland and its capital city.

Few lands inspire as much affection among Jewish expatriates as Ireland. Descendants who find themselves today in England, Israel or America whose forebears spent 30 generations in Lithuania and one or two on the Emerald Isle refer to themselves proudly as Irish Jews.

Maybe it is the beauty of the place, or the welcoming nature of the Irish. Or maybe it is that the Irish notion of persecution seemed to consist mainly of name-calling, which must have seemed quaint to immigrants from the Czarist Empire.

The Jews of Ireland had a silver age, lasting roughly from 1880 to the end of the 1940s, when the community peaked at about 5,000. It has since fallen to about 1,700, but with Ireland’s tranformation from economic backwater to Celtic Tiger the Jewish population is growing—however slightly—for the first time in more than 50 years. The bigger story for visitors is that few communities so small in number have made such a visible impact on the landscape. A large part of the reason is the energy and drive of the people who built and continue to be a part of Irish Jewry.

But an unmistakable role also belongs to Leopold Bloom, the fictional hero created by James Joyce as the modern embodiment of Ulysses. Joyce’s protagonist resonates through the years and perhaps reflects modern Jews more closely today than on that day in June 1904 when he schlepped across Dublin.

History

Bloom’s wanderings were nothing compared to the first recorded Jewish journey to Ireland. As indicated in the Annals of Innisfallen, a chronicle of medieval Irish history, in 1079 “five Jews came from over the sea with gifts to Tairdelbach [king of Munster] and then were sent back again over the sea.” Small numbers of Jews, notably some refugees from Spain and Portugal, came and went between the 12th and 18th centuries, but by the dawn of the 19th century the Jewish community, if it could be called that, had dwindled to just three families.

Jewish immigration picked up in the 1820s, from England, Germany and Poland, but the biggest Jewish impact on Ireland in the mid-19th century came from a man who never lived there. During the great famine of the 1840s, which caused so much misery and emigration, support came from Baron Lionel de Rothschild, the first Jew elected to the British House of Commons. In the words of a Dublin newspaper at the time, Rothschild contributed “a sum far beyond the joint contributions of the Devonshires, and Herefords, Lansdownes, Fitzwilliams and Herberts, who annually drew so many times that amount from their Irish estates.”

By 1880, Dublin’s Jewish community of 450 was, by and large, prosperous as well as English speaking. There was a synagogue on Mary’s Abbey, just north of the River Liffey (like the synagogue, Dublin’s Abbey Theater, today a few blocks east, derived its name from the monastery).

Lithuanian Jews began arriving in 1881, and though it was but a wavelet compared to the masses that arrived in London and New York, it would subsume the existing community in Dublin and give Ireland its first real taste of an immigrant ethnic presence. By 1900, Dublin had more than 3,000 Jews. Smaller numbers lived in Cork, Belfast, Limerick, Waterford and Londonderry.

It was a tight-knit community, most hailing from a cluster of towns and villages in northern Lithuania. They settled south of central Dublin, in an area that was eventually dubbed Little Jerusalem. Many of the immigrants became peddlers, petty traders and moneylenders—“credit drapers” and “weekly men” in the local parlance—some of whom got their start with a five-pound stake from the Hebrew Philanthropic Loan Society. The second generation moved up the occupational ladder, as Jews became a major force in the manufacture of clothing and furniture.

Jews were sometimes the target of animosity, though it was mild compared to what they and their forebears had experienced on the continent. Some superficial histories refer to a “pogrom” that took place in Limerick in 1904, though it was more of an economic boycott, which caused little violence and no fatalities.

When the Easter Rebellion broke out in 1916, Jews tended to favor the status quo, but some distinguished themselves in the cause of Irish independence. Robert Briscoe smuggled arms for the Irish Republican Army and, in the 1950s and 1960s, served as Dublin’s mayor (succeeded a generation later by his son, Ben). Michael Noyk acted as a lawyer for IRA defendants. Estella Solomons was a Dublin artist whose studio became a Republican gathering point and sometime hideout.

Freed of British rule, Ireland remained neutral throughout World War II. During the war, Delia Murphy, a popular singer who was married to the Irish ambassador to the Vatican, spearheaded a campaign to shelter Roman Jews and escaped Allied prisoners in church buildings.

Community

After the war, the slow pace of Irish economic growth, coupled with a tendency for young people to study abroad and then stay abroad, took a heavy toll on the Jewish community. Ninety percent of those who left settled in Britain, Israel and the United States. With Ireland’s economic boom over the past 15 years, small numbers of immigrants, mostly Israelis, Americans and South Africans, have given the community its first boost in two generations. There are now about 1,300 Jews in Dublin and another 400 scattered around the country.

As they prospered, Jews moved beyond the Grand Canal, which is the southern boundary of Little Jerusalem, and today are concentrated in the south Dublin neighborhoods of Terenure, Rathmines and Rathgar. Though some still have retail businesses, more and more tend to be doctors, lawyers and university professors. At one point in the 1990s, the Dail, Ireland’s parliament, had one Jewish member from each of the three major parties. Today, the lone Jewish member is Alan Shatter, who represents south Dublin for the Fine Gael Party.

Dublin has three functioning synagogues. The largest is the Dublin Hebrew Congregation on Rathfarham Road in Terenure. A modern structure with a sloped roof and series of Stars of David on its façade, it is the seat of Ireland’s chief rabbi (currently Yaakov Pearlman) and follows Orthodox tradition, with a tendency toward modern Orthodox. The synagogue holds weekday as well as Shabbat services and houses Ireland’s only mikve.

Two other houses of worship are the more traditional Orthodox Machzikei Hadass, at the rear of 77 Terenure Road North, and the liberal Dublin Jewish Progressive Congregation, at 7 Leicester Avenue in Rathgar.

For information on religious services, kashrut, accommodation suggestions, community events and other inquiries, consult the Web site of the Irish Jewish community (www.jewishireland.org).

Sights

Dublin is a walker’s paradise of Georgian architectural charm and leafy parks. It has great theater and a lively music scene, inviting shops and history that seeps from every corner. In the case of James Joyce and the Jewish protagonist who is indelibly linked with the city, literature literally bubbles up from the ground in the form of dozens of plaques embedded in the sidewalks, identifying scenes from Ulysses.

For the better part of a century, critics have debated why Joyce chose a Jewish hero. Some Joyce scholars have become near experts in halakha as they parse Leopold Bloom’s heritage: Though Bloom had a strong Jewish identity and was seen as a Jew by all around him, his Jewishness came only from his father’s side.

The fictional Leopold and Molly Bloom lived at 7 Eccles Street, north of the River Liffey. For many years, a plaque on the actual Georgian row house at that address identified the spot. The house was torn down a few years ago to make room for a hospital annex. But across the street at No. 78, another Georgian similar to old No. 7, bears a sign reading “Bloom House.”

A few blocks away, the James Joyce Centre occupies another restored Georgian house. The center (35 North Great Georges Street; 011-353-1-878-8547; www.james joyce.ie) has an extensive library and archive as well as exhibition space, a bookstore and café. It also conducts Joyce tours around Dublin. One tour, devoted to Ulysses, takes visitors along many of the streets Bloom traversed, pointing out episodes from the novel and the sidewalk markers that provide snippets of narrative. Among the stops are the site of the Freeman’s Journal on Abbey Street (the Journal was the newspaper for which Bloom worked as an ad canvasser and where the sight of a typesetter composing lines of copy backward reminded him of his father reading the Haggada) and Davy Byrnes’ Pub, at 2 Duke Street, where Bloom lunched on a gorgonzola cheese sandwich— which is still on the menu.

The Joyce tours take visitors through the center of Dublin, past many of the city’s most important landmarks, from O’Connell Street, scene of heavy fighting during the Easter Rebellion, to Grafton Street, the pedestrian shopping area, and past Trinity College. The Trinity College library (353-1-896-1661; www.tcd.ie/library) is best known for the Book of Kells, a 9th-century illuminated manuscript of the Gospels, and the Long Room, a striking chamber of floor-to-ceiling shelves holding 200,000 leather-bound books. The library collection includes a Scroll of Esther and a copy of the first Hebrew translation of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. It was Trinity that first introduced Hebrew studies in Ireland in 1591.

Mansion house is where the Irish Declaration of Independence was signed in 1919 and, two years later, the declaration of cessation of hostilities with Britain. A taupe-and-white stone building with an ornate wrought iron entry, it also has a place in Dublin’s Jewish history. As the residence of the city’s lord mayor, it was home to Robert and Ben Briscoe, both of whose portraits hang inside. The building is on Dawson Street, just off St. Stephen’s Green.

The National Gallery of Ireland (Merrion Square West; 353-1-661-5133; www.nationalgallery.ie ) is brimming with works on Hebrew Bible themes, a disproportionate number of which feature women. Among those to look for are three studies of the Queen of Sheba arriving in Solomon’s court, by Lavinia Fontana, Giovanni di Ser Giovanni and Leandro da Ponte Bassano. Others include Andrea Mantegna’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes, William de Poorter’sThe Robing of Esther, Govaert Flinck’s Bathsheba’s Appeal to David, Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini’s Bathsheba and Pellegrini’sSusanna and the Elders.

Other biblical scenes on exhibit are Guercino’s Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph, Pieter Lastman’s Joseph Selling Corn in Egypt, Ludovico Mazzolino’s Crossing of the Red Sea, Ferdinand Bol’sDavid’s Dying Charge to Solomon and Orazio Gentileschi’s David and Goliath.

Little Jerusalem is less than a mile south of central Dublin. Though few Jews live there today, it looks largely unchanged from a century ago. Jews lived and worked on the streets and lanes off the South Circular Road and Clanbrassil in buildings that are mostly neat rows of two-story, red brick Victorians and one-story laborers’ cottages.

Though many from the neighborhood climbed the ladder of success, no one went further than the son of Isaac Herzog, who lived at 33 Bloomfield Avenue. Ireland’s first chief rabbi (and later chief rabbi of Israel), Herzog might have become the country’s best-known Jewish figure. But in 1985, as president of Israel, his son, Chaim Herzog, unveiled a memorial plaque on the façade of the red brick house in which he was raised.

Creativity collides with reality at 52 Upper Clanbrassil Street, a Victorian house with a gravel driveway and an iron fence. A plaque on the house reads, “Here, in Joyce’s imagination, was born in May 1866 Leopold Bloom, citizen, husband, father, wanderer….”

Two former synagogue buildings remain neighborhood landmarks. The Adelaide Road Synagogue (37 Adelaide Road) is a Moorish-Victorian structure with high arched windows and doorways. It functioned until 1999, when its remaining congregants moved to the Dublin Hebrew Congregation, and today the building is a business center. The former Greenville Hall shul at 228 South Circular Road is still regal with its Greekstyle columns and arched windows. It, too, is now an office building.

One culinary landmark that continues to operate in the neighborhood is the Bretzel Bakery (1A Lennox Street), which opened in 1870. Though no longer Jewish owned, it still sells many kosher products (the community Web site has details). It’s also worth entering just for the aroma.

The nerve center of the old neighborhood today is at 3 Walworth Road, where the Irish Jewish Museum is housed in a former synagogue (353-1-490-1857; www.jewishireland.org/museum.html). On the ground floor, a series of display cabinets tells the religious, social and cultural story of Irish Jewry using photos, documents and artifacts. The second floor is the virtually unchanged sanctuary of the former Great Synagogue, so called because it seated as many as 100. In the back of the sanctuary are displays of Torahs and Torah covers, mezuzot and holiday items, including a mahzordecorated with a shamrock. Still used for simhas, the sanctuary has a low ceiling with hanging brass lamps, wooden pews and an old wooden organ for weddings.

Side Trip

The mythical Brigadoon-a village that reappears for one day every 100 years—is in Scotland, but Cork is something of an Irish-Jewish version of the same legend. Once home to a community of 400, Cork’s Jewish population has dwindled to five. But at least three times a year, for Passover, the High Holidays and Hanukka, Jews seem to appear from the mist. The synagogue fills with as many as 100 people speaking English and singing Hebrew melodies in a dozen accents.

Freddie Rosehill, an energetic man in his eighties who has led the community for decades, says that in the counties surrounding Cork there may be as many as 100 Jews, mostly expatriates; add to those the casual travelers and he says he gets a fairly constant stream of calls from people needing a Jewish connection. “There was a man from Wisconsin who called me from Shannon some years ago,” Rosehill recalls. “He needed a place to say Kaddish. He died shortly after his visit and every year his widow sends us a check; she said he never forgot the hospitality he received in Cork.”

Cork’s synagogue, located at 10 South Terrace, was built in 1896. It is a lavender stone structure with three arched doorways. The sanctuary has a central wooden bima, wraparound women’s gallery and a skylight. There is one scheduled Shabbat service per month. To arrange a visit, call Rosehill at 353-87-234-1274.

Cork’s Jewish immigrant families clustered in the Hibernian Buildings, a squat row of brick dwellings with sloped roofs and fat chimneys along Albert Road, south of the town center. Though the last Jewish family moved out over 30 years ago, the city honored the street’s Jewish history when it dedicated Shalom Park, directly in front of the Hibernian Buildings, in 1989.

Cork’s favorite Jewish son was Gerald Goldberg, who served as mayor in the 1980’s. In a linguistic honor, residents dubbed a footbridge over the River Lee, completed during his term, the Passover Bridge.

Cork is an excellent base for touring Ireland’s ruggedly beautiful south and west coasts. Don’t miss the pretty fishing town of Kinsale or Clonakwilty, Irish patriot Michael Collins’s hometown. For a good Irish pub experience on the edge of Cork (and five minutes from the Blarney Stone), stop at Blair’s Inn on R579 (www.blairsinn.ie). The smoked salmon is out of this world.

Personalities

In addition to the Jewish mayors of Dublin, Ireland also had a president of Jewish descent, Erskine Childers, one of whose ancestors was a 16th-century Sefardic refugee. Actor Daniel Day-Lewis is the son of an Irish-poet father and an English Jewish mother; though born and raised in London, he became an Irish citizen in 1993. American actor Ben Stiller is the son of comedians Anne Meara, an Irish-American convert, and Jerry Stiller.

Recommendations,

A good book to pack is Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce(Princeton University Press), a socioeconomic history of the community during its peak years, by Cormac Ó Gráda.

Don’t leave Dublin without exploring its theater and music scene. One very lively place to hear Irish music in Dublin’s trendy Temple Bar section is Oliver St. John Gogerty’s.

For more information on travel to Ireland, contact the national tourist authority (www.discoverireland.ie).

Even short-term visitors typically rave about Ireland. And those who stay longer? Stick around for more than a week and you may come home referring to yourself as an Irish Jew.

SCOTLAND JEWRY

Glasgow and Edinburgh

By Alan M. Tigay October 2008 Hadassah Magazine

Jews have prospered in Scotland’s two largest cities for over 200 years, building a strong religious tradition while becoming devout Scots.

Scotland seems to prove the notion that Jews get to the heart of a place under any circumstances. Scottish Jewish history is remarkably short—several American cities have an older Jewish presence—and even after Jewish communities took root, their numbers were never large.

But look at Scotland’s landscape, history or contemporary life, and Jews seem to be everywhere, not just as artists, doctors or political leaders, but in fields that seem quintessentially Scottish, such as distilling whiskey and making kilts.

And Scotland has returned the favor by getting to the heart of Jewish matters. Jewish students studied at universities in Edinburgh and Glasgow at a time when they were effectively barred from Oxford and Cambridge by the requirement of taking Christian religious oaths. When English novelists were still turning up their noses at Jewish characters, Sir Walter Scott gave the English-speaking world its first Jewish heroine—Rebecca in Ivanhoe.

Then there was the British foreign minister, scion of Scottish nobility, who was instrumental in the greatest gift of all: Arthur James Balfour, who, in 1917, wrote the declaration committing Great Britain to a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

History

Individual Jews came to live in Scotland in the late 1600s, and the first Jewish graduate of Glasgow University—Levi Myers from South Carolina—got his medical degree in 1787. But it wasn’t until the 19th century that there were enough Jews to form communities—Edinburgh in 1816, Glasgow in 1823. By midcentury, as trade and industry contributed to Glasgow’s explosive growth, it also attracted the large majority of Jewish immigrants.

In 1879, when Glasgow had a Jewish population of 700, the community inaugurated the Garnethill Synagogue, a landmark that is today the most historic Jewish building in Scotland. The congregation founders had moved up from England or come from Germany or Poland, many working as agents for textile and shipping companies based in Hamburg.

Two years after the opening of Garnethill, a new wave of immigration reached Scottish shores as a result of pogroms in Czarist Russia. Because Scotland’s main cities had close links with Baltic ports, a disproportionate number of Jews who arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were from Lithuania.

Some of the immigrants became itinerant salesmen, riding the Dundee train and stopping at towns in Fife. In the Scots-Yiddish dialect they developed, they were called “trebblers” (possibly a contraction of traveling peddlers). Others became furriers and tailors.

There was a smaller wave of Jewish immigration before and after World War II. Scotland’s Jewish population eventually peaked, sometime around 1970, at 17,000, with 15,000 in Glasgow.

Though anti-Semitism was rare in Scotland, there was one case that had echoes of the Dreyfus Affair in France. In 1908, Oscar Slater was convicted of murdering a woman in Glasgow. Many came to the conclusion that Slater was innocent and had become a suspect because he was both German and Jewish; it took 18 years to free him, but there was a prominent Scot who played an Emile Zola-like role in promoting justice in the case: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.

Community

One of the ways Jews have integrated into Scottish culture has been through veneration of literary heroes. Though Scott is the center of the prose universe, perhaps closer to the heart is the national poet Robert Burns, whom everyone refers to as Robbie Burns. Every January 25 there are Burns birthday events held all over Scotland (and in Scottish communities abroad). Notable are the university Burns suppers. Jewish students in Glasgow and Edinburgh typically hold their Burns Ball at the synagogue. They dress in kilts, sing “Auld Lang Syne” and dine on vegetarian haggis. They also have a double meaning when they toast “Robbie” (pronounced like the Hebrew word for “my rabbi”) Burns.

Whenever they wore plaid, Scottish Jews traditionally used a generic pattern rather than one officially recognized as belonging to a specific clan. But earlier this year, the Scottish Tartans Authority approved a Jewish pattern of blue, white, gold, silver and red. The pattern was submitted by Mendel Jacobs, Glasgow’s Chabad rabbi.

Glasgow’s Jews have followed a familiar occupation track over the generations. The peddlers and tailors are part of history, and today the community profile shows large numbers in law, medicine, high technology and accounting. In Edinburgh, the situation is similar, with perhaps a larger proportion in banking and academia.

In the late 19th century, Glasgow’s Jewish newcomers headed for the Gorbals district, south of the city center. Though once a gilded ghetto of Victorian and Georgian buildings, by the 1920s it was a slum. Eventually, as part of an urban renewal project, Gorbals was razed. With increased affluence, the Jewish community moved further south; today, aside from the Garnethill Synagogue, virtually all communal life takes place in the suburbs of Giffnock and Newton Mearns, home to five synagogues as well as a variety of other Jewish institutions.

But affluence has been accompanied by exit. Glasgow’s Jewish community today numbers about 5,000. Part of the decline can be attributed to the strength of Zionism among Scottish Jews, many of whom now live in Israel. Closer magnets are Manchester and London. While Edinburgh has also bid farewell to many of its Jewish residents, it has also attracted a fair number because of the growth of its financial sector; its community remains stable at about 1,000.

As the representative body of Scottish Jewry, the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities (011-44-141-638-6411; www.scojec.org) is the best place for information on individual synagogues, community events and kashrut.

Glasgow Sights

Central Glasgow is a beautifully revived city core, packed with landmarks, historic buildings and pedestrian malls. At the heart of it all is George Square, adjacent to the main train station and the point from which most bus tours begin.

The square also has a few points of Jewish interest. On the eastern end is City Chambers, an Italian Renaissance building noted for its interior décor of marble and mosaics. In the Upper Gallery are portraits of the city’s provosts (the equivalent of mayor), including Glasgow’s only Jewish provost, Myer Galpern, who served from 1958 to 1959.

George Square is also of interest from a literary point of view. The creation of a Jewish heroine (widely believed to be modeled on educator and philanthropist Rebecca Gratz of Philadelphia) certainly didn’t alienate Scott’s people. Though Glasgow’s central square is named for King George III and has statues of political and industrial leaders, the statue at the center that towers above all others from atop a column is that of Scott himself.

The Garnethill Synagogue, at 125/7 Hill Street (44-141-332-4151), is a 15-minute walk from central Glasgow. An imposing stone structure with Moorish, Romanesque and Gothic features, its entry is through a small row of columns flanked by twin towers. The stunning sanctuary has a central bima and an ornate Ark in the form of a Jerusalem-style tower. Worshipers sit on wooden pews and the second-floor women’s gallery is fronted by a wrought-iron railing and topped by sweeping arches. Above is a vaulted blue ceiling.

Though few Jews live today near the city center, Garnethill has Shabbat and holiday services. Like most of Glasgow’s synagogues, it is Orthodox.

Also located in the synagogue building is the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre (44-141-332-4911; www.sjac.org.uk). Though largely a research facility, the archive also has an exhibit room with photographs and artifacts highlighting the history of Jews in Scotland. Among the items are photographs of Jews in kilts, especially the Jewish Lads and Lassie’s Brigade, a local youth group. The group still exists, but its bagpipe band is a thing of the past.

One of the most attractive sections of Glasgow is Kelvingrove where, on opposite banks of a narrow river, sit Glasgow University and the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum—a red-sandstone structure built in Renaissance style. Glasgow’s premier art venue, the Kelvingrove has works by Rembrandt, Monet and Botticelli.

The Kelvingrove (44-141-276-9599; www.glasgowmuseums.com) is the best place to see works by Benno Schotz (1891-1984), a Jewish immigrant who came to be regarded as Scotland’s greatest sculptor. Among the pieces on display are his Self Portrait and Milky, a bust of his wife. Both are in terra cotta and date from 1953. Other Schotz works are the stone bust The Call and a bronze of the Glaswegian art dealer Alexander Reid. (Schotz was in good company; the museum also has a portrait of Reid by Vincent van Gogh.)

In the museum’s French Gallery are two paintings by Jewish artist Camille Pissarro: the Impressionist Tuileries Garden and the pre-Impressionist Banks of the Marne. The Dutch-Italian Gallery includes Jacob van Loo’s Susanna and the Elders.

The Kelvingrove has a collection of drawings and watercolors on Holocaust themes by the Prague-born artist Marianne Grant, who settled in Glasgow after World War II. Because the works are light sensitive, they are exhibited on a rotating basis.

Visitors can get a good sense of the contemporary Jewish community by heading to Glasgow’s southern fringe. The Giffnock and Newlands Hebrew Congregation (44-141-577-8250), on Maryville Avenue in Giffnock, is at the center of a communal complex that also includes the facilities of Jewish Care (a communal welfare service), senior housing, a mikve, burial society, Chabad, Maccabi and the weekly Jewish Telegraph.

The synagogue, with a membership of 800, has a modern sanctuary with light wooden pews, a central bima of black-and-white marble and modern lamps.

The most striking feature, however, is the set of stained-glass panes by the artist John K. Clark that hang from the ceiling above the Ark and in front of the room’s clear glass windows. The stained-glass pieces, with decorations of the Jewish year and the cycle of festivals, were removed from the Queens Park Synagogue, which closed in 2003.

Newton Mearns, near Giffnock, is home to the Glasgow Reform Synagogue (44-141-639-4083; www.grs.org.uk) at 147 Ayr Road. The 350-member temple sits, slightly below street level, behind an iron fence. Its white stucco building features a central gable bearing a Star of David.

Behind the Glasgow Reform Synagogue, on quiet Larchfield Court, is the Newton Mearns Hebrew Congregation (44-141-639-4000;www.nmhc.org.uk). A brown-brick building with a sloping roof, it is a 500-member Orthodox congregation.

Edinburgh Sights

If Glasgow is a city that rose up from urban decay, Edinburgh looks like it was lowered from the clouds. The New Town merely seduces the visitor with its orderly streets of Georgian houses. The Old Town, with its neoclassical grandeur, its spires and turrets, all perched on a hilltop, overwhelms. The heart of the Old Town is the Royal Mile, which begins at Edinburgh Castle and slopes down to the Palace of Holyrood, the queen’s residence in the Scottish capital. Across the street from Holyrood House is the dramatically modern Scottish parliament.

In the middle of the Royal Mile is John Knox’s House (45 High Street), which dates back to 1450 and is, by some accounts, the oldest building in Edinburgh. The house is a museum devoted to Knox, a leader of the Protestant Reformation, and offers a good look at Old Town life in the 16th century. A prominent feature of the building exterior is a relief sculpture, at second-story level, of Moses. The figure appears to be simultaneously bowing before God and pointing up to a sculpted sun, which has God written in Greek, Latin and English on its face.

But the most fascinating aspect of Moses’ position—however coincidental—is that he also faces the shop Geoffrey (Tailor) Kiltmaker a few feet away at 57-61 High Street (www.geoffreykilts.co.uk). Geoffrey is owned by the Nicholsby family, the only Jewish kiltmakers in Edinburgh.

Owners Geoffrey and Lorna Nicholsby helped revive kilt fashion in the 1970s. Their son, Howie, has pioneered the kilt as a piece of clothing not just for ceremonial occasions but for everyday use by hip urban youth; his line is called 21st Century Kilts (www.21stcenturykilts.com).

A 10-minute walk down the southward slope from the Royal Mile leads to the Newington section and the Edinburgh Hebrew Congregation at 4 Salisbury Road. Though the red-brick, Byzantine-style building dates from 1932, it traces its lineage to the community founded in 1816, making it Scotland’s oldest congregation. The sanctuary is a large square room with wooden pews and a centralbima, topped by a dome.

The congregation is officially Orthodox, though “traditional” in practice. In addition to Shabbat and holiday services, it hosts Jewish and local events, ranging from the annual Burns supper of Jewish students to meetings of the Edinburgh Literary Society, the Masons and the Edinburgh Friends of Israel. For information on services, events and kashrut, go to www.eh cong.com or call 44-131-667-3144.

Edinburgh also has a Liberal Jewish congregation, Sukkat Shalom (44-131-777-8024; www.eljc.org), which holds services on the first Friday of each month and a Shabbat morning service in the middle of each month.

Personalities

Scotland has been either the birthplace or home of prominent Jewish figures since the 19th century. Hannah Primrose, of the London Rothschilds, entered the nobility when she married Archibald Primrose, fifth Earl of Rosebery, who became Britain’s prime minister. Their son Harry, the sixth Earl of Rosebery, served as secretary of state for Scotland.

More recent figures include the late author and journalist Chaim Bermant, whose family immigrated to Glasgow when he was a young boy; artist and sculptor Hannah Frank, a native of Glasgow’s Gorbals district; cellist Richard Markson; and Torah scholar Aviva Zornberg, who was born in London but raised in Glasgow. Sir Jeremy Isaacs, leading television broadcaster and producer who became director of the Royal Opera in London, was born in Glasgow. David and Mark Knopfler, founders of the rock group Dire Straits, are the sons of a Hungarian Jewish refugee who settled in Glasgow.

Edinburgh is home to Malcolm Rivkind, the longtime Conservative member of parliament who, as minister of transport under Margaret Thatcher, bore a large responsibility for the Channel Tunnel between England and France.

Hazel Cosgrove was the first woman to serve as a judge on the Scottish Supreme Court.

Reading and Recommendations

Most of Chaim Bermant’s books are out of print, though they are available in secondhand stores and on the Web. According to The List, a leading magazine of Scottish culture, Bermant’s novelJericho Sleep Alone is one of the 100 best Scottish books of all time and the best on the Scots-Jewish experience.

Second City Jewry (Scottish Jewish Archives) by Kenneth E. Collins is a comprehensive history of the Glasgow community from its beginnings through World War I.

Garnethill Synagogue is within walking distance from hotels in central Glasgow. One place that is extremely comfortable and in the moderate price range is Fraser Suites, at 1-19 Albion Street (www.frasersuitesglasgow.co.uk).

In Edinburgh, the closest major hotel to the main synagogue is the Radisson SAS Hotel at 80 High Street (www.edinburgh.radissonsas.com). A small, charming alternative located amid the Georgian splendor of Edinburgh’s New Town is the Hudson Hotel, 9-11 Hope Street (www.hudsonhoteledinburgh.co.uk).

While Glasgow and Edinburgh can take days to explore, visitors should see the countryside as well. Loch Lomond is within half an hour of Glasgow, and Stirling Castle is less than an hour from Edinburgh. The Highlands and the islands are farther, but the scenery is spectacular.

Glasgow and Edinburgh both have lively entertainment scenes for all tastes, from theater to classical music to rock. One popular fixture is the Scottish klezmer group Moishe’s Bagel (www.moishesbagel.co.uk).

Like the Jewish community itself, Jewish music seems to have found its way to Scotland’s heart.