A Thousand Years of Jewish Return to Palestine Before WWI

                                                                       

RASHI, Rabbi Solomon Yitzhaki (b:1040 in Troyes, France-d: 1105)studied, lived in Rhineland, famous Jewish commentator 

                                                                           

The 10th century marked the Moslem conquest of the Middle East and Palestine.  It was also a time when the Karaite leaders (Jews who did not support the Oral Law-only Mosaic Law who broke off from mainstream in 8th century)  called for aliyah in Jerusalem.

In 1121, 300 Jews went to Palestine from France and England.  Nahmanides went in 1267 and Obadiah of Bertinoro went in 1488.  Both were followed by groups of disciples.  Then in 1492 saw many Sephardi Jews including an important kabbalistic circle moved to Palestine, mainly in Safad (Tzfat).  Joseph Nasi's resettlement attempt in 1564 brought groups from Italy, while in 1700, 1,500 arrived from Eastern Europe in response to Rabbi Judah Hasid's call.  In the end of the 18th century, there was an influx of both Hasidim and followers of the Vilna Gaon.  30 years (1850-1880)  before the Bilu (1st modern Zionist pioneering movement started in 1882 at Kharkov by Jewish students reacting against the wave of Russian pogroms.  , 20,000 to 30,000 Jews settled in Palestine.  That was the start of the 1st Aliyah which then started in 1882 to 1903 which started from going through the Russian pogroms and was led by the Bilu.  300 families and smaller groups came from Russia in 1882.  Also arriving were the 450 pioneers from Romania and a few dozen from Yemen.  The Turkish authorities didn't make it any easier.  More persecutions of Jews in Russia caused more to come in 1890 when thousands more entered.  By 1948, there were 750,000 Jews living in Israel when the state was re-born.

The 1st Bilu was made up of 15 men and women who reached Jaffa in the summer of 1882 and the others later that year.  They were true pioneers in a barren land. They went from cold Russia to hot Palestine.
                                                                         

Crusaders ruled the land and immigration was forbidden.  No Jew could legally or safely enter Palestine during that period.  Testing the waters, Yehuda "Judah Halevi, the greatest Hebrew poet of the exile, called for the Jews to immigrate, and many generations drew inspiration from his teaching.  He was killed soon after arriving in Jerusalem in 1141 by a Crusader whose horse had crushed him to death.  He was born in 1075 in Toledo, Spain, and lived in Cordova, a physician by profession, lived a life of affluence and honor.  .   and died 1141 by the Wall according to legend, or  in Alexandria, Egypt.

The Crusaders' grip on Palestine was over when 300 rabbis from France and England made aliyah in the year 1210 to help the Jewish communities of Jerusalem, Acre and Ramleh.
                                                                 

 
The Mongol invaders arrived a generation later who were the most destructive.  Here they had taken Baghdad.  After Baghdad, the Mongols continued on westward. They conquered Syria from the Ayyubids, with help from the Armenians and neutrality from the Crusaders. In Palestine they reached the extent of their conquests.
                                                                                 
Moses Nachmanides, AKA Ramban,  then made aliyah to Jerusalem and found only 2 Jews, father and son who were dyers.  Nevertheless, Moses had disciples who answered his call and they reestablished the community.  From 1267, he lived in Palestine, where he settled in Acre, reorganized the Jewish settlements and wrote his popular bible commentary with hits characteristic combination of rational interpretation and insistence on kabbalistic implications.  "Ramban became a practicing physician in his native town. However, he was the communal rabbi of Gerona at the same time, and later became the chief rabbi of the entire province of Catalonia.

For many years the Ramban lived in his native town, supporting himself as a physician, and devoting most of his time to the study of the Talmud and Kabalah, and to his literary work, writing commentaries on the Talmud. But in his declining days, when he was nearly seventy years old, his quiet life underwent a sudden change. An apostate Jew, masquerading as a devout Catholic, Paulus Christians, had challenged the Jews to a religious disputation."  He was the 2nd Spanish Jewish doctor who saw the need to return to the Jewish ancient homeland.  

                                                                           

Ship called a Cog in 1304. 

So, from the 12th century onward, Jews came to settle in Palestine.  Europe had become a purgatory for Jews,  This was during the Middle Ages and people were primitive when "Jews were subjected to the whole range of persecutions, from mass degradation to death after torture."  All travel was dangerous.
                   
The 13th, 14th and 15th centuries were very dangerous for Jews in Europe.  To go from Western Europe to Palestine was a heroic undertaking which most often ended in disaster.  Praying for the return to Zion was a dream of heaven.
                                                                       

Pope Nicholas V in 1447-gave Catholics what would become the Vatican Library and the Doctrine of Discovery – the right of Christians to take any non-Christian lands they “discover”. In “Dum diversas” (1452), to get Portugal interested in a crusade against the Turks, he allowed the Portuguese to put non-Christians Africans into “perpetual servitude”.

Popes ordered their followers to stop Jewish travel to Palestine.  In the 15th century, the Italian maritime states denied Jews the use of ships for getting to Palestine.  Jews had to end their project or make the whole journey by a roundabout land route and take on more dangers by going through Germany, Poland and Southern Russia or another route of going through the inhospitable Balkans and Black Sea crossing before reaching Turkey that was semi-safe.

In 1433, right after the ban against Jews traveling was imposed, Yitzhak Tsarefati urged Jews to come by way of Turkey.  Often, the journey took years! This was so the traveler could work at the stopping places to raise money for the next leg of his journey.  If Jews lived there, he would ask rich ones to finance his journey and share vicariously in the mitzvah (good deed) of his aliyah.
                                                                       

                                                                           

Christian pilgrims Siebald Rieter and Johann Tucker visited Jerusalem in 1479 .  They followed the path taken by a German Jew who had set out from Nuremberg and traveled to Posen, Poland (300 miles).  They went from Posen to Lublin, Poland (250 miles), then Lublin to Lvov in Galicia, now in Ukraine (120 miles), then Lvov to Khotin, Bessarabia, now Moldova (150 miles), and from Khotin to Akerman (150 miles) and from Akerman to Samsun, Turkey  (6 days), Samsun to Tokat, Turkey (6-7 days), Tokat to Aleppo, Syria (15 days), Aleppo to Damascus, Syria  (7 days), and finally-Damasuc to Jerusalem, Judah (6 days).  Aleppo came to have a very large Jewish community, larger than Damascus had.  After traveling 970 miles from Germany to get to Turkey, they had to travel another 41 days at least to get to Jerusalem.

How about the Ottoman Empire?  They held the land of Palestine for the past 400 years from about 1517.  They had encouraged Jewish immigration into their dominions.  A stream of immigrants moved to Palestine even though conditions in Europe made it possible for only a few Jews to get up and go before the call.
.
Many who heeded the call were refugees from the Spanish Inquisition of 1492  All sorts of skilled Jews came; scholars, artisans and merchants.  The 16th century now had a new pulse into the Jewish life in Palestine.  The Empire wasn't doing so well and life there became harsher.  By the 17th century, rebelling Cossacks in 1648 and 49 started massacring Jews.  Those that could flee went to the nearest refuge which was in Western Europe and from there they made their way to Palestine.

That same generation saw Shabbetai Zevi b: 1626 in Smyrna and affected by Chmielnicki massacres of 1648-49 and was manic-depressive .   a self-appointed Messiah who compiled followers from the East and West.  People saw he wasn't able to take them magically to Palestine so they got there  by sea or by overland through Turkey and Syria.

The Ottoman Empire suffered from anarchy in the local administration, the degradations and exactions, plagues and pestilence and the ruin of the country continued in the 18th and into the 19th centuries.  Jews in Europe were doing worse than ever living in even greater poverty.  Groups massed together and came from Italy, Morocco, and Turkey.   Hasidim, disciples of the Baal Shem-Tov came from  Galicia and Lithuania.  Jews were dying in Palestine faster than immigrants could take their place.
                                                                     

       
By 1810, disciples of the Vilna Gaon had just immigrated and mentioned that "even in Palestine's ruin, there is none to compare with her, even in her desolation she is unequaled, in her silence there is none like her.  Good are her ashes and her stones."  They knew this was HOME.  These poor immigrants suffered from an earthquake, pestilence and murderous onslaught by marauding brigands.  Yet they or their children lived to see the beginnings of the modern restoration of the country.
                                                                     

Sir Moses Montefiore, a Jewish philanthropist from Britain had great plans to resettle Jews in their own homeland.  In 1869, moved a group of 7 Jews in Jerusalem and set up the 1st housing project outside the walls.  Each built a house among the rocks and jackals and it came to be called Nahlat Shiva (Estate of the 7).  Today it is the heart of downtown Jerusalem, bounded by the Jaffa Road between Zion Ssquare and the Bank of Israel.

In 1878 another group came across the mountains of Judea and set up the 1st modern Jewish agricultural settlement at Petah Tikva, which became the mother of the settlements.  8 years earlier, the 1st modern agricultural school in Palestine was opened at Mikveh Yisrael near Jaffa.  Thus the Jews were awakened to return to what had been their ancient home of Israel and Judah, called Palestine for almost 2,000 years since 135 CE by the Romans who had to fight 3 years to take Jerusalem again after taking it in 70 CE.  The Jewish General Bar Kokhba almost had won against the wily Romans.
                                                                             

Meanwhile, the newly formed Catholics thought it was their duty to enforce Jewish dispersion.  They could not stand the idea of Jews returning to their own land.  But, by 464 CE, the Emperor Julian announced his intention of rebuilding the Temple.  What a change of heart.  This was part of his apostasy.  Protestant sects had been forming and they all voiced a new chant of saying it was a Christian act now to help the Jewish people regain its homeland.  Maybe this was because it was in the secure hands of the Ottoman Turks, and there was no way of carrying out this new 180 degree change of objectives towards Jews.
                                                                             

As luck would have it, Christians turned 180 degrees again in the early 19th century.  Napoleon Bonaparte had something to do with it.  He had a plot of conquest of Palestine in 1799 and had promised to restore the country to the Jews!  Somehow he lost the battle and didn't take over Palestine.  He did ring a bell in everyone's minds, though of the idea of restoration of Jews to Palestine.
                                                                         

1865 picture of Lord Lindsay and son Ludovic

Lord Lindsay, Lord Shaftesbury who learned Hebrew, Lord Palmerston, Disraeli, Lord Manchester, George Elliot, Holman Hunt, Sir Charles Warren, Hall Caine, all spoke, wrote, organized support and submitted practical projects of ways Britain might help the return of the Jewish people to Palestine.  Some even wanted the British government to buy Palestine from the Turks to give it to the Jews to rebuild!

     Lord Lindsay wrote: "The Jewish race, so wonderfully preserved, may yet have another stage of national existence opened to them, may one more obtain possession of their native land...
    The soil of "Palestine still enjoys her sabbaths, and only waits for the return of her banished children, and the application of industry, commensurate with her agricultural capabilities, to burst once more into universal luxuriance, and be all that she ever was in the days of Solomon."

1845 and Sir George Gawler called for replenishment of the deserted towns and fields of Palestine with the energetic people whose warmest affections are rooted in the soil (Jews).  How did they know anything?  They didn't have cell phones in those days, or even telephones.  It was in 1839 that the Church of Scotland sent 2 missionaries, Andrew Bonar and Robert Murray M'Cheyne, to report on the conditions of the Jews in their land.  The newspaper, The Times urged the Jews to take possession of the land.  If they needed another Moses, they supposed one would appear.  They were very naive. Many pitched in with more thoughts and ideas.
                                                                   

Benjamin Disraeli, twice voted a British Prime Minister, b: 1804 to Jewish Italian parents, baptized to Christianity in 1817, -d: 1881. 

Along came the Crimean War which pushed all these great ideas back.  1878 saw the Prusso-Turkish War, and the Congress of Berlin tried to find a peaceful solution.  Lord Beaconsfield (Benjamin Disraeli) and Lord Salisbury were proposing to declare a protectorate over Syria and Palestine and that Palestine would be restored by the Jews.  The reports were unfounded but the political planners in Britain had this in their minds.  The newspaper, Spectator, on May 10, 1879 criticized Beaconsfield for not having adopted it and wrote:  "If he had freed the Holy Land and restored the Jews, as he might have done instead of pottering about Roumelia  (today southern Bulgaria) and AFGHANISTAN,  he would have died as Dictator."  Roumelia was a historical term describing the area now referred to as the Balkans or the Balkan Peninsula when it was administered by the Ottoman Empire.
                                                                       

How about the Moslems of the Middle East?  In 1831, Palestine was conquered from the Turks by Mehemet Ali, who ruled it from Egypt for the next  9 years.  This was when Sir Moses Montefiore was busy making plans for Palestine and the Jews.  He visited Mehemet Ali in Egypt in 1839 and presented his ideas of large scale Jewish settlement to regenerate Palestine.  MEHEMET ALI ACCEPTED IT.    Right in the middle of getting in the practical details, Ali was forced to leave Palestine and the land returned to Turkish rule.

40 years later the Turks were presented with the same plans of Jewish return.  Laurence Oliphant was the man who worked on these newer plans.  He showed the Turks that this idea was in their own interest as well as in Britain's benefit to restore Jews to Palestine.   He had plans for Gilead to have a settlement and it was Beaconsfield who  presented it.

The Sultan liked the plan, The Foreign Secretary Lord Salisbury and even the Prince of Wales (later the King Edward VII)  and the French government as well wanted it to happen.but in  1880, a British election caused Beaconsfield to lose his position and he was replaced by William Ewart Gladstone, who was considered an enemy by the Turks.  Jews settling in Palestine was to become an idea to be shelved.

Jewish groups were then born and a wave of Jewish immigration took place.  The First Aliyah was in 1882, but remember, movements of Jews returning started in 1121.  Theodore Herzl's place in history was still 15 years away when the World Zionist Organization would be developed.  After all this, how did the mandate of Great Britain, given to them on April 24, 1920 at the San Remo Conference, ever get so sidetracked from England's main goal of settling Palestine with Jews once again.  The answer is:  Oil in the Middle East for Britain's use.  They gave away 80% of the Jewish land to Jordan, and then tried to divide the 20% left between  the Palestinian Jews and  Palestinian Arabs to make 2 states.  The Arabs declined.  They didn't want half.  They wanted all of it.  Today many of those Arabs and their descendants live in Jordan.  Abbas and his Palestinian Fatah members (PA), are not negotiating at the present.  They are trying to start the 3rd Intefada.

Resource: BATTLEGROUND, fact and fantasy in Palestine by Samuel Katz, p 100-105.
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
http://lostislamichistory.com/mongols/
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/111857/jewish/Ramban.htm
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0012_0_11097.html
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/shabbetai-zevi/
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Zvi.html
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Benjamin+disraeli









  

Khazarians, Karaites, Tatars and The Jews of Crimea

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                             

Crimea has been a Russian peninsula in the Black Sea for years and years.  Way back in the 5th century BCE, there were Greek colonies here.  Jews settled there from the 1st Century BCE  before  the fall of Jerusalem from the Roman invasion but during their Occupation.  Roman soldiers had entered Crimea in 47 BCE and stayed until 330 CE.  Many were taken as slaves to work for the Roman army  in dirty work.   Inscriptions have been found dating this evidence.
                                                                                   

Along came the 7th century and eastern Crimea was controlled by the prevailing Khazars which lasted until 1117.  Khazaria's ruling party had converted to Judaism, but did not make it a forced decision on their population.  It was a choice.  The royal family had converted, that we know.
                                                                             

Karaites Dance 

By the 12th century, with Khazaria swallowed up by Russia, a large Karaite population lived in Crimea, centered at Eupatoria, Crimea.  Karaites were a Jewish sect that had rejected the Oral Law the rest of the Jewish family followed.  They had developed in the 8th century in and around Persia where the Jewish community was not long established and did not accept the discipline of the Babylonian gaonate (leadership).  They had been exposed to the Messianic hopes that came to them from the local  people.  There had been the Arab conquest of Persia in 640; the fall of the Umayyad dynasty in 750, and the urge toward social justice and asceticism which they had inhaled from the local population.  An ancient document from the 760s was written by the new Karaite, Anan Ben David who had interpreted the Tanakh (Bible) literally and tried to deduce a code of life without reference to the Oral law.
                                                                             

The decendants of the khazars are most like the crimean karaites who 1) look "eastern" 2) speak turkic 3) are from the General area of the khazar empire

During the next few centuries, there were others who rejected the ancient Oral Law in this area. There were Karaites who traveled as far as to Egypt to make converts to their particular doctrine of Judaism.  They presented themselves as an austere asceticism that didn't go over very well.  Rabbis just avoided controversy with them until Saadyah Gaon, who died in 942, attacked them violently and tried to exclude them from the Jewish family.  Educated scholars emerged among the Karaites inaugurating the Golden Age of Karaite literature in  both Arabic and Hebrew.  Intermarriage between the 2 groups was common.  Karaite scholars studied along with rabbis and were influenced by them.
                                                                             

Karaites are Jews who take their shoes off before entering their shul.  

During the 10th century, Karaite communities sprang up in the Byzantine Empire of Asia Minor, the Balkans, Damascus, Syria, Cyprus, Toledo Spain which had gone Moslem, etc.  The Palestinian and Egyptian centers surpassed those of Persia and Babylonia which dwindled and degenerated.  The Palestinian Karaites were most austere, and had settled in Jerusalem and mourned for the Temple and prayed continually for redemption.  Karaism spread to the Crimea by the 12th Century, to Troki, Lithuania in the 13th century, and Volhynia (Luck), after the Russian Karaites received from the Czars privileges and rights denied the Rabbanites.  The question begs, why did the Russians accept Karaites and not mainstream Judaism?  Probably because they saw them as having broken away from the mainstream Judaism like Christianity had, and Judaism had been so slandered.  They saw Jesus as having broken away.  They just didn't know what they had broken from, and it WAS NOT THE TORAH.  IN FACT, THEY WERE STRONG KEEPERS OF THE TORAH.
                                                                               

At ancient Theodosia,today's (Kaffa), the Jewish community preserved the Byzantine rite of prayer, published finally in 1793 and is now extinct.  .  Many Jews converted to Islam under Tatar rule which was from the end of the 13th century.  In 1346, the bodies of Mongol warriors of the Golden Horde who had died of plague were thrown over the walls of the besieged Kaffa (ancient Feodosiya). It has been speculated that this operation may have been responsible for the advent of the Black Death in Europe.  Kaffa had a synagogue there already in 909 CE, and a strong Jewish community was reported during the 13th to 15th centuries.  After the 18th century, the Jewish population declined and before WWII, numbered about 2,000.  
                                                                               

These Crimean Tatars planned on boycotting elections last year in September. "More than 99%of Crimean Tatars boycotted the Moscow-orchestrated referendum on transferring Crimea to Russian control, Mustafa Cemilev said. Now, as a result of enormous Russian pressure, 98% of them will not participate in Sunday’s election in their occupied homeland."

Crimean Tatars were a Turkic ethnic group that formed in the Crimean Peninsula from the 13th to 17th centuries from Turkic tribes that moved to the land from the Asian steppes beginning in the 10th century and mixed in with the pre-Cuman population of Crimea.  The Tatars were led by Batu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan in 1223 and they went into Kiev, Ukraine.  They constituted the majority of Crimea's population from the time of its ethnogenesis until the mid 19th century.  "Crimean Tatars are not Turkic but a mixture of many settlements from Europe to Asia."  When Tatars entered the area, they managed to cause the blending of Greeks, Armenians, Italians and Ottoman Turks on the southern coastline, Goths of the central mountains and Turkic-speaking Kipchaks and Cumans of the steppe which formed the Crimean Tatar ethnic group.  This Golden Horde of Tatars mixed with populations which had settled in Eastern Europe and Crimea since the 7th century; the  Tatars, Mongols, Khazars, Pechenegs, Cumans and Kipchacks.  They took slaves from the eastern Europeans that they invaded, such as Polish, Lithuanians, Russians, etc.  
They emerged as a nation when the Crimean Khanate, which was an Ottoman Empire vassal state from the 15th to 18th centuries and was one of the great centers of slave trade for the Ottoman Empire.  Crimea had mostly adopted Islam in the 14th century following the conversion of Ozbeg Khan.  Note Khazaria went from pagan to Judaism, now Crimea switched to Islam.

The first Russian invasion of Crimea was in 1736. The Russian Empire annexed the territory of Crimea in the last quarter of the 18th century, after a number of bloody wars with the Ottoman Empire. The city of Simferopol had piped water, sewerage and a theatre where Moliere was performed in French.  Their port of Gozleve could be compared with Rotterdam. Bahcesarai, the capital,  was described as Europe's cleanest and greenest city.  "However, in the Crimea’s largest city of Sevastopol, which is considered a separate region of Crimea, there are very few Crimean Tatars and around 22 percent of Ukrainians, with over 70 percent of the population being Russians."
                                                                                

Crimean Tatars in traditional costume in traditional dance.

On the negative side, beginning in the 18th century, Crimean Tatars were known for annual and devastating raids into Ukraine and Russia.  The Crimean Khanate kept a huge slave trade with the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East which was the basis of their economy.  Kefe was one of the most important trading ports and slave markets.  Slaves and freedmen formed about 75% of the Crimean population.

May 1944, the USSR ordered the removal of a majority of the Tatar population from Crimea, including the families of Crimean Tatars serving in the soviet Army-in trains and boxcars to Central Asia, mainly to Uzbekistan.  In 1967, some were allowed to return to Crimea.  In 1989, the USSR condemned the removal of Crimean Tatars from their motherland as inhumane and lawless.  Today the Tatars make up 12% of the population in Crimea.  A large group still lives in Turkey and Uzbekistan.  

The Genoese ruled southern Crimea in the 15th century and they prohibited interference with internal Jewish affairs.

From 1475 to 1783, the Turks ruled as the Ottoman Empire.  Chafut-Kale was the Jewish center then.  Many Jewish captives from the Ukraine next door were sent to Crimea after 1648.

Then the Russian conquest occurred in 1783 and many Ashkenazi Jews settled in Crimea.

In 1863, the Russian authorities granted the Karaites equal rights, but other Jews continued to suffer from disabilities until the 1917 Russian Revolution.

In the late 1920s, thousands of Jews were settled in Crimea under a plan to establish an autonomous Jewish agricultural center.  By 1939, the peak of Nazi takeover in Germany and disaster for the Jews, the Jewish population in Crimea numbered 50,000 including 40,000 Ashkenazim and 6,000 Krimchaks and 4,000 Karaites.

Almost everyone was wiped out by the Germans by 1941 and only a few, including some 300 Karaites, survived.
                                                                                 

Karaites Praying 

By   1980 the Jewish population was up to 25,614 from nothing.  Post WWII European Jews had made their way there for some unknown reasons; most likely common language and cultural reasons along with lack of finances.  They could have opted for Israel but didn't, no doubt because of the attacks previously happening there.  However, 1980 was a good year to make Aliyah.  I did.  Many Russians from the Motherland also did.  Why didn't the Crimean Jews?   Since 1948, the Karaites in Egypt moved to Israel, next door, settling in Matzliah and elsewhere.

 By 1990 there were 25,000 Karaites living in Israel.
                                                                     

When you come right down to it, Karaite doctrine is conservative and more stringent than rabbinical Jewish teachings.  It forbids levirate marriage (marriage with a brother's childless widow.  Such a marriage is commanded where the brother has left no offspring; ) see Deut 25:5, 25:7-10, and Lev 18:16.  and all  Sabbath lighting and is stricter on laws of purity.  They have differences in laws of ritual slaughter that prevent social intercourse with the Rabbanites.  They do not celebrate Hanukkah as it is post-biblical.  They do not use tephillin or mezuzot in prayers.  The surprise is that they have evolved with their own Oral Law, showing that through time, this is something necessary that takes place.  Sometimes theirs even overlaps rabbinical traditiion.  They just don't sanctify our Oral Law.  They rarely discuss ethics and metaphysics.

Resource:  The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
The Jews of Khazaria, 2nd Edition by Kevin Alan Brook
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Tatars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Crimea
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-24/crimea-is-now-putin-s-problem-child
http://www.rt.com/news/crimea-facts-protests-politics-945/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_and_Tatar_states_in_Europe
http://www.forumbiodiversity.com/misc.php?do=vsarules
http://www.thejc.com/judaism/judaism-features/50660/the-jews-who-take-their-shoes-shul