New Rooms, New Chapters, New Hope - Column for the Temple Beth-El Las Cruces Adelante Newsletter for April 2018

    New York City will be thematically and visually represented at this year’s “Chai Five” Jewish Food and Folk Festival. It really isn’t that easy to create an ambience in Las Cruces, New Mexico that truly approximates the feeling of walking on a street in Manhattan, Brooklyn or Queens (based on my own personal experience). We can, of course, present culinary offerings that are common in or near a city with a large Jewish community. 

     During Rhonda’s and my “spring break” visit to the Big Apple, we were treated to the sights, tastes and smells of characteristic Jewish foods. Eating establishments on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (near where the New York Karols live) feature bagels, lox and various cream cheeses; kosher meat dishes (chicken schawarma has become my favorite); and a breakfast café, where Adam, Juli and I heard several conversations in Hebrew. A nearby supermarket touted the widest selection of Passover items in the city. One bakery displayed small challot, challah rolls and sweet delicacies right in the window. My choice for lunch at “Russ and Daughters” at the Jewish Museum featured a pumpernickel bagel, cream cheese and lox with a Dr. Brown’s diet black cherry soda.   

While these foods may represent a definite component of Jewish identity, we know that Jewishness goes much deeper than stimuli for our taste buds. Our visit to the Jewish Museum on March 19 was not just about food. There was a major exhibit of items from their long-term collection that are not always on display. That included ancient artifacts that bore a 7-branched Menorah and six-pointed stars; paintings and sculptures that portrayed Jewish holiday observances; and a presentation of home symbols such as mezuzot, chanukiot, wine cups and Havdalah sets in various shapes and sizes. There was an ark that had been housed in a synagogue in Sioux City, Iowa, up-river from my hometown of Kansas City.

    What affected me the most were the items displayed in two adjoining galleries. The first gallery presented items from Terezin, the Theresienstadt "camp-ghetto" in Czechoslovakia, which existed between November, 1941 and May, 1945. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website, Theresienstadt served as a transit camp for Czech Jews to be sent to other

camps, and, later, as a ghetto-labor camp where the Nazi regime created a cultural life that successfully concealed the nature of the camp itself and the ultimate deportations. The exhibit included an art piece with verses from Psalms that were suggested to the artist by Rabbi Leo Baeck, a liberal rabbi in Germany who survived throughout the war and settled in London afterwards. There was a chanukiah and a piece of jewelry with multiple symbols, both fashioned in the camp. There were drawings that depicted scenes in Theresienstadt that offer evidence of life there at that tragic time. 

    In the next room was an exhibit of stereographic photographs from the Middle East from the years before and after 1900. There were viewers provided for visitors to look at the images in their “near-3D” format. One stereograph showed worshippers at the Western Wall (men and women together). There were other scenes of Jerusalem and Jewish settlement in the land at the time. 

    Before we moved on to another floor, I took a moment to reflect on what I had just seen. There were images and items that reflected vibrant Jewish communities over the course of centuries. There were paintings and expressions of our ritual and religious tradition that had been created even amid the harsh reality of a seeming ghetto/village that expressed anti-Semitism through subterfuge and hidden cruelty. There were visual portrayals of the developing Jewish community in what is now the State of Israel, which is approaching the 70th anniversary of its creation. 

    As we now observe our festival of Passover, with its theme of freedom, it bears a strong message for us in the present day. We are standing on the shoulders of Jews and their communities that demonstrated commitment and persistence in sustaining Jewish life. We, as members of a Jewish congregation and community in the United States, have the unique opportunity to maintain that spirit for the present and the future. We declare, as the Passover Seder concludes, “Next Year in Jerusalem!” May the “next year” and the decades to come in Las Cruces and throughout the world bring an ongoing renewal of the Jewish soul, in our taste buds, for sure, but, primarily, in our minds, hearts and souls!