Started at age of three as a pavement artist, and also shop assistant in parent’s Newsagent and Tobacconist in London’s Soho, through Marylebone Central School, reaching Marlborough College; eventually to St. Martin’s School of Art, to Assistant to the Art Director of a leading Advertising Agency, then to Studio Manager […]
The rubbish is piled high amongst the blue and white dwellings of Hara Seghira, the Jewish quarter of the Tunisian island of Djerba, but the locals are not worried. The government will do a thorough clean-up just before the holiday of Lag Ba’omer. That’s when thousands of visitors will flock […]
In time, we hope the Medias Synagogue will become a best practice model for other communities around the country to rediscover abandoned or forgotten buildings and give them new life through educational programmes designed for their own specific needs and history.For, in the words of John Ruskin, “the greatest glory […]
For all the years I have been going to Romania, Erich Raducan was known as The Last Jew of Sighisoara. He died a year or so ago aged 96.His life covered an extraordinary span of history — encapsulating a vanished world – which started in Bukovina with the first world […]
Tal KatsirSopranoTal was born in Israel in 1988 and began taking piano lessons at the age of seven at the local public conservatory. Eight years later she was admitted as a singer and pianist to the Thelma Yellin High-School of Arts. Taking part in chamber ensembles, she participated twice in […]
Rodney has been a friend of the Spiro cultural endeavours for the last 3 decades and with him we have presented a few of his wonderful events at major public venues: Overseas League, Harrow Arts Centre and, last weekend, Radlett Centre.The performances attracted hundreds of people and have been received […]
MARIA TUDOSA ~ Profile/Presentation of her life & work-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=Born in Adjud — a town in Romania’s province of Moldova (Moldavia) — with a vibrant Jewish community exuding a life-style and atmosphere not dissimilar to those emanating from Shalom Aleichem’s “shteitles”, or as so vividly depicted by Marc Chagall’s imagery of […]
The question whether old and dilapidated synagogues, which are no longer in use should be restored and maintained, is in our view a rhetorical one. For us Jews whose life-line to things Jewish is Jewish history, the answer is obvious. The question however remains whose responsibility it is to bear […]
Hope is one of the most essential concepts in Judaism, a core of Jewish survival despite all historical tragedies which befall our people. Hope is a central aspect in human existence, it is a source of motivation and dynamics which enables us as individuals and as a collective to look […]
1. The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and their languageThere is a particular Jewish culture which is now struggling to survive, but as late as the 1940s it was that of over 300,000 Jews who lived in the pre-1918 Ottoman Empire.This empire, at its height in the 16th century, covered […]