Jewish Small Communities Network

Sarah Aroeste started attending music school at age 12. Sarah spent the next 10 years (including her 4 years at Yale University) training as a classical singer. During that time she won several competitions and sang in various international venues, most notably Tanglewood Music Festival and the Israel Vocal Arts Institute. While singing in Israel in 1997, Sarah met Nico Castel, the world-renowned diction coach of the Metropolitan Opera, and one of the world’s leading experts on Ladino, a form of Castillian Spanish and the language of Sarah’s Sephardic family. Sarah started studying Ladino music and culture with Castel, and upon her return to America she began incorporating Ladino into her concerts. In time, Sarah realized that very few people in America were familiar with Ladino and Sephardic music, so she founded her own music production company, Aroeste Music LLC, to expose this geography of music and make it more accessible to a new and wider audience. Combining the various influences that have shaped her, Sarah has created a musical style that mixes traditional Mediterranean Sephardic music with contemporary sensibilities such as rock, funk, jazz and blues. In 2001 Aroeste launched the Sarah Aroeste Band, the world’s first (and as yet only) Ladino Rock band.

link: Sarah Aroeste

Tuesday 25 September 2007 09:00am & 21.30pm BBC Radio 4
Michael Buerk interviews the American journalist, Laura Blumenfeld, who talks about her decision to track down the man who shot her father. Laura was a student when her father, a New York Rabbi, was shot in the head by a Palestinian gunman. Twelve years later she went on an extraordinary journey to find the attacker. When she did find him, she made an astonishing choice to keep her identity secret.

additional link: Womans Hour 2002

Noam Galit is the father of Gilad Shalit, a corporal in the IDF, who has been a captive of Hamas for the last six months.
Noam Galit could be said to represent Israel’s silent majority. Israeli journalist Lisa Goldman has published a fascinating interview with Noam, which you can read on her web site On The Face

Dr Stacey Daniels has become the first Jewish mayor of Whitby, the small fishing port in North Yorkshire - the Jewish Chronicle reports.

Dr Daniels and his wife are believed to be the only practicing Jews in the town, but still maintain a full Jewish way of life and attend Hull synagogue as well as being members of synagogues in Nottingham. The Daniels say that the internet is also imortant in helping them keep in touch with all things Jewish.

In a few weeks time Brian Viner brings his new book to Southport.

Brian Viner was raised in Southport and attended King George V School. In 1980 he left, first to live in Paris for a year then to attend St Andrews University. After that he studied at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, before returning to England to seek his fortune in the media. He progressed through local papers until landing a job on the Mail on Sunday for five years. In 1999 he joined The Independent. He has conducted over 500 interviews with famous people and thus feels uniquely qualified to discuss what makes them tick.

He is a winner of the “What The Papers Say Award” for “excellence in journalism” and has for three years been writing a column about his new life in rural Herefordshire and how it differs from living in north London. This has inspired his first book, Tales of the Country. It was published on April 4 and has so far sold over 4,000 copies.

He is also a sports columnist for The Independent, and of course an occasional columnist for the Jewish Chronicle.

Brian will be presenting a talk and his new book @ Southport
Wednesday
6th July 2005

…she is only now receiving recognition for a lifetime’s work.

A retrospective of her work is touring the country. She has recently been interviewed on BBC Radio and a short video is currently being made.

What’s it like to be twenty-something, living in Israel and visiting Egypt for the first time? Read on…

Okey dokes people, Tara’s back in Israel, thank g-d!! Wow Egypt has got to be the most fascinating country I’ve ever been to but its so good to be back. I never thought I’d miss a country so much but try spending six months in Israel then going to Egypt for a week its such a culture shock!

Ok so I went to Egypt last Sunday with two friends from Magan David Adom and one friend from my absorbtion centre. We booked a bus from Jerusalem to Cairo, well it was two buses - the Israeli one which took us to the Taba border (we passed Jordan on the way was so cool!) then the Egyptian bus which picked us up from the border and took us to Cairo…we had to go back via Rafa which was interesting we passed Gaza and I’ve never spent so long trying to convince Israelis that I’m not a terrorist, was amazing how good security is there.

First memorable event was walking through the border into Egypt - it was just a little gate with a handle and no one was checking passports so I just opened it walked straight through and set off with my friends through no-mans land into Egypt… anyway no sooner had we almost reached the bus when an arab policeman came running up and screamed at us for walking through the border without being checked! Ooops… well no one was guarding it, so how were we meant to know we couldn’t go straight through? So they sent us back like a load of 5 year olds and made us walk through border again and show our passports this time of course.

In fact no, the first trauma we had to go through was going to the Egyptian embassy in Tel Aviv to get our visas - wow that was the most scary experience of my life - it was well dodge! We had to speak through this little hole in the wall and they would just take our passports and shut us outside for maybe an hour till they called us inside for private interviews, where we were each faced with four huge mafia-looking Egyptians smoking cigars on their mobile phones sitting around a desk. They looked at me, looked at my passport (filled with Israeli stamps) and obviously bells went ringing off in their heads as they proceeded to ask me about a million questions about my life, my name, my heritage, my politics, etc was all fun… I didnt think I knew how to be so creative …anyways eventually we got visas.

First day we arrived in Cairo got to hotel and bought an expensive 1 week deal, ’cause we’re stupid tourists and didn’t realise how much we were paying. But the deal included amazing hotels, trips with tour guides, 1st class transportation around all of Egypt and touring round Cairo, Luxor and Aswan - the three main tourist places. So despite being far more than we could have paid …and apart from Aswan where they screwed up the hotel and tours and trains… it was a great deal. However, we ended up going back to the hotel in Cairo on our last day and complaining so much they gave us the money back for Aswan, so we were happy.

People in Cairo cannot drive! I’ve never seen anything like it in all my life….. forget Israeli driving, Cairo is another kettle of fish. They drive at about 100 miles an hour no matter what road they’re on. There is no concept of lanes, nor traffic lights, nor pedestrians… basically its oh so very dangerous. But we managed as we got people from the hotel to take us everywhere ’cause we were scared… we were actually very nervous on our first day as we’d never really been somewhere where we were completely surrounded by Arabs and ’cause we chose a cheap hotel we ended up under some dodgy bridge… you step out of the hotel and you are surrounded by people pressing you to…. get on their horses, in their taxis, buy for extortionate (tourist) prices from their shops, ride their camels, buy us in exchange for camels… Its so cool! stepping outside in Egypt is like stepping into the Arab shuk in Jlem except more oppresive.

But it was exciting and we soon warmed to the people and learned how to handle the ‘tourist prices’. Funniest thing was even the Egyptians referred to the prices as tourist prices versus Egyptian prices. By the end of the trip we were stopping random Egyptians on the street and tipping them to go and buy us things at Egyptian prices ’cause it worked out cheaper! Learned me a bit of arabic, which was cool. I can now say “hello” “hi” “thank you” “you’re welcome” “toilet” “right” “left” and count to ten.

Ok so we saw lots of pyramids, we rode on horses (for some reason they didn’t want to give us camels) through desert to pyramids in Cairo and saw 1st ‘decent’ step pyramid. We went to a muslim city and saw some amazing mosques, also went to a coptic city and learnt lots about Islam from random Egyptians - apparently you can only marry four times if there are problems with the other wives e.g they’re infertile or something…. and everything green is a cucumber - yeh that was the strangest thing - be it cucumber, lettuce, cabbage, green beans, if its green its a cucumber…
…Oh and everyone offered the guys money for me and my friend Talia. What was stranger was that they were being serious - I should tell my dad, he always said he’ll give my husband two camels and a house in Israel for me, but maybe he’d get a much better deal if I married an Egyptian cos they would pay HIM!

Hmm what else? We went to lots of temples, some a bit boring, some amazing. We went on a Nile cruise with cool entertainment-belly dancers, ancient Egyptian dancers and the highlight of the evening - a midget spinning round and round in a big skirt…
We also went on a felluka trip around the islands where the guy who owned the boat told us he could get us marjuana from the Egyptian mafia who lived just round the corner from his house if we wanted. What else? hmmm I bought an amazing new Nargila. It spins round, its beautiful and it was dirt cheap!

Oh what’s also funny is that the Egyptians have certain phrases planned when you tell them what country you’re from - English ones included ‘how now brown cow’, ‘lovely jubbly’, ‘arite geezer’, ‘long live the queen mother’ (interesting one) and ‘I love Diana, I miss her’. My friend Talia, who is Mexican, had ‘ola ola coca cola’ from everyone and the American guy, Marc, who was with us had some very strange ones which I didn’t understand…there was no ‘long life George Bush’ though, I wonder why.

We met some interesting people there - some leftie Aussie, a fascist neo nazi American, an Ethiopian arab who said Jew hates him so he hates Jew, a Christian woman who left her family after 40 years of marriage ’cause G-d apparently spoke to her and told her to go to Israel and look after some old woman in the old city, and lots more but I’ll save those stories for a rainy day!

Atarah