Kulanu Blog

This Shavuot, Jews around the world celebrate the receiving of Torah. Whether we remember the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai or engage with Jewish ideas from more modern times, we are blessed with access to an ancient and evolving tradition that brings meaning to our lives.

Yet, there are many people in the world who are thirsty to receive Torah and Jewish teaching, but lack the rabbis, teachers, and access needed to gain a Jewish education. They have not been known or helped by the wider Jewish community. The Jews of Suriname are one such group.

Suriname, the smallest country in South America, is home to the oldest surviving Jewish community in the Americas. Until recently, the Jewish community was disintegrating. Now, with help from Kulanu volunteers, the Jews of Suriname are working to reconnect with the Jewish past, and with the wider Jewish world.

Photo by Ryan Lee A Fong

In order to support this renaissance, the Jews of Suriname hope to send a group of its young people on Birthright Israel. There, Suriname’s young Jewish leaders will have the opportunity to see Israel, connect with Jews from all over the world, and learn Torah. Then, they are committed to returning to Suriname and bringing back what they have learned in order to strengthen and revitalize their community.
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Kulanu is offering TWO speaking tours for the coming year — JJ Keki from Mbale, Uganda, and Shi Lei of Kaifeng, China! (Please share this with decision-makers at your organization and pass it along to friends.)

JJ Keki, by Lorne Mallin 2009JJ Keki returns for another fall tour from October 8 to November 9, 2010. As a leader of the Abayudaya Jewish community of Uganda, founder of an interfaith coffee coop, and a Grammy-nominated musician, Keki’s engagements have been in high demand. Kulanu is delighted to have him back in North America to present updates on his unique community and the joint Kulanu-Abayudaya sustainable development and education projects.
Click here for more about the Kulanu-Abayudaya 2010 speaking tour!

(Thanks to Lorne Mallin for this photo of JJ Keki.)

Shi Lei’s 2010 Kaifeng speaking tour has also received rave reviews, and Shi Lei has agreed to return next year for three weeks only, from February 15th through March 7th, 2011, to share the history of the fascinating Jewish community of Kaifeng. A professional tour guide in China, Shi Lei has also studied Hebrew and Jewish studies for three years in Israel, and he is an experienced lecturer. Shi Lei will discuss what Jewish traditions were lost in Kaifeng and what was preserved through the centuries, and what some young Chinese Jews are doing to re-connect to their roots now.
Click here for more about the Kulanu-Kaifeng 2011 speaking tour!
(Thanks to the Sino-Judaic Institute for this photo of Shi Lei.)
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From Devin Naar (long-time friend of Kulanu’s development associate, Katie Rosenthal):

It is with great pleasure that I invite you to attend the lecture I will be giving in the Cavalla Room of the Bart Luedeke Student Center at Rider University, in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, on June 6, at 1 pm. I will have the honor to present the Tenth Annual Dorothy Koppelman Memorial Holocaust Lecture. The topic will be:

“Sephardic Jews in America and the Holocaust.”
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The International Society for the Study of African Jewry /ISSAJ (www.issaj.com) and the Centre of Jewish Studies of the University of London, are glad to announce a conference Jews and Judaism in Black Africa and its diasporas which will take place at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 30th and 31st October 2010 .

We invite proposals from researchers interested in the scholarly investigation of African Judaism, the history of African Jews and the development of Semitic discourses to participate.

The first International Conference of ISSAJ is dedicated to a broad and interdisciplinary overview of the study of black African Jewry. What is the state of this field of study? What are the main points of discussion?

A number of recent studies have dealt with the construction of Judaism or Jewishness among Black Africans and its relation to the historical experience of migrations, slavery and colonialism. The growth of Judaism, or Jewishness among Black Africans has been nurtured by shared historical dicourses about Jews and blackness that transcend national boundaries. In addition, Judaism, Jewishness, ideas of Semitic origins and Zionism have impacted on many Black African and African-American societies.

Particular perceptions of Jewish history have been viewed as a paradigm of African suffering and possible redemption, and can be found in a variety of political and religious discourses among Black Africans.

The topic of Black African Jewry, is not only restricted to the continent of Africa itself, but also includes Israel, the United States and Europe, where increasingly Black African societies are found which profess Jewish identities and practice Judaism in one form or another.

Submission deadline: April 30th, 2010 by email to edithbruder <at> gmail (dot ) com

Abstracts should succinctly state the problematic addressed 200 words. Applications must include the name of the presenter, university degrees obtained, and current institutional affiliation, if any.

Presenters will be expected to pay conference fees and ISSAJ membership to the association as well. More information on the conference organization (hotel booking etc) and the form to submit payments will follow.

Kulanu is very excited that Shi Lei, Kulanu’s spring speaker,  is mentioned in an article in the New York Times that discusses the Jews of China.  The article below is a brief primer on the Jews of Kaifeng, China. Click here to see Shi Lei’s speaking schedule, to see if he will be in a city near you.

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New York Times * China’s Ancient Jewish Enclave * April 4, 2010* by Matthew Fishbane * http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/travel/04journeys.html?pagewanted=1&sq=Jewish&st=cse&scp=2

THROUGH a locked door in the coal-darkened boiler room of No. 1 Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Kaifeng, there’s a well lined with Ming Dynasty bricks. It’s just a few yards deep and still holds water. Guo Yan, 29, an eager, bespectacled native of this Chinese city on the flood plains of the Yellow River about 600 miles south of Beijing, led me to it one recent Friday afternoon, past the doormen accustomed to her visits.

The well is all that’s left of the Temple of Purity and Truth, a synagogue that once stood on the site. The heritage it represents brings a trickle of travelers to see one of the more unusual aspects of this country: China, too, had its Jews.

Ms. Guo, who identifies herself as a Jew, says she hears it from scholars, visitors and Chinese people alike: “ ‘You Chinese Jews are very famous,’ they say. ‘But you are only in the history books.’ “

That seemed a good enough reason to come looking, and I quickly found that I was hardly alone. Ms. Guo and I were soon joined by a 36-year-old French traveler, Guillaume Audan, who called himself a “nonpracticing Jew” on a six-month world tour of “things not specifically Jewish.” Like me, he’d found Ms. Guo by recommendation, and made the detour to see what the rumored Kaifeng Jews were all about.

Earlier, Ms. Guo had brought us into a narrow courtyard at 21 Teaching Torah Lane — an alley once central to the city’s Jewish community, and still home to her 85-year-old grandmother, Zhao Cui, widow of a descendant of Chinese Jews. Her one-room house has been turned into a sort of dusty display case, with Mrs. Zhao as centerpiece.

“Here are the Kaifeng Jews,” Ms. Guo said, a little defiantly. “We are they.”

We were surrounded by signs that supported Ms. Guo’s statement: A mezuza was attached to the door frame. A copy of the Sh’ma, widely considered the most important of Hebrew prayers, decorated with Chinese lettering, hung on the wall. A menorah sat by a Chinese-style altar displaying a black-and-white portrait of Mr. Zhao.

Indeed, some 50 descendants of Kaifeng’s Jews are embracing this legacy and relearning Jewish ways. And a few, like Ms. Guo, are tapping a quirky vein of religious tourism.

From the 10th to the 12th century, Kaifeng was the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty and a cosmopolitan center on a branch of the Silk Road, attracting Chinese imperial suitors and Persian merchants with camels. Amid this ferment was a small community of Sephardic Jews, who arrived most likely from Persia and India as traders, or perhaps fleeing the Crusades.

Scholars still debate the time of their first arrival, but for at least 700 years, Jews prospered free of persecution, largely out of mind of the various Chinese dynasties that dubbed them “blue-hatted Hui” — people from the West. They settled into trades and, around 1163, built a synagogue. In 1605, the peripatetic Italian Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci met one of their emissaries in Beijing and reported their existence back to Europe.

But time, isolation and assimilation took their toll. When European missionaries in Kaifeng purchased a 17th-century Hebrew Torah in 1851 (it is now housed at the British Museum in London, one of 15 known Kaifeng scrolls), no locals could read it. The synagogue, which had fallen into neglect after repeated flooding, was never rebuilt.

Yet for 150 years following the death of the last rabbi, tiny embers of a heritage still glowed in Kaifeng. Grandparents told their grandchildren, as Mrs. Zhao told Ms. Guo: “You are a Jew.” Without knowing why, families avoided pork. And at Passover, the old men baked unleavened cakes and dabbed rooster’s blood on their doorstep.

Most Jewish-themed tours of China skip Kaifeng, focusing instead on the immigration of persecuted European Jewry, in cities like Shanghai, Harbin, Tianjin and Beijing. Thanks to American, Israeli and European support of places significant to their own past, Harbin and Shanghai, for example, enjoy a regular flow of tourists to museums and sites of synagogues, restored though no longer used for prayer.

Kaifeng, by comparison, attracts word-of-mouth backpackers and three or four rabbi- or scholar-led Jewish heritage groups a year. Most visitors, according to Shi Lei, a 31-year-old descendant of Chinese Jews who has been leading tours here since he was sent to Israel to study Hebrew and Judaica, stay for a day, “have a look, and leave.”

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The Jerusalem Post * Feb 4 2010* by PAUL M. FOER, KINGSTON * http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Features/Article.aspx?id=172223

On a warm January evening, I am seated in a synagogue with doors and windows open to the palm trees outside. Such a scene might take place in the US only in Hawaii or Florida, but it is even odder that my feet are resting on a sand-covered floor as we welcome Shabbat. It’s not the typical service which I am used to and it’s not just because of the tropical surroundings, nor is it because of the hazan’s place on a stepped-up platform in the middle. Neither is it simply because of the balcony above or because of some of the melodies and chants are unfamiliar to me. But behind the wooden doors on the bima, Torahs rest in the ark, and despite the tropical surroundings and the unusual atmosphere, at least to me, the Torahs are the clear reminder that though somewhat different from my perspective, this is a synagogue.

Among the many synagogues that may have existed at one time or another during the past 2,000 years, only a few disappeared due to earthquakes and hurricanes. Although this is the only remaining synagogue in Jamaica, where I came for a conference on Caribbean Jewry, and its cultural roots go back to the late 15th century, the present structure that houses the United Congregation of Israelites goes back only about a hundred years. Sha’are Shalom (Gates of Peace) was rebuilt in 1912 after the 1907 earthquake destroyed the 1888 building. The first synagogue in Jamaica was built in Port Royal in the 17th century, and in nearby Spanish Town a synagogue was built in 1704.

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Would you please consider this special request? For just $119 a day every student could have two substantial meals a day.  The Gervis Foundation matching funds must be available by May 1st. Please give online at green.olm.net/~kulanu/donate or send a check, payable to Kulanu, to Kulanu, 165 West End Ave, 3R, New York, NY 10023, USA. Be sure to write “food program” in the online comments or in the memo on your check.

We would be grateful for any amount you can give. Kulanu and the students of Semei Kakungulu High School thank you in advance.

Please share this on email lists, Facebook, and Twitter! Here’s a “tweet-length” message you can use on Facebook and Twitter:

Enid Bloch, a photographer and scholar from Buffalo, NY, in collaboration with Shi Lei, has made a superb slideshow on the history of the Kaifeng Community. Shi Lei will be working with this slideshow as the basis for his presentations.

You can view this Kulanu-Kaifeng slideshow at www.kulanu.phanfare.com.