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Here are some of our favorite discoveries from recent travels. We hope you enjoy them, and please share your own favorites with us so we can include them in a future newsletter.

Jewish Cultural Tours

Purim in Paris!
www.adathshalom.org

In addition to hanging out in the Pletzl, Ruth's Paris "home away from home" is Adath Shalom, the only Conservative (Masorti) synagogue in Paris. A huge crowd turned out to celebrate Purim this year.

New vocabulary: a "grogger" (noisemaker) is "une crécelle" in French!

Chassidic Tours
www.jewishtours.com

See at a distance an undesirable person;
See close at hand a desirable person;
Come closer to the undesirable person;
Move away from the desirable person.
Coming close and moving apart,
How interesting life is!
~ Gensho Ogura ~

In a world increasingly fragmented along ethnic and religious lines, we rarely have the privilege of "coming close", of being respectful visitors in a culture very different from our own. Chassidic Tours provides precisely this: outreach and insight into a unique element of New York's cultural mosaic-Chassidic Judaism. Inspired by their late spiritual leader Rebbe Menachem Schneerson to let the light of their faith shine in the world, tour guides offer a fascinating and informative visit to important community landmarks, and the chance to schmooze (chat informally) with people as they go about their daily tasks.

This is a unique opportunity to learn and to discover the mystery of Chassidic life not from outsiders, but from Chassidic Jews themselves. Discover how the Chassidic Movement is distinguished by its enthusiasm for meditative prayer, joyous service of the Creator, and intellectual mystical insight.

The tours are not intended to proselytize or convert, but rather to offer openness to all and the chance to build cultural bridges into a community that has been misunderstood and misrepresented. Direct, person-to-person contact like this helps us to understand how we are at the same time profoundly different and profoundly alike as human beings.

Tenement Museum, New York City
www.tenement.org

Walk in the footsteps of your grandparents or great-grandparents at the Tenement Museum on New York's Lower East Side! The Museum's mission is "to promote tolerance and historical perspective through the presentation and interpretation of the variety of immigrant and migrant experiences on Manhattan's Lower East Side, a gateway to America."

Here you can visit tenement apartments that have been carefully and sensitively restored to interpret the lives of actual residents from different historical periods. "These are the stories of immigrant families who struggled, against all odds, to make their way in America."

The Museum uses history as a springboard for considering the contemporary aspects of issues like immigration, assimilation, adaptation and prejudice. While in the neighborhood, don't miss Kehila Kedosha Janina (www.kkjsm.org) around the corner at 280 Broome Street:

"Below Manhattan's skyscrapers, just around the block from today's Chinatown on the historic Lower East Side of New York City lies a hidden treasure few know about...

A 2,000-year-old culture virtually unknown, even to its neighbors. A tiny group. A minority within a minority. They are called Romaniotes. An obscure branch of Judaism, which few Jews have ever heard of, with traditions dating back to Roman times.

They are Jews who, after the destruction of the Second Temple, were sent on a slave ship to Rome. Instead, a storm forced them to land in Greece, where over the next 2,000 years, they developed uniquely different ethnic and religious customs.

Today, all these years later, you can visit the only synagogue in the Western Hemisphere of this tiny, obscure Jewish community. The Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue and Museum. Still operating in its original form."

Berlin Jewish Museum
www.juedisches-museum-berlin.de

A phenomenal collection in a phenomenal building designed by Daniel Libeskind. 2,000 years of Jewish life in Germany presented with intelligence and sensitivity. In the best tradition of museum exhibits, objects are described and shown in their various contexts rather than as isolated artifacts.

Museums and Sights of France

Bleu de Lectoure
www.bleu-de-lectoure.com

In this beautiful workshop, you can learn about the ancient process of dying with woad (Isatis tinctoria). Since 1994, the artisans here have revived this extraordinary blue pigment and applied it to arts, design, textile and decoration. Today they work with a farming co-operative to produce the plants, as well as a regional research laboratory and local dyers and weavers.

Musée de l'Ecole Publique
www.musee-de-lecole-publique.com

In the beautiful Gascon village of St. Clar is a little treasure of a museum. Whether your schooldays are the subject of fond remembrance or rueful reflection, you'll find an amazing collection of objects from French rural schools from 1830-1960 in recreated classrooms as well as a teacher's apartment from 1931. Every summer, the museum offers the chance to take the famous "cértif" exam, or Certificat d'Études Primaire from the early 20th century. Bon courage!

Set your sights a little lower and answer a couple of sheets of questions as you visit the collections and you can still take home a "Témoignage de Satisfaction"!

Témoignage de Satisfaction

Musée de la Poupée
www.museedelapoupeeparis.com

Paris' doll museum is a treat for little girls of all ages. Its permanent exhibition is housed in a series of delightful vignettes, and the facility includes a boutique and a doll hospital. Special activities for adults and children are offered regularly.

Ruth made a point of visiting a temporary exhibition in the spring in honor of the 100th birthday of Bécassine ("snipe" in French), a cultural icon of French childhood. Created in 1905 by the girls' magazine "La Semaine de Suzette", this simple but endearingly good-hearted Breton peasant girl is beloved of French-speaking children everywhere. (Trivia: her real name is Annaïk Labornez). She is one of the first comic book characters, the first comic heroine, and one of the first characters to be licensed to appear on embroidery patterns, tableware, linens, and so on. At least one Bécassine doll is a standard feature of any French little girl's room (to say nothing of teens and even nostalgic adults)!

Raggedy Ann and Andy Bécassine's all-American cousin Raggedy Ann was born only ten years later; she and her younger brother Andy occupy a similar cultural niche. Bon anniversaire, Bécassine, and Happy Birthday, Raggedy Ann! (www.raggedyann-museum.org).

Séviac
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierre.caubisens/

Open from March through November, this vast and luxurious Gallo-roman villa shows what the good life was like in the South of France in the 4th and 5th centuries. Built around a central courtyard, the villa contained lavish bathing facilities and over 30 exquisite mosaic floors which you can enjoy today.

Bayonne

While in Baionan (Bayonne), spend some time at the Euskal Museoa, the Basque Museum (www.musee-basque.com). Here you can learn about this utterly unique culture whose language is unrelated to any other on earth. Where did the Basques come from? As they will tell you, "Before boulders were boulders and before G-d was G-d, the Basques were already Basque." All aspects of Basque life are presented in permanent and temporary expositions.

Montreal-based writer Taras Grescoe says, "Bayonne is where the secret of chocolate-making first came to France, brought by Sephardic Jews driven from Spain and Portugal by the Inquisition. Until the nineteenth century, chocolate-making provided one of the city's main raisons d'être." They still serve it "bitter, spicy and in a cup"; drink a chocolate toast to the Jewish merchants of Bayonne at:

Atelier du Chocolat, 2, Rue des Carmes (+33) 05 59 25 72 95
Cazenave, 19, Arceaux du Port-Neuf (+33) 05 59 59 03 16
Daranatz, 15, Arceaux du Port-Neuf (+33) 05 59 59 03 55
Paries, 14 Rue Port-Neuf (+33) 05 59 59 06 29
Pudobeyat, 66 Rue d'Espagne (+33) 05 59 59 20 86

Keokuk, Iowa

www.keokukiowatourism.org

Meredith Willson summarized the Hawkeye character in "Iowa Stubborn" from "The Music Man":

Oh, there's nothing halfway
About the Iowa way to treat you,
When we treat you
Which we may not do at all.
There's an Iowa kind of special
Chip-on-the-shoulder attitude.
We've never been without.
That we recall.
We can be cold
As our falling thermometers in December
If you ask about our weather in July.
And we're so by God stubborn
We could stand touchin' noses
For a week at a time
And never see eye-to-eye.
But what the heck, you're welcome,
Join us at the picnic.
You can eat your fill
Of all the food you bring yourself.
You really ought to give Iowa a try.
Provided you are contrary,
We can be cold
As our falling thermometer in December
If you ask about our weather in July.
And we're so by God stubborn
We can stand touchin' noses
For a week at a time
And never see eye-to-eye.
But we'll give you our shirt

And a back to go with it
If your crops should happen to die.

So, what the heck, you're welcome,
Glad to have you with us.
Even though we may not ever mention it again.

You really ought to give Iowa
Hawkeye Iowa
Dubuque, Des
Moines, Davenport, Marshalltown,
Mason City, Keokuk, Ames,
Clear Lake
Ought to give Iowa a try!

For about nine weeks over this past winter and spring, Ruth did exactly that: gave Iowa a try and loved it! The project that took her to Keokuk was for a French manufacturer of products derived from corn. She taught French language and culture to the company's IT staff and spent weekends exploring and enjoying the heartland:

"I've stood on a bridge over the Mississippi and
watched literally HUNDREDS of bald eagles
wheeling overhead, talked about Native American genealogy with an elderly Cherokee woman,

town

walked in the footsteps of Mark Twain along the Big Muddy in Hannibal,

parade

played a mountain dulcimer, enjoyed Tulip Time in Pella (good thing there were tourists since it looked like the entire town was in Dutch costume and marching in the parade)

and learned that a credit card makes an effective although not a dandy ice scraper for car windshields.

pottery Spent an afternoon in Bonaparte, Iowa, on the Des Moines River, with a woman whose passion is the Bonaparte Pottery which operated from 1865-1895. The University of Iowa has done some excavations on the site, and she is putting together bits of information like a detective to understand how it all worked. You can still see clay handprints that the potters left on some of the beams.

display

Bentonsport, a tiny village farther up the Des Moines, and heaven on earth. One of the local residents has spent a lifetime searching for and learning about Native American spearpoints, arrowpoints and other artifacts, and has built a log cabin to display his collection. Using local woods of different colors he has also built extraordinary display cases for the collection.

Garrison Keillor noted that few of us are so blessed that we have been able to stand on a gravel road in the Midwest and watch a prairie sunset.

prairie sunset

On the way back from the Amana Colonies one Sunday, I pulled over to watch and recite Carl Sandburg (being an unrepentant lit major has its advantages):

O prairie mother, I am one of your boys.
I have loved the prairie as a man with a heart shot full of pain over love.
Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise or a sky moon of fire doubled to a river moon of water.
. . .
I speak of new cities and new people.
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.
I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down,
  a sun dropped in the west.
I tell you there is nothing in the world
  only an ocean of to-morrows,
  a sky of to-morrows.

I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say
at sundown:
To-morrow is a day.

Who else but a US American could write this? And as I was standing there, a guy in a beat-up pick up truck wearing farmer's overalls and a John Deere cap who undoubtedly voted for Bush stopped and asked if I was having trouble with my car and could he help out. Sometimes I just really, really love this country!"

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