Crystal Cruises Expands Jewish Heritage Tours

 This post was originally published in my En Route blog on the LA Jewish Journal


By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Here’s what looks like some good news for my first En Route post…. Crystal Cruises has announced it will expand its Jewish heritage tour options for the 2012 season.
According to a press release,  the tours “visit neighborhoods, museums, monuments, synagogues, and more somber sites in/near Palamos, Berlin, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Dublin, Hamburg, Rome, Odessa, St. Petersburg, and Israel. “

Announced highlights include:
Haifa: A kibbutz, the ancient holy city of Safed, Golan Heights, and a second-century Jewish burial ground.
Girona: El Call, one of Europe’s best-preserved Jewish Quarters, by Segway or foot.
Dublin: The homes of Dublin’s Jewish Lord Mayors and ex-Israeli President Herzog, the first dedicated day school, and Jewish cemetery.
Stockholm: The Jewish Museum and three local synagogues, from Stockholm’s first (1790) to one whose interior is originally from another synagogue in Hamburg.
Berlin: Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, the Grosse Hamburger Strasse deportation area, Otto Weidt’s broom-making factory, and the 205,000-square-foot Holocaust Memorial (two different excursions).
Athens: Athens’ Jewish Museum, containing 8,000+ domestic and religious artifacts from 2,300 years of Greek Judaism.
Odessa: Kosher refreshments, Ukraine’s only Jewish history museum, Shomrei Shabbos synagogue, and Beit Grand Jewish Cultural Center.
Hamburg: Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, home of 100,000+ WWII prisoners.
Ashdod: Jerusalem’s Western Wall, Old City, and Holocaust artifact-filled Yad Vashem memorial.

For more details see the Press Release

Crystal Cruises Expands Jewish Heritage Tours

 This post was originally published in my En Route blog on the LA Jewish Journal


By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Here’s what looks like some good news for my first En Route post…. Crystal Cruises has announced it will expand its Jewish heritage tour options for the 2012 season.
According to a press release,  the tours “visit neighborhoods, museums, monuments, synagogues, and more somber sites in/near Palamos, Berlin, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Dublin, Hamburg, Rome, Odessa, St. Petersburg, and Israel. “

Announced highlights include:
Haifa: A kibbutz, the ancient holy city of Safed, Golan Heights, and a second-century Jewish burial ground.
Girona: El Call, one of Europe’s best-preserved Jewish Quarters, by Segway or foot.
Dublin: The homes of Dublin’s Jewish Lord Mayors and ex-Israeli President Herzog, the first dedicated day school, and Jewish cemetery.
Stockholm: The Jewish Museum and three local synagogues, from Stockholm’s first (1790) to one whose interior is originally from another synagogue in Hamburg.
Berlin: Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, the Grosse Hamburger Strasse deportation area, Otto Weidt’s broom-making factory, and the 205,000-square-foot Holocaust Memorial (two different excursions).
Athens: Athens’ Jewish Museum, containing 8,000+ domestic and religious artifacts from 2,300 years of Greek Judaism.
Odessa: Kosher refreshments, Ukraine’s only Jewish history museum, Shomrei Shabbos synagogue, and Beit Grand Jewish Cultural Center.
Hamburg: Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, home of 100,000+ WWII prisoners.
Ashdod: Jerusalem’s Western Wall, Old City, and Holocaust artifact-filled Yad Vashem memorial.

For more details see the Press Release

England -- an "old Jewish quarter" tour in London

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

By now, "old Jewish quarter" tours in places like Prague, Venice and Krakow (or Boskovice, Trebic, even L'viv and beyond) are normal -- and popular -- niche itineraries. Here's a story in the London Jewish Chronicle about an old Jewish quarter tour in London's East End.......a district long the hub of Ashkenazi life in London that is now largely Asian.... but which I am old enough to remember when it was still at least something still of a Jewish district.....visiting the market in Petticoat Lane (and hearing about how Jewish it was) is a vivid memory from childhood.

The tour is offered by London Walks, a wellknown walking tour operation, which provides a video preview of the walk, which it describes as "set amid the alleys and back streets of colourful Spitalfields and Whitechapel ... a tale of synagogues and sweatshops, Sephardim and soup kitchens."

Here's some of what Monica Porter writes in the Jewish Chronicle:

The highlight of the tour [is] a visit to the country's oldest surviving synagogue at Bevis Marks. [...]

Maurice Bitton, the shamash of Bevis Marks, welcomes us into the beautiful building, which dates from 1701. Tucked away in a courtyard, because Jews were not allowed to build on public thoroughfares at the time, it is virtually unchanged since it was built. The great brass hanging candelabra, austere dark oak benches, magnificent ark - everything is original.

Bitton recounts with relish the history of the Sephardi synagogue, and regales us with tales of the congregation's most famous son, the 19th-century philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore. He shows us the great man's seat, now roped off. The congregation has shrunk since then, but Bitton says it is starting to grow again, as young Jews move back into the area.

For me, the visit brings back memories. In the 1970s, long before the City was redeveloped, I worked for a magazine whose creaky Dickensian offices overlooked this synagogue. On dusky winter evenings, I peered down through its windows into the warm, candlelit glow, mesmerised by the sound of chanting.

From here we walk north-east to Petticoat Lane (aka Middlesex Street), home of the shmutter trade. This is in Spitalfields, the beginning of the East End proper. Jews fleeing the pogroms in the late 19th century set up their stalls in the market here. Later, Alan Sugar, too, started life as a Petticoat Lane stallholder. Now it is abuzz with Asians, hawking shmutter of their own.