Weird headline of the day
"NYC ultra-orthodox Jews give Amish walking tour" (from the Associated Press):
The city's ultra-Orthodox Jews took the Pennsylvania Amish on a walking tour of their world Tuesday, saying their communities are naturally drawn to each other with a commitment to simpler lifestyles.My cousin is a Lubavitcher rabbi in New York. I wonder if he was in on this. I'm always trying to get my mom to ask him to get me in on that birth right free trip to Israel thing, but she somehow thinks that is dishonest. Whatever, my friend Lisa is Jewish and she, like me, only has one Jewish grandparent. Luck of the draw that it was through the maternal line, I say. And SHE doesn't even want her free trip to Israel... grumble grumble grumble."It's reinforcing to the Amish community to see us Jews living the way the Bible says Jews are supposed to live, and have lived since the time of Moses and Abraham," said Yisroel Ber Kaplan, program director for the Chassidic Discovery Center in Brooklyn. "The Amish are also living their lives as the Bible speaks to them."
. . . At a workshop where a young man was touching up a Torah, a scroll of the holiest Jewish writings, Epstein told the group how a Jew in wartime Germany had rescued the sacred scroll by wrapping it around his midriff under his clothes as he fled to safety.
The Amish listened, commenting to one another in Pennsylvania Dutch, a dialect of the German of their ancestors.
When Epstein, a native of Chattanooga, Tenn., had first greeted the Amish with the Yiddish "Zei gazunt!" — "be healthy" — they understood. After all, the expression is derived from the German word "sei gesund."
Anyway, this is adorable. The end.
