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The guided Jewish tour

Ben G. Frank embarks on enviable itinerary, sadly he fails to take us along.

scattered tribe cartoon 521
Photo by: Avi Katz
There is a certain PATH OS to the life of Jews in far-flung places. A few hardy souls, usually elderly, often neglected or beleaguered, hold on to vestiges of religious ritual in tumbledown old synagogues in a last-gasp attempt to remain Jewish. Their struggles can make for poignant tales and are rich material for writers and journalists, who come calling in search of those private little dramas that are inherent in conflicts of identity.

Then there’s the other type of “Jewish World” story: the tales of Jews abroad. A member of any other ethnicity on a prolonged stay abroad is simply an expat; a Jew is a citizen of the Diaspora – a sort of geographical purgatory, a halfway house between exile and redemption. Theology considers all Jews outside the Promised Land to remain in a state of exile, even if they have never set foot in Israel and feel perfectly at home in the land of their birth..

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