Exploring New York's Jewish heritage
NEW YORK — Museums and historic sites, the world's largest menorah, and a trendy new Tribeca restaurant inspired by an old-school Catskills resort. They're all part of Jewish New York, with a heritage that stretches back 400 years and a vital contemporary community that's reinterpreting old traditions for the 21st century.
New York City has the largest concentration of Jews in the world outside of Israel, according to the Jewish Databank, which put the city's Jewish population at 1.4 million in 2002. The stories of European Jews who arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are relatively well-known and easy to find in places like the Lower East Side. But visitors with an interest in Jewish New York will also want to explore many other parts of the city, from the Jewish Children's Museum in Brooklyn to a 17th century graveyard on a Chinatown side street.
An obvious place to start is Ellis Island, where the ancestors of so many American Jews first set foot on U.S. soil. Boats run from Battery Park to the National Park site in New York Harbor. The Ellis Island museum offers a wealth of artifacts connected to Jewish immigrants, including a photo of a kosher kitchen that opened on the island in 1911 and an eye chart with a line of Hebrew letters.
From where the boat lets you off on your return to Manhattan, you can walk to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park City. Through summer 2012, the museum is hosting a fascinating exhibit about Emma Lazarus. Lazarus' sonnet "The New Colossus," with its famous line "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses," is engraved on a tablet in the Statue of Liberty's pedestal, and Lady Liberty can be seen from the museum windows.
Comfort foods
A little farther uptown you'll find a newcomer restaurant with nostalgic ties to New York's Jewish past. Kutsher's Tribeca, which opened in November at 186 Franklin St., is the brainchild of Zach Kutsher, whose grandparents ran Kutsher's Country Club, a popular Catskills resort in its mid-20th century heyday.
Sonnet From The Portuguese - News
Lazarus' sonnet "The New Colossus," with its famous line "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses," is engraved on a tablet in the Statue of Liberty's pedestal, and Lady Liberty can be seen from the museum windows.
Only fifty sonnets from Rumi's Divan of Shams were selected and translated into Italian by the famous orientalist Alessandro Bausani in 20th century, he said. He pointed to Turkish, English and French translations of works by Rumi calling them
Pedro Ayres Magalhães's Portuguese band Madredeus (pictured left) is on stage again after a six-year sabbatical, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the start of their career featuring the amazing new voice of Beatriz Nunes.
