MY HALF CENTURY TRAVEL in TWO MINUTES

MY HALF-CENTURY OF TRAVEL TO 88 COUNTRIES IN A 2-MINUTE TALK BEFORE THE JEWISH BOOK COUNCIL, IN NEW YORK CITY

Recently I had the honor of speaking at the Jewish Book Council’s “Meet the Author Program,” of JBC network authors on tour. The talk is a testimonial to a happy aspect of my life and the people I met along the way.

       

“When I was 14-years-old, my father put me on a Greyhound bus in downtown Pittsburgh, bound for Detroit.

When I got there, my cousins showed me the city: Vernors Ginger Ale plant,a Tiger baseball game, Chrysler assembly line, I called it:Travel. After all, I went from one destination to another. And I had fun.

And I have been traveling ever since: 88 counties in over half a century --- mostly to exotic Jewish communities--- “The Scattered Tribe,”

I’ll take you to Rangoon, Burma, where Moses Samuels opens a 100-year-old synagogue every day in a country with only 20 Jews, hoping for tourists to arrive for a minyan.

 To Vietnam where the Chabad rabbi welcomed  me to  a Passover seder ---full of French and American expats, all  working in--- you guessed it,--- the shmate business.

To Mumbai and Cochin and Delhi, where I attended a Jewish wedding; the women all dressed in colorful saris bedecked with jewels.

To Tahiti, where the occupations of the Jews are doctors or selling black pearls,

You’ll ride the Trans-Siberian railway with me and meet Jews in Irkutsk  Birobidzhan, Vladivostok, and then we’ll hop over to Havana, Cuba where  we’ll visit the most photographed kosher butcher shop in the world.

 To Morocco where I got caught in a snow storm in the Atlas Mountains on my way to a Merekesh synagogue.

And finally home to Israel where a woman from Tahiti once told me the only paradise in the world is Jerusalem.

 Then I remembered a saying of another ancient people. The Chinese, who say ‘ the journey of a 1000 li begins with the first step.’ So when you plan your next trip, who knows you might choose one of the exotic lands in my book, “The Scattered Tribe.”

“The Scattered Tribe.:Traveling the Diaspora from Cuba to India to Tahiti & Beyond.” (Globe Pequot Press.) is available wherever books are sold.

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 Check out my blog, “I travel the world”: www.bengfrank.blogspot.com

Twitter: @BenGFrank

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