Jerusalem Tales
My Home, My History, and My Heart
by Sara Yoheved Rigler
I live in a 900-year-old house inside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. When we expanded our miniscule bathroom by tearing down its meter-thick wall, we found the capital of a pillar form the 6th century. We also found pottery shards from the First and Second Temple periods. The shards now sit on our living room shelf, in front of our wedding picture. Sometimes I gaze at them and wonder about the Jews who lived in this place, a few meters below the level of our house, over 2,000 years ago.
The Sacred and the Cruel
by Prof. Benjamin Z. Kedar
My earliest memory relating to the Esplanade—the Temple Mount—is a mistaken notion. As a child in postwar Nitra, Czechoslovakia, I was convinced that the imposing domed building on the cover of a Passover Haggadah we had at home was none other than the Temple of Jerusalem, for whose speedy rebuilding we implored God in a concluding hymn of the Passover seder as well as in sundry other prayers.
By Virtue of Jerusalem
by S.Y. Agnon
As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of the Exile. But always I regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem. In a dream, in a vision of the night, I saw myself standing with my fellow Levites in the Holy Temple, singing with them the songs of David, King of Israel, melodies such as no ear has heard since the day our city was destroyed and its people went into exile.
Pearl Harbor
by Moshe Garson
Rudy Rabinowitz and Judy Cameron lived in Bay Ridge, a pleasant Brooklyn neighborhood that hugged New York Harbor. Lots of Swedes and Norwegians and sprinklings of many different nationalities, including some assimilated Jews. Yom Kipppur meant no more to Rudy than Chinese New Year—he didn’t know it was Yom Kippur when Yom Kippur came around—but he did not consider himself an assimilated Jew. His brother had changed his name from Rabinowitz to Rogers. That he considered to be assimilation.
Moe Miller
by Moshe Garson
The names Kevin and Scott were out of the question, and Adam and Joshua, the other big two, sounded yuppie to Joe Miller. “I’ll give my son a Biblical name,” said Joe. “I’ll call him Moses.” So the birth certificate said Moses Miller, but from infancy everyone called him Moe. Joe Miller. Moe Miller. Father and son.
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Jerusalem
by Sarah Shapiro
Last week they came from America to Jerusalem for the wedding. All the relatives – the agnostics and the conservatives, the orthodox and the atheists and the female rabbi, the Reconstructionist and the Federation activists and the Jews for whom Jewishness seems so irrelevant that they don’t bother to define themselves – kept joining hands to dance.
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