Torah Scroll or Torah Codex? Synagogue Prayer as a Focal Point of Interaction between Local Romaniot and Immigrant Sephardi Jews around 1500

This article analyzes the relationship between forest resources, refugees, and the host population. The findings of the research suggest that the host population are heavily dependent on the local forest for their daily needs such as fuelwood, timber, grazing area, fodder for domestic animals, foods, and medicine in addition to cultural and esthetic needs. The forest has also been relied upon for agricultural needs such as manufacture of agricultural tools, maintenance of irrigation water systems, erosion control, and fertilizer needs. The forest was under a sustained demand as any other Terai forest of Nepal. After the arrival of refugees in 1992, the demand for forest resources increased substantially. Initially, the construction of the refugee camps decreased the total forest area and also required some felling of trees. More significantly, the refugees themselves became active users of the forest resource, which generated extra pressure on the forest and created scarcity of forest resources. Before the arrival of the refugees, forest management and monitoring of illegal use of the forest resources were carried out by the government through its local forester office. The local residents were active users of the forest resources, but were passive in managing and maintaining the forest resource. However, competition from the refugees instilled a desire in the local population to safeguard and protect the dwindling resource against the external threat by creating the Humse Dumse Community Forest.

Reviewed by: Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America by Shari Rabin Joseph P. Slaughter (bio) Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America. By Shari Rabin. (New York: New York University Press, 2017. Pp. 208. Cloth, $37.00.) Seventeen-year-old telegraph worker Edward Rosewater struggled to hold down a job, roaming throughout the Midwest in search of reliable [End Page 377] employment. Although a Jew, Rosewater attended a smattering of Christian churches, including a Tennessee revival. Characters with shifting religious identities like Rosewater serve as a vehicle for Shari Rabin’s ambitious argument that the religious lives of nineteenth-century Americans demonstrate continuity with the much-discussed “nones” of the twenty-first century.1 Rabin argues that the fluid religious identity that characterized Jews like Rosewater prior to the Gilded Age was not exceptional, but rather the “default” setting for religiosity in America (3). Heartily embracing “mobilities” theory, which examines the influences of various phenomena on people’s movements, Rabin interprets the religious lives of her subjects who self-identify as “Israelites” in a subliminal recognition of their status as physical and spiritual wanderers (7). Challenging and insightful, Rabin’s work helps address a glaring hole in American religious history prior to the Gilded Age: the religious lives of Jewish Americans. Rabin’s opening chapter explains her concept of “unfettered mobility” which she argues distinguishes the Jewish experience in America (21). One of her key arguments is that the framework of European state regulation dictated the physical mobility of Jews in fundamentally different ways than in America, where such regulation was almost nonexistent. For example, while European governments classified Jews as a distinct race, American customs and census forms contained no such category. Functionally, Jews were “white” in America, and consequently, Jewish males were mobile out of choice in contrast to the forced mobility that characterized Jewish life in Europe. Rabin admits this mobility had its limitations, as many states and municipalities passed laws restricting mobile Jewish professions like peddling. Likewise, the proliferation of Sabbatarian laws in the nineteenth century forced Jews to work on their Sabbath day, while eschewing market activity on Sundays. The regulatory context of the American state and unfettered mobility hindered young Jewish migrants’ attempts to form families and follow halakhic rituals (those based on the totality of Jewish law, encompassing both the oral and written Torah). Instead, nineteenth-century Jewish migrants “embraced ideals like romantic love, the nurture of children, and sentimentalized death” in ways that could fulfill Jewish tradition, but [End Page 378] just as often competed with and refashioned halakhic norms regulating marriage, sex, divorce, circumcision, education, and death (59). For example, while halakhic law and European governments legislated against Jewish intermarriage, lack of such bureaucratic constraints and few Jewish women in America meant that intermarriage was more prevalent. An expectation of romantic love further complicated adherence to the older marriage norms. More ambitiously, Rabin argues that the situation of Jews on America’s frontier “fueled” the formation of Reform Judaism in response to a scarcity of traditional Jewish material culture: kosher foods, Torah scrolls, prayer books, and other tools of ritual such as shofar trumpets (80). Capitalism was slow to provide the goods necessarily to reliably practice Judaism. Defective Torah scrolls and inauthentic kosher were just two challenges faced by those who sought to live as “authentic” Jews. Consequently, reformers like Isaac Mayer Wise advocated for a pragmatic Judaism that accounted for the constraints of the American market and geography. If capitalism failed to support Jewish orthopraxy, Rabin argues instead that a combination of government and private innovation fostered a “mobile infrastructure” that forged bonds between erstwhile Jewish “strangers” (103–104). Railroads, the postal service, Jewish newspapers, Jewish fraternal organizations, itinerant rabbis, statistical data collection, and personal correspondence fostered bonds amid young, mobile American Jews. However, Rabin contends these innovations could also undermine this “imagined community” since the very nature of a mobile infrastructure worked against the unification of the Jewish community under a unified minhagim (Jewish rites and custom, including prayers and liturgy), particularly across the nation’s western regions. It was this attempt to form an imagined community of Judaism that...

Secureni, a town in the Hotin judeţ, in Bukovina province, in the northeastern part of Romania (today: Sokyryany, Ukraine), is located 7 kilometers (5 miles) from the Dniester River. It is 111 kilometers (69 miles) east-northeast of Cernăuţi. In 1930 there were 4,200 Jews in Secureni, representing 73 percent of the town’s total population. By June 1941, the number of Jews had decreased, after some of the wealthiest and Zionist Jews were deported by the Soviet authorities to Siberia. The commandant of the Hotin Gendarmes Legion was Maior Traian Drăgulescu. The prefect of the Hotin judeţ was Joe Gherman, who was succeeded by Colonel Virgil Popovici. The Romanian Army occupied Secureni on July 10, 1941. The first army units that entered the town denigrated the Jews and incited the local population to mistreat them. The locals abused the Jews for a few days, ransacking their homes, injuring some, and killing 87 who were thought to be pro-Soviet. Torah scrolls were desacralized and torn ...

387 Ab Imperio, 1/2011 Irena VLADIMIRSKY История икультура российского и восточноевропейского еврейства: Новые источники, новые подходы. Материалы международной науч- ной конференции, Москва, 8-10 де- кабря 2003 г. / Ред. О. В. Будницкий, К.Ю.Бурмистров,А.Б.Каменский, В. В. Мочалова. Москва: “Дом еврейской книги”, 2004. 424 с. ISBN: 5-98370-017-0. There is a certain difficulty in reviewing conference proceedings due to two main reasons: the multiplicity of subjects and the number of contributors . Every conference despite its announced theme always refers to a greater number of problems. The reviewed publication is not an exception from this general rule: the articles differ in length and content, some of them can be characterized as serious research essays while others are rather of informative character. Two problems are central for this collection: a) the problem of location and variety of primary sources on Jewish history and b) the problem of self-identification searches on the individual and community levels. The accessibility of primary sources is indeed an acute problem for the researchers in this field. Personal archives and archives of various Jewish organizations in the former Soviet Union for a long time were unavailable due to strict restrictions. A great number of the local sources, so-called pinkasei kehilot (community registry books), were destroyed during WWII, others still need a comprehensive systematization . Over the last decade, the objects of material culture (Jewish cemeteries, synagogues, Torah scrolls, etc.) and oral history records have become increasingly used as independent and important source of information on the Jewish life in Eastern Europe. The chapter by the late John Klier of the University College London focuses on the study of the Russian Jewish history in the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century. Actually, in the USA the interest in Jewish history aroused after WWII and followed by reestablishment of the Institute for Jewish Research (YIVO), which was originally founded in Vilna in 1925 as Yiddish Scientific Institute. First Institute’s publications were made in Yiddish, and only in the beginning of the 1950s first publications in English appeared. The real pioneers in the field of the Jewish studies in the United States were Louis Greenberg and Isaac Levitats. From the very beginning, the problem of access to archival materials became critical for NorthAmerican researches; they could use only available secondary sources or pri- 388 Рецензии/Reviews mary sources from Israeli archives. The situation slightly improved in the middle of the 1980s, when American scholars began to consult archives in Poland and study the history of Jews in Poland and Lithuania. They also were allowed into Soviet archives to research on some “neutral ” subjects, such as the history of Russian periodicals (the media coverage of the “Jewish question” and manifestations of anti-Semitism ) and Russian revolutionary movements. Some important works by Hans J. Rogger and Ezra Mendelsohn were published then. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, access to archives was facilitated, but the identification of sources became even more complicated because of the dissolution of the formerly centralized archival system, and redistribution of documentary collections among different regional authorities, national depositaries, and academic institutions. In her essay, Olga Belova from the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences refers to the studying of objects of material culture in former Jewish communities of Podoliya and Western Belarus. One of the first ethnographical expeditions in this region of the Pale of Jewish Settlement was organized by S.An-skii in 1912–1914, when Jews comprised about 80% of the local population. The latest expedition was organized by the Institute of the Slavic Studies and the Center “St. Petersburg Judaic Studies” in 2000–2003. During the expedition, rich material on Jewish presence in the region before WWII was collected, while the survived synagogues, cemeteries, and community buildings in the former Jewish quarters of towns and villages were mapped. The working group interviewed many locals, both Jews and gentiles. It is concluded that the problem of preserving the historical memory still receives little attention from the local authorities in both Belarus and Ukraine. Dmirtii Feldman from the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (RGADA) describes the difficulties in locating documents on the Jewish history in Russian archives. As it is known, RGADA stores documents dated back to the eleventh century, and the documents relating to the Jewish history (most of them refer to the first partition of Poland) are...

ABSTRACTThe 1940s in Cyprus, was extremely sensitive to national movements and balances. That’s why the people of the island were not indifferent to the sudden arrival of Jewish refugees. This article describes the history of the Cyprus camps, in which the British forcibly detained tens of thousands Holocaust survivors who had sought to brave the British naval blockade of Palestine, from the perspective of the Greek Cypriot press. Two main coverage prisms can be discerned: description of the British policy and its effects on the Jewish refugees, and the effects of the establishment of the camps for Cyprus’s local population.

In most German cities today, refugees are welcomed and supported by a large and growing number of individuals and collectives whose volunteer work covers almost all aspects of refugee reception. At the same time, the arrival and establishment of refugees has been met with xenophobic protest and violence in many German localities. Focusing especially on the example of a local welcome initiative, but also considering exclusionary civil-society practices, this contribution explores recent civil-society involvement in refugee reception against the legal and political context of asylum in Germany. It will be argued that measures of forced dispersal, deterrence and discomfort, in particular, have materially and discursively produced the framing of current refugee movements as a ‘crisis’ and have triggered the differing actions and reactions among local populations. The fact that the ‘refugee crisis’ has been presented not only as a threat, but also as a ‘humanitarian crisis’ that needs to be tackled by both German state actors and civil society has encouraged the wave of positive reactions. Furthermore, taking into account local negotiation processes of asylum is significant if we want to understand the recent and often contradictory civil-society responses. The paper draws on observations from an ongoing research project on local migration regimes and urban asylum, as well as on other studies dealing with refugee reception in Germany.

Reviewed by Helga Embacher Department of History University of Salzburg Jüdische Gemeinden, Vereine, Stiftungen und Fonds: "Arisierung" und Restitution, by Shoshana Duizend-Jensen. Veröffentlichungen der Österreichischen Historikerkommission, Bd. 21/2. Vienna-München: Oldenburg Verlag, 2004. 347 pp. €49.80. Before the Anschluss in March 1938, the Viennese Jewish Community was one of the richest and liveliest in Europe. It ran schools, a home for the elderly, a hospital, and a home for blind Jews, to mention just a few of its institutions. Out of 200,000 Austrian Jews, most of them residents of Vienna, approximately 130,000 managed to escape Austria and 70,000 were killed in the Holocaust. In her book, a work commissioned by the Austrian Historians Commission, Shoshana Duizend-Jensen shows that in addition to the famous Jewish community of Vienna, 34 Jewish communities existed in the Austrian provinces. They owned property and ran synagogues. There were also more than 600 Jewish clubs and associations in Austria, such as the famous sport club Hakoah, a variety of religious and Zionist societies, fraternal lodges, and 325 charitable foundations. Jewish life in pre-war Vienna was active and heterogeneous. After giving an overview of the property owned by the Jewish communities and the numerous Jewish institutions before the Anschluss in 1938, Duizend-Jensen analyzes their "Aryanization" and liquidation, and finally discusses the complicated question of restitution. She shows that the liquidation was done in step-by-step fashion, whereby the so-called Stillhaltekommissar für Vereine, Organisationen und Verbände played the major role. While some clubs were dissolved immediately after the Anschluss, a few—mainly the Zionist associations—were permitted to exist for a while. The assets of those that were dissolved were transferred to the Stillhaltekommissarfür Vereine, Organisationen und Verbände and, to a major extent as well, to the Viennese Jewish community, whereby 25–40 percent of all assets were retained by the National Socialists in the form of fees such as the Aufbauumlage and Verwaltungsgebühr. The Viennese Jewish Community, on the other hand, was forced to use all the money transferred to it to support impoverished Jews and to finance the emigration and finally the deportation of Austrian Jews. It was also put under great pressure to sell its own property far below its market [End Page 168] value. As Austrian historian Doron Rabinovici1 has shown, the Jewish community was put into a very difficult position after the Anschluss. The National Socialists appointed the leaders of the Jewish community and forced them to fulfill their demands, which went as far as supporting and financing the deportation of those who failed to emigrate. By forcing the Jewish community to sell all the assets of Jewish institutions, the perpetrators could relieve themselves of the responsibility of supporting the impoverished Jewish population.2 Duizend-Jensen also discusses the expropriation of synagogues and prayer rooms (Betstuben) during the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9, 1938 when synagogues were burned all over Germany and thousands of Jewish men sent to Dachau. In Vienna alone 42 synagogues were demolished and the land on which they had stood was Aryanized by individuals as well as by the city government. In addition, more than 110 prayer rooms were also dissolved. Duizend-Jensen points out that, like the synagogues, most of the prayer rooms also possessed ritual objects such as torah scrolls and prayer books, all of which disappeared or were destroyed. Concerning the question of restitution, Duizend-Jensen's publication makes clear that it is very hard to come up with an estimate of the total losses suffered by the Jewish community. She shows that 230 out of 300 pieces of Aryanized or liquidated real estate were restituted, whereas libraries, archives and torah scrolls were not returned to their rightful owners. She also emphasizes that in many cases the process of restitution turned out to be very complicated and protracted. In the end, the...

In today’s Korean society, the crisis of rapid decline in local population, coupled with a decreasing population, poses one of the biggest challenges in preparing for future generations. Moreover, the issue of rapid decline in local population may present a significant threat to democracy, a foundational principle of the Constitution, beyond just being a concern at the level of industrial or administrative policies for balanced regional development. This article points out that democracy is also weakening due to the crisis of rapid decline in local population, and proposes solutions in terms of the implementation of democracy, focusing on institutions such as elections, political parties, and direct democracy. Firstly, from the perspective of localities and regional populations, there are issues with the proportionality of electoral districts and regional representation. As an extreme imbalance in population between metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas forms, the citizens of the latter experience weakened representation in the election of their legislators, leading to the emergence of large electoral districts or the abnormal setting of a single district for areas lacking regional homogeneity or community cohesion. Under the current small constituency plurality system, maintaining strict population proportionality presents a difficult challenge to overcome. To harmonize the proportionality of electoral district populations with regional representation, considering a constitutional amendment to transform the unicameral legislature to a bicameral system where the upper house has regional representation, or adopting a regional proportional representation system for legislative elections, are potential institutional changes that should be explored. Secondly, recognizing regional political parties as a way to promote local democracy could help enhance local political autonomy. Current Party Law recognizes only national parties, and the Constitutional Court has upheld these provisions. However, the essential function of a party is to participate in the formation of political will of the people, which does not necessarily have to be nationwide. Recognizing regional parties could bolster local democracy and should be considered for enhancement. Thirdly, in response to regional issues more actively and flexibly, the diversification of local government structures should be actively recognized, and strengthening direct democracy measures is necessary to address issues in areas experiencing extreme population decline.

Pre-1939: Berezów, village, województwo poleskie, Poland; 1939–1941 and 1944–1990: Berezovoe, Rovno oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Beresowo, Rayon Rokitno, Gebiet Sarny, Generalkommissariat Wolhynien und Podolien; post-1991: Berezovo, Rivne oblast’, Ukraine Berezów is located 32 kilometers (20 miles) north–northeast of Rokitno in a remote area of Polesie. In 1921, there were 58 Jews residing in the village. By the 1930s, their number had increased to about 100. On September 17, 1939, the Red Army arrived in Berezów, which became part of the Soviet Union. In the fall of 1939, it is probable that the Jewish population of Berezów was increased by the arrival of refugees from central and eastern Poland. Soon after German forces occupied the region in July 1941, two SS men accompanied by two Poles arrived in the village of Glinne, not far from Berezów, to arrest a woman named Muszka Szuster. After saying good-bye to her family, Szuster was taken to Berezów, where the German authoriti...

Pre-1939: Zbaraż, town, powiat center, Tarnopol województwo, Poland; 1939–1941: Zbarazh, raion center, Ternopol’ oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Zbaraz, Kreis Tarnopol, Distrikt Galizien, Generalgouvernement; post-1991: Zbarazh, raion center, Ternopil’ oblast’, Ukraine Zbaraż is located 19 kilometers (12 miles) northeast of Tarnopol. The 1931 census recorded 3,000 Jewish residents. During World War II, the Jewish population reached 5,000 with the arrival of refugees from western Poland. The town was occupied by German troops on July 4, 1941. Until August 1941, Zbaraż was controlled by a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur), but authority was then transferred to a German civil administration. Zbaraż became part of Kreis Tarnopol, in Distrikt Galizien. Until April 1942, the Kreishauptmann in Tarnopol was first Gerhard Hager, then Mogens von Harbou und von der Hellen. Anti-Jewish Aktions in Zbaraż were organized and conducted by the Security Police outpost (Sipo-Au...

This paper studies the impacts of the construction of a new highway on the built-up land use dynamics in the southern neighboring area of Beirut in Lebanon, whereas the impact of transport infrastructure on land use dynamics has been widely studied, few examples are found for developing countries where data are not widely available. Moreover, it is difficult to assess the impact of the infrastructure among several external and internal factors. Areas of built-up land use in Beirut Southern entrance in Lebanon were extracted from land use classification maps for years 1985 to 2019 using 30 m resolution satellite reflectance images in ArcGIS software. To compute an accessibility index to the population, average car travel speeds were determined for major local roads and population distributions were collected for years 2004 to 2019. Results revealed that after the completion of highway’s construction, the development of built-up land use has increased by 13.9%, but also that the land use dynamics depends highly on the unexpected arrival of Syrian refugees between years 2011 and 2013. The results were analyzed with the help of several interviews of stakeholders.

BackgroundDecision Analytic Models (DAMs) are established means of evidence-synthesis to differentiate between health interventions. They have mainly been used to inform clinical decisions and health technology assessment at the national level, yet could also inform local health service planning. For this, a DAM must take into account the needs of the local population, but also the needs of those planning its services.Drawing on our experiences from stakeholder consultations, where we presented the potential utility of a DAM for planning local health services for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the UK, and the evidence it could use to inform decisions regarding different combinations of service provision, in terms of their costs, cost-effectiveness, and public health outcomes, we discuss the barriers perceived by stakeholders to the use of DAMs to inform service planning for local populations, including (1) a tension between individual and population perspectives; (2) reductionism; and (3) a lack of transparency regarding models, their assumptions, and the motivations of those generating models.DiscussionTechnological advances, including improvements in computing capability, are facilitating the development and use of models such as DAMs for health service planning. However, given the current scepticism among many stakeholders, encouraging informed critique and promoting trust in models to aid health service planning is vital, for example by making available and explicit the methods and assumptions underlying each model, associated limitations, and the process of validation. This can be achieved by consultation and training with the intended users, and by allowing access to the workings of the models, and their underlying assumptions (e.g. via the internet), to show how they actually work.SummaryConstructive discussion and education will help build a consensus on the purposes of STI services, the need for service planning to be evidence-based, and the potential for mathematical tools like DAMs to facilitate this.

Before the arrival of European Jewish refugees, China had two influential Jewish communities, the Sephardi Jews and the Russian Ashkenazi Jews. This chapter is about the development of the Jewish communities and their support for European Jews fleeing to take refuge in China.

Pre-1939: Brody, city, powiat center, Tarnopol województwo, Poland; 1939–1941: raion center, L’vov oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Kreis Zloczow, Distrikt Galizien, Generalgouvernement; post-1991: raion center, L’viv oblast’, Ukraine Brody is located 87 kilometers (54 miles) east-northeast of Lwów. In 1939, of 18,020 residents, 8,365 were Jewish. In 1940, there were 12,617 Jews, but by mid-1941, of 22,218 residents, just 10,070 were Jews.1 The sudden increase in the Jewish population was caused by the arrival of many Jewish refugees from western and central Poland in the autumn of 1939. The rapid decrease again by mid-1941 reflected the deportations, especially of Jewish refugees, carried out by the Soviet People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) in a series of actions in 1940 and the first half of 1941. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, a small part of the Jewish population was able to evacuate to the east, leaving almost 9,000 Jews in Brody.2 Unit...

Due to the lack of written records or inscription, the origin and affiliation of Indian Jewish populations with other world populations remain contentious. Previous genetic studies have found evidence for a minor shared ancestry of Indian Jewish with Middle Eastern (Jewish) populations. However, these studies (relied on limited individuals), haven’t explored the detailed temporal and spatial admixture process of Indian Jewish populations with the local Indian populations. Here, using large sample size with combination of high resolution biparental (autosomal) and uniparental markers (Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA), we reconstructed genetic history of Indian Jewish by investigating the patterns of genetic diversity. Consistent with the previous observations, we detected minor Middle Eastern specific ancestry component among Indian Jewish communities, but virtually negligible in their local neighbouring Indian populations. The temporal test of admixture suggested that the first admixture of migrant Jewish populations from Middle East to South India (Cochin) occurred during fifth century. Overall, we concluded that the Jewish migration and admixture in India left a record in their genomes, which can link them to the ‘Jewish Diaspora’.