It all started the summer before my last semester at UW-Madison.  I had heard good things concerning the technology entrepreneurship scene in Boulder, Colorado and I wanted to check it out.  Without any plans, I got on a plane and went to Boulder in hopes of networking with tech start-ups.

The first night I was in Boulder, I went to a group meditation and sparked up a conversation with a nice young man named Chris Thorne.  Chris just so happened to be working for a tech start-up called Spot Influence, and was nice enough to share the BOCC* with me—a networking event for the tech start-up industry. Tuesday morning came along and my socks were knocked off by how perfectly things fell together–the BOCC was EXACTLY what I was looking for.

As the BOCC concluded, I began a conversation with a smart dude who just so happened to be a graduate from UW-Madison–the college I was currently attending.  Not too far into the conversation, we also figured out that we were both Jewish. Perfect timing, for at that precise moment Cheryl Fellows from Boulder Jewish News was walking by and heard our conversation.  She clarified that we were Jewish, and simply handed me a sticker that said “Boulder Jewish News.”

About an hour later, I took that sticker out of my pocket, looked at it and placed it on the back of my Mac Book pro–I don’t know why I did, I don’t really like computer stickers.  Either way, my trip concluded – successfully – and I was off to Madison, WI for my last semester.

A few weeks into school, I was working on my start-up – WomStreet.com – with my business partner, Alex, who just so happens to be Jewish as well.  As we were talking, we were approached by a nice Jewish lady named Chava Cohen.  She saw the Boulder Jewish News sticker, asked if we were Jewish and then proceeded to talk to us about her Jewish student organization JEM.  It just so happened that Alex knew all about JEM and actually went on his Birthright trip through them.  Because of that conversation, I found out about Birthright – an amazing opportunity for young Jewish adults to escape to the motherland for free – and signed up for my Birthright trip through JEM.  My trip starts in three days.   (Follow my trip on twitter: @VfordVendetta.)

Let’s connect all the dots:

1.  I went to Boulder wanting to network with Tech Start-ups, and I had no idea how it was going to happen.

2.  I met a random guy at a random meditation who told me about the EXACT event that I was looking for.

3.  After this amazing event, I sparked a random conversation with a random guy who just so happened to graduate from the school I was currently attending, and we both shared the same Jewish heritage.

4.  While I was conversing with this random guy, the second we realized that we were both Jewish, Cheryl from Boulder Jewish News walked by, heard our conversation, and gave me a sticker that said Boulder Jewish News.

5.  For no reason at all, I placed that sticker on my Mac Book pro, which I never do.

6.  Back in Madison, while working at a coffee shop with my Jewish partner, a nice Jewish lady from JEM told us about Birthright.

7.  It just so happened that my partner knew about Birthright, because he went to Israel with them.

8.  Now I’m going to Israel.

Steve Jobs – one of my heroes – once said that it’s impossible to look forward and see how things will work, you can only look back and connect the dots.  These were some serious dots.

*BOCC (Boulder Open Coffee Club) is an open conversation between tech enthusiasts/entrepreneurs at 8:00 am every other Tuesday at the Atlas Purveyors Coffee Shop on Pearl Street, Boulder Colorado.

One of my favorite parts was being welcomed to Shabbat dinner and lunch of one of the community members in Mumbai and being able to see how they do services and enjoying a delicious Shabbat meal with them.  After our week in Mumbai we took an overnight train to the city we live in, Hyderabad.

The two weeks I have been here have been an experience I would describe as the Olympics for the senses. The aroma of delicious home cooked Indian food with dashes of all the right spices added to the mixed of the smell of pollution and urine permeating the streets, I dare not ask what splashed up on the back of my leg.

The tastes are incredible; I have yet to find a dish that I did not have the desire to eat more than the capacity of my stomach and the sting that accompanies each meal on my tongue. The colors are amazing everywhere is brightly colored cloths that shimmer from a mile away. The loud sounds of honking horns and rick-shaws chugging down the street coupled by the exhilaration of negotiating over what in the end ends up being over 20 cents with each new driver; sometimes I win and sometimes they win, the key to the game is time.

1. Which two New York-born baseball players famously refused to play on Yom Kippur?

A: Sandy Koufax and Hank Greenberg.

2. What New York arrival point is named after a half-Jewish politician?

A: Laguardia Airport. (Fiorello LaGuardia was born in Greenwich Village to an Italian lapsed-Catholic father from Italy and a Triestine mother of Jewish origin, Irene Coen Luzzato. He was raised an Episcopalian and practiced that religion all his life. )

3. What is the fare on the Staten Island Ferry?

A: Free

4. Who is Dr. Zismor?

A: A dermatologist famous for his ads on the NY subway

5. What comes next in this series: 34, 28, 23, 14, 8 …

A: “Prince.”  These are consecutive stops on the downtown N and R trains.

6.  What do New Yorkers call the Avenue of the Americas?

A: 6^th Ave

7. What is the largest group of immigrants that settled in New York?
A: Eastern European Jews.

By 1914, there were more than 1.5 million Jews in New York city. Why New York?
1. Eastern Europe Jews came to New York harbor and stayed there, mainly in the east side.
2. New York was the center of the dressing industry which was the Jews preferred business.
3. In New York there was already a large Jewish community.

8.  If the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty had his way, where would the Statue be located?

A: The entrance of the Suez Canal (This plan collapsed for financial reasons)

9. What is the world’s largest synagogue?

A: Temple Emanu-El on 5^th Ave. on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. (Built in 1929, and with 2,500 seats, it is larger than St. Patrick’s Cathedral and slightly larger than the Budapest Great Synagogue, the largest in Eurasia. The first Reform Jewish congregation in New York City, founded in 1845, it has served as a flagship congregation in the Reform branch of Judaism and now boasts 3,000 members. Its landmark Romanesque Revival building on Fifth Avenue is widely admired as the largest, and one of the most beautiful synagogues in the world. Emanu-El means “God is with us” in Hebrew.)

10. The first bike path in the US was created on what New York thoroughfare?
A: Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn added a bike and pedestrian path in 1894.

11. What game was played at the Polo Grounds?

A: Baseball. This stadium in the Bronx was home of the NY Giants (MLB) until they moved to San Francisco in 1957 (along with the Brooklyn Dodgers to LA).  The Mets played there for 2 seasons, 1962 and 1963, before Shea Stadium was ready.

12. What is the origin of Wall Street’s name?

A: There was a wall there! When the Dutch still controlled the region, Wall Street was the city limit and there was actually a wall there. The vaults 80 feet beneath the Federal Reserve Bank on Wall Street store more than 25% of the world’s gold bullion.

13. What nickname did Brighton Beach acquire in the 1970s?

A: Little Odessa, due to the influx of Russian Jews.

14. Which of the following is NOT an acronym for a New York City neighborhood: Soho, DUMBO, Nolita, and Redho?

A: Redho.

(Soho: South of Houston. DUMBO: Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Nolita: North of Little Italy.)

15. What is the largest park in New York City?

A: Pelham Bay Park, with 2,765 acres. (Central Park is the city’s 5^th largest at 843 acres.)

16. Which of these novels is NOT set in New York? “Native Son,” “The Age of Innocence,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Washington Square.”
A: Native Son (Chicago

But if you’ve only got 30 minutes, check out the shuk (market) in Ramle. It’s closer to the airport. Pound for pound, there’s more IL packed into this down home shuk than anywhere east of the beach. While  trendy cafes and boutiques infiltrate Jerusalem’s shuk Mahane Yehuda, the shuk Ramle stays the real deal. Health Department hasn’t cracked down here, yet. No sneeze guards, plastic gloves, tongs. Elbow your way in. Grab/Bag/Cash&Carry. Gleanings feed the needy. Leviticus 19:9-10.

Photographer Irus Hayoun Rosenfeld suggested our Ramle drive-by as a pretext to visit her mother in nearby Lod. More incentive: mom’s Tunisian dishes are best in show. I didn’t get much other local lore in my half-hour. But historic conquerors of Ramle had cool names for your kid’s garage band or your grandchildren (b’shaa tova): Ikhshidid, Fatamid, Seljuq, Crusader, Mameluk, Turk and Brit.

Ramle today is mostly Jewish with a significant Arab minority – a flip-flop from pre-State days. For how that happened, you can try on various narratives and choose the one that suits you, or do some mixing and matching. That many younger Jews and Arabs are more interested in unveiling a cooperative future than prevailing about the past, may bode well. Here’s some place and face images.

More from Scene In Israel and This Year In Israel is here.

Built in the late-1920’s by merchant and artisan immigrants from Greece, Bulgaria and elsewhere in the Mediterranean Basin, crowded Florentin joined its neighbors in decline during subsequent decades of exile to the suburbs. Now, it’s emerged as an eclectic blend of trendsetting art&design types, holdover working class heroes, post-grads, oldsters and scenesters set among knocked-up, fixed-up and built-up apartments, studios and galleries.

High fashion, retread trashion, eco-chic – its all designed, sewn and worn on the same beat streets that serve deliciously cheap ethnic food (eat Levinsky street!) and overpriced cuisine. Furniture making, too, is inspired by dilapidated cool. “Florentin is where we discovered the beauty of decay,” scavenged furniture designer Joy van Erven told the Jerusalem Post. Take that, Ikea.

Lacking the know-how to verify that there’s quite the nightly pub&club scene here, I day-hopped trades & carpentry workshops to a buzzy band-saw soundtrack. Charly, a third-generation lathe shop owner, took a break to show me around a few blocks featuring some impressive graffiti riffs. A few of ‘em are in this filmstrip. Have a look.

More from Scene In Israel and This Year In Israel is here

It’s camouflaged on the valley slope below Highway 1 as you enter the city. If you’re willing to crash your car, you can crane your neck and see it out the driver’s side. Just a stony hillside at a glance, with time and focus, rough hewn blocks assemble into 55 or so broken quarters, compounds and vessels of old village life. Of all the Arab villages in Israel emptied in 1948, Lifta is the only one that was neither destroyed nor re-inhabited.

In mid-1940, Lifta was predominantly Muslim, with a population of 2,550. The village had a mosque, a shrine for Shaykh Badr (a local sage), two coffee houses, a social club, and a few shops. It also had an elementary school, one for boys and one for girls. The farmers of Lifta marketed their produce in Jerusalem markets and took advantage of the city’s services.” –Wikipedia.

Today, bathers and hikers take advantage of the cool spring-fed pool at the bottom.

Streaming traffic din and short-story dialog accompanied me as I tread around open wells and cisterns and thread through the wreckage. A mixture of elders’ artifacts and the pictographs and finery of Lifta’s recent squatters personalizes each vacancy. Best explore the brokenness early, before the midday heat reeks the refuse to shamayim. And soon. Planning is underway for a 212-unit luxury housing project, as are the lawsuits to halt it, filed by former Lifta families and NGOs. Whatever the outcome, neither Jerusalem gentrification nor preservation will revive Lifta’s character or chase away its rafayim.

For more about Lifta and the housing project, see

• Wikipedia
• Legal battle over an abandoned Palestinian Village
• Haaretz.com: Israel Moves To Turn Deserted Palestinian Village Into Luxury Housing Project

I have always liked a challenge, and this potential gem spoke to my creativity. Working to restore it was like a three dimensional art project. For over 10 months we tore out old lath and plaster, lowered ceilings, and replaced rotting floor boards. We needed to change door entrances to several rooms. For example, the kitchen had 4 doors leading into it…not great for having a serviceable kitchen! It was fun restoring the old world charm, yet making it comfortable, convenient, and beautiful.

I chose this fine old house as a way to earn some income, so I decided to make it a vacation rental here in Salida, Colorado. Since Salida is such a popular getaway in all seasons, being a lovely 3 hour drive from Boulder/Denver, it often has no rooms available for visitors. In my travels the last few years, I have found that staying in a vacation rental is much more comfortable and interesting than booking an ordinary motel room. Also, I prefer to cook some of my meals instead of eating out all the time.

Once the renovation was done, the next challenge was furnishing it. This can be an enormous expense, if you want good quality, attractive pieces. No problem…my grandchildren call me the “Craig’s List Queen”. I have gotten really good at finding everything from beds to rugs to dishes that others are ready to let go of, usually at a fraction of the original cost. It is a good thing I have our GPS to get me to all the unknown streets in the metropolitan area. I met some very interesting people in the months that I hunted up my treasures.

Concerning the walls, I am an artist, so I hung 8 of my paintings in the rooms. They are for my guests’ enjoyment and also for sale. My Dad was a great businessman. I seem to have his entrepreneurial spirit in my veins.

Salida, Colorado is famous for hot springs, restaurants, art galleries, skiing, hiking, biking, kayaking, rafting, fishing, swimming, dancing and tango. If you have not visited yet, you should plan a trip!

To see pictures, and availability of “Dvora’s Guest House”‘, you can visit my website or find it on VRBO.

I look forward to welcoming you to Salida.

Welcome!

I have just returned from the amazing city of Kiev after an incredible Ukrainian adventure through lost worlds and new dreams, connecting to holy souls, eating too much starch and drinking very good vodka. What a place and what a journey.

This trip was born out of my involvement in a documentary film project tracing the life and legacy of the great and mystical figure of the Baal Shem Tov and our desire to visit his grave, but there have been so many rich dimensions to the few days here, beyond what we could have imagined. Ukraine has been such an important center of Jewish life for centuries and yet, of course, the history of the community has been punctuated with horrible tragedy and much spilling of Jewish blood at the hands of the Cossacks, the communists and the Nazis. There were one and half million Jews in Ukraine before the war and now there are maybe 200,000. We visited many towns and villages that had once been vibrant centers of Jewish life, but now it is the old cemeteries, including the graves of some of the most famous Hassidic rabbis, that are the main sites of Jewish interest. The town of Berditchev, once the home of the legendary Rebbe Levi Yitzhak, had 50,000 Jews before the war, making it the second largest Jewish population in Eastern Europe. 38,000 of those Jews were massacred in one day, many fled and today, there are 250 Jews living in Berditchev. We also visited the memorial at Babi Yar, that dark ravine in a forest on the outskirts of Kiev, where over 33,000 Jews were killed in just 2 days in 1941 and then many, many more Jews, communists, gypsies and Catholics killed in the following months. In spite of all of this horror, our trip was certainly not one focused on destruction and tragedy. We went in search of some of the personalities whose stories of wonders and miracles, deep teachings and spiritual melodies have captured the imagination of Jews and non-Jews for over two hundred years.

After a cold and wet beginning in Kiev, our driver Yuri met us and our journey began south to Uman, the burial place of Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav, the great grandson of the Baal Shem Tov. He has many followers today and there is a massive pilgrimage every Rosh Hashanah to Uman – this year they are expecting some 30,000 Jews, mostly from Israel, to show up and celebrate the New Year with their Rebbe. Because of this phenomenon, there is a growing infrastructure of kosher food and some basic accommodation, as well as a population of Jews living there year round. Chuck Davis, the director and producer of the film, Antony Cooper, the camera man and editor and me, the film’s narrator, spent a slightly bizarre, cold Shabbat in Uman. One of us is not Jewish, one Jewish and not very observant and one observant and none of us see ourselves as Bratslover Hassidim, yet we certainly met some interesting characters. We also discovered Nemiroff, a very pure Ukrainian vodka, which kept us warm in our unheated, Spartan dwelling. After Shabbat we went with the camera to find some action and met a group of Sefardi Jews from Israel who explained the difference between Sefardim and Ashkenazim based on the climates from which they emerge and also their own attachment to Rebbe Nachman and other Ashkenazi spiritual leaders. We also met Lipa Schmeltzer, a famous, young Hassidic pop singer, who sang for us and shared some insights and feelings for the camera after his first Shabbat in Uman.

On a much brighter Sunday, after a wonderful walk and horse and carriage ride through Sofia Park in Uman, we headed for Bratslav, where Rebbe Nachman had spent most of his life as a rabbi and where his primary student and scribe, Rabbi Natan, is buried in a beautiful hillside cemetery overlooking a magnificent river. From there we headed for Meziboz in search of the holy Baal Shem Tov, after a short stop in Nemiroff, where the vodka is made!

Meziboz is a stirringly powerful place, a pretty small, pastoral town with a tranquil and enchanting graveyard in which an Ohel, a kind of sanctuary, houses the graves of Baal Shem Tov and others, including his grandsons, Baruch of Meziboz and the Degel Machane Ephraim, Reb Wolf Kitzes and the Ohev Yisrael, Rav Abraham Joshua Heschel of Apt, grandfather of the great 20th century Heschel. Walking into this place was immensely powerful and moving for me, and for all of us. The Baal Shem Tov, Yisrael ben Eliezer, has been so alive in my spiritual imagination for years and hearing and telling the stories about him and his followers has been a significant part of my own Jewish journey and was the bridge for me from actor to rabbi. And here we were standing by a gravestone inscribed with the words, “Here lies the holy Baal Shem Tov. May his merit protect us. Amen.” Suddenly, this great charismatic figure became more real and tangible and somehow made all the tales of mystery and wonder feel within the realm of possibility, more accessible to us if we chose to find them.

That evening, we sat with Yuri, our driver, a Russian Orthodox resident of Uman, who takes many Jewish pilgrims on these journeys, and has developed some strong relationships over the years. With the camera filming our vodka-inspired conversation, we asked Yuri what he thought of the Baal Shem Tov. He told us that he was a very holy man and a miracle worker and that he felt his power in Meziboz, that he was important not only for the Jews. Many Ukrainians, even before the growth of the pilgrimage industry, know stories of the Baal Shem and the role he played in this region.

After spending the night in another pretty basic guest house right near the grave and some more time in the Baal Shem Tov’s presence the next morning, we continued our journey. There is a larger than life Hassidic rabbi called Yisrael Meir Gabbai, a real character, whose life’s work is to preserve and beautify these holy sites, as well as create hospitality around them, building these “hotels.” He has also been responsible for a wonderful reconstruction of the Baal Shem Tov’s old synagogue in the village of Meziboz, which we visited later that morning along with Bug River, which was probably where the Baal Shem would go every day for his mikveh, or ritual immersion.

We left Meziboz for Anipoli, a very quiet, rural and stunning little village, the burial place of Reb Dov Ber, the great Maggid of Mezeritch, who was, according to hassidic history, the successor of the Baal Shem and the one who systematically organized all of the other disciples. Reb Zuzya of Anipoli is also buried there in the same Ohel and, once again, as I told stories that I have been telling for years for the camera, in this place where their last physical form remains, I felt as if I was connecting to them in a more tangible way. The idea behind a pilgrimage to the grave of a Tzaddik, a righteous one, is that the purest essence of who they are remains at the place where they are buried and that we can somehow connect to this power and attach ourselves to their souls. I do not know for certain if I believe this in a literal way, but I do know that I felt something in these places.

On the way to our fifth night of lodging in Berditchev, we stopped briefly in Shepitovka, to greet Reb Pinchas of Koretz and in Polnoye to see Reb Yaakov Yosef, both important disciples of the Baal Shem Tov. Along the road, there are thick forests, the landscape that is in so many of the stories, and we filmed some scenes among those trees, whose branches may still remember. We also stopped at a simple road side memorial in Ganatovka, a mass grave of 800 Jews killed in the forest by the Ukrainian collaborators with the Nazis in 1941. It is a very different kind of experience to visit the sites of great spiritual masters who have died, for the most part, in their time after years of teaching and inspiration, to these other silent places, where lives were so brutally and cruelly cut off in their prime.

Berditchev, which I mentioned above, is a much larger town than the other places we had visited and we stayed the night in a hotel in the town and ate Ukranian food, which feels so Jewish. The pickles, latkes, gefilte fish, blintzes and way too much sour cream are all foods that our ancestors ate and many Ukranians eat today and it makes so much more sense now.

The following morning, we were met by Hershel who looks after the cemetery in Berditchev where the Kedushat Levi, Reb Levi Yitzhak is buried. Hershel was born in 1940 and is one of the last surviving Jews in this town. He speaks Yiddish, Russian and Ukrainian but no English or Hebrew and we wanted to film an interview with him, so with my broken German and a bit of improvised Yiddish, we managed to understand each other and we were able to hear his stories, inherited memories of a lost world. Levi Yitzhak is yet another wonderful figure in Hassidic folklore, with his great love of all Jews no matter what they did or who they were. We started the day early and I prayed my morning prayers, with tallit and teffillin, by his grave and it felt so good to be in his presence. His is the only grave that we saw that has his name listed as son of his mother, Sarah. Many people pray for healing and other help to the God of Levi Yitzhak son of Sarah. The Ohel that houses this holy grave is the only refurbished part of a huge, old Jewish cemetery. Hershel took us to a large park that was once another Jewish cemetery, but was destroyed by the communists in 1925 and we also saw the one remaining synagogue built in 1886, where there are not enough people to have regular services.

From Berditchev, we started our three-hour journey back to Kiev, stopping in Gnatovka, the burial place of Reb Mordechai of Chernobyl, whose grave stands in a dome like building, the only structure in a huge field in this village just 14 kilometers south of Kiev. As we left, we were greeted by two little local girls and pitchers of water for us to wash our hands in a exchange for a dollar. A reflective, filmed walk by a river was our last stop before Babi Yar and a couple of days of being tourists in Kiev.

Visiting Babi Yar was so stirring as you look over the ridge of this large ravine and the imagination is able to create pictures of the horrific scenes and screams of this deathly valley. There is little there in the way of memorial and explanation and it is quite a beautiful and public place, now within the city, and we could not help wondering what locals really knew of its significance. It is hard to take in what really happened here.

Apart from seeing some of the sites of what is a very beautiful city, we met and filmed Kiev’s two chief rabbis, one of whom was an old friend, a final year rabbinic student when I started my training in London in the late 1990s. Rabbi Alex Dukhovny carries the official title of “Chief Rabbi of Kyiv and Ukraine of the Progressive Jewish Congregations.” He was born and raised in Kiev and is now responsible for 47 communities and 13,000 Jews as a liberal rabbi who is a controversial figure for the Orthodox establishment. His grandfather was a Hassidic rabbi from the Rizyner line and he grew up hearing stories and melodies of the Baal Shem Tov and others, but in Soviet Russia, he never imagined being a rabbi of any kind. I asked him where I could wash a few of my clothes and we learned that Ukraine doesn’t really have places where you pay others to do your laundry, or even pay to do it yourself, so Alex, Rabbi Dukhovny, offered to take it home with him and wash it and bring it back later that evening when we were meeting for dinner. I have to say that I got quite a kick out of the fact that the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine, or at least one of them, did my laundry for me!

American born, Rabbi Yaakov Bleich was the first rabbi in post-Soviet Ukraine and is a Starliner Hassid with the title “Chief Rabbi of Kyiv and Ukraine” and based at the late 19th century Podol Synagogue, which is very active. He is seen as the official chief rabbi, but was not representing any of the non-Orthodox Jews of Ukraine, which was why the other position was created. Ah, Jewish politics. So here in Ukraine’s capital we met two very different rabbis, telling very different stories and yet each of them with a strong link in the broken, unbroken chain of a joyful, open-hearted Judaism started with that elusive figure, the Baal Shem Tov. When we asked Rabbi Bleich in his interview if he had a favorite Baal Shem Tov story, his response was that the most miraculous story of all is that we are still telling the story 250 years later.

Hopefully the film will be released by the end of this year for some living images of some of this journey.

I am not sure if this journey into Ukraine has brought me any closer to knowing who this so-called founder of Hassidic Judaism really was, but I am convinced that a long time ago he lit a holy fire in a deep forest, whose flames are still burning in Jewish hearts and souls today.