Haveil Havalim, at Dad’s place.
Carnival of the Cats, at IMAO, but written by Dad.
What is this, an early Father’s Day thing?
While I’m at it, I was over at Ellison’s earlier, and found this moving and wonderful sermon given by his daughter for Kol Nidre. It speaks particularly to me because my grandfather always thought that his family was descended from Spanish Jews who pretended to convert, but who kept their faith hidden until they could emigrate from Spain.
We have lost so many of our own to forced conversions and the outlawing of Judaism. That’s one reason why the yellow badge story echoed so fast, and so fiercely, across the blogosphere and even the media.
Have you ever read The Ghost of Hannah Mendes by Naomi Ragen? It’s set in modern times but contains a great many flashbacks to Gracia Mendes’s life in sixteenth-century Europe. Fascinating reading. Gracia Mendes used the enormous fortune she inherited to rescue Conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity who continued to practice Judaism in secret) from countries under the sway of the Inquisition. Her husband and brother-in-law, and eventually she, ran an Underground Railroad that existed several hundred years before the one in the US.
I’m thinking of blogging about this later. In the late 70’s because of the involvement of the late Rabbi Herman Neuberger of Ner Israel, many Jews who escaped Iran made their way to Baltimore. There was a family who lived near us. The father’s father would walk to Shul. But he would walk in the street; not on the sidewalk.
He had learned from his youth that the sidewalk was not a place for a Jew to be; he had to defer to his betters. This a man who lived under the Shah too. Even if the current regime doesn’t require the stars don’t you figure that a number of ither restrictions exist? I do.