European Judaism

Any plans we had for this issue of European Judaism were put on hold after what happened on September 11, 2001. Certain events become both personal and public landmarks which freeze moments in our lives and memories. They are often the most tragic ones. We remember where we were, whom we were with, what we were doing at the precise moment when we heard about the assassination of President Kennedy or Yitzhak Rabin. Such an experience is clearly that moment on or around September 11, when we first heard about or saw the appalling events in New York and Washington, played and replayed on our television screens.

A Survey of New Year Sermons

Facing Fundamentalism

Meditation for Friday, September 15

Israel between Ethics and Politics

‘Truly the Times I Live in Are Dark’

We Must Not Give Up

Some Words for Erev Rosh Hashanah

Reflections

After Judgement: Freedom

A Muslim Calls for Sanity

Media, the Intifada and the Aftermath of September 11

The Sane Person Within

Remembering and Forgetting: A Reflection on Jewish Experience

Tributes and Memoirs

Irene’s Work in the Jewish Community

Our Irene

The World of Christian Counselling

Irene

Irene Bloomfield

A Tribute

While the illustrious crowd may frequent Mallorca for some sophisticated sun, I convinced my wife that the island also represented the perfect, perhaps once-in-a-lifetime Passover plan. In mid-winter, a colleague, Gloria Mound, informed me that she was organising Passover in Mallorca for the local descendants of the island’s Jews, who had converted to Catholicism – some willingly but most under duress – beginning in the fourteenth century. Gloria and her husband Leslie direct Casa Shalom, an institute in Gan Yavneh, Israel that researches the worldwide descendants of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews, many of whom converted to Catholicism. A vacation they took in Ibiza turned into a three-year stay.

‘It is a great pleasure and satisfaction for me to have the privilege of welcoming you all.’With these words, Claude Goldsmid Montefiore, standing where I am standing now, give or take a few feet, opened the inaugural session of the first international conference of Progressive Jews on Saturday evening, 10th July 1926.

Tribute to Yehuda Amichai Little Life in Big World By Rifkah Goldberg

Adam By Amiel Schotz

zwischensprachen die seele meines grossvaters By Anne Blonstein

Poet, seek the stars; one neared Aleksey Koslov

Anna Akhmatova By J.L. Kubicek

Enigmas Severed Train By Jo Ezkiel

Raising the Dead By Don Segal

Foreign By Allen C. Fischer

Ignaz Maybaum: A Reader, edited by Nicholas de Lange, Berghahn Books 2001, 224 pp., ISBN 157181 720 4 hardback; ISBN 1 57181 720 1 paperback.

“Good News” after Auschwitz? Christian Faith within a Post-Holocaust World, edited by Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, Macon Georgia, Mercer University Press, 2001, 215 pp., $30. ISBN 0 – 86554-701-7

After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany by Michael Brenner (translated from the German by Barbara Harshav), Princeton University Press, 1997, 196 pp., cloth $24.95, £17.95. ISBN 0-691-02665-3