Teacher blog

photo taken by Joshua Bousel, on September 8, 2010, CC licensing

For many people, Rosh Hashanah is the festival of apples. There are, of course, the newly ripened, crisp quarters dipped in honey to embody our wish for a sweet new year.

photo taken by Matthew Hine, on July 3, 2009, CC licensing

It is always nice when a dish can be a conversation piece. This classic favorite from the Austro-Hungarian Empire has never failed to start a round of stories and memories from my guests. Some variety of Cold Fruit Soup was a traditional menu offering at all the Catskill resort hotels. You might try asking people where they first tasted it. You will surely hear some wonderful stories.

photo taken by Virtual Eric, on January 3, 2009, CC licensing

Ingredients:
- 3 kilos/6 lbs chicken parts
- 3 carrots, scraped and cut into bite-size pieces
- 4 onions, unpeeled
- 2 or 3 celery stalks with leaves
- 1/2 celery root (if stalks are not available), peeled
- 1 bunch of parsley
- 1 parsley root, scraped and cut into pieces
- 1 turnip, scraped and cut into pieces salt and pepper

photo taken by Magnus von Koeller, on July 3, 2006, CC licensing 

Vienna looms large in Jewish history and memory.

photo taken by Stewart Morris, on June 25, 2005, CC licensing

Trieste sits at the end of long sliver of Italy that curves around the northeastern corner of the Adriatic like a slim, outstretched finger. 

Dzialoszyce, Poland

The first time I visited Dzialoszyce, a dusty village about 50 kilometers northeast of Krakow, an elderly woman approached as I stood with several companions, gazing at the gaping roofless ruin that had once been the town's grand synagogue.

She mumbled a few words of Yiddish in our direction, then apologized that it had been such a long time since she had spoken that language.

 A mighty hand reaches out and, forming a tight fist, grasps the bough of a tree and breaks it sharply off. The image is extraordinary, even surreal. It is so vivid that you can almost hear the crack of the wood.
     The tree is the Tree of Life and the hand is the hand of God -- or maybe that of the Angel of Death. The portrayal, found repeated over and over in the Jewish cemetery in Radauti, in northern Romania, is one of the remarkable sculpted images found on Jewish tombstones in several counties in East-Central Europe.

(Gustav Mahler, 7 July 1860 – 18 May 1911)

The years 2010 and 2011 mark a memorable double anniversary for the great conductor and composer Gustav Mahler -- 150 years since his birth in an out-of-the-way Czech village and 100 years since his untimely death in Vienna at the age of 50.

Mahler conducted in great cities all over Europe -- among them Hamburg, Budapest, Prague, Leipzig, London, Moscow and, most notably, Vienna, where he directed the Court Opera for 10 years.

It's more than ten years since the end of the bloody series of wars that broke apart the former Yugoslavia and made much of the Balkan peninsula a strictly no-go area for tourists.

Happily by now, most parts of the region are once again wide open to visitors. The stunningly beautiful Dalmatian coast of Croatia in particular has again become a summer playground for hundreds of thousands of foreign holiday-makers, many of them from Israel, and even Bosnia-Hercegovina has upgraded its tourism infrastructure in a bid to welcome guests.

PRAGUE -- Lying between the Vltava River and the Old Town Square, Prague's medieval "Jewish Town," Josefov, is one of the most popular attractions in a magical "golden city" that draws millions of tourists a year. Here, amid historic synagogues, the Old Jewish Cemetery, the Jewish Town Hall and other major sights, is the Ground Zero of Jewish Prague: the stomping ground for heroes and villains and the evocative background setting for a host of old legends, not to mention the cradle of present-day Jewish life.