Mea Shearim (“hundred gates”; contextually, “a hundred fold”) is one of the oldest Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem. It is populated by HarediJews, and was built by members of the Old Yishuv. The oldest Sephardic Haredi dynasty, Levi Kahana of Spain, has a religious cultural center in the neighborhood. The name Mea Shearim is derived from a verse from Genesis, which happened to be part of the weekly Torah portion that was read the week the settlement was founded: “Isaac sowed in that land, and in that year, he reaped a hundredfold; God had blessed him” (Genesis 26:12). According to a tradition, the community originally had 100 gates, another meaning of Mea Shearim. read more…
The synagogue in Konstanz, the district town of the district of Konstanz in Baden-Württemberg, was built in 1882/1883 and destroyed during the November pogroms in 1938. This first synagogue was on Sigismundstrasse. A new building was inaugurated in 2019. The Jewish community of Konstanz tried to build a synagogue from 1872. The property at Sigismundstrasse 19 was purchased from the Konstanz Hospital Foundation and, thanks to numerous donations and a loan, the financing was secured. The synagogue was built according to the plans of the architect and city builder Holzmann from Constance. The inauguration, attended by numerous representatives of the state and municipal authorities and the Christian churches, took place on September 28, 1883. read more…
The 19th arrondissement of Paris (XIXe arrondissement) is one of the 20 arrondissements of the capital city of France. In spoken French, this arrondissement is referred to as dix-neuvième. La petite Jérusalem (Little Jerusalem) is located in the Quartier de la Mouzaïa/Quartier d’Amérique. read more…
George Soros is a Hungarian–Americanbillionaire investor and philanthropist. As of May 2020, he had a net worth of $8.3 billion, having donated more than $32 billion to the Open Society Foundations. Born in Budapest, Soros survived Nazi Germany–occupied Hungary and moved to the United Kingdom in 1947. He attended the London School of Economics, graduating with a bachelor’s and eventually a master’s degree in philosophy. Soros began his business career by taking various jobs at merchant banks in the United Kingdom and then the United States, before starting his first hedge fund, Double Eagle, in 1969. Profits from his first fund furnished the seed money to start Soros Fund Management, his second hedge fund, in 1970. Double Eagle was renamed to Quantum Fund and was the principal firm Soros advised. At its founding, Quantum Fund had $12 million in assets under management, and as of 2011 it had $25 billion, the majority of Soros’s overall net worth. read more…
Ohel Jakob (from Hebrew: “Jacob’s Tent”) is a synagogue in Munich in Germany. It was built between 2004 and 2006 as the new main synagogue for the Jewish community in Munich and is located at the Sankt-Jakobs-Platz. The synagogue was inaugurated on 9 November 2006 on the 68th anniversary of the Kristallnacht. The building is part of the new Jewish Center consisting of the synagogue, the Jewish Museum Munich and a community center. read more…
Ayn Rand< was a Russian-American writer and philosopher. Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, to a Russian-Jewish bourgeois family living in Saint Petersburg. She is known for her two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. Educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926. She had a play produced on Broadway in 1935 and 1936. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead. In 1957, Rand published her best-known work, the novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own periodicals and releasing several collections of essays until her death in 1982. Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge and rejected faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism and rejected altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed collectivism and statism as well as anarchism, instead supporting laissez-fairecapitalism, which she defined as the system based on recognizing individual rights, including property rights. In art, Rand promoted romantic realism. She was sharply critical of most philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her, except for Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and classical liberals. Literary critics received Rand’s fiction with mixed reviews and academia generally ignored or rejected her philosophy, though academic interest has increased in recent decades. The Objectivist movement attempts to spread her ideas, both to the public and in academic settings. She has been a significant influence among libertarians and American conservatives. read more…
