Oldest - Mikve Israel in Curacao

In the Caribbean, Curacao is home to the oldest synagogue - Mikve Israel - in continuous use in the Western Hemisphere; it was founded in 1651.

Second oldest (?) (Though not in continuous use) - Synagogue of Bridgetown, Barbados

The first synagogue on the site was built about 1651 by Jews from Recife, Brazil, fleeing Portuguese lands to English territories during the Inquisition. The original building was destroyed in a hurricane in 1831, and rebuilt two years later. (Curacao’s synagogue, built in the 1660’s, is the oldest continually operating synagogue in the hemisphere.) The Bridgetown synagogue, deconsecrated early in the century, was seized by the Barbados Government about five years ago and scheduled for demolition. But through the tenacity of the island’s tiny Jewish community, it is now a Barbados National Trust property and is undergoing a $1 million restoration. The building, a short walk from the main shopping district, is to be rededicated as a synagogue when the restoration is finished by next winter. It will remain a National Trust property.Today, the building’s exterior, with its balustraded roofline, lancet-shaped windows and thick walls with rounded corners, appears much as it did in the 1830’s, the prosperous days of Barbados’s Jewish community, which led the island’s sugar industry.

Third oldest - St. Thomas Synagogue Virgin Islands

The third oldest synagogue in the Western Hemisphere, this gracious building has a sand floor. This signifies the time during the Spanish Inquisition when practicing Judaism was punishable by death. Jews would worship in cellars with sand on the floors to absorb the sound.

Oldest synagogue - non-continuous use: Kahal Zur Israel, Recife Brazil.

Flanked by bustling cafes in downtown Recife on Brazil’s northeastern coast is a little-known treasure of Jewish history in the New World - the oldest synagogue in the Americas.Sephardic Jews built the two-story Kahal Zur Israel Synagogue before 1641 - most likely in 1636 - when they enjoyed religious freedom under the Dutch, who ruled part of the northeast region from 1630 to 1654 to control sugar production.

The Mikve Israel Congregation in Curacao, a Dutch Antilles island in the Carribean, was considered by some to have been the first congregation in the Americas. But it was founded only in 1651, also by Sephardic Jews from Holland.

Oldest synagogue in North America - Touro Synagogue, Newport Rhode Island

For over two centuries, the small synagogue standing on top of a hill on a quiet street in the New England seaport community of Newport, R.I., has occupied a unique place in American history — not only as a part of the American Jewish experience but also as a symbol of religious freedom for all Americans. It is her “that the right of the individual freely and without governmental restraint to follow the dictate of his own conscience in religious worship could be exercised without danger to the state”

UPDATE: Life at full volume visited Mikve Israel and has an account as well as a link to a set of photos of the Shul.

Well it turns out that Larry and I visited the oldest, Mikvé Israel-Emanuel, while we were on our honeymoon in Curaçao.We were there in June of 1992 and it was absolutely gorgeous.After a bit of digging I found a roll from our trip and I’ll share a few of the pictures we took of the synagogue and the Jewish Cultural Museum. First up is a picture of the organ and some of the chandeliers inside the sanctuary.

It was beautiful inside the building. My pictures really don’t do it justice, the dark mahogany wood, the bright sunlight streaming in and the white paint conspired to confound my film. But I did get a few good shots and if you click through the picture it will lead you to the picture set. I don’t remember much, other than the building being very cool and airy inside.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Here are a couple that Paul Simon didn’t think of.April Wormly threatened to blow up the plane her (soon to be ex-)boyfriend was boarding.

A woman who called in a bomb threat to an airport in an attempt to break up with her boyfriend was sentenced to two years in prison, the U.S. attorney’s office said Wednesday.April Wormly, 36, of Hobbs, N.M., also was ordered to pay $19,761 in restitution for phoning in the threat to San Antonio International Airport.

(h/t Betsy’s Page)

Finland’s PM text messaged his “Dear Susan” note.

It was a Nordic fairytale that began with an internet date, developed between the shelves of Ikea, and ended when the Finnish Prime Minister texted “that’s it” to his lover on his Nokia.Now it is payback time for Susan Kuronen, a 36-year-old divorcée. Only days before the Finnish general election on Sunday, she has published a kiss-and-tell book designed to embarrass Matti Vanhanen, who was once dubbed “the sexiest man in Finland” by Jacques Chirac.

BTW, those Finns are really handy with text messaging, they’ve written novels with them and unlock public toilets too!

Consequences: jail time and tell all book. No wonder Paul Simon didn’t recommend them.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

The original episodes of Sesame Street have been issued on DVD. But our children better not watch them. It wouldn’t be right.

Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

Virgina Heffernan explains in Sweeping the Clouds away:

Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official” and “two billion in credit over the next five years” — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World” started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street” might hurt your feelings.

What?

Well for one thing, there was Cookie Monster doing his Allistair Cooke impersontation:

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Cookie Monster? wrong behavior?

As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict.

No we wouldn’t want our children to follow his example.

Unfortunately one of the examples does strike as a reason to be careful.

Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.

Some of the reasons why Sesame Street isn’t fit for children sound like warmed over political correctness. The last one mentioned here, though, reflects the our society’s loss of innocence. At the same time that our society has become overprotective of children in silly ways, in other ways new hazards have appeared that we must protect them from.

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll adds:

Forty years from now, when the current season of Sesame Street is being assembled for release on whatever the successor format to the successor format of DVD is, how much of it will have to be reshot to comply with how much further the nanny state is sure to have expanded further?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

It occurs to me that I haven’t done this in ages.

Now I have.

I was thinking.

Today is a good day for a blogwar.

Gee, I hope one of my old playmates decides to do something stupid.

When you are not quite awake, and watching the spam run through your mailbox before your brain gets into full gear, you see a spam header running through your email that says this:

Your koan approval

What is the sound of one spam deleting?

So, was today the longest day, or is it tomorrow?

I get so confused.

Either way, y’know, it eventually gets dark out.

It turns out that when I have the right motivation—such as a thunderstorm bearing down on me—I can put the windows back in my Jeep in about five minutes.

Hey, I’m impressed.

That’s Entertainment III is on PBS tonight.

And I was thinking: What if Judy Garland had survived, and what if Judy Garland had sung Sondheim?

Now that’s perfection. Just imagine her singing “I’m Still Here.”

They just don’t make ‘em like that any more.

Sigh. The studio musicals were wonderful.

They really don’t make ‘em like that any more. “Chicago” was a fluke, and compared to a funny, charming, upbeat musical like “Singin’ in the Rain,” it’s depressing and, well, there is no real comparison.

It’s a different era.

Shame.

Cats do not like it when you change the smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors.

Well, actually, they really wouldn’t mind it if I didn’t also test each one after inserting the new battery.

WHOOSH.

Update: Turns out this was post number 3000 since we went Wordpress. Not 3000 by me. By me and my cobloggers. I’ve only written 2,559 of them.

It’s 94 in Richmond right now.

It’s going to be in the sixties tomorrow.

WTF?

Do they bury you barefoot? I mean, in Jewish burials.

I love going barefoot. I was born barefoot. Iwouldn’t mind if I died barefoot. And I would like to be barefoot when they put me in that pine box.

I wonder if the rabbi would think it an odd question at our monthly “Ask the Rabbi” service.

I have an appointment with an allergist on Thursday to determine exactly which parts of Virginia I am allergic to. One result of the appointment is that I may not take any allergy medicine or antihistamines or pseudofed, starting today. No Zyrtec, which is what I take. All of my OTC antihistamines have pseudofed in them. So this morning, I called and asked, “What CAN I take?”

Turns out I can take Nasonex. Turns out I have two sample bottles from my doctor that I never used, what with not really wanting to squirt things up my nose every day. (Go figure.) Of course, when the choice is squirt medicine up my nose, or suffer from allergies during the prime allergy season of the year, well, I squirted. But there’s a strange side effect.

I have found myself starting to speak like Antonio Banderas.

That side effect isn’t listed anywhere on the warning label.

Lair reminded me that today is 4/11. He says to ask him any question.

I think I’ll take questions from the audience, too.

So, did anyone ever put up a sign that says, “We gave peace a chance, and it didn’t work. Now it’s time for war.”

Just wondering.

I have always—always wondered what the hell “reading them the riot act” meant. I knew there was a Riot Act, but I never got it. But then I found this nifty website, which explains what that prhase means.

In English law the control of unruly citizens has usually been the responsibility of local magistrates. Any group of twelve or more that the authorities didn’t like the look of could be deemed a ‘riotous and tumultuous assembly’ and arrested if they didn’t disperse within an hour of the Riot Act being read to them by a magistrate.

Ohhhhhhh. Now I get it.

Whenever my friends and I were tired of talking about a subject (often after a serious discussion), someone would say, “So, how about those Yankees?” It was code for “Change the subject, this is boring/depressing/over with.)

Scanned the news today.

So, how about those Yankees?

Okay, I really almost never watch baseball anymore, and frankly get most of my Yankee news from Lair Simon’s baseball posts, which I actually sometimes even read (well, more than the gardening posts).

I ought to find a topic that Lair Simon doesn’t like so he can skip my posts on that topic. It seems only fair. Gardening and I are not friends. I like the results of gardens, but I have zero interest in actually planting one. In fact, the lone green thing in my apartment succumbed a month or so ago. One might say it succumbed to neglect, and that I was tired of it and just let it go in peace, but whatever you say, it succumbed, and now I don’t have to water the damned thing every day.

Of course, the way Lair Simon is, this post may be taken as some kind of challenge. It isn’t, but, well, Lair is about the most unpredictable person I know. I never know what he’s going to write about, and am often taken by surprise by some of the posts he puts up here.

It’s a good thing I like surprises. Well, okay, I don’t like surprise parties, because standing in the door and being shouted at by forty people on your thirtieth birthday when you were expecting just to see Janet’s husband? Not so nice. Heart-attack inducing shock. I swear, it took me half an hour to recover and finally figure out who was at the party.

But surprises that don’t include heart attack-inducing shock? I can deal with those.

Why Americans are better than Islamists, Reason One:

They have fatwas.

We have WaWas.

Today, while talking to a friend or two, I made the following comparison:

A flea is an annoyance that must be hunted down and destroyed, as are flies and mosquitoes. But a gnat? Most people ignore gnats, at most, waving them off with one hand and going about their business.

No, I don’t expect any of the rest of you to understand this post.

I was just looking around for various statistics, and discovered that I am older than more than a third of the people in America.

Wait. That means that I’m younger than nearly two-thirds.

I feel much better now.

If one needs to open a can with a can opener, one should probably not put it in the dishwasher and then run the dishwasher before one opens the can.

Just sayin’.

Have you ever notice that the more stressed out and angry you get, the stupider the world gets?

I swear, my IQ must go up fifty points when I’m going through tough times.

Did I really, truly think that ELP was anything other than facile, puerile, pretentious pap?

Just go look at the lyrics to Closer to Believing and you’ll see what I mean.

A tip for you all: If you ever drop a box of toothpicks, make sure you find them all.

Half an inch of pointed, wooden toothpick in the ball of your foot is a very unpleasant experience.

If you don’t want your child to be traumatized for life, trust me when I tell you that it is not funny to pretend you’re going to throw your daughter into the alligator pit at the Staten Island Zoo.

I hate alligators. What a coincidence.

The average ear of corn holds 800 kernels.

You’re welcome.

is that you have to roll down the windows of your car to air out your car once you’re out of the range of the skunk.

You know, if there’s a worse odor than skunk, I do not want to ever know about it.

I was thinking about something I’d read regarding Justice Antonin Scalia and his penchant for constructionalism — the concept that we should interpret the Constitution only in the way the Founders meant it when they wrote it.

To which I must ask: If they thought the Constitution was perfect the way it was, then why did they put in an amendment process?

I have some Amazon gift certificates that I banked, and I want to use them up to buy something, but I just can’t decide. Should I get the Firefly TV/movie set? Should I get season two of Babylon 5? Season 4 of Buffy? Season 3 of Angel? Should I buy some music that I’ve wanted for a while, and get three CDs?

For some reason, I am utterly unable to come to a decision on how to spend my Amazon money.

So I make it through the worst of Virginia’s pollen season. We’re about done here, folks, and we’re like number seven in the nation (and not in a good way) for allergens.

And I’m going to NJ this weekend for a family thing, and what time of year is it?

Maximum pollen season.

Thank goodness for [brand name deleted out of fear of spamkilling software].