Features
LEEUWARDEN, Netherlands — When Jacob Nathan de Leeuwe found himself returning nearly two decades ago from his home in a suburb of Amsterdam to this isolated idyll he calls “the end of the world,” it undoubtedly was the pull of his roots.
De Leeuwe’s family had lived in this semi-autonomous region in the northern Netherlands known as Friesland for 200 years, and a unique Jewish community with its own customs, traditions and even language had thrived here.
His mother was raised in Leeuwarden, Friesland’s capital, among 1,500 Jews concentrated in a Jewish quarter that had several kosher butcher shops, a kosher cafe and a Jewish education network going from kindergarten to high school.
But then the Nazis came and the Friesland community was wiped out. Today only 50 or so Jews remain in Leeuwarden among the approximately 650,000 people living in the region.
TULSA — Wearing a tattered house robe and with a cigarette dangling from her hand, the pregnant woman in a low-income neighborhood opened the door.
Would she cut down on smoking now that her first child was on the way, the expectant mother was asked by the visiting nurse?
The response: “This baby has taken everything else from me and she’s not going to take the cigarettes, too, and if you ask me to do anything else I’m going to slap you in the face.”
But then the woman confessed to ...
SCOTTSDALE — Matt Bycer is like any other 33-year-old attorney who wakes up at the crack of dawn to exercise.
Except that rather than sweating to a P90X regimen, Bycer, in a T-shirt, shorts and cowboy hat, lugs 170 buckets of water across his backyard in Scottsdale, Ariz., to water his etrog farm.
The Phoenix native has been nurturing his citron project since he first started collecting etrogs in 2007. With a 60% survival rate for each etrog tree he plants, Bycer is optimistic that he’ll b...
CHATTANOOGA — Sometimes, Benjamin Rosenthal thinks about leaving the small town of Indianola, Miss., pop. 11,000, where he spent most of his life.
He wants to go somewhere bigger, with more Jews.
“It’s very easy to lose your identity in the Bible Belt in a town when you are the religious minority,” said Rosenthal, 25.
In the Bible Belt, religion rules and Jesus is king, particularly in the small towns and cities that make up the region in the US South.
Jews comprise less than 1% of t...
ROSH HASHANAHSECTION A
ATTORNEY-activist Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, head of Shurat HaDin Israel Law Center in Tel Aviv and one of the most famous women in Israel, promptly answers her office phone at 6 p.m. Israel time.
Although she probably won’t get home to her six children (three are triplets) for several hours — unless court proceedings necessitate a late transatlantic flight — conviction trumps fatigue.
Since 1997, Darshan-Leitner and a group of dedicated lawyers have been on the f...