Interestingly we don’t talk very much about Hassidic Dynasties in NYC other than Chabad. The other major dynasty is that of the Satmar’s. Their populations, in NYC, can be found in Williamsburg and Boro Park.

Quick Facts:

They originated from Hungary (and surrounding areas).

They are Anti-Zionist….believe it or not.

They have been locked in a succession (blood) feud for decades.

Satmar communities are hierarchical.

U.S. Satmar populations exist in Williamsburg, Boro Park, and Upstate New York.

Here is what Wikipedia has compiled on the Satmar Hassidim:

Satmar (or Satmar Hasidism or Satmarer Hasidism) (חסידות סאטמאר) is a Hasidic movement comprising mostly Hungarian^[1] and Romanian Hasidic Jewish Holocaustsurvivors and their descendants. It was founded and led by the late Hungarian-born^[2] Grand Rebbe Yoel Teitelbaum^[1] (1887-1979), who was the rabbi of Szatmárnémeti,Hungary (currently Satu Mare, Romania).^[1] The town’s name in German is Satmar. The name Satmar was also used by the Yiddish-speaking population, Yiddish being then the common language of the local Jews. Members of the movement are usually referred to as Satmar Hasidim or Satmarer Hasidim.

The two largest Satmar communities are in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and Kiryas Joel, New York. There are also significant Satmar communities in Borough Park, Brooklyn andMonsey, New York. Smaller communities can be found in North American cities such as Los Angeles, Montreal and Toronto; European cities such as Antwerp, London andManchester; Argentina; Australia and numerous cities and towns in Israel. The late Satmar Rebbe, Rebbe Yoel Teitelbaum, also held the title of the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem’sEdah HaChareidis, although he did not live in Jerusalem after 1946.

Satmar is one of the largest and most influential Hasidic movements in existence today, but formal demographic comparisons with other Hasidim are not available. It is believed to number close to 130,000 adherents (including men, women and children), and is rapidly growing due to the extremely high fertility rates of the group. This population figure does not include a number of smaller and related anti-Zionist Hungarian Hasidic groups who align themselves with Satmar.

^[3]

To Read The Entire Wiki-Web Satmar Articles, Continue Here.

I also wanted to mention that a film came out recently about certain fringe elements of the Satmar community in NYC.

Holy Rollers (2010), is an actual true story about Satmar kids being used as drug mules. Set in the late 1990s, the height of New York’s rave scene, ecstasy pills were being smuggled by Hassidim.

Holy Rollers stars, Jesse Eisenberg, as a struggling Satmar youth, who was sick of his destiny being decided for him. Now I’m not exactly sure what was in the main characters head, or his motives for taking such risks. Nevertheless, I won’t spoil the film for you. It’s a must see!! I really loved this film.

-David Mirand 

Contributing writer and former Program Director of RJI

By Patricia Rice, Special to the Beacon   

Posted Sun., 4.17.11

ST LOUIS BEACON

At Passover Seder dinners in Jewish homes across the world, the youngest child will ask “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

Then, the story is told of that spring night when, according to the Book of Exodus, God’s angel “passed over” Jewish first-born sons as the Egyptians’ first-born males died in the 10th plague. Moses then led the enslaved Jews across the parted Red Sea to freedom.

On Passover as St. Louis Jewish grandparents and elders look with loving pride at their young questioners, many will talk about the next generation. Will young American Jews have the desire and support to celebrate their Jewish faith in St. Louis?

“Our numbers in St. Louis are diminishing,” said Barry Rosenberg (right), executive director of the Jewish Federation of St. Louis, a planning and fund-raising umbrella group. It serves all Jewish denominations, including Jews who are not synagogue members. Lower numbers hurt, he said. In January the federation announced that its annual fund-raising campaign brought in less that its $10 million goal. The total of “just under” $9.95 million was the lowest campaign results in 13 years. For each of the previous three years, the total has diminished.

In response to reduced numbers – in giving and in members – the Jewish Federation, which has a $100 million endowment, developed an energetic strategic plan to streamline its resources, cut duplication and “sunset” some programs.” For a decade it has urged synagogues with declining membership and high staff and maintenance costs to merge.

Read More

Simon Kuznets was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on April 30, 1901; he moved to the United States with his father in 1922. He attended Columbia University and received his B.Sc. in 1923, M.A. in 1924, and Ph.D. in 1926. From 1925 to 1926, Kuznets spent time studying economic patterns in prices as the Research Fellow at the Social Science Research Council. It was this work that led to his book Secular Movements in Production and Prices, published in 1930.

From 1931 until 1936, Kuznets was a part-time professor at the University of Pennsylvania; becoming a full-time professor 1936 until 1954. In 1954, Kuznets moved to John Hopkins University, where he was Professor of Political Economy until 1960. From 1961 until his retirement in 1970, Kuznets taught at Harvard.

Kuznets is credited with revolutionising econometrics, and this work is credited with fueling the Keynesian Revolution. His most important book is National Income and Its Composition, 1919–1938. Published in 1941, it is one of the most historically significant works on Gross National Product. Much of Kuznets’ research and experience with domestic economics came from his working for the National Bureau of Economic Research, from 1927 to the 1960s. His work on the business cycle and disequilibrium aspects of economic growth helped launch development economics. He also studied inequality over time, and his results formed the Kuznets Curve.

Simon Kuznets was elected president of the American Economics Association in 1954. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1971 for his experimental work on economic growth. He identified a new economic era, which he titled “modern economic growth,” which began in Europe and spread toward the east and south.

Simon Kuznets died on July 8, 1985, at the age of 84.

Known as Golda Meyerson from 1917–56) was the fourth prime minister of the State of Israel.

First Posted: 12- 9-09 11:14 AM
Huffington Post

A 25-year-old student in Ukraine has been killed by an exploding stick of chewing gum, accordingto the Russian news agency Ria Novosti.

The student, who attended Ukraine’s Kiev Polytechnic Institute and remains unidentified, was apparently working at his parents’ house when the incident occurred.

“A loud pop was heard from the student’s room,” a police officer explained, according to USA Today. “When his relatives entered the room they saw that the lower part of the young man’s face had been blown off.”

In terms of what might have caused the incident, the Telegraph says the student was apparently working on an experiment and had covered the gum in a chemical solution, possible some type of explosive, before trying to chew it. Ria Novosti reports that the student had the highly unusual habit of chewing gum that he had dipped into citric acid. Police believe the student may have confused the chemical packets he had applied to the gum before chewing.

Source: Ynet

New book published in Germany tracks Nazi dictator’s hatred of Jews to belief a Jewish doctor poisoned his mother

Adolf Hitler’s hatred for Jews stemmed from his belief that a Jewish doctor poisoned his mother, a new book by Joachim Riecker claims.

In a Monday report in the British Daily Telegraph, Riecker claims that the future dictator believed his mother, who died of breast cancer at the age of 47, was in fact poisoned by her physician, Dr. Eduard Bloch.

Bloch treated Klara Hitler with idoform – standard medical practice for the disease at the time.

“Hitler never forgave the Jewish doctor. In conversations with aides such as Josef Goebbels he referred to the Jews as being like TB and himself as a ‘healer’ who had to stamp it, and consequently them, out,” Riecker says in the book.

The arguments in the book, titled:

“November 9: How World War One Led To The Holocaust,” contradict other views that Hitler respected and liked Dr. Bloch, even helping him to emigrate from Austria to the US in 1940.

Riecker chose to focus on November 9 as a key date for Hitler since on that day in 1918, the Weimar Republic was formed. Hitler staged an attempted coup in 1923 and the Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews happened on the same date in 1938.

December 9, 2009

TORONTO (JTA) — Quebec has ended a 24-year arrangement that allowed fervently Orthodox Jewish students to study at a Montreal junior college at public expense.

Quebec Education Minister Michelle Courchesne announced recently that the province will cut funding to three Chasidic schools next year because of their religious focus.

Since 1985, the Jewish schools have been operating in tandem with Marie-Victorin CEGEP, a public, post-secondary college in Montreal. Students in Quebec generally attend CEGEP for two years before proceeding to a university.

Teachers at the Jewish colleges are hired and paid through CEGEP, and the Jewish students learn the same curriculum as their non-Jewish counterparts. Women and men are segregated in some classes.

Quebec “cannot accept” that schools with such religious restrictions are funded by tax dollars, Courchesne said.

The decision came as a surprise to Eli Meroz, academic coordinator at one of the Jewish schools, the Torah and Vocational Institute,  who said the school focuses on job training, not religion.

“I’m a little bit surprised because we’ve not adapted any of the content in the courses,” Meroz told CBC News. “There may be some small adaptations in terms of calendar — we don’t offer classes on Jewish holidays.

“The main objective here is to provide job training to these communities, so that students from these communities can access the job market. There are communities that in the past have not had access to CEGEP programs and this type of job training because they were not comfortable in the public CEGEP system.”

Meroz added that not every class is segregated by gender.

About 800 Jewish students are affected by the funding elimination.

November 23, 2009 by eJP

by Robert Singer

“A definite emergence of Russian-speaking Jews in the global Jewish community”

The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming… the title of the Jewish Federations of North America GA workshop is a playful take on the American patriot Paul Revere’s legendary midnight warning of the approach of King George’s troops. In the case of this year’s GA, this phrase ends fittingly appropriate: “wait, they are here”.

Indeed, the gears at this year’s GA have started to shift dramatically. With Leonid Nevzlin as the international GA chair, Natan Sharansky as the chair of the Jewish Agency and many of the Knesset’s top ministers speaking in Russian as their mother language, we see a definite emergence of Russian-speaking Jews in the global Jewish community.

Clearly, this did not happen overnight. The North American Jewish community worked tirelessly to help Soviet Jews fight for their freedom. The Federation system has been a major supporter of the Soviet Jewry movement, the people’s integration in new societies in Israel and the United States, and the support for those who choose to stay in the former Soviet Union.

World ORT alone has some 30,000 beneficiaries in the region a miraculous renaissance after Stalin closed down our operations there before the war. Our graduates move forward in their homeland, in Israel, the US and elsewhere to become successful professionals, entrepreneurs and philanthropists. Irina Nevzlin Kogan is a shining example of this – a graduate of ORT Techiya School #1311 – who is now leading the Nadav Fund.

Some are saying that with the rise of Russian-born philanthropists, the job of the Jewish community in North America supporting Jews in the former Soviet Union is done, that Russian-born Jews who have achieved significant wealth should take care of their brethren. After all, who can understand the needs of fellow Jews better than those who come from similar backgrounds? Yet, the responsibility of taking care for those left in the former Soviet Union cannot be put solely on the shoulders of Russian-speaking philanthropists. In the case of ORT schools, a number of local philanthropists in the former Soviet Union republics have stepped forward to help schools in their communities.

These schools have been crippled by JAFI’s withdrawal of funding for vital student services like hot, kosher meals, transportation, security and the adequate provision of Jewish Studies by supplementing teachers’ notoriously modest salaries and arranging the provision of Hebrew language teachers from Israel. These are needs which are far beyond the means of local philanthropists. Without the immediate mobilization of the global Jewish community the future of the world’s third largest Jewish population could be cut tragically short.

Rather, the Jewish community of North America should pave the way for more collaboration with Russian-speaking philanthropists. Jewish federations, private foundations and individual donors should continue to welcome Russian-speaking Jewish philanthropists to the table; treat them as equal partners, and determine global strategies for the betterment of the Jewish people together.

Everything is global today; the crisis and the opportunity. In World ORT, we have seen many crises in the organization’s 130 years, and have come through them all, sometimes battered but never bowed, and always looking at the opportunities that lie ahead. The “coming of the Russians” is an opportunity. The fight for the future of the Jewish people is not one group’s cause alone. Paul Revere was not the Lone Ranger, he had help along the way. So, today, we call on the Jews of the United States to partner with Jewish philanthropists everywhere to catalyze the necessary changes to make Jewish life better not only in the former Soviet Union but around the world; not only for this generation but for tomorrow’s.

Robert Singer is the director general and CEO of World ORT.

By Masha Gessen
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2009, at 10:51 AM ET

Slate.com

BIROBIDZHAN, Russia—The first time I logged on to the official Web site of the Jewish Autonomous Region, its home page featured an article called “Twenty Facts About the Jewish Face.” I later realized that it was fed to the JAR site at random via a link from a Moscow-based Jewish-book site, but the article’s appearance seemed fated, for it spoke to the basic question raised by the JAR: What is a Jew? A Jew is his face, said the article, which was lighthearted for the most part, written by a Jewish woman for a Jewish readership. A Jew is eyes wide open in eternal surprise, large ears tuned to the sounds of the world, and a large nose, which evaded functional explanation and as a result took up points 3 through 5 in this 20-item list. The last fact stated simply that the human habit of determining another’s tribe by his face is hard-wired—which, to a Russian reader, was very much a “fact about the Jewish face.”

The original Birobidzhan project was to create a center of Jewish culture without Judaism. David Brown, a Jewish-American journalist who visited Birobidzhan in the 1930s, predicted that this would prove impossible: Deprived of their religion, Jews would assimilate and their identity would dissipate. He was wrong, sort of. The Jews of Birobidzhan seem to have done pretty well at maintaining their cultural identity through the 1930s and ’40s, when most of their children attended Yiddish-language elementary schools—even local ethnic Russians and Koreans studied Yiddish, the better to get along in the JAR. Following the annihilation of European Jewry, Birobidzhan briefly became a true center of Yiddish culture, the one place in the world where Yiddish was the language of cultural production. Yiddish-language writers who survived the war flocked to Birobidzhan.

The Soviet regime took care of that. In 1948-49 the writers—all the writers—were arrested on charges of belonging to a “bourgeois nationalist conspiracy to create a center of Jewish culture in Birobidzhan.” Yiddish-language schools were shut down or quickly re-formed as Russian-language schools; the Jewish orphanage was disbanded, its charges torn away from one another and shipped to children’s homes in other regions, where their names were often changed. Yiddish-language books and journals were confiscated from libraries, bookstores, and even warehouses, and burned. Let me repeat that: Four years after the end of World War II, the Soviet regime staged a mass burning of Yiddish-language books. A few people must have hidden theirs in their houses and apartments; later they found their way back to the Birobidzhan library, which, in turn, gave them to a museum at an old collective farm just outside the city, where they are now kept under glass: “No one can read them anyway,” the museum’s director told me.

For most of the second half of the 20^th century, what remained of Jewish culture and identity in Birobidzhan stayed largely underground. Starting in the late 1980s, the JAR tried to restore some of its Jewishness, often to comical effect. There is a synagogue and a Jewish community center named Freud, located on Lenin Street, where the city has also built two Russian Orthodox churches. This is the unofficial main street; it runs parallel to the official main street, which is named after Sholem Aleichem, whom a plaque identifies as “a people’s writer,” quaintly demurring to identify the people, as though the word Jewish had no place in polite society.

Jewish-themed monuments, designed by a single local artist and installed by an energetic Jewish deputy governor, speckle the city now. There is a tiny rabbi blowing his shofar on Lenin Street, and a menorah with a treble clef at the center in front of the philharmonic, and, in front of the railway station, a bearded Jew moving his life’s possessions in a horse and buggy—an image that clearly made its way from Ukraine to Birobidzhan via Hollywood. The Jewish deputy governor’s next project is to get some Jewish food cooking in Birobidzhan. (I went on my own quest for Jewish food; it took three days and finally yielded two gefilte fish patties, taken from a jar and reheated, for a price of roughly $4.) There are now memorials at historic sites, all of them adorned with a menorah and containing text in three languages: Russian, English, and Yiddish. One of the city’s last remaining Yiddish-speakers, though, told me that a memorial in the regional library (also named for Sholem Aleichem) purports to list well-known writers who worked at the library “in Sholem Aleichem’s lifetime.”

“I told them that’s what it said, and that he died 40 years earlier, but they said, ‘No one can read it anyway,’ ” Iosif Bekerman told me. He is the oldest living resident of Birobidzhan and probably the last of the voluntary settlers.

compiled by Ner LeElef

In 1939, there were 17 million Jews in the world, and by 1945 only 11 million.  While in the 13 years following the Holocaust the Jewish population grew by one million, it took another 38 years for it to grow another million. These sobering figures reflect how severely Jewish population growth has slowed down over the past 40 years.  Even a fertility increase of 0.4% will add millions of Jews over the next 50 years. But this is not happening right now.

As we know, the distribution of the Jewish population now is completely different from before WW II. Europe was decimated of its Jewish population and Israel and America became the new major centers of Jewry. France, the Soviet Union and Hungary were the three Holocaust-hit countries left with reasonable populations. The war left 250,000 displaced Jews who were mainly supported by the Joint Distribution Committee until they could relocate.

But there were further changes after the war. The Moslem countries emptied out, and the world Jewish population has continued to consolidate over time in fewer countries with large urban Jewish populations over time. The main counter trend in Europe has been Germany, with a large Russian immigrant influx of over 100,000 Jews.

The Jews from Arab Moslem countries went in the main to Israel, but not always. The Algerian Jews, and also considerable numbers of Moroccans (75,000) and Tunisians (80,000), especially the more wealthy ones, went to France, doubling the French community from 300,000 to 600,000 overnight and creating a large Sephardic presence. (The Algerian Jews had French citizenship already in Algeria and had automatic rights of immigration to France.) The vitality of Orthodoxy in France today is largely a result of these immigrants, giving France a high kiruv potential to this day.

Many people do not realize how large and vital the Jewish populations of these Moslem-Arab countries were, with our historical consciousness swamped by Holocaust and pre-Holocaust literature.  A number of these countries would make it to the top ten in numbers, were they to exist today. Morocco had 285,000 Jews, Iraq 140,000, Algeria 135,000, Iran 120,000 and Tunisia an estimated 105,000. Several others would be in the next ten. Libya, which was down to 20 Jews in 1974, had a population of 48,000  in 1948. Egypt had 75,000. Of these, possibly the most tragic was Iraq, for the community there had a direct lineage back to the original exile in Babylonia.

Some 150 Iraqi Jews have managed to leave the country in the past five years, leaving just 38 Jews in Baghdad, and a handful in the Kurdish-controlled northern areas of the country. There are  just two or three young people left. Whereas Baghdad once had 53 active synagogues, only one remains open.  Amazingly, Saddam Hussein’s regime has in recent years shown reasonable tolerance toward the Jewish community, even refurbishing the tombs of Yechezkiel Hanavi and Ezra HaSofer (also considered sacred by Muslims), as well as that of Yonah.

The worldwide Jewish population is 13.3 million Jews.  Jewish population growth worldwide is close to zero percent. From 2000 to 2001 it rose 0.3%, compared to worldwide population growth of 1.4%.

In 2001, 8.3 million Jews lived in the Diaspora and 4.9 million lived in Israel. Just about half of the world’s Jews reside in the Americas, with about 46 percent in North America.   (top)

Approximately 37% of worldwide Jewry lives in Israel. Israel’s Jewish population rose by 1.6% the past year, while the Diaspora population dropped by 0.5%.

Europe, including the Asian territories of the Russian Republic and Turkey, accounts for about 12 percent of the total. Fewer than 2 percent of the world’s Jews live in Africa and Oceania.

Metropolitan Tel Aviv, with 2.5 million Jews, is the world’s largest Jewish city. It is followed by New York, with 1.9 million, Haifa 655,000, Los Angeles 621,000, Jerusalem 570,000, and southeast Florida 514,000.

In 2001, 8 countries had a Jewish population of 100,000 or more; another 5 countries had 50,000 or more. There is not a single Diaspora country where Jews amounted to 2.5 percent of the total population. Only 3 Diaspora countries had more than 1 percent. Gibraltar (24.0 per 1000), United States (20.1), Canada (11.9), France (8.8), Uruguay (6.7), Argentina (5.3), Hungary (5.2), and Australia (5.1)[1] had the highest ratios.

“I disagree with the Obama administration on [Israeli settlements],” Palin told Walters. “I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.”

“More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead.” Does she know something that we don’t?

by Allison Krant

Early Years

Iceland does not have a very rich history of Jewish culture. There are no synagogues or rabbis, and the congregations that do exist are very small.

It is widely assumed that the first Jews to travel to Iceland were traders and merchants who arrived as early as 1625. Most of these merchants came from Denmark, and trade continued during the 18th and 19th centuries. Native Icelanders owned most of the trading businesses, but a small number of wholesale firms in Iceland were owned by Danish Jews.

Few Jews lived in Iceland at this time. During the period of Western emancipation, there was no economic or personal incentive for Jews to immigrate to Iceland. It was a country where the practice of a non-Christian faith was not tolerated. Jewish immigration to Iceland did not really begin until the mid-1930s, when Jewish refugees from Europe began arriving in the country.The term for Jew in the Icelandic language is Gyoingar, and most Icelanders only knew of the Jews from the Bible. The term Gyoingar still holds negative connotations today.

The First Jews

The first Jew to be recorded in Icelandic annals was Daniel Salomon, a Polish man who resided in Denmark. However, when he arrived in Iceland in 1625, he was no longer a Jew. He converted to Christianity in Copenhagen and changed his name to Johannes Salomon just a few years prior.

The first Jewish ship, named the Ulricha, arrived in Iceland in 1815. The ship belonged to a Danish merchant, Ruben Moses Henriques, who sold hats, fabrics, and paper.

On April 5, 1850, the Danish King implemented a law that allowed foreign Jews to settle in Denmark. In 1853, the King requested that Iceland, too, implement this law, but the Icelandic parliament, the Althing, rejected this request. Two years later, the parliament overturned the original decision, and chose to implement the law. There is no documentation, however, of any Jews permanently settling in Iceland at this time.

As the first practicing Jew recorded in Icelandic annals, Max Nordau was a physician as well as journalist from Pest, Hungary who first came to Iceland in 1874 to cover the celebration commemorating the country’s millennium anniversary. Nordau was known at the time for his Zionist affiliations.

In 1906, a young merchant from Copenhagen, Fritz Heymann Nathan, arrived in Iceland, and became the first practicing Jew to settle there. His company, Nathan & Olsen, became one of the largest and most successful businesses at the time. However, the absence of any Jewish culture in Iceland greatly bothered Nathan, and after marrying in 1917, he decided it was impossible to live a Jewish life in Iceland with his family. After the completion of the first five-story building in Reykjavik, he left Iceland and returned to Copenhagen.

WWII Period

In 1933, a small Nazi party was founded in Iceland, and in 1934, it became a National Socialist party with official ties to its German counterpart.

In November 1937, C.A.C. Brun, the first secretary of the Danish legation in Reykjavik, met with the Icelandic Prime Minister, Hermann Jonasson to discuss the plight of a Jewish family that was threatened with expulsion. In his diary, Brun exclaimed, “Iceland has always been a pure Nordic country, free of Jews.” This view echoed the sentiments of many other Icelanders at the time.

In 1938, after Denmark closed its doors to Austrian Jews, Iceland soon followed suit. Several Jews were expelled from Iceland during this time. Throughout the late 1930s, Icelanders became increasingly hostile to Jews living within their borders, and the few Jews who resided there were very poorly treated. Anti-Semitic trends could be seen in many aspects of Icelandic society. In 1939, a report written for the Aid Association of German Jews concluded that refuge in Iceland to escape Nazi Germany was impossible.

It was not until 1940, when British forces arrived in Iceland with some Jewish soldiers included among their ranks, that the first official congregation was established in Reykjavik. A service was held in 1940 that included 25 servicemen from Britain, Canada, and Scotland on Yom Kippur in a lodge that belonged to the Good Templars. They used a borrowed Torah scroll, the only one available in Reykjavik, and had two prayer shawls and one skullcap. This service was the first non-Christian religious ceremony to take place in Iceland in 940 years, since the nation officially embraced Christianity in the year 1000.

Jewish life became much more active after the arrival of American troops to Iceland in 1941-1942. An American rabbi arrived in the country in late 1941, and a few years later, in 1944, there were 500 Jews present at a Rosh Hashanah service that took place at Naval Air Station Keflavik with a Torah scroll flown in from the United States.

In 1944, about 2,000 Jewish servicemen were stationed in Iceland. A rabbi was present in Keflavik for a few years after 1944, and two Jewish congregations existed until the mid-1950s.

According to Iceland’s Statistical Bureau, there were only 9 Jews in Iceland in 1945.

Iceland officially became independent in 1944.

Post WWII

Although Iceland and Israel had virtually no ties, Iceland was one of the nations that voted in favor of the Partition Plan at the United Nations on November 29, 1947.

Of the small number of Jews who remained in Iceland after World War II, many preferred to keep a low profile, and not call too much attention to themselves or their Jewish faith. Almost all adopted Icelandic names, and shed their Jewish identity altogether and adopted an Icelandic one.

After author and journalist Alfred Joachim Fischer visited Iceland in 1955, he wrote an account of Jewish life in the country. Fischer himself was a Jewish German refugee who settled in London and Berlin. In his writings, Fischer described the first Yom Kippur service of 1940, and also noted that most Jews who had settled in Iceland had taken Icelandic names.

Jewish Life Today

The Jewish community that exists in Iceland today is relatively small and unassuming. All are married to native Icelanders. Religious observance remains minimal, although they do gather in Reykjavik on the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Passover. Most do not have a strong Jewish identity, and some have even kept their Jewish faith a secret from their children. Many took Icelandic names in the mid-1950s and prefer to assimilate because of the strong anti-Semitic climate that has resonated throughout the years in Iceland.

The Jewish congregation first established at the American NATO base in Keflavik during WWII is still active..

The most prominent Jew in Iceland, however, is the First Lady, Dorrit Moussaieff, wife of President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, whom she wed in 2003. She was born in Jerusalem to a wealthy Bukharian Jewish family. Although she is secular, she is well known among Icelanders for bringing a positive view of Judaism to their country.

Source: The Virtual Jewish Library

Mr. Brin, now 36 and wealthy as the co-founder of Google.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

By STEPHANIE STROM

Published: October 24, 2009

Were it not for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, there might be no Google.

Thirty years ago today, Sergey Brin, a 6-year-old Soviet boy facing an uncertain future, arrived in the United States with the help of the society.

Now Mr. Brin, the billionaire co-founder of Google, is giving $1 million to the society, widely known as HIAS, which helped his family escape anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and establish itself here.

“I would have never had the kinds of opportunities I’ve had here in the Soviet Union, or even in Russia today,” Mr. Brin said in an interview. “I would like to see anyone be able to achieve their dreams, and that’s what this organization does.”

The gift is small, given Mr. Brin’s estimated $16 billion in personal wealth, but he said it signaled a growing commitment by him and his wife, Anne Wojcicki, to engage more substantially in philanthropy.

“We’ve given away over $30 million so far, which isn’t so tiny but obviously small in terms of our, um, theoretical wealth,” Mr. Brin said. “Our philanthropy is something I want to take my time with and develop and systematize.”

He has already learned enough about philanthropy to add immediately: “Our foundation is not soliciting proposals. Please make sure to include that.”

Mr. Brin noted that Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, was widely criticized for not giving away enough money but is now known as one of the world’s leading philanthropists. “While everyone was criticizing him, he was generating a whole lot more money for his foundation, and ultimately, when he got serious about philanthropy, he did it really well,” Mr. Brin said. “I’d like to learn from that example.”

The bulk of the money the Brins have given away has gone to the Michael J. Fox Foundation and other research organizations devoted to Parkinson’s disease. But this year, in honor of the 30th anniversary of the Brin family’s immigration to the United States, they have given gifts to several Jewish organizations that aided along the way. HIAS, which helped the family navigate the cumbersome process of leaving the Soviet Union for the United States, paid for tickets, gave them money and helped them apply for visas, received the largest amount.

The family lived in Paris for several months while waiting for visas and then moved to Maryland, and the relationship with HIAS ended. “Although they gave us tremendous help, we didn’t stay connected with HIAS,” said Eugenia Brin, Mr. Brin’s mother. “Then a few years ago, I guess because of Google, we got a call from HIAS asking if we could help them digitize their archives.”

Eventually, Mrs. Brin joined the HIAS board and started a social networking site, mystory.hias.org, initially to encourage Russian Jewish immigrants to post their stories and eventually to attract the stories of other immigrants.

Gideon Aronoff, chief executive of HIAS, said the gift would be put to a variety of uses, like increasing the organization’s use of technology and supporting advocacy on immigration policy.

“One of the most important things that Sergey Brin’s gift signifies, not just for HIAS but more importantly for the nation,” Mr. Aronoff said, “is the possibilities inherent in being a refugee. The debate over immigration has frequently become so bitter that an important element has been lost: refugees are as varied in their skills sets and contributions as the rest of us.”

Europa Europa: Another must see for all Russian Jews

(1991)

NYT Critics’ Pick

I’ve seen this movie so many times that I’ve lost count. It’s a classic! A Jewish boy from Poland does everything he can to stay alive during the Holocaust - even pretending to be a Nazi. If you haven’t seen it, please rent it.

-David Mirand

Summary:

This drama was based on the true story of a young German Jew who survived the Holocaust by falling in with the Nazis. Solomon Perel (Marco Hofschneider) is the son of a Jewish shoe salesman coming of age in Germany during the rise of Adolf Hitler. In 1938, a group of Nazis attack Solomon’s family home; his sister is killed, and 13-year-old Solomon flees to Poland. Solomon winds up in an orphanage operated by Stalinist forces; when German forces storm Poland, Solomon’s fluent German allows him to join the Nazis as a translator, posing as Josef Peters, an ethnic German. In time, “Peters” is made a member of the elite Hitler Youth, but since Solomon is circumcised, he can be easily revealed as a Jew, and he lives in constant fear that his secret will be discovered. Solomon’s close calls include an attempted seduction by Robert Kellerman (André Wilms), a homosexual officer, and his relationship with Leni (Julie Delpy), a beautiful but violently anti-Semitic woman who wants to bear his child for the glory of the master race. Europa, Europa (shown in Europe as Hitlerjunge Salomon) also features the real Solomon Perel, who appears briefly as himself.