travel Archives - Moment Magazine

05 Aug

Beshert | Not a Chain Restaurant

September 8, 2021
By Dan Freedman
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In the early 1960s, when I was about 10 or so, I was in the backseat of our family car driving somewhere in upstate New York. My parents were in the front seat and my older brother, Paul, was next to me. It wasn’t the busy New York Thruway but it wasn’t a winding country road either. In any case, we were running low on fuel and our stomachs were growling as well. My father, the driver, was never one to let the gas gauge slip too low. But as we traveled onward, we noticed there were no filling stations along the way—nothing except trees and nature. This went on until the gas gauge pointed to near empty. We all got a bit apprehensive; anxiety mixed with hunger is never a good combination. Then as we rounded a...

20 Aug

Beshert, Latest

Beshert | The Brother Who Opened My Path—and My World

April 7, 2021
By Lucy Rose Fischer
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My big brother, Jerry Rose, was my beshert, He was eleven years older than me. I adored him. He was my idol and my mentor. Jerry was a writer and an artist. Today, so am I—because of him. When I was little, he read poetry to me, classics like Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee” and John Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” As I grew up, he gave me reading lists and critiqued my writing. He taught me to use strong and authentic imagery and avoid clichés. When I went to college, I wrote asking Jerry’s advice about everything—from books and writing to love and sex. When I wrote that I was starting to keep kosher, he didn’t approve. He responded that Jewish dietary laws were really about health and no longer relevant in today’s world. I...

09 Jul

Jewish World, Latest

Tracing Morocco’s Jewish Past

April 7, 2021
By Gail P. Dubov
2 comments

While most of Morocco’s quarter of a million Jews emigrated to Israel, Europe and the U.S., 2,500 remain today. Traces of their deep-rooted culture stretch from the Mediterranean to the Sahara, a less-traveled region steeped in Jewish history.

06 Feb

Beshert, Latest

Beshert | Once Upon a Time in Montevideo…

February 28, 2020
By Lisa Delafontaine
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I met my husband in a hotel lobby in Montevideo, Uruguay on my 27th birthday. We were browsing the lobby stores because the hotel’s only elevator was broken. We hailed from different continents and were both on delayed business trips, which made meeting on yet another continent beshert. He thought I was a local girl from Uruguay and I thought he, a European businessman, was attractive with an accent. By the time they fixed the elevator, we had invited each other for dinner. Work friends were taking me out for my birthday; when they picked me up, they were surprised at my speed in rounding out the dinner party. At a restaurant on the Rio Plata, bordering Argentina, we spoke a mix of languages made fluent by champagne. He claimed he spoke English and that my Spanish...

31 Jul

Jewish World, Latest

On the Island of Rhodes, Marking 75 Years Since the Jewish Deportation

August 15, 2019
By Sherri Moshman Paganos
14 comments

On the island of Rhodes, a community that existed in the old town for 2,300 years was nearly wiped out in a single day: July 23, 1944.

24 Jan

Jewish World, Latest

A Guide to Sand Synagogues

February 8, 2019
By Julie Bielenberg
4 comments

Today, there are only five sand synagogues remaining in the world, three of them in the Caribbean.

24 Jan

Jewish World, Winter Issue 2019

A Gold Rush Synagogue Hangs On Down Under

December 23, 2021
By Mark I. Pinsky
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More than a century and a half has passed since the gold rush created the booming Australian city of Ballarat, 70 miles inland from Melbourne. The gold is long gone, but the worshippers who sit shoulder to shoulder in the pews of Shearith Yisroel seem determined to live up to their synagogue’s name: “Remnant of Israel.”

29 Oct

Jewish World, Latest

Rediscovering and Restoring Cape Verde’s Jewish Heritage

February 8, 2019
By Rosanne Skirble
5 comments

Four large and heavy commemorative bronze plaques wait in storage at the Praia airport in Cape Verde, an archipelago of ten tiny islands 300 miles off the coast of Senegal in West Africa.

27 Sep

Jewish World, Latest, World

Curacao, the Island That Brought Jews to the Americas

February 12, 2019
By Gail P. Dubov
3 comments

It’s hard to imagine that at one time, this tiny island, so far from the cobblestone streets of Portugal, the canals of Amsterdam and the shtetls of Eastern Europe, had the largest Jewish population in the Americas.

04 Apr

Israel, Latest

Photos | The Holy Land 1000

April 29, 2018
By Nadine Epstein
1 comment

I just returned from Israel, where I found myself in the passenger seat of a Jaguar roadster roaring through the Judean Hills on a segment of the Holy Land 1000, a 1,000-kilometer road trip through Israel. The morning was golden as we breezed, top down, on the winding back roads to Tel Aviv, 76 cars in all with motorcycle escorts, ending at a rally attended by devoted members of Israel’s antique car association. Here are some photos from the event:

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