Documenting Jewish life in America: What a cool project!
I always thought travel writing would be such a fun job. But I also enjoy writing about Jewish community life. So it was with great interest that I learned about the current project by Dr. Saul Landa, a dentist and Orthodox rabbi from New Jersey. No comments yet. You can be the first!
Three years ago he started working on a book that would bring him, armed with a camera, to 18 Jewish communities around the United States to capture the perseverance of Jewish life in our country. (He said that originally he wanted to cover all 50 states, but then realized that it would be “ridiculous” to try to do that.)
For each community he visited, he focused on one or more aspects of Jewish life in that area and now, through photographs and narrative, he will tell the story of life in that community, comparing the past to the present through the juxtaposition of the photos — and interviews with rabbis, elders and historians.
Earlier this year, he took photos at the Jewish National Fund’s Feb. 8 Tu B’Shevat festival at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts. During a visit to Phoenix last month ("One man's Odyssey"), he visited the Jewish News with his wife, Marlene, to search through the newspaper’s archives to learn about how our community observed past Tu b’Shevats.
In addition to Phoenix, he visited Baltimore; Bangor, Maine; Charleston, N.C.; Cincinnati; Dallas; Denver; Memphis, Tenn.; Milwaukee; Minneapolis; New Orleans; the Lower East Side and Ellis Island in New York; Philadelphia; Newport, R.I.; San Francisco/Oakland, Calif.; Seattle; St. Louis; and Washington, D.C.
In addition to holidays, he covered a kosher barbecue contest (Memphis), a bris (St. Louis), a wedding (Denver) and the Shoah (Washington, D.C.),
Landa, who has also worked as a photojournalist at his local Jewish newspaper, has had many other adventures, including reaching the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania (and spending Shabbat at 14,000 feet, complete with kosher challah rolls and grape juice boxes).
His book is scheduled to be published by Gefen Publishing House in Israel by Passover 2010.
Contact him at slanda99@comcast.net.
20 Aug, 2009 >