Atlanta

Sandwiched between the hubbub of Chinatown and the vibrant nightlife of the East Village are the remnants of the historic Lower East Side, once the teeming center of immigrant Jewish life and now an area under the grip of gentrification.

For the past 20 years, one woman has championed the movement to preserve the neighborhood’s deep-rooted history and culture. Ruth Abram, 62, a social activist and historian, founded the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in 1988, transforming what was initially an empty storefront into a lively National Historic Site.

When I visited Israel for the first time, I fell in love.

Not with any individual, although, like seemingly everyone else in the Overseas Student Program at Tel Aviv University, I harbored a hormonally charged admiration for the tan, arrogant, gun-toting young sabras who roamed the land.

To get to her parents’ graves, Beth Rocke, 77, rides the A train more than an hour from Morningside Heights in Manhattan to Ozone Park, Queens.
 

Shalom, y’all. That’s what the Jews of Atlanta will be saying to two charismatic New York-area rabbis who are giving up pulpits here for the Georgia boomtown.
 

Washington — Jimmy Carter is asking the Jewish community for forgiveness — and insists it’s not simply because his grandson has decided to launch a political career with a run for the Georgia state Senate.

Jason Carter, 34, an Atlanta-area lawyer, is considering a run to fill a seat covering suburban DeKalb County should the incumbent, David Adelman, win confirmation as President Barack Obama’s designated ambassador to Singapore.
The seat has a substantial Jewish community.

Charging that the FBI is being compromised by political concerns, activist Rabbi Avi Weiss is seeking a meeting with U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft to discuss why the July 4 shootings at Los Angeles International Airport have not been classified a terrorist incident: in apparent neglect of the Justice Department's own guidelines.

Stuart Rockoff, Southerner by birth and Northerner by education, is one of the most prominent voices of Southern Jewry. Since 2002, he has served as director of the history department at the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life and the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience in Jackson, Miss. The institute provides educational and rabbinic services to isolated Jewish communities, and documents the history of Jews in the South, where nearly 400,000 live. Rockoff was here a few days after the historic presidential election to speak at Village Temple in Manhattan.

Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, a Long Island native, has spent nearly three decade as a pulpit rabbi in four states, most recently at the historic The Temple in Atlanta. Now he serves as executive director of Kol Echad, a “transdenominational” adult learning center in Atlanta.

A prominent mock trial competition is a mockery this year, some voices in the Jewish community say.

The Anti-Defamation League, prominent Washington attorney Nathan Lewin and several Jewish newspapers have protested the recent decision by the National High School Mock Trial Championship not to accommodate the Shabbat requirements of a Boston day school that qualified for the 2009 competition, which was held this week in Atlanta.

Washington — Since its opening in 1993, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum here has tried to position itself as a respected national institution, not an instrument of Jewish politics.
But this week it became ensnared in just what it hoped to avoid when its top lay and professional leaders spurned an administration request for an official welcome for Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat during his trip to Washington.