Category: Judaism

Ho Feng Shan (1901-1997)

A hero from the Holocaust has emerged after his death because in his humility he didn’t tell his story. After he died at the age of 96, Ho Feng Shan’s daughter included in his obituary the one story he had told her about a time he confronted the Gestapo while he was a diplomat in… Read more »

Rafael Schäcter and the “Defiant Requiem”

During World War II the Jewish inmates of the Terezin Concentration Camp (sometimes known as Theresienstadt) under the Nazis found a nonviolent way to resist, to claim their own identity and find a place of freedom amid the horrors of the Holocaust. The key was music. The initiator was Rafael Schäcter, a Czech Jewish composer… Read more »

Peter, Paul and Mary

One can’t think about the protest movements in the ’60s without including the music of Peter, Paul and Mary.  Formed in 1961, the trio of Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey and Mary Travers popularized songs by Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and others as well as adding some of their own rich tunes into the vibrant mix. … Read more »

MOSES MAIMONIDES (1135-1204)

Moses Maimonides was the major medieval philosopher of the 12th Century as well as being a Jewish rabbi and the physician to the Grand Vizier Alfadhil and Sultan Saladin of Egypt. He was born in Spain during the golden age of Jewish culture in Cordoba. However when the Almohades, a radical Islamic sect, conquered Cordoba… Read more »

AARON JEAN-MARIE CARDINAL LUSTIGER (1926-2007)

Aaron Lustiger was born in Paris in 1926 to Jewish parents who had emigrated from Poland. When World War II broke out, the family fled to Orléans. After reading the Christian Bible, the teenage Lustiger felt drawn to the Orléans Cathedral. He decided to convert to Catholicism, with the reluctant consent of his parents, adding… Read more »