Travel and Food

An impressionistic tour of Germany and Austria

Our guide book indicated the location of Hitler’s underground Chancellery on our walk. The place where he died has no marker anywhere. There are nomarkers anywhere in the world memorializing Hitler’s existence. The location shown on our map was Potsdamer Platz, where an entire city within the city of Berlin was under construction. We counted twenty-five giant cranes in this ten square block area. I could only approximate where the Chancellery was, and so a symbolic spit was the best I could do to memorialize “Der Fuhrer.” [Ira Spector]

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International, Jewish History, Travel and Food

Wildfires illustrate difference between spiritual and physical

Even while back in Petaluma, our family experienced life on the wild side, or better worded: wild-fire side. We awoke to find ashes on the car and all windows in the house closed to protect from the low air quality.  As we kept a watchful eye as the Lightning Complex Fires continued to spread, we tried to look at the events around us to see what we could learn to become better people. We looked at the difference between the physical and spiritual.  [Rabbi Rafi Andrusier]

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Lifestyles, The World We Share, Travel and Food, USA

Making a feline friend in a new sunny city

After graduating college in New York, I moved to Seattle.  Having finally landed my first job, I was excited to put my aeronautical engineering degree to work and design jumbo jets for a premier aerospace company.  Everything was great—Seattle has a thriving Jewish community, a vibrant arts scene, and spectacular nature.  However, it also has rain.  A lot of rain.  Did I mention the rain? [Teresa Konopka]

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Lifestyles, San Diego County, Teresa_Konopka, The World We Share, Travel and Food

Lebanese memories prompted by Beirut explosion

George Salameh, owner of the Alforon Restaurant on El Cajon Boulevard near 59th Street, remembers living within the area near the port of  Beirut that was leveled by the terrible blast on August 4  that killed at least 177 people and wounded or injured 6,000 more, leaving as many as 150,000 people homeless, and causing property damage estimated between $10 billion and $15 billion. [Our Shtetl San Diego County by Donald H. Harrison]

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Donald H. Harrison, Middle East, Obituaries & memorials, San Diego County, Travel and Food, USA

COVID-19 separates couple, threatens Polish restaurant

Marcia Vineberg was almost packed and ready to rejoin her husband.It’s complicated. They had moved from Vancouver to this Tampa Bay community on Florida’s gulf coast 10 years ago to care for her mother, who had fallen. Harriet Rand, 95, died in December. And Gerald Vineberg a Canadian native who spent half of each year as a businessman traveling in Europe and Asia, wound up opening The Nosh Kosher Cafe in Tarnow, Poland, three years ago. Then COVID-19 arrived. [Bruce F. Lowitt]

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Bruce F. Lowitt, International, Travel and Food, USA

A book reviewer’s search for Jewish stories

The author, born in 1990, earned her Mathematics degree from Middlebury College and completed an MFA in fiction at Columbia University in 2018. The novel is set in crisis plagued New York around 9/11 2001. The author drops almost poetic hints; “Lower Manhattan opened its gates to the general public again…a light northward breeze perfumed the air with drywall dust and soot…we looked south and saw the great gap tooth against the gullet of the sky.” We were at war, from where would the next terror come? [Oliver Pollak, PhD)

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Oliver Pollak, Travel and Food

Those dang fish must be prejudiced!

It has been a constant sense of amazement to both my Christian wives, how quickly I can pack a suitcase when we leave on a trip. The spouses would begin packing a week or more before we set out. I never pack until the last few minutes before going out the door. There is a simple explanation, consider the history of my Jewish ancestors, and you can see why. For the last two thousand years, we have always been ready to leave town at a moment’s notice. With that in mind, it is easy to understand when I exclaim: “A Jew can spot anti-Semitism earlier and from more subtle sources than any other person.” We can pick them out in a sold Super Bowl football game, or smell one in a tropical jungle. I personally discovered a previously unknown, festering group, during a four-month road trip my wife Carole and I took around the U.S.A. when we first retired. [Ira Spector]

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Sports & Competitions, Travel and Food, Trivia, Humor & Satire

Face to face with the Cambodian genocide

Lieng, our fortyish Cambodian woman guide, told us prisoners were brought to these rooms for four months of torture before they were killed. They were defiled day and night without rest. The jailers extracted the names and locations of all their relatives and friends from them. Those people were also arrested and brought to the prison. The first people to be killed once wore glasses. The Khmer Army leaders were ignorant peasants and reasoned that anyone who wore glasses was an intellectual and hence were the enemy. People threw away their glasses and stumbled around when they became aware of this irrational thinking. A similar fate followed for any professional person, doctor, teacher, businessman, bureaucrat, etcetera. The legacy of this stupidity is, that Cambodia desperately needs to rebuild its intellectual capital to fully function as an independent nation. Today it is totally dependent on the aid of other nations to support basic services and repair war damaged structures. [Ira Spector]

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International, Travel and Food

Morocco a model for U.S. multiculturalism

As the United States embraces improving race-relations, Black culture and heritage become more than just an expression of the Black community, but something that is inherently all-American. As the movement brings light to nationwide change, it may be helpful to consider the methods of Moroccan multiculturalism, where cultural protection is tied to development, limiting socioeconomic divides and welcoming diversity. [Jacqueline Skalski-Fouts]

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International, Jewish History, Lifestyles, Middle East, Science, Medicine, & Education, Travel and Food, USA