The Western Hemisphere’s Only Romaniote Synagogue

Kehila Kedosha Janina, located in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was founded by a community of Greek Jews who—unlike most of their Greek coreligionists—are not Sephardim but Romaniote. Marjorie Ingall writes:

The Romaniote are a people who view themselves as neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi. According to their oral tradition, they’re descended from Jews who were put on a slave ship to Rome after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE; a storm grounded the ship in Greece, and there they stayed for 2,000 years. Their unique culture flowered. They didn’t speak Ladino, the Spanish-Hebrew hybrid language of Sephardi Jewry [who arrived in Greece later on]; they spoke their own Judeo-Greek language, sometimes called Yevanic—a mix of Greek, Hebrew, and Turkish with a few Spanish words thrown in. . . .

[D]uring the Middle Ages, Jews fleeing persecution in Italy, France, and Germany made their way to Greece as well, and, after 1492, they were joined by Sephardi Jews who had been expelled from Spain. Many Romaniote communities were absorbed into the broader, wealthier Sephardi culture. But Jews in the isolated town of Janina (or Ioannina), near Greece’s Albanian border, kept their Romaniote heritage alive.

These Jews wound up founding Kehila Kedosha Janina. They began arriving in New York shortly before the turn of the 20th century, during that period of American history when so many Jewish immigrants converged on the Lower East Side. They founded their congregation in 1906 and built the synagogue in 1927. . . .

Nearly 90 percent of Greek Jews died in the Holocaust. . . . Today, Greece suffers from the growing anti-Semitism that plagues much of Europe.

Read more at Tablet

More about: History & Ideas, Lower East Side, Romaniote Jewry, Spanish Expulsion, Synagogues

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society